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By Fr. Francis Duniya1
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The church must be the church, and she should be so via a renewed attention to the \u2018Word\u2019 of God. Faith itself is always the essential reform we need. Faith is always the starting point for putting the institutions we ourselves created in the Church constantly to the test. The challenge Christianity faces is how to embrace this spiritual renaissance without crushing it, how to enrich it without polluting it, how to deepen it without mutilating it. Whether the current religious awakening can be saved from its own worse excesses depends on how it manages to relate itself to history, and to politics. I do not have clear answers to current questions that confront our world and our Church today. I do have questions, and as a matter of fact, I think that a man is known better by his questions than by his answers.

At the close of World War I, a soap manufacturer walking down the street with his pastor was bemoaning the \u201cfailure\u201d of Christianity. \u201cAfter nineteen centuries of preaching and teaching Christ, there is still so much evil in the world. I don\u2019t see how you can go on preaching the gospel.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t see how you can go on manufacturing soap\u201d, retorted the Pastor. \u201cLook at that little urchin playing in the gutter. Neck and ears filthy. There is still so much dirt in the world. Soap is such a failure.\u201d \u201cBut\u201d, countered the soap manufacturer, \u201cif people will just apply the soap, they will be clean.\u201d \u201cYes\u201d, concluded the Pastor, \u201cand if men will but apply Christ to their daily living, they will be clean.\u201d2 In order words, for the Pastor, \u201cChristianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been tried and found difficult and consequently many have ceased trying.3 This is the point that the Epistle to Diogenes had expressed, in its own way, by saying that \u201cChristianity is to the world what the soul is to the body\u201d4. And St. Augustine is convinced that to preach this \u201cChristian virtue is to work for the happiness of mankind.\u201d5

Some of us are tempted to agree with J. Oswald Sanders, who noted that we form part of a generation that worships power \u2013 military, intellectual, economic, scientific, etc. the concept of power in various realms, often with questionable motivation.6 We find nowadays barriers and road blocks everywhere, stopping us and hampering our progress. It would appear that no one is able to control the present situation, neither the bishops nor the Holy Father \u2013 both of who, however, are leading the fight for fidelity and unity in the face of storms from East and West, North and South. Jesus alone can calm the storm; neither Peter nor the apostles could do so [cf. Matt. 8; 23 \u2013 27].7

The world is in complete state of flux. The Church sitting in Council, felt this. The introduction to the \u2018Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes,\u2019 on \u2018The Church in the Modern World\u2019, briefly describes this state of change, but that was in 1965. Since then, we have witnessed a mad galloping urbanization during these three decades.8 Modern science and technology now master the world in worldly way and with Nietzsche, leave heaven to sparrows and old women. In other words, we are living in an age of technology and science that demands proof. Today it has become almost a truism to call our time an age of anxiety.9 It is in this world of tension and terror that Evely could write:

\u201cHopelessness gnaws at our era. Unfortunately the sad, bitter man of our times can draw no consolidation from the witness which is offered to him by a Christianity that only too often has turned his hope into caricature, an evasion, an alibi, a life insurance policy.\u201d1 0

With Thomas Merton, I do not have clear answers to current questions that confront our world and our Church today. I do have questions, and as a matter of fact, I think that a man is known better by his questions than by his answers.

\u201cThe present crisis\u201d in the words of Yves Congar, \u201cis a real one.\u201d1 1 The present situation is heavily marked by religious indifference, by a widespread mistrust regarding the real capacity of reason to reach objective and universal truth, and by fresh problems and questions brought up by scientific and technological discoveries.1 2

More than a hundred years ago, Kierkegaard asked how it was even possible to be a Christian in Christendom. He wondered how a man could say \u201cYes\u201d to the Gospel when its message was so obfuscated by its compromised involvement with European culture and bourgeois values.1 3 Thomas J. J. Altizer, in \u201cToward a New Christianity\u201d, asked the following questions: \u201cHow can the Christian faith exist and be real in a world and history in which God is dead?\u201d The problem is that the old system of repression are still alive in our hearts and therefore in our institutions. They are old and ugly, but they remain obstinately alive. However, radical theologians are united in their insistence that faith must exist fully in the actuality of our history. They invite us to abandon all nostalgia for the lost world of Christendom, and seek the Christ who is real here and now for us.1 4

We need a new revolutionary theory, pertinent to the pressures of the times. Faced with a new situation, the Church, in the words of Karl Rahner, \u201cmust march valiantly towards the new and not yet experienced, to the outer limits; there where Christian doctrine and conscience can travel no further. In the practical life of the Church today, the only fitting theology is a daring theology . . . What is certain in this day and age is not the past but the future.\u201d1 5 To deliver a nineteenth century answer to a twentieth century dilemma is an obsolete task according to Harvey Cox. What is needed, rather than a step backward, is a step ahead; a step into thinking theologically about the issues that confront us in a modern society. Gibson Winter has described the style of theological thinking we need if we are to take a step forward instead of a step backward. He calls it \u201ctheological reflection.\u201d It is coming to consciousness about the meaning of contemporary events in the light of history. It is a way of taking responsibility, both for the reshaping of the past and the constitution of the future.1 6

When Christians have enough courage to \u201ccome out\u201d of the present crippling structures, God Himself will provide the new ones.1 7 This point is very relevant today for the Church and for Christianity in general. If we subject men and women to structures and put them at the service of those structures, instead of placing the structures at the service of man, and if we are unwilling to do away with those structures when they prove hurtful to man; then we are going against Christ, because Christ said clearly and definitely that \u201cthe Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.\u201d]Mk. 2: 27]1 8 Principles are often \u201csticking to principles: can become just another