Transcending boundaries
The synodal process launched by Pope Francis has a deeper meaning than the reform of the Catholic Church, one of Europe’s leading Catholic intellectuals argued in his keynote address to the Lutheran World Federation assembly in Krakow, Poland.
Christianity stands on the threshold of a new reformation. The Church is, in the words of St Augustine, ever reforming, “semper reformanda”. From Martin Luther, the great teacher of the paradoxical wisdom of the Cross and disciple of the great German mystics, we must learn in these times to be sensitive to how God’s power is manifested – “sub contrario” – in our crises and weaknesses. “My grace is sufficient for you” – these words of Christ to the Apostle Paul apply to us, too, whenever we are tempted to lose hope in the dark nights of history. Reformation is necessary where form inhibits the dynamism of the living core. The core of Christianity is the risen, living Christ, living in the faith, the hope and the love of men and women in the Church and beyond its visible boundaries. These boundaries need to be expanded, and all our human outward expressions of faith need to be transformed if they stand in the way of our desire to hear and understand God’s Word. Two parallel Reformations in the sixteenth century, the Lutheran Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, enriched, renewed and deepened Christianity, but they also divided it. The twentieth century also saw the beginning of two great parallel reformations – the global expansion of Pentecostal Christianity and the Second Vatican Council. The Council marked the transition of the Catholic Church from “Catholicism” (confessional closedness, counterculture to Protestantism and modernity) to Catholicity, universal ecumenical openness. The present-day reformation can build on both of these “unfinished revolutions” and take an important step towards Christian unity: one body, one Spirit, one hope.
But we will only receive the gift of unity among Christians if we engage in a common journey towards an even wider and deeper ecumenism. Unity among Christians cannot be the ultimate goal of the new reformation; it can only be a by-product of an effort to bring the whole human family together and to assume a common responsibility for the whole of Creation. The new reformation must strengthen the consciousness of Christian co-responsibility for the whole “body” of which we are part through the mystery of the Incarnation: the whole human family and for our common world. We need to have the courage to transcend the current forms and boundaries of Christianity. The mission of the Church is an instrument of reconciliation and healing of the wounds of our common world. We strive for unity not to make Christianity more powerful and influential but to make it more credible: to make the world believe. We are to communicate the message entrusted to us in a credible, intelligible and convincing way. Tensions between Christians undermine that credibility. St Paul calls Christians not to uniformity but to mutual respect and harmony among the various parts of the body. This unity in diversity is to be the beginning, the source and the example of coexistence within the whole human family. The first reformation arose from the courage of St Paul to lead young Christianity out of the narrow confines of one of the Jewish sects. He presented it as a universal offer, transcending religious, cultural, social and gender boundaries: it no longer matters whether one is Jew or Gentile, male or female, free or slave – we are all new creatures in Christ. Today, too, Christianity is faced with the need to transcend existing mental and institutional, confessional, cultural and social boundaries. We must be more open and receptive to God’s call, hidden in the pains and anxieties, joys and hopes of the people with whom we share our common world. The history of the world and the history of the Church is neither a one-way progress nor a permanent decline and alienation from an idealised past, but an open drama, a constant struggle between grace and sin, faith and unbelief, waged in every human heart.
Martin Luther taught that every Christian is “simul justus et pecator”. Let us add that many people in our world today are “simul fidelis et infidelis” – a hermeneutic of trust intertwined in them with a hermeneutic of scepticism and doubt. If we can turn the conflict of faith and doubt within our minds and hearts into an honest dialogue, it will help the maturity of our faith and can contribute to a dialogue between believers and unbelievers living together in a pluralistic society. Faith without critical questions can lead to fundamentalism, bigotry and fanaticism. Doubt that is incapable of doubting itself can lead to cynicism. Faith and critical thinking need each other. A mature faith can resist the temptation of the too-simple answers offered by dangerous contemporary ideologies. At the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church committed herself to strive for unity among Christians, to dialogue with believers of other religions and with people of no religious faith, and to solidarity with all people, especially the poor and the needy. It professed to be a community of pilgrims who are far from the eschatological goal of full unity with Christ. To critics of religion, such as Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, we owe the recognition that many of our ideas about God were only projections of our fears and desires and our social conditions. To Friedrich Nietzsche we owe the recognition that this God of our imaginations is dead. To Dietrich Boenhoffer we owe the knowledge that our faith can live without this God of our illusions. Bonhoeffer, a disciple of Meister Eckhart and Luther, taught us that the only authentic Christian transcendence is self-transcendence towards others in solidarity and sacrificial love. Today, not only individual Christians but also our Churches are called to this self-transcendence. But if Christianity “steps out of itself”, will it not lose its identity? People in Luther’s time were gripped by fear for the salvation of their souls. In our time, people, nations, religious communities and Churches are haunted by the fear of losing their identity.
