Editor’s note: Roger Haight, S.J., died on June 19, 2025. A prominent Catholic theologian and a frequent contributor to America, he offered this substantial essay in April of this year, with typical humility, in an email titled “Sneaking in a submission.” We offer it as a final word from this Jesuit theologian and longtime friend. May he rest in peace.
As the church has been the subject of careful self-examination in recent years, an important observer has been the Rev. Tomas Halik. In his The Afternoon of Christianity, Halik 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 to 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.
Strategy for reimagining the church
Most Christians have a general idea of how the church developed. The New Testament provides the main entrée into that process, but it does not paint an exact picture of how the church took form in response to the preaching of Jesus and his execution. Critical reconstruction of the apparitions to disciples and the history provided by the Acts of the Apostles yields only fuzzy historical data about the period between Jesus’ death and the earliest letters of Paul. A distinctive theological perspective on that period will not yield new historical details, but it will help us to reimagine the dynamics of how the church developed.
I begin with a seemingly obvious distinction within the New Testament’s presentation of Christian faith. The first three Gospels present the ministry of Jesus in narrative form; the rest of the New Testament follows a developing Christian movement (Acts) and offers theological commentary on the person of Jesus. John’s Gospel straddles this distinction because it reflects a more developed, Christocentric view of the world. The distinction lies between a Jewish Jesus preaching the rule of God found in the earlier Gospels and the rest of the New Testament focused on the person of Jesus; the development moves from Jesus’ representation of God to an interpretation of Jesus.
Anyone familiar with this transition would know that this oversimplifies the New Testament texts, because all the Gospels express precisely Christian faith in Jesus. But one has to recognize that Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Many exegetes agree that the Jesus behind and within the first three Gospels did not preach himself as Messiah but promoted the rule of God. After that, the Christian apologetic concentrated less on Jesus’ message (while obviously not ignoring it) and more on his person in order to establish and explain his messiahship.
The Catholic Eucharistic ritual follows this basic structure. The Liturgy of the Word tells the Gospel stories of Jesus’ ministry against their traditional background as found in the Old Testament. This follows a logic of prophecy and fulfillment in the Christian imagination; more deeply, it preserves the historical continuity of Jesus’ formation in his tradition.
Also by Roger Haight, S.J.: Lessons From an Extraordinary Era: Catholic theology since Vatican II
The Eucharistic prayer that follows the Liturgy of the Word resembles the second dimension of the New Testament. Theological ideas dominate the language and communicate a framework shaped by the recognition of sin and represent Jesus Christ as a sacrifice that won God’s forgiveness. According to St. Anselm, who had an outsized influence in solidifying this doctrine in Western theology, this atonement was a transaction between a Chalcedonian Christ (a single person with two natures, divine and human) and God the creator. A history of theological speculation distinguishes between the Liturgy of the sacrament and the Liturgy of the Word.
The significance of this reflection lies in its implication for a comprehensive vision of the church. Importantly, the distinction between Jesus and later interpretation of him does not in any way impugn that interpretation. But we are looking for a formula that welds together a holistic vision of the church as beginning with a group of disciples who continued to assemble for meals in remembrance of the prophet, teacher and healer. This began with meals with Jesus during his ministry and has continued to this day. The allegory of the disciples on their way to Emmaus conveys it. They talked about Jesus, reflected on their Scriptures and recognized his presence in the breaking of the bread. This image of the church refers to a massive “model” of the institution and to each assembly gathered today for the ritual. People who are leaving the church are not simply abandoning a worldwide institution, but their parochial assemblies.
Using the distinction between Jesus and interpretation of him as background, we can imagine the following plan for reimagining the church. First of all, it works within a framework of a theology of revelation with a distinctive structure: the transcendent object that is revealed (God), the historical medium through which revelation draws its content (Jesus) and the reception of the revelation that actively interprets it (his followers). In short, Christian revelation opens up a consciousness of God, through Jesus of Nazareth, to the disciples affected by it. The conception fixes attention on the mediation of Jesus of Nazareth, whose ministry can be discerned principally but not exclusively through the texts of the earlier Gospels.
Abraham Heschel
Following Jesus’ ministry, the church came to be through the disciples who had encountered him. The teaching and ministry of Jesus were the key elements for determining what the church, as a community of disciples, would look like. He is the mediating source of Christian faith. A way of catching the accent of Jesus’ ministry would situate it within the context of the Jewish theology that shaped his thinking and acting. I look to Abraham Joshua Heschel for a representation of Jewish anthropology and theology drawn from the Bible but expressed to a post-Holocaust modern world. This stage of reimagining the church turns to Jesus’ teaching by reading it in the light of a present-day representation of the biblical faith from an American Jewish religious thinker.
Reimagining the church today will vary with the interpreters themselves. The formulation of the task releases almost as many readings of the data as there are situations, needs and the proclivities of the interpreters themselves.
Before moving to a fuller description of Jesus’ appeal for religious participation as a guideline for actualizing the church, it is important to offer a brief introduction to Heschel and the main categories from his theology that correspond to Jesus’ teaching and can be used as guidelines for reimagining the church today.
Abraham Joshua Heschel was born a Hasidic Jew in Warsaw in 1907. He never lost his vivid experience of God and his ability to communicate it. He finished his higher education in Germany after working extensively on the Jewish prophets. He escaped the Nazi occupation of Poland by emigrating to the United States, where he found a teaching position at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1940. He joined the faculty of Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1946. During the course of his career at J.T.S., he published widely and aligned himself with the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. His anthropology and theology rely heavily on biblical teaching, with an emphasis on the prophets.
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I would argue that Heschel’s digest of the Jewish Bible’s teaching correlates neatly with Jesus’ teaching and can be carried forward into norms that apply to the church today. These include the personhood of God. The creating power that sustains the universe is personal, and God’s reliance on human freedom in our world is the same. This means that God does not control human history, but in various ways leaves history in our hands. Shifting to anthropology, one can easily note that Heschel’s interpretation of the role of gratitude and responsibility are similar to the foundational characteristics of Jesus’ Jewish spirituality. These themes come together in the formation of a community whose public face generates hope and an active life in society.
One can reimagine the church using basic principles of Jesus’ revelation of God and interpreting them against their Jewish background. The approach highlights a number of themes that should characterize the substance and face of the church. It responds to the criticism that doctrine has been abstracted from the teachings and ministry of Jesus. It promotes an image of church that applies to the largest institutional structures of the church and reaches the basic ecclesial unit, including the structure of its worship service. It respects the correlation between the lex orandi and the lex credendi, the relationship between the rule of prayer and the rule of belief. Congregational worship is the primary place where the church’s institutional form encounters its member participants.
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-evidenta 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.
Also by Roger Haight, S.J.: St. Ignatius, the Spiritual Exercises and the social sin of racism
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 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 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?
