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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.
Four characteristics of the teachings of Jesus
In what follows, I reduce Jesus’ teaching to a schema of four descriptors that organize its qualities. In each case I highlight Jesus’ expansive teaching by alluding to a Gospel story and develop its characteristics through a Jewish interpretation stimulated by Heschel. The four qualities could be subdivided and multiplied to carry further interpretive nuances. They are illustrative and not exhaustive. The important point here consists in recognizing that Jesus was Jewish – and that what he represented in his preaching deserves unique attention on the part of the churches of his disciples.
First, Jesus represented a personal and compassionate God. This personal quality of God stands out in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. Arguably, the key teaching bears reference to the father of the young man who committed the worst of acts: disloyalty and implicit contempt of his own family. What he meets upon his return constitutes a complete reversal of expectation in an excess of forgiveness that exalts him and inflates his original status. Some of the Jewish nuance of this teaching will help to illumine its astonishing character.
The Hebrew Bible is thoroughly anthropomorphic in its depiction of God, but it does not entail naïveté. The mind recognizes God as ineffable and incomprehensible mystery, beyond all things and yet imbedded within the perceptible world: omnipresent. This transcendent reference fills prosaic language with reverential wonder and awe.
It refers to spiritual presence; God, objectified in language, does not live at a distance but surrounds and subsists within the world and us. God represents the pure power of being that supports my non-possession of my own being. The notion of God cannot be entertained without implicating the self: Human existence depends upon God in each moment of its being. This can be ignored and dismissed, but it cannot be considered without direct relevance to each person.
But these standards of theology pale in comparison with what Heschel calls the pathos of God. God is the God of Abraham: “out of stillness of endless ages came compassion and guidance.” God means divine feeling and love for human existence. In Hosea, the relationship between God and God’s people is like an ideal marriage that is constituted by sympathy, tenderness and pure love.
At the same time, one will never understand God’s love without seeing how deeply it grounds God’s concern for justice. The prophets who view the world with God’s eyes show that God’s love equals God’s sense of justice. That is an intrinsic and self-evident a priori of Jewish faith. God’s justice should not be seen as an equilibrium; it always leans or is biased toward the poor and those who are disadvantaged. As justice dies when it is dehumanized into a mathematical formula, so God’s justice disappears when separated from God’s compassion. The substance of divine justice has its roots in God’s concern, love and compassion for human beings.
These reflections should apply to the public face of the church. The principle speaks for itself and releases myriad instances where either this is not the case or many more where the church could better represent Jesus’ God. The sheer force of God’s absolute being and the tensive reciprocal forces of love and justice that define God’s relationship to human beings charge the church to become as “Godlike” as humanly possible. “Be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Whenever the church appears self-interested rather than standing for human beings in whatever prodigal condition they find themselves, it contradicts its own being and the God it stands for.
Second, Jesus represented God’s reliance on human freedom. Preaching from within the Jewish tradition, Jesus taught that God relied on human freedom to accomplish God’s intentions for human beings on earth. An explicit example of this is Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan. The parable responds to the question posed to Jesus’ reiteration of the Jewish commandment that we should love the neighbor. A lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ response indicated that all are our neighbors, even our enemies, and we should act like the Samaritan who showed kindness to his traditional enemy: “Go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37).
Jesus’ formative tradition supports this idea. The relationship between God and human beings is reciprocal. Human beings trust in God and God trusts human beings. “Belief in” and “reliance upon” go in both directions. The covenant consists of mutuality and companionship; the bond includes partnership. But the Jewish Bible also recounts God’s disappointment with human response. The parable of the vineyard of Isaiah (5:1-7) describes God being wounded by the response of Israel and hurt at the thought of abandoning the vineyard into which God had invested so much care and expectation.
As Heschel puts it, God’s will on earth depends on human freedom; God appeals to human freedom. The word of God becomes history through freedom. Spirituality entails an active freedom working in consort with God’s presence. This idea runs very deep. A grasp of what is going on here requires an explicit insight. God is not only interested in and present to human freedom; God needs human freedom for achieving God’s ends. This lies at the heart of the Sinai covenant. The servanthood of Israel in Isaiah means that human beings are to be God’s instrument and God’s witness of God’s salvific power in history.
Heschel communicates this conviction sharply: “Life is a partnership of God and man; God is not detached from or indifferent to our joys and griefs […] God is a partner and a partisan in man’s struggle for justice, peace and holiness, and it is because of [God’s] being in need of man that [God] entered a covenant with him for all time, a mutual bond embracing God and man, a relationship to which God, not only man, is committed.”
This is Jesus’ tradition; this is Jesus’ teaching.
Imagine a church that has internalized partnership with God in its teaching, its internal workings and its external appearance. This is not a church telling people to be good. Church membership, like Israel in covenant, does not appeal to individuals; it refers to community responsibility and public history. It encompasses church self-understanding, the sacraments, the preaching and the practice of the community itself: its raison d’être. Church appears as a community that is always in the service of the rule of God, which is Jesus’ expression for living out the lessons of the Torah in daily life. It conquers not by power but by being compassionate.
Third, Jesus gives us an anthropology of gratitude and responsibility. In Jesus’ teaching, the virtues of gratitude and responsibility sum up fundamental moral attitudes that structure his conception of the bond between God and human existence. The two themes are captured in a paradigmatic way in his parable of the talents. Talents are distributed to human beings as personal and social capital for investment into the social order for the increment and strengthening of community thriving. The parable takes the social covenant of Sinai and applies it to each individual to describe the Jewish way of life. The straightforward intent of the parable could not have been misunderstood. It describes how dependence, gratitude and responsibility coincide in Jewish thinking and bear uncommon spiritual power.