Perhaps the concept of “identity” is not too far from what the word “soul” used to express – that most precious thing in us that makes us who we are. Populists, nationalists and religious fundamentalists exploit this fear for their interests. They offer as a substitute for the “soul” various kinds of collective identity in the form of nationalism and political or religious sectarianism. They also misuse Christian symbols and rhetoric; they make Christianity an identitarian political ideology. Luther, but also the mystics of the Catholic Reformation, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Ignatius of Loyola, recognised the way of salvation in faith in our personal relationship to Christ, and in Christ’s self-gift to us. What forms the basis of Christian identity, and what for Christians is the key to understanding history, is the Easter event that once entered history and continues to transform it. Luther’s theology of the Cross needs to be renewed, rethought and deepened today. Through the cumulative global crises of our world – climate change, environmental destruction, pandemics of contagious disease, the growth of poverty, war and terrorism – we participate in the ongoing mystery of the Cross. The Cross is the way to resurrection. The resurrected Jesus came in such a changed form that at first even those closest to him could not recognise him and for a long time doubted whether or not it was him. Christ also comes to us in many new, surprising, ambivalent forms. He comes to us as to the Apostles after the Resurrection. He comes to us in strangers, as on the road to Emmaus; we only recognise him after the breaking of the bread. He comes through the locked doors of our fear, “legitimises” himself with his wounds. When we ignore the wounds of our world, these wounds of Christ in the present world, we have no right to say with the Apostle Thomas: My Lord and my God! Faith in the Resurrection includes the adventure of seeking the hidden, transfigured Christ.
We know the true Christ, the true Church and the true faith by being wounded. A wounded Christ, a wounded Church and a wounded faith bring the gift of the Spirit, peace and forgiveness into the world. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in a sermon before his election as Bishop of Rome, quoted the words of the Apocalypse: Jesus stands at the door and knocks. And he added: Today Jesus knocks from the other side, from inside the Church – he wants to go out and we must follow him. He wants to go first of all to all the marginalised, to those on the margins of society and the Church, to the poor, the exploited. He goes where people are hurting. The Church is to be a field hospital where wounds – physical, social, psychological, and spiritual – are dressed and healed. The coronavirus pandemic was a warning sign of the times: unless Christianity undergoes a radical transformation, churches, monasteries and seminaries will continue to stay closed and empty. The empty churches during the pandemic at Easter were reminiscent of Jesus’ empty tomb. Many churches that were once full are now empty. The number of “nones” – people who answer “none” when asked about their religious identity – is growing rapidly. Many have been disappointed, often scandalised, by the state of their Churches. Many have looked to the Churches for answers to their serious existential questions but have heard only stereotypical religious phrases. Many were brought up in the faith in childhood, but when they grew up beyond the infantile form of faith, no one offered them a mature faith. When Jesus gives us children as an example, he is not calling us to infantile religiosity, but to be open, spontaneous, eager, uninhibited and also able to grow and learn as children. The main mission of the Church is evangelisation. Fruitful and effective evangelisation consists in inculturation – in the creative incarnation of faith in the living culture, in the way people think and live. The coming reform of the Church is a response to a long-term process that is the opposite of evangelisation: the process of ex-culturation of Christianity in much of our world. We can speak of ex-culturation where the Christian faith, or its external form, the Church and its ways of expression, loses credibility, clarity and fruitfulness. A certain form of the Church then becomes a grain that cannot die on its own and produce a new plant. It remains unchanged and perishes without benefit. But let us return to the Easter story. Those who come to the “empty tomb” are not to fall into sorrow and confusion. We are not to lament the dead Christianity of the past. We should not be deaf to the voice that says to us: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Go to Galilee, there you will see him!” The task of Jesus’ disciples from Easter morning onwards is to seek the living but often unrecognisably changed Christ where we can meet him. Missionary efforts today must first be directed inward to the Church. There we find many “valleys of dry bones” to whom the Word of the Lord must be proclaimed. Only then can we head out into the wide world of “nones” beyond the visible boundaries of Churches and religious communities. But we must first understand this world well. It would be a misunderstanding to regard those “who do not walk