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Johannes Röser

Reform between Alpha and Omega:
Questions for a Council on Faith

From: Christ in der Gegenwart, 26/2009, P.287 et sequ.
webmaster's own, not authorized translation

After the Vatican's generous co-operation in favour of the traditionalists many Christians wonder whether the great faith problems concerning the future of Christianity will at last be discussed at the highest level. Half a century after the Second Vatican Council the world has dramatically changed and thus also the religious experience.

The discussions with the Lefebvre people announced by the Vatican should be "done in less than no time". That is the wish of the Regensburg Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller. His patience has extremely been strained and his episcopal authority has been evaded by the traditionalist Pius-Brothers who want illegally to ordain priests on the territory of his diocese. The Vatican does here obviously tolerate the disobedience, as further ordinations of traditionalist priests in the U.S. show. For the pope does not want to endanger the agreement with this schismatic group, after his so-called favour for the rehabilitated Lefebvre bishops whose excommunication was revoked. In a KNA-interview Müller nevertheless expressed clearly his displeasure, "The Pius-Brothers have to join the church, not vice versa. It is of course psychologically difficult to admit that one has gone in the wrong direction in the last thirty years." The greatest obstacle was the Pius-Brothers' "wrong concept of tradition". They "freeze the tradition at a fixed moment and fail to recognize the connection between revelation, tradition and teaching authority of the church."

Are the traditionalists now even claiming the authority to interpret the "world event" Second Vatican Council - and what should result from it for tomorrow or what - according to their interpretation - must by no means happen? Since the Second Vatican Council, which in its documents and intention {Text und Klangfarbe] was a clear reform council with many paradigm shifts and also with actual breaks in the patterns of understanding faith and knowledge, the world has once again developed more dramatically. Many of the facts of today were then not yet in sight. Moreover, with the general progress the crisis of the faith in God [Gottes- und Glaubenskrise] has increased. This happened however not because of that council but because this meeting took place far too late after a long period of stagnation in the church, and so a lot of damage could at the most just be restricted or delayed. Those who are late are punished by life - also in religion. And at present we are globally and vehemently experiencing it in the life of the church and in matters of faith.

A heavy "Maybe"

A reform deadlock is actually afflicting Christianity; with regard to its dimensions it reaches if not even surpasses its predecessors. This it mainly due to the fact that now demythologization and enlightenment have an effect on the entire population; it is connected with significant changes in the awareness of life and of the lifestyles in the wake of revolutionary discoveries of the human and natural sciences, with a global economization of all areas of life affecting even the most intimate relationships. The world in 2009, including the religious worlds, entirely differs from that of the sixties. If at that time a council was necessary, then even more so today. But who has the courage to start, as a first step, at least a pre-conciliar process that could some day lead into such a religious world event? It is difficult to imagine it. But the most urgent issues are in full view, as for instance the question of God as key element.

Long since a kind of popular atheism has taken root in the feeling of many people, quite without militant intentions, rather with melancholy and even sadness. According to it God, even if he existed and wanted it, has no possibility to act and perhaps to intervene in the world. Revelation - how? People rather experience a kind of reverse revelation: Where was God when he was not there, for example at the tsunami, for example at the 11th September 2001, for example with killer viruses or other disease attacks for which the supposedly free man is not responsible? The religious failure, the deep spiritual desolation and loneliness are the actual common daily experience of many who would like to believe, if they were only able to do it. God is at best a huge "Perhaps" for them. That's why large parts of the population say: Sometimes I believe, sometimes I do not believe! In those real twilight worlds religiosity happens - if at all - in a vague, uncertain, approximate way. One does not want to get on to the track of truth but to be truthful. Where God is not faithful, at least I want to be faithful to myself. One feels like this. That's why it is increasingly difficult to make the perspective of the Christian faith accessible as liberating hope, as way, truth and life. That's why every "proposal for faith" breaks down already in the preliminary stages of everyday scepticism.

The Evolution has Consequences

Have Christians - as the PR language often says - to offer a really great "product" that they only poorly "market"? Or are perhaps the problems in the "product" itself? In his new book, "Darwin, Einstein - and Jesus" on "Christianity in the Universe of Evolution" (Patmos, 2009) the theologian Georg Baudler who is teaching in Aachen outlines the huge challenge to faith given with today's experience of the world that was not in this way on the mind of former generations: "In a universe that is to be thought as evolving, reality is not the sum of objects which can be reduced to increasingly smaller elements, finally to 'elementary particles'; reality has rather to be seen as a continuous process that becomes more complex. In a universe evolving out of itself 'being' is a verb that dynamically connects the various, different processes with each other."

