The thought of God

“God between loss of meaning and existential content”: that’s the theme of the 9th Summer Ecumenical Academy, held at Kremsmünster in Austria between 11 and 13 July. The conference ended with the traditional round table; its participants included the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan MICHAEL STAIKOS , the Catholic bishop MANFRED SCHEUER (Bishop of Innsbruck) and the future Lutheran-Evangelical bishop MICHAEL BÜNKER . RELIGION AND MODERN SOCIETIES . Starting out from the premise that the offerings of the Church are based on the gifts of God and are not subject to the logic of the market, Bishop Scheuer emphasized that the “Church proposes spaces of intermission from the market, freedom and hope, and protected spaces for the suffering and the poor”. He warned of seeing spirituality only in terms of its hoped-for positive effects. “Those who seek God always speak of God having ‘seized’ them. But God should rather be thought of as absolute freedom, and therefore God also permits the freedom of the person”; but this freedom, he added, must be “interpreted” and understood with “a clear mind”. Metropolitan Staikos, for his part, pointed out the significance of common Christian witness in contemporary society where “human dignity is exploited to obtain the maximum productivity. People today must feel themselves utterly abandoned and betrayed. That’s why it’s all the more important that the Churches be conscious of their diaconal task. True faith does not exist without the concrete service to our fellowmen”. Michael Bünker underlined the predomination of the economy in the world. In observing that “the Gospel undoubtedly follows other criteria”, Bünker admitted that “with the Gospel it may be difficult to conduct a successful market economy”. On the existential level, the future bishop said that “the nostalgia of the human being, combined with suffering, distinguishes the fragmentary reality of man. Human life is not perfect and is not perfectible. The Churches operate to the best if they succeed in accepting the frailty of human life”. RELIGIONS AND DEMOCRACY . Intervening on the relations between religions and politics, the sociologist of religions JÜRGEN MANEMANN urged Christians to maintain a “critical distance” from the dominant “religious boom”. “Despite the option of separation between Church and religion”, other tendencies are at work in our time: on the one hand, tendencies to “politicise religion”, and on the other demands for “a forced secularisation according to a strict interpretation of secularism”. “Exponents of secularism pose the question whether religions are not substantially ‘incompatible with democracy'”, he explained; and “by affirming that terrorist attacks are the proof that everything is permissible ‘with God’, they reinforce their conviction that it is not morality that has its foundations in God, but rather that it is faith in a single God that is the cause of immorality”. “The new politicisation of religions is the expression of a ‘post-modern cultural crisis'”, declared Manemann. After the Second World War, “the idea that social and economic modernization would reduce the influence of religion as an important element of human existence has increasingly spread”, he explained. “This prediction however has been shown to be unfounded”. GOD FORGOTTEN? WOLF KRÖTKE , Evangelical professor of systematic theology in Berlin, treated the question of the ‘re-christianization’ of those who do not recognize God, referring in particular to the situation in the former DDR. In these regions roughly three-quarters of the population do not belong to any Christian Church at all: “The practice of atheism has become second nature to most of the inhabitants of the new Länder”, he said. “God plays no role in the life of these people. They have already forgotten they have forgotten Him”. This situation, he stressed, “has not changed even as a result of the social revolution in 1989”. Krötke then described the possibilities of preaching the Christian gospel in a situation in which we need to “speak of God by beginning anew from the very beginning”.