with us” as atheists or unbelievers. And we must distinguish well also among atheists. If many “atheists” reject certain theories about God, it does not necessarily mean that they are closed to the mystery that we name with the word “God”. We too, in the footsteps of Meister Eckhart, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich, are to discover and proclaim a “God beyond the God of theism”. Part of the new reformation, the new evangelisation and the new ecumenism of the twentieth century is also a transformation of the way of mission. We cannot approach others as arrogant possessors of truth. Only Jesus can say: I am the truth. We are not Jesus; we are imperfect disciples of Jesus, on a journey of discipleship in which the Spirit gradually brings us into the fullness of truth. The goal of this journey, the fullness of truth, is an eschatological goal. Now we see only in part, as in a mirror. This awareness of the limits of our individual and group perspectives should lead us to humility. To expand these limits, we need respect for the experience of others. The goal of mission is not to squeeze more people into the existing mental and institutional boundaries of our Churches, but to go beyond those boundaries and, together with others, in mutual respect and mutually enriching dialogue, take the next step on the journey towards a Christ who is greater than our ideas of him. You are meeting in a part of the world that has gone through the dark night of communist persecution. The great moral authority of Pope John Paul II, the former Archbishop of Krakow, contributed significantly to the fact that the solidarity of workers, intellectuals and the Church initiated here in Poland the Europe-wide collapse of the communist dictatorship, which culminated in the non-violent revolution of 1989. The transition from communism to democracy in most of Europe was bloodless, but not easy. Democracy is not just a certain political regime but a certain culture of interpersonal relations. Democracy cannot be established and sustained merely by changing political and economic conditions; democracy presupposes a certain moral and spiritual climate. The collapse of communism was not an immediate transition to the promised land but the beginning of a long exodus that is still ongoing, during which Christians in post-communist countries have been subjected to many trials and temptations. Society after a long period of dictatorship is always wounded, sick – it requires a therapeutic process. Here is an important place for the Church; Christians should be experts in the process of reconciliation. The Churches in countries that are yet to see the fall of communism should be prepared for this. The process of reconciliation is often difficult – guilt must be confessed, named and a path of repentance, of healing must be adopted. In many post-communist countries, this process has been neglected. Many of the last communists became the first capitalists. Some post-communist countries are ruled by populists and oligarchs – former communist elites, the only ones who had the capital of money, influential contacts and information after the fall of communism. “Wild capitalism” in post-communist countries leads to major social problems. In Russia there is an economic, moral and demographic crisis. Putin’s dictatorial regime has nothing to offer its population except the drug of national messianism. After the collapse of communism, there were optimistic visions that the “end of history”, the global victory of freedom and democracy, was coming. Today, not far from where we meet, an apocalypse is unfolding that poses the real threat of a quite different end of history: nuclear war. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is not just one of its local wars; the attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people is part of Russia’s plan to re-establish its expanding empire. The main reason for the Russian invasion was the Russian regime’s fear that the example of the “colour revolutions” in the former Soviet republics would awaken civil society and the desire for democracy in Russia itself. What is happening in Ukraine is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s strategy, of which the nations in this part of the world have experience: first occupy the territories with linguistic minorities, and if the democratic world remains silent and succumbs to the illusion that agreements and compromises can be made with dictators, the expansion will continue. If the West were to betray Ukraine and give in to Moscow’s demands, as it did in the case of Czechoslovakia on the threshold of the Second World War, it would not save the peace but would encourage dictators and aggressors not only in the Kremlin but throughout the world. To love the enemy means, in the case of an aggressor, to prevent him from doing evil, Pope Francis teaches in his encyclical Fratelli tutti; in other words, to knock the murder weapon out of his hand. President Putin cynically uses Russian religious messianism and the corrupt leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church to further his aims. The global ecumenical Christian community cannot be blind and indifferent to this scandal either. Where the Church enters into “registered partnerships” with political