The renowned spirituality writer Tomas Halik, in a recent book entitled “The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change”, makes this suggestion. As the world makes less and less explicit space for Jesus, we need to search for him more and more in those places where he is “anonymously present.” The invitation here is to better respond to the signs of the times, given that we are living now in what he calls “the afternoon of Christianity.” What is the afternoon of Christianity?
Halik distinguishes three periods in the history of Christianity. He sees the morning of Christianity as the time before AD 1500, the pre-modern period, the time before secularization. The noonday of Christianity, for him, is the time of secularization and modernity, basically from the 19th century until our own generation. The afternoon of Christianity, for him, is our time today, the post-modern world, where we are witnessing a breakdown of much of the world as we once knew it with the effects of this on faith and religion. And for Halik, the effect of all of this is that the Christian faith has now outgrown previous forms of religion.
Christianity today finds itself in a certain cultural homelessness, in a time where so many social structures that once supported it are collapsing, so that the Christian faith is now needing to seek a new shape, a new home, new means of expression, new social and cultural roles, and new allies. The hope is that (paradoxically) the very dynamism and diversity that frightens many Christians is the incubation phase of the Christianity of the future.
Here is how Halik puts it: “I believe that the Christianity of tomorrow will be above all a community of a new hermeneutic, a new reading, a new and deeper interpretation of the two sources of divine revelation, scripture and tradition, and especially of God’s utterance in the signs of the times.”
We must let the signs of the times lead us to a deeper understanding of both Scripture and tradition, especially so that we might bring together in better harmony the Christ of cosmic evolution with the resurrected Jesus; and then recognize that they are both not just present in what is explicit in our Christian faith and worship, they are also anonymously present in the evolution of our culture and society.
Consequently, we need to search for Jesus Christ not just in our Scriptures, our churches, our worship services, our catechetical classes, our Sunday schools, and our explicit Christian fellowship, though of course we need to search there. This isn’t a time of dying, it’s a time of kairos, a time when we are being invited to open our eyes. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Looking to the Future as we enter the ‘Afternoon of Christianity’ ” April 2025]
