Why the Church?: Self-Optimization or Community of Faith

Cultural Memory in the Present

Hent de Vries, Editor

WHY THE CHURCH?

Self-Optimization or Community of Faith

Hans Joas

Translated by Alex Skinner

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

English translation © 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Why the Church? was originally published in German in 2022 under the title Warum Kirche? Selbstoptimierung oder Glaubensgemeinschaft © Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2022.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Joas, Hans, author.

Title: Why the Church? : self-optimization or community of faith / Hans Joas ; translated by Alex Skinner.

Other titles: Warum Kirche? English | Cultural memory in the present.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2024. | Series: Cultural memory in the present | Originally published in German in 2022 under the title Warum Kirche? Selbstoptimierung oder Glaubensgemeinschaft. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024007605 (print) | LCCN 2024007606 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503638037 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503640795 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503640801 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mission of the church. | Dignity—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Christian sociology.

Classification: LCC BV601.8 .J6313 2024 (print) | LCC BV601.8 (ebook) | DDC 260—dc23/eng/20240315

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024007605

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024007606

Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Typeset by Newgen in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/13.5

For Susanna Schmidt and Joachim Hake

Contents

Preface to the English-Language Edition of Why the Church?

1. Introduction

2. Why the Church?: Can Transcendence Be Organized?

3. Problematic Predictions: Religion in a Secular Age

4. Do We Need Religion?: On Experiences of Self-Transcendence

5. Faith or Self-Optimization?: On the Cultural Role of the Church

6. A Christian through War and Revolution: Alfred Döblin’s Narrative Work November 1918

7. Christianity without the Church?: The Intellectual Trajectory of Leszek Kołakowski

8. Human Dignity: The Religion of Modernity?

9. Is Human Dignity Still Our Supreme Value?

10. The Church as Moral Agency?

11. The Church’s Global Responsibility and Particular Obligations

Notes

Bibliography

Name Index

Subject Index

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 person⁴—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

1

Introduction

The impetus for this book came from the journalist Volker Resing, for many years editor-in-chief of the monthly Herder Korrespondenz, a thought-leading journal among Catholic Christians in Germany. Resing was previously responsible for initiating the lengthy debate between eminent Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann (d. 2018) and myself, which he moderated and excerpts of which he published in 2018 as a book titled Beten bei Nebel: Hat der Glaube eine Zukunft? (Praying in the dark: Does faith have a future?). Over many a shared lunch, but also in an extended circle with editors from the Herder publishing house, we discussed which question was inflaming passions in Christian circles in Germany today—much as the question of whether religion has any future at all did in the early days of the new century. At that time, a debate that had taken off a few decades earlier in the social sciences was attracting growing attention on a much broader basis.

The debate in question revolved around attempts to critique and overcome so-called secularization theory, in other words, the idea that economic and scientific-technological modernization ineluctably results in the weakening of all religion. More than ever before, this debate was gripping the wider public in the churches and beyond. In line with this, Do we need religion? was the topic of the first keynote lecture at the first Ecumenical Church Congress ever held in Germany in 2003, which I had the honor of giving. Drawing inspiration from that gathering, I also published a short book of my own essays under the same title in 2004.¹

Now, the exponents of secularization theory, as defined above, have by no means fallen completely silent. The turn away from the churches, especially the Catholic Church, which was already under way in certain countries, has intensified following the exposure of countless cases of sexual and spiritual abuse by clerics and the habitual cover-up of these cases by church officials—or the inadequate acknowledgment of their own wrongdoing. This turning away is undeniable and is not difficult to understand. No wonder, then, that the proponents of a scholarly position that had been on the defensive are once again becoming more vocal, convinced that they can confirm the global decline of religion after all. Perhaps the most prominent author among them was the leading scholar of value change, Ronald Inglehart, who died in 2021. In 2004, he and coauthor Pippa Norris came up with an original way to reconcile the basic idea of advancing secularization due to modernization with the simultaneous but—on this premise—seemingly paradoxical finding of an increasingly religious world.² They did so by taking greater account of the demographic dimension, that is, the different birth rates and variable population growth of societies depending on their degree of secularization. While his proposed explanation was problematic in many respects,³ it was still an important step forward. In more recent works, however, Inglehart again tended to fall back on conventional secularization theory.⁴ His key evidence in this regard was the increase in the number of people who no longer belong to a religious community in the United States. I will come back to this later.

First, however, it should be noted that in the discussions mentioned above we were quick to agree about another issue: for many Christians today the pressing question is not whether religion or Christianity has any future at all but whether there is any need for a church in that future. Many contemporaries view the Christian ethos of love for one’s neighbor as plausible, at least in essence, and also find Christian forms of spirituality attractive. As a result, they have a hard time imagining that this heritage will one day lose its vigor completely and vanish from the scene. In any case, many of them are determined to hold fast to it personally, even in the face of strong resistance to Christianity in a secularized world. But they increasingly ask themselves why one cannot be a Christian without belonging to a church. So the pressing question today is not Do we need religion? but Do religious people—do Christians—need a church? Might a free, in other words, institutionless Christianity better facilitate the spread of the Christian message? Do clergy and church do more to obscure than to convey this message? What would be missing—many Catholic Christians are now asking themselves—if there were no more priests, bishops or popes?