power, especially with nationalist and populist parties, it always pays a heavy price. When the Church allows itself to be corrupted by a political regime, it first loses its youth and critically thinking educated people; nostalgia for the past, for the marriage of Church and State, deprives the Church of its future. When the Church enters into “culture wars” with its secular environment, it always comes out of them defeated and deformed; culture wars deepen the process of ex-culturation and secularisation. The alternative to the culture wars is not conformity and cheap accommodation but a culture of spiritual discernment. This discernment is about the distinction between the zeitgeist, which is the language of “this world”, and the “signs of the times”, which are the language of God in the events of the world, society and culture. In the time of communism, the Church needed most the virtue of fortitude to defend itself; today it needs most the virtue of wisdom, the art of spiritual discernment. The synodal process launched by Pope Francis can have a much broader and deeper meaning than the reform of the Catholic Church. I am convinced that here is the possible beginning of a new reformation of Christianity that will build on both the Second Vatican Council and the Pentecostal revitalisation of global Christianity. The reform of the Church must go much deeper than the reform of the Church’s institutions. The fruitfulness of reform and the future vitality of Christianity depend on a rediscovery of the relationship between the spiritual and existential dimensions of faith. A renewed and newly understood Christian spirituality can make a significant contribution to the spiritual culture of humanity today, far beyond the Churches. When Francis of Assisi heard in a dream the call: “Arise, Francis, and repair my house!”, he understood God’s meaning to be to repair a small ruined chapel in Assisi; only later did he realise that he was being called to assist in a radical reconstruction of the entire ruined Roman Church. Perhaps Pope Francis and the whole Catholic Church is only gradually realising that synodal renewal is a process that does not just concern the Catholic Church. It is about much more than the transformation of the clerical mentality and rigid institutions of the Church, wracked by scandals and internal strife, into a dynamic network of mutual communication. Synodality (syn hodos – common way) requires solidarity, cooperation, compatibility and ecumenical communion in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. It is more than unity among Christians or the deepening of interreligious dialogue. Globalisation is in serious crisis. Its many dark sides have been revealed – the rise of economic inequality, the globalisation of terrorism, contagious diseases and the infectious ideologies of ethno-nationalism, populism and conspiracy theories. But the great problems of humanity cannot be solved at the national level alone. Global interconnection at the level of economics, transport and information will not create an oikumene, a common home by itself. No ideology, not even “Christian ideology” – Christianity as an ideology – can replace the missing spiritual dimension of the globalisation process. It is not only with all Christians, but with all human beings and all forms of life on earth, that we form one body. The Spirit of God is constantly creating, animating and transforming this body, the unfinished symphony of Creation. It lives and works through our hope, faith and love; it is constantly transcending and breaking down all the boundary walls we have erected between us and within us. Finally, let me quote a Jewish, Hasidic story. Rabbi Pinchas asked his pupils when night ends and day begins. “It’s when it’s light enough to tell a dog from a sheep,” one suggested. “It is at that moment,” replied Rabbi Pinchas, “when we can recognise in the face of any human being our brother or sister. Until we can do that, it is still night.” In parts of our world, in parts of our communities of faith and our Churches, in parts of our hearts, it is still night; the darkness of prejudice, fear and hatred reigns. The goal of the new reformation is to transform and unite Christianity in the striving for the unity of the human family. It is an eschatological goal, but we can take an important step now. It consists in recognising and acknowledging – with all its implications – that all people are our brothers and sisters, that they have equal rights to recognition of their dignity, to our acceptance in respect, love and solidarity. The theme of this assembly is “One Body, One Spirit, One Hope”.
This hope rests in our faith that the Spirit of God is continually uniting humanity into one body. St Paul wrote about faith acting in love. Let us be witnesses of a faith that continually awakens hope through love. Let us be witnesses to the ongoing resurrection of the Giver of hope.
Tomáš Halik is professor of sociology of religion at Charles University, Prague. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2014. Adapted from the keynote address at the 13th General Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation, Krakow, 14 September 2023. Visit thetablet.co.uk for the complete text.
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