“Christianity Afternoon” paves the way for courageous change

With a wisdom that few can summon, Halik calls on the Church to consider how the most faithful expression of its mission might be in its future. To this end, he states:

I believe that the Christianity of tomorrow will be above all a community of a new hermeneutic, of a new reading, of a new and deeper interpretation of the two sources of divine revelation, Scripture and tradition, and above all of the expression of God in the signs of the times. .

Considering revelation and the word of God, Halik argues that the Church, as stated in the subtitle, must also find the courage to change.

Part of Halik’s inspiration came as a result of an early glimpse of what is happening in the wake of secularism. A lifelong resident of Prague, Halik was ordered into clandestine service in Erfurt because the specter of secular communism was slightly less threatening in East Germany than in Czechoslovakia.

Initially, the Velvet Revolution invited optimism that a free people would repopulate the Church in a way that predated the rise of power. Iron Curtain. What Halik and his colleagues found was that people whose habits of faith had been removed were unable to reflexively return to the Church. Although still curious, a malaise of indifference has become the spirit of the post-secular era.

Halik, a priest serving the Prague Academic Parish and professor of sociology at Charles University, found that he needed to re-examine the threads of his own vocation. As the biblical prophets show, Halik realized that he was called to serve as a public theologian, or as someone who perceives “changes in the world as the expression of God in history.”

In addition to Halik’s efforts as a priest and teacher, the results of this reexamination can be found in the pages of his 21 Czech-language books, seven of which are now translated into English. In his first work translated into English, Patience with God: The story of Zacchaeus continues in usHalik is pushing for the Church to be called to reach a generation metaphorically embodied by Zacchaeus – curious but waiting at a safe distance, perhaps assuming that their posture of indifference will persist unless surprisingly constrained otherwise.

As the body of Christ, Halik believes, the Church is the only community that can, in fact, compel the curious but also the indifferent. The Afternoon of Christianity is then “a book on faith as a journey in search of God in the midst of a changing world, on lived faith, the act of faith, the way in which we believe (fides in qua) rather than what we believe (fides quae), what is the “object” of faith.

Over the course of 16 interlocking chapters, what follows is Halik’s assessment of how such a journey occurs. At the risk of oversimplification, this journey includes reexaminations of the nature of God, the nature of faith, and the nature of the Church. Along the way, Halik consulted an eclectic mix of voices, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jungthe Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and Pope Francis.

As stated, this journey begins with the nature of God. If the modern legacy of apologetics provided the Church with arguments worthy of God, it also left the Church with arguments defined by a logic according to which God could be known like any other object. If such arguments reduce God to something other than God, they also elevate humanity to something other than beings created by God and in the image of God.

In contrast, Halik argues that the curious but indifferent among us are drawn to the mystery of an infinite God because of an acute awareness of our own finitude. The resulting process is “The Spirit of God leads the Church ever deeper into the fullness of the truth. ” Accordingly, Halik asserts that indifference succumbs to compelling conviction when we “use with gratitude all the instruments of knowledge that have been given to us” and that we must still “marvel at the immensity and depth of that which (us) transcends infinitely.” ”

An understanding of God that leaves room for God to be God means that faith not only recognizes but also honors the space of doubt. For Halik, “the doubt that is a healthy corollary of faith and makes it humbling is not doubt about God, nor doubt about the existence of God, but doubt about myself, about the extent to which , as a believer, I understood well what God is. telling me.” Such doubt recognizes humans as finite and God as infinite. Such doubt also respects the questions that compel the Zacchaeus in each of us to keep a safe distance to observe and wait for the coming of the Savior.

In some ways, the Church’s response to such understandings of God and faith is simply to continue to be the Church, relying fully on the grace present in the sacraments over which it presides. Halik emphasizes the perception of the Church as “God’s people traveling through history”, “a school of Christian wisdom” and “a field hospital”. But to these ancient perceptions of the Church, Halik adds “the idea of ​​the Church as a place of meeting and conversation, a ministry of accompaniment and reconciliation”.

Drawing inspiration from Jung, Halík believes that the afternoon of life and, therefore, of Christianity is “a suitable time for the development of spiritual life, an opportunity to complete the lifelong process of maturation “. Perhaps now is the time for the Church to sit down and read. What awaits on the other side may well be a presence in the world worthy of the crucifixion experienced by Christ and which made the very existence of the Church possible.