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This has consequences for our conceptions of God. Is therefore also "God" rather a verb than a noun? Baudler refers to the interplay of understanding and not understanding. "Only if God is in a paradoxical way thought both as being and not being he can become evident as the transcendent Creator of the world." There must be "from the viewpoint of religion" a connection "from this world to another world." At any rate, in view of today's enigmatic nature of space and time the previous beliefs were no longer sufficient for letting oneself be moved or even shaken by God's mystery. A council can admittedly not establish such a faith between continuity and discontinuity, but it can be more than just an atmospheric help by promoting a school of a new presentiment of and view on religion, particularly among thoughtful people of good will.

The Centre

For Christians the Christ event is and remains the centre of a devout life. But how can the uniqueness of Christ be connected with the diversity and inconsistency of other religious views around the globe? The pluralist theology of religion has tried to answer the question by resolving it into an equal validity [Gleich-Gültigkeit] of different ways of salvation. This cannot satisfy us, and certainly not when we consider the variety of fundamentalisms, radicalisms and traditionalisms in foreign religions as well as in our own. Also the archaic magico-mythological contents still resonating in many ways of faith are neither help nor consolation for those who honestly want to believe in Christ in the context of an evolutionary world. Ultimately not a few contemporaries are looking for a reliable faith, for a modern, contemporary mysticism that is able to support people because it is aware of the problems and does not suppress them. So we are and will always remain in search of a Christ-mysticism, which includes, inter alia, universal-cosmic dimensions without speculatively drifting into esoteric; hence, of a mysticism that remains true to history and earth. The question of Christ urgently requires a conciliar act.

The theologian Hans Waldenfels, expert in fundamental theology and religious studies, sees in this context reasonable chances. A modern Christian mysticism doesn't need to betray its origins and can nevertheless expose itself to today's rather vague and cautious experience of the world. In his book "Löscht den Geist nicht aus" [Don't Extinguish the Spirit] (Schöningh, 2008) he gives an orientation for it. "The centre at stake remains withdrawn from man's disposal. He can detach himself from everything hindering him on his way to the centre and can open to the width beyond measure. The centre itself remains incomprehensible for human beings. From the perspective of man the unavailable centre can only be told negatively. In the end It is calling him into complete silence. But just in silence man has to remain open for the free and unlimited possibilities of the Unavailable. From a Christian perspective follows from it in concrete terms: Just because man is not able to dispose of God, God's loving self-communication in the Word and at the end in the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus of Nazareth will always cause amazement. Man's appropriate answer to it can only be to adore and to praise God and to serve the poor." This may sound abstractly, but there is no getting around it that there are ultimately only linguistically-experimental approaches to the mystery of Christ. The largest language field of this kind however remains prayer - together with the celebration of the Eucharist. There we are spiritually as close as nowhere else to the early Christians and thus to our religious roots.

Logic of Resurrection

The miracle is the first love of faith - and the beginning of all the doubts. For the extraordinary event that we popularly describe as miracle, because we mean with it the breaking of natural laws by "a supernatural power", lies outside any reality. The old trick to attribute positive "miracles" to God and to hold Satan responsible for negative "miracles", i.e. for disasters, does neither help God nor us. The crucial sting of faith is the mortality, the inevitable finiteness. Our fascination is only increased by the fact that there exists something at all and not rather nothing, although nothingness would be much more plausible than anything that stirs. The miracle of the visible is therefore far more wonderful for us than the miracle of the invisible. But if the miracle of the - real - life is in full view, why should - in the same weak logic - the hoped for miracle of eternal life not be allowed to exist? Here are the great questions worrying us in view of the fact that we must die. And here hope often establishes itself as hope for - as Waldenfels says - "cure". It was possible where the believers accept the biblical message of God "and confess their faith in a God who gives man a limited time between birth and death, creation and Last Judgment and the goal of a life reaching its completion in God."

