With knowledge solely few can summon, Halik calls the church to contemplate how essentially the most trustworthy expression of its mission could also be in its future. To that finish, he contends:

I imagine that the Christianity of tomorrow might be above all a group of a brand new hermeneutic, a brand new studying, a brand new and deeper interpretation of the 2 sources of divine revelation, scripture and custom, and particularly of God’s utterance in the indicators of the instances.

When heeding revelation and God’s utterance, Halik argues the church, as famous within the subtitle, should additionally summon the braveness to vary. 

A part of Halik’s inspiration is the results of getting an early glimpse of what lay in secularism’s wake. A lifelong resident of Prague, Halik was ordained in a clandestine service in Erfurt as a result of the specter of secular communism was barely much less ominous in East Germany than Czechoslovakia.   

Initially, the Velvet Revolution invited optimism {that a} free folks would repopulate the church in methods previous to the rise of the Iron Curtain. What Halik and his colleagues discovered was that individuals whose habits of religion have been stripped from them have been incapable of reflexively returning to the church. Whereas nonetheless curious, a malaise of indifference turned the spirit of the post-secular age. 

Halik, a priest serving the Educational Parish of Prague and professor of sociology at Charles College, discovered he wanted to reexamine threads of his personal vocation. As exemplified by the biblical prophets, Halik discovered he was referred to as to function a public theologian or as one who perceives “the adjustments on this planet as God’s self-expression in historical past.”

Along with Halik’s efforts as a priest and professor, the outcomes of that reexamination are discovered within the pages of his 21 books in Czech, of which seven are actually translated into English. In his first work translated into English, Endurance with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Persevering with in Us, Halik lobbies that the church is known as to succeed in a technology metaphorically embodied by Zacchaeus — curious but ready from a protected distance, maybe assuming their posture of indifference will persist until surprisingly compelled in any other case.  

As Christ’s physique, Halik believes, the church is the one group that may, in reality, in any other case compel the curious but detached. The Afternoon of Christianity then is “a guide about religion as a journey searching for God within the midst of a altering world, about lived religion, the act of religion, how we imagine (fides qua) slightly than what we imagine (fides quae), what’s the ‘object’ of religion.” 

Over the course of 16 interlocking chapters, what follows is Halik’s appraisal of how such a journey happens. Risking oversimplification, that journey consists of reexaminations of the character of God, the character of religion and the character of the church. Alongside the best way, Halik consulted an eclectic mixture of voices together with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek and Pope Francis.  

As famous, that journey begins with the character of God. Whereas the fashionable legacy of apologetics afforded the church some arguments worthy of God, it additionally left the church with some arguments outlined by a logic that God might be generally known as might another object. Whereas such arguments cut back God to one thing aside from God, additionally they elevate humanity to one thing aside from beings created by God and in God’s picture.

In distinction, Halik contends the curious but detached amongst us are drawn to the thriller of an infinite God as a consequence of a eager consciousness of our personal finitude. The ensuing course of is “The Spirit of God leads the church ever deeper into the fullness of reality.” Because of this, Halik asserts that indifference succumbs to forcing conviction once we “gratefully use all of the devices of information which were given us” and we nonetheless are left to “marvel on the immensity and depth of that which infinitely transcends [us].” 

An understanding of God that leaves room for God to be God means religion not solely acknowledges but additionally honors area for doubt. For Halik, “The doubt that may be a wholesome corollary to religion and makes it humble just isn’t doubt about God, or doubt about whether or not God exists, however doubt about myself, in regards to the extent to which as a believer I’ve correctly understood what God is saying to me.” Such doubt acknowledges people as finite and God as infinite. Such doubt additionally respects the questions which compel the Zaccheus in all of us to safe a protected distance to observe and look ahead to the approaching of the savior.                       

In some methods, the church’s response to such understandings of God and religion is just to proceed to be the church, leaning absolutely into the grace current within the sacraments over which it presides. Halik factors to perceptions of the church as “the folks of God journeying by historical past,” “a college of Christian knowledge” and “a area hospital.” To those longstanding perceptions of the church, nonetheless, Halik provides “the thought of the Church as a spot of encounter and dialog, a ministry of accompaniment and reconciliation.” 

Drawing inspiration from Jung, Halík believes the afternoon of life and, in flip, of Christianity is “a time acceptable for the event of non secular life, a possibility to finish the lifelong technique of maturing.” Maybe the time has come for the church to take up and skim. What awaits on the opposite facet of doing so may simply be a presence on this planet worthy of the crucifixion Christ skilled and made the church’s very existence potential.