As I've described in this series, everywhere you look we are witnessing moral, symbolic, sacramental, and ecclesial drift away from the ontological. We've severed our connection to the Real. We've cut ourselves loose through deconstruction and demythologization. This has created a host of problems, from our mental health crisis to an impoverishment of our moral vision to a deeper slide into post-Christian disenchantment. Churches have begun to traffic almost wholly in the therapeutic and the moralistic and are systematically talking themselves out of existence.
Given all this, do I have any takeaway recommendations?
One recommendation is this: Pay attention to how your church describes the spiritual life. Notice when our language becomes reduced to the therapeutic and the moral, when the only agents in view are human persons. It is, of course, very good to gather "in the name of Jesus" to "encourage" each other and to "love each other." It is good to "serve the world" and "bless our neighbors." But be alert to how such stock phrases make no reference to the Real. Notice when we are the only players on the stage. Be concerned about the functional atheism on display.
In one of the letters Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge, he described the decisive moment in his spiritual journey as turning from "the phraseological to the real." Influenced as he was as a German theologian by Bultmann's demythologization, theology for Bonhoeffer had been moral and existential. But during his American sojourn, Bonhoeffer's theology became ontological. He turned toward the Real. This is what the church must do. We must turn to the Real. All the layers--moral, existential, and ontological--need to be stitched back together.
How to do this?
Following from what I've just said, words matter. We can pay attention to how we talk. Throughout this series I've shown how we can highlight the ontological aspects of faith, from the sacraments to eschatology. Following people like Jordan Peterson, we can remythologize the moral layer. Meaning, remember, is the bread of life. But we need to push past Peterson's agnosticism to reontologize the existential layer. Because if it's all just a symbol, to echo Flannery O'Connor, then to hell with it.
So that's the first thing we can do, we can remythologize and reontologize faith and the life of the church.
But we need more than words. Otherwise, like Bonhoeffer, we get caught up in the phraseological and never turn toward the real. Reontologizing the faith isn't about shuffling words around, like rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. We need to encounter the Real.
Given this, let me, once again, share the insight of Karl Rahner:
The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’—someone who has ‘experienced something’—or will cease to be anything at all.
