Churches and the Crisis of Decline

Andrew Root’s monograph Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age is the fourth volume in a series titled Ministry in a Secular Age.  Throughout seventeen chapters Root dialogues with numerous conversation partners including Karl Barth, the Blumhardts (father Johan and son Christoph), Harmut Rosa, Eric Fromm, and, as usual, Charles Taylor. Root aims to “show how the great Karl Barth must be seen as a pastor,” and as such he is “a modern theologian addressing the immanent frame” (x). Of course, when referring to the immanent frame, Root is once more engaging Charles Taylor’s seminal work A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007), which considers three seculars. Secular one refers to the divide between the public and the private (7), secular two refers to the declining number of people who belong to religious institutions (8), and secular three refers to the modern philosophical climate, in which all belief is contested and thus fragile (8).

Root’s style of writing is a blend of story and practical theological reflection, alternating between a fictional local congregation (xi) called St John the Baptist that is undergoing an existential crisis and the writings of scholars who speak to the type of challenges faced by the fictional church. He contends that the best manner of teaching theology is “through stories of concrete people encountering a living God” (xi) and his style of writing utilizes, in differing measures, pathos, ethos, and logos to deliver reflections.

Root contends that the church is not a building but rather (embodied) people who live in a secular age, wherein belief is contested and the immanent frame is closed to transcendence, and in particular to an encounter (relationship) with the living God. This often results in a loss of meaning and purpose, and Barth helps show how a relationship with God can be established/restored. At one stage in his life Barth experiences a conflict between his theological studies, mainly in liberal Protestantism, and his pastorate experiences; but then he encounters the Blumhardts, who eventually lead him to assert that God is God—namely a personal God who acts by intervening in history. Barth asserts that to find God starts with the realization that we cannot find (possess) him, rather he finds us. Unfortunately, we confuse knowing (possessing) with being (existing).

Furthermore, for Barth, the expression of this realization is “that because God is God, we [the church] are called to love the world” (87), and not focus on the church’s survival. Here, Root asserts that the church suffers a crisis of relevance within the immanent frame because it is the “subject (star) of its own story” (97). The immanent frame relegates God to a supporting actor (or depersonalized product), which in turn blinds the church to God’s action. Barth is “convinced that human epistemology had its limits—even in its religious forms—most particularly when it came to the knowledge of God” (113). Barth agrees in part that religion is the problem, as religion is “a closed structure of the givenness of reality [that has] often led to believing its existence is its highest good,” more often focusing on having than being.

At this point (Chapter 11) Root states that we can wait to have or wait to be, with the latter, known as “resonance,” occurring in relationships. Resonance is “waiting action” (165) moved by affection and suffering; it is “always a direct experience with something truly other” (175). Root next relays how Barth chooses dialectic theology as opposed to the pietism or liberalism of his earlier mentioned conflict. For Barth, Jesus as fully God and fully man is the real dialectic, as opposed to the noetic dialectic, and this real dialectic is encountered by dying. This “real dialectic allows us to recognize that God is God” (266) and in Jesus, understood through an enhypostatic/anhypostatic Christology. Enhypostasis “means Jesus suffers with us,” while anhypostasis “means that salvation comes through this suffering” (278), and the church exists when it is “in Christ enhypostatically praying for the world” (274-275).

One aspect of Root’s work that we are led to reflect on is the nature of the church—church as organization and church as organism. As organization, the church seems to have succumbed to the busyness of life, pursuit of resources, and positioning of its relevance. This promotes a “possessing” approach that is in stark contrast to an “existing” approach, which is indicative of the church as organism. As organism, the church exists, fulfilling its role in praying for the world, and waiting alongside the world for an encounter with the God who is God, amongst others. We are warned, though, that waiting is not a passive mode of being, and that praying for and alongside the world is an active mode of being. The church as organism knows it cannot possess God but waits for God to reveal himself (an indicator of Barth’s dialectic theology)—we cannot know God other than what he reveals of himself to us.

Root succeeds in showing that Barth as a pastor, using his real dialectic theology, addresses the immanent frame by asserting that God is God, namely, wholly “other” yet becoming one like us in Jesus Christ. This dialectic holds in tension joy and suffering in affection for God and the world he made. It requires resonance—waiting in community for God to act. As such, Churches and the Crisis of Decline continues to expand on ministry in a secular age and is highly recommended.

Shaun Joynt is senior academic at the South African Theological Seminary, Bryanston, South Africa.

Shaun Joynt

Date Of Review:

August 20, 2023