The feeling of gratitude accompanies the experience of God and being dependent upon God for existence itself. The question of the inner meaning of life itself cannot be severed from the question of God; God becomes present in the very question of the meaning of existence. The insight into dependence-in-being reinforces an invitation to a fundamental gratitude for one’s existence.
But Jesus’ Jewish experience penetrated more deeply than into some sense of passive dependence; it contains a sense that something is required of us. Jesus’ recognition of God includes a sense of obligation that surpasses an invitation. It appears as law and a command from God to conform to God’s intention for creation itself. God’s good will should be fulfilled in us “on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). Conscience, the witness to this duty, drives home this sense of obligation to the source of existence.
God has entrusted creation to us. God’s covenant with us translates this imperative from a vague sense of obligation to an interpersonal relationship with God who has placed trust in human existence. This sense of covenantal responsibility, which assumes God’s partnership into our own purpose and task, corresponds exactly with the open sense of the “rule of God” that summed up Jesus’ view of how human beings exist within and are responsible for their world.
It is important to translate this conception into the framework of a description of the church. The church does not lay responsibility for the rule of God upon the backs of members; this is no obligation added on to autonomous human freedom. This responsibility, parsed by individuality, describes in an explicit way the intention of creation and the meaning of existence. One grows into the inner dynamics of baptism and membership. As the prophets offered a rebuke and an invitation to a covenant people, so do preachers and ministers speak from inside a common sense of gratitude and responsibility in order to discern the rule of God in each discrete society.
Finally, Jesus calls us to be a community of hope and action. Although Jesus talked about service to Jewish society, he more dramatically demonstrated his conception of discipleship when he sent his followers to the villages to do what he was doing. Like the prophets, Jesus prodded and cultivated active discipleship within the partnership between God and human beings. Several layers thicken this commitment.
A primal level of this insight lies in the mutual entailment of faith and action. In Heschel’s description of Jewish spirituality, ideas and actions need each other; beliefs are the principles of action and provide the structure for human behavior. No separation can divide abstract beliefs and the laws that regulate everyday patterns of living. Each includes the other. Religious ideas bear existential weight; they express an inner demand; they propose ideals meant to be implemented and attained.
Jewish tradition consists in remembering and re-enacting; faith becomes historical because it is carried by the community in action. Action both objectifies faith and provides evidence that verifies beliefs. As Jesus said: By their fruits, not by beliefs alone, you shall know them (Mt 7:16). Mysticism and active engagement, devotion and deed, run together. Religion cannot be separated from conduct, from doing, from action. God’s stake in human history actualizes itself in our partnership with God.
The importance of liturgy
What can be said of faith applies as well to hope. Prophets denounce, but they also hold out hope for the future. Heschel reads Isaiah as proposing two dimensions of hope. The one applies immediately to a turn of fortune in the near future. The other is distant, final and eschatological; God will transform the world at the end of time.
This theme of the union of hope and action in Jesus’ teaching provided the inspiration for the formation of the Christian church. It continues to yield imperatives for preaching and the ritual of the Eucharist. It is absolutely necessary that reimagining the church have a direct bearing on liturgy as the place where community is actualized in assembly.
In his preaching, Jesus’s Judaism placed emphasis on action, behavior, a way of living as the measures of authentic inward devotion. The Jewish background forbids making this a kind of either/or thinking; it refers to the depth of response and commitment. Heschel describes Jewish faith as containing what he called “an ecstasy of deeds.” These were “luminous moments in which we are raised by overpowering deeds above our own will; moments filled with outgoing joy, with intense delight. Such exaltation is a gift” that accompanies acts of service. These actions transpire within the agency of human freedom and with a sense that the action is carried by a force beyond one’s individual power. This partnership of God and human freedom becomes actual in everyday life. Nothing in Jesus’ teaching suggests what might be called free-standing beliefs valued for their own sake.
The second application points directly to the way Christian liturgy is structured as word and sacrament. Whereas the first part of Christian liturgy, the Liturgy of the Word, directly appeals to the teaching of Jesus, the second, the Eucharistic prayer, has been controlled by the other side of the New Testament – that is, commentary on Jesus rather than the rule of God he promoted and a set of doctrines that emerged within the tradition. My concern is that in contemporary liturgy the Eucharistic celebration is often interpreted within the context of a notion of original sin and an atonement theory that was hardened by the theology of Anselm [of Canterbury] and has been seriously compromised by present-day critical theology. In the face of apathy regarding religious belonging and an extraordinary abandonment of the rituals of Christian assembly, we need to question the perspective and language of present-day liturgy.
A call to contemporary Christians
A constructive reimagination of the church provides a new apologetic that addresses contemporary apathy to religious assembly. To be comprehensive, it has to go back to the foundations of the church. It also has to engage the contact points where the public institution meets particular cultures and the congregations of people who go about their daily lives. The story of the disciples walking to Emmaus tells how the church was founded on the continuing assembly and exchange of the memories of the historical Jesus. Beginning with the community assembled for a memorial meal, this image of the church, drawn from the message of the Jewish Jesus, reflects an internalization of the responsibility to respond to God’s calling implicit in the creation of human existence, that is, each single human being and the human community as a whole.
This image of the church might be called a community of disciples. But too often, it has been turned inside-out by retrieving Jesus’ teaching and placing the rule of God as the criterion of discipleship. Jesus’ representation of the rule of God re-centers the discussion; it restores the mutual entailment of faith and action. Like Jesus’ ministry, it appeals directly to the affectivity of gratitude, compassion and responsibility. Who is not moved by the integrity of Jesus’ witness? If this summons were obvious in the public image and performance of the church, could apathy resist it?
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.
Please note, 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. 23/2025
Photocredits: Portrait provided by the author