The Quiet Revival

The gospel reading which we have just heard describes the first few moments of the public ministry of Jesus. St Luke of course places the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth. There is that dramatic evocation of Isaiah, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor’. But Matthew has a slightly different take. He has that same simple proclamation of the gospel that we find in Mark’s account – ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’, but Matthew moves Jesus from the hill-town of Nazareth down to the Sea of Galilee, where he makes Capernaum his home. Scholars speculate why he moves to Capernaum. Some wonder whether it was a more diverse community than Nazareth – one commentator suggests that Capernaum was more free-thinking by virtue of its dealings with foreigners! But Matthew probably uses Capernaum to reinforce the passage from Isaiah which he then quotes. It contains a reference to ‘Galilee of the gentiles’ – and of course, Matthew loves to demonstrate the ways in which the promises of the prophets are fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. But more than that, this accent on the ‘Galilee of the gentiles’ prefigures the mission to the gentiles, and of course Matthew’s gospel ends with the great commission ‘Go and baptise, and make disciples of all nations.’ It is perhaps no accident that in this particular passage, Jesus makes disciples beginning with the call of Simon and Andrew, and then the call of James and John the sons of Zebedee.

There is a breathless pace about this passage. The sons of Zebedee drop everything in responding to the call of Jesus. And then Matthew tells us that ‘Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.’ The breathless pace of these missionary endeavours perhaps seems at odds with a phrase like ‘the quiet revival’, a phrase used by a recent report by the Bible Society. This report suggests that there are signs of an increase in church attendance, particularly among young adults. It suggests that more men are coming to church, that the Church is more diverse, with one in five churchgoers coming from an ethnic minority, and it notes a recent spike in sales of the Bible. While some question the methodology adopted by the Bible Society and point to other trends in statistical data, there is some evidence that there is a greater openness to the depth and range of the Christian spiritual tradition. It has led one contemporary European theologian and sociologist to wrestle with the question, ‘Is God Coming Back?’

Tomáš Halík is a Roman Catholic priest who serves as a Professor of Sociology at Charles University in Prague. He also serves as the parish priest of the University Church in Prague. It is sometimes worth remembering that the network of University Churches extends beyond Oxford and Cambridge. Halík is an extraordinary figure. He was ordained in secret in the communist era, and even his mother didn’t know that he was a priest. So Halík is someone who has experienced the church and ministry in a period of persecution. His voice is worth hearing. And of course, as a sociologist, he reflects on secularisation, but is careful to distinguish between secularisation as a socio-cultural process,  secularism as a one-sided ideological interpretation of secularisation, and the secular age as a certain chapter of history in which the process of secularisation took place in a number of European countries. And Halík notes the postsecular age announced by Jurgen Habermas in his celebrated lecture at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the autumn of 2001, shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in 9/11. Habermas argued that religions would be important actors to be reckoned with in the coming chapter of history.

Halík notes that classical theories of secularisation, predicting the weakening or early demise of religion in the course of the modern age, were influenced by the ideology of secularism. And yet, following Habermas, these narratives have been displaced by more recent literature on the new flowering of religion. Books with such titles as The Return of Religion or God is Back have appeared. So: is religion really making a comeback?

You might expect Halík to say ‘Yes’, but instead he chooses to interrogate the question: first, he says, religion is not coming back because…it never left. It didn’t go away. It didn’t disappear. It was always there, constantly changing and adapting and transforming itself. It just escaped people’s attention. It just didn’t fit with the self-fulfilling prophecy of secularists. Secondly, Halík makes the interesting observation that ‘in much of our world what now fills the spiritual space vacated by traditional religion, or after the era of harsh secularization in communist countries, is by no means the same as what was there in the past, in premodern times.’ In making this observation, Halík is inviting us to respond anew to the call of discipleship, but he is also attempting to account for the phenomenon of fundamentalism, and the ‘new traditionalism’ within the Roman Catholic Church which looks back beyond the horizon of the Second Vatican Council to a rather Romantic vision of a church unsullied by the modern world. 

He makes the obvious point that this is not a simple continuation of the premodern world. It is in fact a reaction against modernity. And he notes with perhaps some frustration that for many years, the Roman Church committed a kind of ‘intellectual self-immolation by silencing many creative thinkers within its own ranks… Thus, when modernity was reaching its peak, the Church lost its ability to engage in honest dialogue with philosophy…(and) science’. Halik is seeking to counter those very conservative voices in the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in North America, who believe that everything can be solved by a heady combination of more celebrations of the Tridentine Mass, and an unwavering support for right-wing political causes. 

But my sense is that the ‘quiet revival’ eschews such close political affinities. It is tired of them. It is dissatisfied with the banality of so much contemporary political discourse, whether from the left or the right. In the gospel, we discover something which is both ever ancient and ever new. Perhaps the ‘quiet revival’ speaks of a deliberate search for authenticity. By ‘authenticity’ I mean something that combines a genuine passion for truth with being real about ourselves, about the world we live in, and about our relationships. 

In our gospel reading today, Jesus calls his disciples. And this is where we discover the real power of the Christian gospel, for Jesus teaches us what it means to be authentic. Not only does he proclaim the kingdom of God. He embodies it. But note where Jesus is almost always found in the gospels. He associates, not with the respectable and the powerful, but with the undesirable, the outsiders, the people on the margins. The people he called were collaborators in the Roman tax-collecting system, members of the occupying army, rude fishermen, prostitutes, a revolutionary, widows, those who knew loss and bereavement, lepers, those who were rejected because of their identity. These were the people who responded to the call of Jesus. 

Jesus called them, and their hearts were open to the kingdom, because they were able to respond to his authentic witness to God’s mercy and forgiveness and love. They knew that it was real. And Jesus calls us, and we respond perhaps quietly, sometimes hesitantly, but just as profoundly, because we know deep in our hearts that this is real. It is authentic. It is true. We discover the reality of God's love and mercy.

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Tomáš Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change (trans. Gerald Turner) is published by University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana (2024).