From Impasse to Passage - the evolution of Christianity practices and beliefs

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Isabelle Graessle

Reflections on the Church

On the threshold

Passage, moving on to a new stage of life -- the church has done this many times in the course of its history. From schisms to reformations, from councils to assemblies, from dubious compromises to courageous words and actions, the church has undergone major transitions which have caused it to evolve, to grow, to pass on to new ways of being. It has often become more humane in the process, but sometimes it has also been left with the bitter taste of dissatisfaction or regret. Since its mythic beginnings the church has certainly changed, but new challenges are still appearing to push it further on, beyond where it even hoped to go. Yet the church is now confronted, as perhaps never before, with the issue of its own survival. For the world too has changed, and that on a global scale. Whether the church knows it or not, the time has come for a new passage.

The word "passage" unquestionably conjures up a journey, taking to the road, moving on. It is also that fleeting moment of which one only realizes afterwards that it has happened, when it has passed and already belongs to the past. And it is finally that great passage par excellence, that discreet euphemism for death which is popular in both French and English: passer in the sense of mourir, to pass away.

As the frontier between two worlds (north and south, before and after), passage is related to the rituals of traditional societies which for so long structured individual lives. It lies at the crossroads of the two fundamental axes of space and time and, though it may have come to seem innocuous in present-day culture, which propagates the illusion that we can be everywhere at once, the idea of a passage has an existential, even ontological significance. We humans beings are irremediably creatures of passage ourselves, always moving on, seeking to become that which we are called to be. Thus the act of passage is of our essence, the more so because it also serves a heuristic purpose which can be useful for our topic here. For what is thinking if not a dialogue between one memory and another, passing from one voice to another, bridging between disciplines and ideas, blazing new trails beyond the settled lands?

A hazy context

But in what way is the church concerned with a passage at this time? The context within which Christianity is evolving today demands that the church face the questions of its visibility, its message and its relevance. I will not dwell on the observation which has been very well mapped out by sociologists, anthropologists and historians in recent decades: we have entered the post-modern age as one would a religion, with conviction and determination. The great religious traditions which have up to now, in the West in any case, played their role of structuring the religious life of society and, at the same time, legitimizing political systems, have finished their work. This has caused the philosopher Marcel Gauchet to say that Christianity has become "the religion of the exit from religion". The unbridled individualism of our contemporaries has reduced these ancestral traditions, and our practice of them, to options for living, but no longer obligations into which we are born.

At the same time, the anxiety generated by our ever more hectic life-styles, together with the globalized views of other religions from the East projected by the media, which seem to offer more and to do it better than the old substratum of Christianity, are provoking what some are inaccurately calling a "return of religion". This return is actually more like a reassembling of the same religious behaviour. The men and women of the 21st century are perhaps no less religious than their ancestors of foregoing generations; they simply reject the claim of religion to regulate the whole of society.

This is why immediate experience and personal stories have taken over from all-encompassing codes of meaning and the great stories of faith, which have lost their power and, more seriously, their wisdom and authority. Whatever the epistemological basis of their conclusions, the majority of analysts agree that today's religious crisis is unique on account of its depth. Here the challenges begin. What answers does the Christian tradition have to the urgent demand for meaning, but also for practical experience and wisdom, and for a sense of mystery? How can it work on its principal theological categories, considering them not as the last bits needing to be secularized (as if there were two languages, one for inside and one for outside!), but rather as elements of a message which must be rediscovered by confronting the texts on which Christianity is founded? The fronts are vast, and the haziness of the context in which we are moving does not make understanding easier.

Nevertheless, this is the context in which the church will have to embark on the most important passage of its entire life. But I would not wish to suggest an inevitable causal link between the changes in cultural paradigms and those in the church's paradigms. It would indeed be wrong to think of the church in passage as a concession to the post-modern age, a sacrifice on the altar of generalized relativity and of the evolution of Western culture. For the threat of social change on a planetary scale is not the reason that the church, too, has to change, nor should it do so in order to stay in the current of progress, fascinating and formidable though it may be. The church needs to change simply because it is itself movement, taking to the road, journey. Founded in the midst of the Passover, a time of movement, the church is a "place of passage". At the very heart of its identity the church incarnates the place of many passages. In this respect, it is astonishing that the founding fathers of the Reformation, men of passage par excellence, make little mention of this idea. Yet this was the theme not only of the religious life of their time, but also of the whole of European society, eager to discover other parts of the earth by sending out intrepid sailors to find the passages. The ocean between the continents became symbolically the necessary intermediate passage between the "already" of the past and the "not-yet" of a new world, between the known world of an expanding culture and the otherness of the unknown land, the exalting age of discovery and the endless tranquillity of the voyage.