Historically, these questions are by no means entirely new. In many a rebellious movement in church history and within Protestantism, especially in its more radical forms, and in reaction to ossification within the Reformed churches, they were posed long ago. Sectarian splinter groups and attempts to retreat into mysticism have featured in the history of the churches since time immemorial. In fact, in the theology of the Enlightenment era, the distinction between church and Christianity became central, both in the sense of individuals’ claim to determine for themselves what the Christian ethos demanded of them and in terms of the unbiased perception of Christianity in all its historical and cultural diversity—but also in light of its congruence with other religious traditions. At present, however, these impulses do not seem to stem primarily from intellectual and political motives—in contrast to the past, when there were protests against the church’s entanglement with feudal power structures, the lower classes harbored utopian hopes of overthrowing the prevailing order, and the middle classes aspired to autonomy at both the political and intellectual levels. The wellspring of these shifts is now more likely to lie in cultural tendencies toward individualization. Beyond the field of religious institutions, these are bringing to an end the era of permanent membership in organizations and lifelong loyalty to political parties, and certainly the selfless commitment of the party soldier. Once again, we can identify precursors in the shape of the religious quest movements around 1900 with their distinction between the spiritual and the religious, and in the hopes expressed by thinkers such as pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in the 1930s, who believed that the religious sphere would have to emancipate itself from all institutional forms, from all traditional mythologies and dogmas and from any claim to exclusivity in order to finally develop without constraint.⁵ Under these circumstances, many people find that they can extol their faith only in light of its invigorating, comforting, inspiring effect and thus as something that helps them personally, perhaps even something that enables them to achieve autonomy and take action to help others. But this makes it more difficult for them to ascribe a constitutive role in their personal development to the church as an institution, to describe the Catholic Church, for example, through the metaphor of the Mother Church;⁶ they may also struggle to acknowledge possible restrictive effects of faith that arise from commitment to ideals and that entail a profound shift in people’s lives—away from a focus on realizing their own potential and the optimization of the self.

So why the church? Quite deliberately, the title of this book asks why? and not what for? In the aforementioned speech, Do We Need Religion?, I distinguished between two possible meanings of this question.⁷ It may imply that we are looking for benefits of some kind that individuals, society or humanity might derive from religion, such as happiness, stable morality, mental health, social cohesion or peace. This way of posing the question features a disturbingly autosuggestive undertone. Ultimately, everyone knows that even the most convincing proof of the utility of faith does not lead to faith. So we have to discern another meaning in the word needs, namely, whether something may in fact be dispensable under certain conditions. When it comes to religion, this pertains to the extra-ordinary human experiences that are articulated in faith. Hence, when it comes to the church, the goal cannot be to seek to legitimize it as an institution because it fulfills a purpose or proves functional for a certain system. Instead, the imperative must be to reflect on the factors that once prompted believers in Jesus Christ to create and imbue with life an institution that differs from all other contemporary social forms such as family and kinship, but also those characteristic of the polity. After all, not all religions have brought forth such an institution. Reflection on these historical causes, however, if convincing, may itself engender reasons and motives to hold fast to the social form of the church in the present and to actively participate in it—despite all the disappointment, even despair, about its concrete form in place and time.

That is what the present book is about. Rather than a monograph, it is a collection of essays that, instead of dealing with the topic in systematic, step-by-step fashion, illuminate it from a number of different angles. Forming the consistent background to all of them, however, is my longterm project of providing a systematic, historically grounded alternative to so-called secularization theory, but also to the grand, influential historical narratives centered on a world-historical process of disenchantment (as in the work of Max Weber), world history as divine reason coming to know itself (as expounded by Hegel) or the emergence of secular reason (as in the writings of Jürgen Habermas). This alternative consists of a global history of moral universalism, that is, grasping the diversity of religious and philosophical sources of an ethos directed at all of humanity. For now, all I will say about this is that it places Christianity in a light that allows for a new perspective on the church.⁸

The first essay most directly addresses this connection between moral universalism and appropriate forms of social organization. This chapter asks whether the human relationship to transcendence is even amenable to organization. Only against this background, in other words, after clarifying the deeper meaning of the church as institution, can we meaningfully probe power, authority and the separation of powers in the church. While these issues arise in all human institutions and organizations, they do not appear in every setting in the way typical of truly political institutions. I therefore express reservations here about rallying cries for the democratization of the church.

This key text is followed by a chapter that concisely summarizes my view of the failure of predictions of secularization and disenchantment. I also take the opportunity to reflect on the limits of historical forecasting in general and predictions about religion in particular. My reflections in this chapter raise the question, which I am unable to pursue further in the present book, of when in the history of Christianity the idea that it might ever perish arose last in antiquity and first in modernity. For more than a millennium—I surmise—it was inconceivable, despite the significance of apocalyptic statements in Christianity, that the