){kind=link}
Introduction by Andreas Telser
For a growing number of Christians, mainly in the Western hemisphere, church-talk has become problematic for many reasons. However, for theology to shy away from or even avoid questions of the church only further limits the credibility of theology. Throughout his œuvre, Roger Haight has consistently tackled challenging issues for contemporary publics. His straightforward plea for new ways of thinking about the church gains special weight against the backdrop of his having also experienced the restrictive side of the church (policy).
In the last two years, American Jesuit Roger Haight (1936–2025) had several online encounters with the Research Center “Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society,” for which we are very thankful!
The following lengthy text, published in three parts, was Haight’s last published work before his death in June 2025. We are grateful to America Magazine for the chance to republish it here.
On New Ways of Thinking about the Church by Roger Haight SJ (Part I)
As the church has been the subject of careful self-examination in recent years, an important observer has been the Rev. Tomáš Halík. In his The Afternoon of Christianity, Halík criticized the church on the parish level for failing to stimulate a spirituality for our time. At the same time, a group of Catholic sociologists, in their recent review of the last 50 years of church development, Catholicism at a Crossroads: The Present and Future of America’s Largest Church, described why people are streaming out of the church rather than into it.
It seems like an old order is passing away. The social base of large families, ethnic enclaves in cities, worldwide denominational solidarity, expanding membership and building exist today only outside developed Western societies or in some pockets within them.
We cannot adequately understand the church without addressing why so many of its members are walking away from it. But sociological description and explanation do not supply a theological ideal at which to aim. We need a framework for representing the church that addresses this issue with a deep theological grounding and in a public way. This revisioning of the church should explain the foundations of the church beyond a merely ad hoc response to the situation.
In what follows, I will discuss further the reasons why a new theological perspective on the church is needed. I then describe a strategy of going back to Jesus’ teachings during his earthly ministry. I use the theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel to illumine Jesus’ Jewish perspective. Then, in a final section, I want to offer an outline of how placing Jesus’ own teaching at the center of an understanding of the church elicits a new vital way of thinking about the church and its mission.
Explaining the church
In a religious context, the term apology has several different connotations. During the Enlightenment, the churches defended themselves by rational argument right up to the threshold of faith itself. Apologists showed that critics mistook external religious institutions for inner faith commitments that are the basis of the spiritual life. Often churches argued against one another. More recently, much of apologetics took a constructive turn: By the correlation of challenge and response, it argued against the metaphysical skepticism that infects a scientific age. It addressed the relativism suggested by the plurality of religions and offered a more open view of the church, one that stressed that any one expression of truth cannot mean other conceptions of absolute mystery are utterly false.
In this Christian context, massive violence and suffering provide more reasons for scandal: God does not seem to temper the instinct for survival in this world. Yet I maintain that God can still be experienced within the workings of nature as a sustaining presence, the ground of human fellowship and an inspiration for living into an absolute future.
As coherent as these theological reflections may be, they exert little influence on effective Christian leadership or stem the tide of people leaving the church. It can seem that theologians are talking to themselves, a few students and still fewer intellectuals. Christian idealism has given way to large scale withdrawal from the churches. Such abandonment offers an implicit critique that has to be addressed on a foundational level.
I use the idea of a foundational conception to include the classic sense of “apology,” a considered explanation and justification of a person, a cause or a community. Whether defensive or neutrally expository, the main point lies in the clarity of the inner logic of its object. Does it ground and represent its subject matter? A reimagining of the church examines the roots of the community, the cause that drives it and the aims that attract it. To be effective, such an explanation has to be attentive to the audience it addresses and the situation at hand. In other words, we need a foundational idea directed to the specific problem of our time and place.
The problem of apathy
A new problem facing the church has developed in Western culture, one that may be called apathy. That word is a diffuse way of summarizing the many dissatisfactions analyzed in detail by the sociologists to explain disaffiliation. It refers to a fundamental moral attitude that affects a person’s, a group’s or a nation’s reaction to public religious belonging. It expresses itself bluntly in rejecting the importance of religious community. It is neither hostile nor aggressive. Apathy does not notice the affectivity usually associated with religious belonging. And it offers a special problem for revisioning religious community by not attending to argument.
Apathy toward religion resides in the area of spirituality. I look on spirituality as the way persons or groups lead their lives in relation to what is considered ultimate. Or, turning that around, the transcendent values of personal lives can be read in the objects that actually organize those lives. When people say that they are spiritual but not religious, they may indeed be ardent theists, but they ignore the importance of active participation in religious community. Apathy shuns church guidance that shapes personality and criticizes individual self-deception. Religious communities are meant to teach, support and guide. The privatization that surrounds much of spirituality in our culture gains support in an apathy toward religious belonging.
Apathy to public religious expression challenges the standard modes of religious self-explanation. Rational argument does not reach something so deeply embedded in affectivity. It says, negatively, “I’m not interested”; in a more positive vein, it says, “I’m already doing things that contribute to a humane society.” “My life is already full of meaning.” Apathy blocks the church’s answers to existential questions. If revision of the idea of church intends to address our religious situation, it must find a way to address this apathy.
William James addressed an analogous question in 1896 in a short book, Is Life Worth Living? His response to the question lies in life itself – or, more accurately, in the living person. All persons have to answer this question for themselves, and they can only do so existentially in and by their living.
While this response may seem obvious, it provides some guidelines for reimagining the church for today’s ecclesial membership. Revision has to reach behind and below conceptual analysis and rational argument. It must appeal to something that attracts attention, moves affectivity, appeals to reasons of the heart and at the same time addresses actual churches on the ground. Explanation must contain a formula for change.
An adequate foundation
This raises the expectations for an adequate foundational conception of the church in three respects. First of all, it should provide a new way of conceiving the basis of the church rather than merely describing the way the churches actually are. It has to consider those who have left the church. It seems impossible to propose an adequate rationale of the church today that does not address the implicit critique of so many formerly active members.
Second, such a conception of church must propose a positive antidote to apathy, a constructive vision that opens up again the horizon of promise that followed the Second Vatican Council. It should provide a formula for how the church can engage contemporary culture and society.
Third, self-explanation has to bear reference “from the bottom up,” from the smallest instantiation of the church in the congregation to its largest administrative structure. The description of the church should include the assembly of Christians in their primal acts of worship and offer guidance on how to live in the world as it is.
This heavy charge to reimagine the church requires more historical and sociological detail than the descriptive outline offered here. But even a short form can go back to the teachings of Jesus that addressed the basic desires of human existence. It will include an explicit shift away from traces in the liturgy of an individualist and privatized spirituality and open them up to include the whole of one’s active life.
Continue reading part II (to be published soon)!
This excerpt is reprinted with permission from America magazine, published by America Press, Inc. © 2025. All rights reserved. To read the full article, please click here or visit www.americamagazine.org. For subscription information, call 1-800-267-6939 or visit www.americamagazine.org/subscribe.
The collected volume Breaking Boundaries in Theology. In conversation with Roger Haight SJ which critically discusses some of Haight’s central theological issues is now available in open access at Brill: https://brill.com/edcollbook-oa/title/72372
RaT-Blog Nr. 18/2025