Preface for Why the Church?
Preface to the English-Language Edition of Why the Church?
It was only after the original German-language edition of this book had been published that I discovered, with a degree of horror, that a book with the same title had appeared in French half a century earlier. Pourquoi l’Église? asked no less a figure than eminent theologian Jean Daniélou in 1972, a Jesuit whom Pope Paul VI had admitted to the College of Cardinals three years earlier. This is not the place—and it is perhaps not my job in any case—to compare these two books in depth. Yet such a comparison might well be instructive, at least with regard to the changed circumstances in which the question is being posed. Jean Daniélou was still writing under the influence of the great collective process of self-reflection that the Second Vatican Council represented for the Catholic Church. One can still sense an air of epochal awakening in his book, but also a kind of defiant attempt at self-assertion in the face of a culture in which atheism seemed to be marching inexorably toward ultimate triumph. In opposition to an increasingly hostile environment, it was not only faith itself that had to be defended but also faith in community, in the church as an institution, with its traditions and its authoritative interpretations of the Gospel. With great vigor, the author rejected the notion that the church might have to shrink to a small spiritual community of those still loyal to the faith: “I must say that a Christianity which would no longer be open to the poor, a Christianity which would not be available to all, a Christianity which would be limited to a small spiritual elite shut up in their chapels within a totally atheistic world, literally horrifies me: because this would mean that we abandon all of mankind to atheism, that we renounce our obligation to bring Jesus Christ to them.”1
For him, there were two aspects to the church’s raison d’être. First, everything in the church must be geared toward the idea of caritas, and second, there must be a profound privileging of “holiness.”2 In his aversion to the idea of a church reduced to a mere spiritual community, I feel close to Daniélou’s views. But I find his perspective rather unclear and of little use under present circumstances because in the fifty years between the publication of his book and the present day, a profound disillusionment has set in with respect to the Catholic Church.
In the 1970s, many still hoped that the church’s new post-conciliar self-understanding would lead to fundamental organizational reforms. Today, however, most have abandoned such hopes or even harbor fundamental doubts about the church’s capacity for structural reform. At the same time, the pressure on the church has grown enormously due to the shortage of priests in most economically advanced countries, the widespread disappointment felt among women in view of the discrimination they still face within the Catholic Church and, in particular, the exposure of numerous cases of sexual and spiritual abuse—along with the routine cover-up of such incidents. In the United States, the uncovering of these terrible offenses and the debate on their causes and ways of preventing them began in 2002, much earlier than in Europe. For several years, a number of European commentators went so far as to claim that this problem was limited to the United States. Subsequently, however, Europe too has been gripped by this great convulsion, which has also swept through other religious groups and institutions beyond Catholicism. In Germany, the ensuing crisis of credibility has led to the great endeavor known as the “Synodal Way,” which saw the participation of all the country’s bishops and auxiliary bishops, an equal number of representatives of Catholic associations and the priesthood, as well as a few “independent figures,” myself included. In early 2024, as I write this Preface, no final judgment is possible on where this process will lead at the national and global levels.
But that cannot be the focus at this point. I merely wished to explain the context in which this book emerged and how it differs from Daniélou’s era. My goal in this book is not to present a concrete program of reform—although I certainly have strong opinions on the controversial issues identified above. If you are interested in my thoughts in this regard, I invite you to consult the volume in which renowned conservative Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann and I discussed some of the key bones of contention.3 My intention in the present book is to uncover a common benchmark beyond the various matters of controversy, one on which the disputing parties should be able to agree. My goal here is to help prevent further polarization in both church and society—and to do so in an idiom that breaks free of the discourses at large within the church, within Christianity and within Christian theology. Daniélou’s sainteté, “holiness,” has to mean something quite different today. Far greater attention must be paid than in Daniélou’s book to the tension between the church’s institutional claim to sacredness and the offenses against human dignity—that is, the “sacredness of the person”4—manifest in the abuse of children, young people and women.
There is no need to go into detail here about how I pursue that project in the present book (for that, see the Introduction). But I would like to comment briefly on two points in order to avoid likely misunderstandings. First, this is not a book exclusively about the Catholic Church. On the contrary, I advocate a pluralist understanding of Christianity. What I mean by this is that Christianity de facto exists in a multitude of forms, strands and organizations. To dispute this is to assert that only one’s own brand of the faith is truly Christian. But I also wish to suggest that it would be a good thing if many Christians took this pluralism as an opportunity to learn from one another in terms of both theological self-understanding and forms of social organization. I would also like to emphasize that my line of argument in this book draws substantially on Protestant thinkers such as Ernst Troeltsch and H. Richard Niebuhr and that, as a Catholic and nontheologian, I was appointed to the honorary professorship named after Ernst Troeltsch by the wholly Protestant Faculty of Theology—an institution steeped in tradition and founded by Friedrich Schleiermacher—at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Second and finally, the ideas informing this book are derived from a much broader project dedicated to the history of moral universalism. The first two volumes of the associated trilogy have already been published in English translation. These are chiefly concerned with refuting the historical narratives propagated by Max Weber and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.5 The third volume puts forward a narrative that is intended as an alternative to both—though important aspects of this narrative can already be found in outline form in the final sections of the first two volumes. If, at its core, Christianity is a moral universalism, then—to quote my key contention in the present book—this must find expression in its organizational structures. I do not mean that this moral universalism must take the form of a centralized and hierarchical global organization on the Catholic model. But efforts must be made to avert the ever-present threat of a relapse into merely particularist orientations such as nationalism. As it happens, this problem is not unique to Christianity, as it is not the only religion with universalist aspirations.
Looking at the present book and Jean Daniélou’s volume together can help clarify that my assessment of the social causes of secularization and my view of atheism also differ in crucial ways from the ideas that guided the French theologian and so many others.6 Of course, there is no need to take his work as representative of the 1960s, the era of the Council or the subsequent years; naturally, by the same token, I cannot simply claim that my trains of thought are representative of our time. Still, the coincidence of the same title and the differences between the books may perhaps inspire readers to come up with their own answers to the question of why the church exists at all—that perennial source of astonishment—and in what form it ought to do so.
Hans Joas
Berlin, January 2024
Notes
1. Jean Daniélou, Why the Church? (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1975), 15.
2. Ibid., 27.
3. Hans Joas and Robert Spaemann, Beten bei Nebel: Hat der Glaube eine Zukunft? (Freiburg: Herder, 2018).
4. Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013).
5. Hans Joas, The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Hans Joas, Under the Spell of Freedom: Theory of Religion after Hegel and Nietzsche (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).
6. Hans Joas, Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).