Theologian thinks Church is there to create spaces not save souls

Theologian Schallenberg asks about the meaning of the church

What would be missing without the church?

What do we still need the church for today? The official church is divided, more and more people are turning their backs on it. In his new book, moral theologian Peter Schallenberg asks what the Church still has to offer.

DOMRADIO.DE: "In our post-modern age, God is as little known and as vivid as Little Red Riding Hood or the seven dwarfs. And the Church is only perceived as useful when it contributes decisively to the improvement of this-worldly life, such as in charitable institutions," you write in your book "Church without Morals?". Is God still as important today as Little Red Riding Hood and Ruebezahl (folklore mountain spirit of the Giant Mountains, a mountain range along the border between the historical lands of Bohemia and Silesia)?

Prof. Peter Schallenberg (Professor of Moral Theology at the Faculty of Theology in Paderborn): I am of course of the opinion that God is more important, much, much more important than Little Red Riding Hood and Ruebezahl. But I have the impression that he is filed away in a drawer of Little Red Riding Hood and Rübezahl, that is, in the fairy-tale tradition from times past.

But that is not my idea. Rather, I came to it through Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who has done extensive research on God-forgetfulness in Western societies. It's not so much a question of the churches forgetting God; there has been such a thing throughout the ages, in the Renaissance, in Voltaire's time, even more so in the French Revolution, and so on.

The phenomenon of forgetting God is, I believe, new in this widespread way. Basically, the experience of God has now sunk to zero in the Western world.

DOMRADIO.DE: What do people miss when they don't believe in God? Can life also be lovable without God?

Schallenberg: Definitely. We don't need to convince people that they are sick so that we then have to make them healthy with the help of God. Highly developed countries in this world show that you can have a flourishing social state, a welfare state, a humane society that can get along without God at all. There is not much missing, unless someone discovers that it would be nice to possibly hear more than everyday life provides.

An example of this originally comes from the philosopher Robert Spaemann, who says: Could it be that an unbeliever behaves towards the believer like someone who listens to ballet without music, and once he has heard ballet with music, no longer wants to miss the music?

DOMRADIO.DE: But then, in order to miss God, you have to have experienced or known him somehow?

Schallenberg: That is exactly the point. How can you bring magic back into a disenchanted world? In other words, in a technical world that has been styled through and through, how can you bring back so much magic that you long to experience something of the magic? We would very much wish and missionarily help anyone who has never experienced the magic of a Mozart sonata to hear a Mozart sonata. I would connect that roughly with the question of God.

"What would be missing without the Church"

DOMRADIO.DE: In your book, you quote the theologian Karl Rahner, who says: "The pious person of the future will be a mystic, one who has experienced something, or he will no longer be". Why is this quote so important to you?

Schallenberg: The central word here is: Experienced. It does no good to build God into one's rational thinking in the way we think that one and one is two. Of course we depend on the laws of natural science, on the laws of nature, on mathematics, because we need them to survive, in medicine for example, to the point of surgery, to everything.

We are not dependent on God in the same way, but by having certain experiences, we then also come to think about God - and about the possibility that someone has placed me in this life and that someone is expecting me.

That is true for every human being, that they experience that as a very valuable part of their life. That is what is meant by experience. But how this experience can come about is very mysterious.

DOMRADIO.DE: Is the person who does not have this experience a deficient person?

Schallenberg: Deficient is a very strong word. I would say he is more vulnerable than deficient in that sense. He lives in an unfulfilled longing. The old theology would probably have said: he lives longingly. Desiderius naturale is what they called it, he has the natural desire to experience more than just his 100th birthday.

DOMRADIO.DE: You go on to write: "We need a mystical, not a moral Church in the now secular world". Why does everything begin with mysticism? Why does everything start there for the Church too?

Schallenberg: An example: Let us think of the petition in the Lord's Prayer. "Give us this day our daily bread". That actually means, 'Give us already now our bread that goes beyond our daily bread', 'Give us already now our bread that is beyond the everyday and the purely technical and biological use of life'.

The Church has the mission to provide such spaces, to make it possible to experience precisely that, in the liturgy and in Caritas, that a space is created in which I can feel that I am absolutely loved.

If it only creates a space in which everything functions perfectly, then it is basically only imitating what our normally developed world already does.

DOMRADIO.DE: So faith in God is not there to establish basic humanistic values and make them tangible, like protection of life or property or protection of marriage and family. One could also justify all of this from a humanistic point of view. But faith in God can certainly serve to reinforce adherence to these basic values, to make them absolute in the responsibility to adhere to them?

Schallenberg: Immanuel Kant says that God, soul and immortality serve to strengthen my power into the realisation of absolute goodness, so that man does not tire before time - so that man does not have the impression that the stupid one wins, so that one has the strength to jump over one's own shadow.

With forgiveness this is very clear. For that, I have to be willing to risk something, to risk myself, to surrender. This is fuelled and inspired by the thought that God will catch me, even if I have the impression that I am the stupidest of all people.

DOMRADIO.DE: That would then also be missing in a society without God and Church? This reinforcement and responsibility and absolutisation of human commandments?

Schallenberg: I would say so. A reinforcement of what every human being naturally considers fair and just is reinforced by the thought: I don't have to do this because it corresponds to natural law and natural justice, but I want to do this because God enables me to do it, because God expects me to do it, because God has great hopes for me.

DOMRADIO.DE: Are you optimistic about the future of the Church? At the moment it presents us with a rather embarrassing picture - with a lot of noise and bickering. No one who is looking for meaning and fulfilment and wants to open up to experience God in the Church wants that.

Schallenberg: You are absolutely right. Point, paragraph. It would be all the more important to make it clear what the actual task of the Church is. What should it actually do and what should it do? But that starts with each and every one of us.

This does not have so much to do with the notorious official church, with the desks and the official journals and the disputes and the bossiness, but it has to do with each individual thinking about: Why am I baptised? What horizon does it offer me? What possibilities are there if I go to the Sacraments, participate in the liturgy? That is the decisive thing that makes up the Church.

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