Book Review:
The Afternoon of Christianity,
the courage to change.
by Tomáš Halík
Tomáš Halík, an almost exact contemporary of mine, is a Czech Catholic priest, sociology professor, and theologian. His 2024 book The Afternoon of Christianity, employs his expertise in both fields to the full.
It was following the Prague Spring of 1968 that Halík became both a Christian and a priest, so some of his formative years were spent in opposition to a totalitarian regime, which perhaps gives him the ability to question institutions. The clarity of his sociological critique is expressed through a rapid retelling of the last five hundred years of western theological and philosophical history. However, even as a questioning theologian, he writes from within the paradigm of Catholic teaching. Given the bases of much of my recent theological reading (liberal, edgy, feminist, queer or apophatic), this is a stimulating change. But, despite his clear and welcome commitment to interpret and undergird the output of Pope Francis, his writing feels constrained at times.
That said, Halík is not afraid of challenging Catholic orthodoxy, which gives him a real appeal to the inclusive liberal in me. As a sociologist he questions the general failure of the Catholic Church to recognise the importance of taking women and their contribution seriously, particularly in the closure of the diaconate to women (I doubt he reacted well to the Pope's words about women uttered in Belgium in September), and he takes a very open and strongly worded position on same sex relationships and the banishment from church of people in irregular relationships or situations (perhaps being pastor of a student congregation in Prague has given him pause for thought?), And though this appeal is directed at a Catholic audience, it would also accuse many fundamentalist churches in their tendency to prefer legalism rather than love.
I do wonder whether his characterisation, towards the end of his sociological history, of a second and third Enlightenment is wholly convincing, unless the speed of change in our lifetime has indeed compressed matters: his second Enlightenment begins with the general mindset changes of the momentous year which was 1968; but does this really give way to a third enlightenment in which we are living now and which began in 2000?
On the face of it, his title, The Afternoon of Christianity, could be seen as a little depressing, suggesting perhaps the continuing decline of Christianity. But this is far from the case. He is drawing on Jung's analogy of life as a day, and calls our attention to the fact that the rebellions and strife of midday can be put firmly behind us, as we enter a period of more settled maturity that is the afternoon. It would be nice to think so, but whereas I can sense this to be true in many lives I know, my experience - especially of our own Church of England - causes me to have some doubt about this at an institutional level. And yet his optimism feeds into a feeling that there is much going on that gives hope, aligning in that sense with much of my other reading referred to above. For Halík, afternoon is at its best a kairos time, a time for spiritual development, for discovering the inner self (though mishandled it can breed rigidity and misery).
A significant part of his theological chapters is a dense and complex argument about faith and atheism, their differences and similarities. In this he uses the French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville as a sparring partner, and claims privilege for the non dogmatic believer, and for the humility of saying 'we don't know'. His clarity that faith and doubt are sisters not enemies, and his recognition of the significance of spirituality, are both wholly admirable.
Though he uses the language of Being, with which I resonate (perhaps it is no coincidence that we were born in the same year, and studied when the style of Christian existentialism, identified in particular with the person of John Macquarrie is this country), he also calls us to remember the ineffability of God, of which we need reminding - we cannot understand God cataphatically if we do not also use apophatic language (if that's not some kind of paradoxical tautology): God is wholly other, yet closer to me than I am to myself, words which he doesn't use, but with which he would surely be comfortable. He also more than once uses the language of process theology. In a Catholic writer, I found this interesting.
The are many places where he put things succinctly and quotably. For instance, the striking images he uses in calling the Old Testament ‘part of the memory of the church’, or his recognition that towards the end of his life he has come to know the meaning of one of his teachers’ words: ‘the Church, my love and my cross’. Two others may be enough to give a flavour: ‘the church must complete the shift from Catholic to catholicity’; and ‘it seems to me that atheistic utopias also need to be demythologised’.
He concludes the book by setting out four visions for the future of the church: a journeying people; a school of wisdom; a field hospital (a particular favourite of Pope Francis) and a place of encounter and conversation. I found these more admirable as generalisations than in the way in which he spells them out. Perhaps this is one of the points in the book where he is most constrained by the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy and a post communist milieu? However, this doesn't prevent him from uttering swingeing words of criticism about, for instance, the relationships between churches and their political setting. But rich though these words are, they do not seem to add to the practical development of his ideas about how the church of his visions should be. Indeed, I feel there is a disappointing negativity in his exposition of each of the visions or models he sets out to promote. And though the images themselves appeal, his broad brush does not hint at much detail about how the vision could be developed in practice. But maybe his intention here is to allow likeminded, but younger people, to take the task on.
The same sense of idealism rather than practicality is found in his sense that the future, rather than being based around the inherited pattern of parish and diocese, which he senses is crumbling in our time, is instead about developing centres of spiritual accompaniment and a ministry of personal spiritual accompaniment. While this may sound wonderful in the abstract, it is surely idealistic, utopian, and somewhat individualistic. And I baulk at his carryover of the word client from his psychotherapy practice into the realm of spiritual accompaniment.
So in all, this is an interesting, indeed at times arresting, book. But I think it suffers both from being too Eurocentric, and from not fully realising the task he set himself to explain ‘the type of faith (not religion) that can best assist the rising generation to cope with the challenges presented by the emerging new age, and what type of transformation the Church, theology and spirituality must undergo in order to address the current crisis as an opportunity to be a support for people in what I call in this book the Afternoon of Christianity.’
John Schofield, October 2024
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Book review written by John Schofield |
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