Churches, Cross and Politics

In the NZZ interview about his recently published novel “Der Rote Diamant”, Thomas Hürlimann says that he “observes with horror how people who have happily walked out of the churches build very horrible new churches”. Instead of the eloquent Holy Week preachers of his childhood, new doom preachers are appearing today who stir up fear of the end of time.

Hürlimann fears a new form of catechism, the first commandment of which would be: “You shall sanctify creation.” Elsewhere, Hürlimann lamented the current crusade against the Christian cross, the churches’ farewell to the last things and their submission to the zeitgeist.

The big questions of mankind

One cannot accuse Hürlimann of making religious contortions and reaching for the divine hemline due to his age. The writer neither wishes for a church threatening eternal fire nor does he want to crawl back into old catechism. It is precisely for this reason that his criticism that the churches have said goodbye to the last things and the big questions of being human – the questions of where from, where to and why – and are switching to social rhetoric, must make us prick up our ears.

Because the search movements of artists and churches are going in the same direction, artists and churches are connected by a sensorium for the reality behind reality and both deal with the essential themes of life such as death, love and guilt, Hürlimann’s criticism must not leave the churches indifferent .

Rather, they should take this as an opportunity to ask themselves, in a kind of examination of their conscience, what they have to oppose the modern preachers of doom and new forms of catechisms: do the churches resist the zeitgeist of deifying nature? Do they resist this “substitute worship of God” (Volker Reinhardt), which means that man is only accountable to “primordial mother nature” and has to confess to being a sinner when he uses the airplane?

Or are the churches themselves contributing to this by increasingly confusing the biblical mandate to shape creation with care for a sacralization, even divinization of nature? Do the churches keep alive what the old theology worked on again and again, namely that nature knows no harmony, its laws are inexorable and its forces are destructive and consequently nature is not divine but demonic, as Aristotle already had to state? And: How do the churches bring the God of their faith, who is said to have counted the hairs on the head of every individual, together with the indifference of “Mother Nature” who walks away in silent cold over the dead and their decomposition as well natural is like the blossoming of a marguerite?

If the churches do not want to let Hürlimann’s accusations, which hit them to the core, then they should also ask themselves critically: How does it go together that in sermons reference is often made to the scandal of the cross of Christ and at the same time a cuddly God is offered who questions nobody and offers little enlightening potential for dealing with difficult life situations?

Is it possible that some sermons sound flat and unbelievable because everything that is disturbing and unwieldy about God is filtered out in them? Do the churches see in the stake of the cross a stake that reveals the cracks in polished society and that holds up the makeup-rending fate of temporal man, namely death, suffering and abandonment?

provocation of the cross

Do you recognize the face in the cross and the promise that the maltreated, abandoned and dead of this world will not be abandoned? Or do the churches retreat before the provocation of the cross and join those who want to enjoy the fine sight, who are therefore annoyed by the stake of the cross and who try to flee finitude and death at all costs, to keep silent and to demonize it?

And: Are the churches satisfied with mediocrity, or do they go all out by daring to tackle the big questions in order to get to the bottom of the enigma of life, good and evil, death and immortality? Or do they leave the field of ultimate things more and more to others? Have they even come to terms with the fact that art has become the land of ultimate things and deepest questions and that music like that of Johann Sebastian Bach is able to convey that existential encouragement for which the churches have lost the words?

Beatrice Acklin Zimmerman is a qualified theologian and managing director of the think tank Liberethica.