THE importance of the veteran sociologist and practising Roman Catholic Professor Hans Joas, at Humboldt University in Berlin, has been noted previously in the Church Times (Books, 19 October 2018 and 29 April 2022). As huge challenges face the next Archbishop of Canterbury, this new book is both timely and welcome.
It is a collection of interconnected essays reflecting on European Churches confronted with growing secularism, pluralism, safeguarding scandals, scepticism, and even outright public hostility to religion. In it, Joas is also critical of his own Church, which, he believes, has not lived up to the bold aspirations of Vatican II, as can be seen in a lecture (on YouTube), “The Church in a World of Options”, which he gave in fluent English at a Vatican conference.
On the much debated issue of European secularisation, he follows Charles Taylor and the late David Martin, dissenting from the widespread assumption of previous generations of academics that modernity inevitably and ineluctably causes the demise of religion. He acknowledges (as most of us do) that European Christianity is waning, with widespread churchgoing decline, not helped by safeguarding scandals and cover-ups, and with many who now claim to have “no religion”. But he argues in detail that the United States, surely the most “modern” of countries, remains radically different.
He also returns to the position addressed in his 2014 book Faith as an Option, namely, that an effect of Western religious pluralism is that “faith” (whether religious or secular) has become “optional”, eroding past “certainties”.
His central sociological question now is why a Church is needed at all. Following the great 19th-century social historian Ernst Troeltsch, he distinguishes broadly between “churches” that try to represent and guide the masses, but are often compromised in doing so, and “sects” that typically refuse to compromise, treasure their “certainties”, and distance themselves as minorities from the masses. He insists that Churches are at peril when they pronounce on moral issues that actually divide their own members and society at large, taking Angela Merkel’s acceptance of a million refugees as an example. She may well have seen this as an expression of her own personal faith, as did key Christian leaders in Germany, but notes that churchgoers were very divided. Joas follows Troeltsch’s conviction that “neither the Gospels nor the history of early Christianity provided truly unambiguous benchmarks or guidelines for the formation of Christian religious communities”.
Joas then writes more as a believer than as a sociologist. He dissents from those who think that the truth of Christianity can be established by evidence of its personal or social benefits. Instead, it is only by living out our faith and expressing it through our lives, worship, and actions that we might hope to convince others, and we need abiding institutions (however flawed) to do this effectively.
He might have referred to William Temple’s remarkable 1942 paperback Christianity and Social Order, with its pellucid articulation of how a Church and its leaders can foster key values to shape society, but should remember that particular policies are shaped by many other political and practical considerations. Wisely, Temple worked publicly to form the Welfare State, but insisted that his strongly held socialist convictions were purely personal.
Important lessons for the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent and Editor of Theology.
Why the Church? Self-optimization or community of faith
Hans Joas
Stanford University Press £21.99
(978-1-5036-4079-5)
Church Times Bookshop £19.79