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The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change
By Tomas Halik
University of Notre Dame Press, 2024
ISBN: 978-0-268-20747-2
The Afternoon of Christianity is not a book about preaching, yet it is a work which could be a great help to preachers in reflecting on their own praxis and on the needs of their hearers. Halik, a sociologist by training, has also worked as a psychotherapist and was secretly ordained as a Roman Catholic Priest in 1978 for service in his native Czechoslovakia (as it then was). He brings these different competencies to bear in his review of the challenges facing the Christian churches in the 21st century.
The title is taken from the thought of C.G. Jung, who saw a typical pattern in human life: a ‘morning’ during which the ego is established and personal value systems are adopted; a ‘noon-day crisis’ when all of this is called into question and tested; and, if the crisis is surmounted successfully, an ‘afternoon’ of life when energies are redirected on the basis of a deeper understanding of ‘The Self’. Halik applies this model to the history of Christian faith.
He insists that religion is a historical phenomenon that inevitably evolves. Nothing could be more disastrous than to attempt to return to earlier stages. Christianity has been shorn of its Constantinian function as a source of social cohesion (‘religio’) first by the confessionalism of the Reformation, then by the secularisation of the Enlightenment (which would reduce faith to one ‘world-view’ among others) and finally by the crisis of institutional religion in the West and the emergence of ‘Post-Modernity’, with ‘spirituality’ now often divorced from communitarian expressions of faith. But he makes the important point that the passage from one epoch to another is never a neat break. These different strata co-exist in our congregations and in their pastors – pre-modern piety, Enlightenment scepticism and post-modern spiritual seeking.
Halik calls Christians to learn the art of discernment (what he calls ‘Kairology’ – reading the signs of the times or the Kairos). He sees little prospect of the decline of existing church structures across Europe being reversed. Yet he is confident in the future importance of the Christian community if it will undertake its real task, of witnessing to the love of God and of humanity through lives of disinterested service.
The author identifies four essential pathways for the Church in our generation, if we wish to move beyond the ecclesial ‘noonday crisis’. The Church needs to understand itself simultaneously as the People of God journeying through history, as a school of Christian wisdom, as a ‘field hospital’ for those wounded by life and as a place of encounter and conversation with those beyond the boundaries of the Church. This is a quietly passionate and prophetic book that deserves a wide audience.
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