Mystery is not Magic

The mystery of healing and sanctification of the souls as well as of the whole universe, of the animate and inanimate things has to be celebrated in cult, ritual and liturgy. But how? All too often we feel in our public worships that the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council got stuck half-way and that the so-called special forms, such as the Trent liturgy, are of no help at all to us. With its borrowing from magico-mythological ideas and its archaic ideal of the priest's purity it falls back into paradigms that can no longer be ours. The sacred mystery of making Christ present in the sacramental Eucharistic event needs reforms, according to the true shock provided by the powerful dramatization of secular staging in today's media culture. While the Christian liturgy has for millennia used the best contemporary art in order to enrich its language, by now it has unfortunately separated all too much from the development of true art and taken refuge to the weak, illustrative derivatives of obliging and thus harmless arts and crafts. True art, however, is offensive, disturbing, shocking - and so honest, true to what the mystery of Jesus Christ's life, suffering, death and resurrection can and should move in us. It applies also there for a conciliar reconsideration: Dare more liturgy!

Servant of God

In view of the severe shortage of believers, particularly with the worships, the priest shortage is no side issue. For without personal closeness there will be no faith, also in societies aiming at anonymity in which the individuals all the more intensively knit personal networks. We therefore need someone else but the sacramental "administration priest": "communication priests" who are deeply imbued with religion, men of God who are able to awaken and to stimulate what many religious people are secretly bearing within them but what they do not dare to ask. Since we need there the best spiritual quality, we also need a corresponding quantity of priestly quality. People are not interested in the manager-curate who self-pityingly documents his activism by showing his thickly filled diary. Young people are today just as little interested in a magician-priest who is emulating a priest model like that of the Curé of Ars (with its peculiar psychopathological features), which has once again been represented as model in the just proclaimed "priest year". No, people of today expect and love Spirit-filled and educated pastors, who are worldly wise and imbued with God; where one can feel that they are truly God's servants with their weaknesses as well as with their strengths; people who in their priestly vocation also know the divine vocations of the worldly servants and who know the great desires and the sinful pitfalls of every human existence. Then, in the celebration of the sacraments, the mysteries of salvation can indeed light up something of that Beyond which enlightens this world, of that Spirit towards which matter becomes transparent, especially in the Eucharistic gifts of bread and wine.

The pastoral theologian Paul Michael Zulehner deplores the flagrant failure of the Church's teaching authority in this particular field. In the book "A New Pentecost" (Schwabenverlag, 2008) he writes, "This inactivity in the matter of priest shortage is insofar surprising as one at the same time emphasizes that the Eucharist was the centre of church life and that for its celebration a consecrated priest was necessary."

Another big problem is that the church with its traditional conceptions of life is regarded as antiquated in large parts of the younger to the middle generations, especially but not only in the better-educated strata. Almost everywhere the young people's turning away from the church is accompanied by the discovery of sexuality. And in virtually all social strata one meets today with incomprehension that the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches have not yet managed to overcome their more or less open patriarchy and to accept the modern view on the role of women. In addition to sexuality women's lib is the gateway for religious dissociation, especially in young age. It remains open, whether and how a council is able to respond to the change in the lifeworlds and in the attitudes to morality. At any rate, mere appeals do not solve the basic problem. This applies in exactly the same way to the life sciences, including the hope of medical healing, considering their dynamism. Beyond defiant incantation or resigned capitulation a council could very well discuss the renewal of Christian morals without falling into the old traps of natural law.

Ready for Development?

Between tradition and reform also churchly identity is no rigid entity but is since the days of Jesus exposed to the process of historical change. The pentecostal dynamism of yesterday accompanies us through the times also into the future. Zulehner suspects, "Is sometimes not more of God's spirit in the modern world and more (obsolete) zeitgeist in the church? The church of which some nostalgic people dream is no longer the vibrant Church of the Spirit ready for development but has rather the shape of the church before the French Revolution ... " The Christian faith was oriented towards salvation and therefore by its very nature turned to the future in which at the end God himself will be everything in everything. "The innermost centre of the always Easter faith of Christians is that God has already started this finale of history in one of us - Jesus of Nazareth. In his death and his resurrection eternal heaven reaches into the transient time ... This salvation is inseparably connected with the risen Christ who is the complete type [Vollgestalt] of man. Everyone matures towards this perfect type of man. This is the inner dynamism of his/her life: to become what he basically has always been - a lover, due to the power of being united with God."

Pope Benedict XVI has begun his tenure with the encyclical "God is Love". The Church that is always to be reformed has to serve Him. Councils are no all-rounders. But in times of need and crisis they can at least help to reduce blockades and resistance to advice. It is also today not about pleasing adaptation. It's about substance, at stake is the Christ event, Christ in the process of history. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega in a dynamically evolving world; he is therefore never only the Alpha. Until Omega there are many letters in between. Councils are there to spell them, always anew.