1 - 2000

Mission in Germany

Human Beings in a World Without Limits

What the church is called to do

by Johannes Weiss

Many people in Germany are moving further away from religion - and at the same time more in need of something to hold onto for meaning and orientation. The churches in Germany, West and East, are still looking for convincing responses to this challenge.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literary critic, cannot remember "a single moment" in his life when he believed in God. When he was asked in an interview years ago about God, his reaction was brusque. No, no, back then in the death camps God was needed, but wasn’t there. For Reich-Ranicki, a son of Jewish parents, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, there is no God. But he made the decision to live without God long before the Nazi persecutions. As a young person, he writes in his autobiography, he tried in vain to understand the meaning of the word God. It was finally an aphorism from the Enlightenment philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg that brought him insight: namely, that the creation of human beings in the image of God really means that human beings created God in their own image.

More and more people in our newly reunified country live their lives without God. Most of them, however, differ from Marcel Reich-Ranicki in their godlessness, since they have never really made a serious decision to live without God. Politically opportunistic reasons to do so have existed: in the German Communist state, witnessing openly to God in one’s life brought disadvantages. Therefore the great majority decided rather to live without God, because they did not want to put up with disadvantages for God’s sake. And so today, for most people in the East German federal states, Christian traditions are as distant as Greenlanders are from the Cape of Good Hope.

But in the west of our republic as well, God seems to be less and less present in people’s lives. For most cases also in this region godlessness does not begin with a conscious decision. People simply lose track of God. Other patterns of orientation have taken God’s place: achievement and success, prosperity and consumption, self-realisation, physical fitness and the search for happiness. A prominent self-made man is the pop star currently serving as Germany’s Foreign Minister. "My Long Road to Myself" is the title of Joschka Fischer’s latest book. "The true secret of my success," he tells us, "was changing my personal programme diskette and writing an entirely new one." If one can do that, why does one need God?

Fischer is not a religious person. For him there is no question of believing in a "personal God with a long white beard", but he still does not want to leave the Catholic Church. He considers himself a "Catholic atheist". In a nutshell his is the basic feeling of many people today in a nutshell: they want to be religious, but without God. The younger generation in particular seems to sense that there must be a hidden meaning in things beyond the sherbet of consumer pleasure, which fizzes up quickly and already tastes stale not long afterward. In their search for meaning, many go shopping among the wares offered by today’s religious supermarket; a bit of New Age, a shot of superstition, a few rudiments of Christian tradition, not to forget a generous pinch of "light Buddhism" in its particularly digestible Dalai Lama form. Who believes any longer in a God to whom one can pray and even bewail one’s lot?

Nevertheless, "God" is one of the "most clicked" search words on the Internet. But what does that signify? Does it mean that serious searching for God has today degenerated into God-clicking? And what does it mean that Ernst Jandl’s poem "to god" ("an gott" in German), which somebody put on the World Wide Web, was called up 320 times between September 1998 and November 1999? In any case it shows that the Viennese lyricist, whose poems both delineate the boundaries of the language and go beyond them, gives accurate expression to the stammering thoughts of many contemporaries in their search for God: "that in god believed he had once/that in truth he could not say it/ that just there was simply god there/and that then was no more god there/and in between nothing happened/and that now he has to struggle/if believe in god he wants now/that could no one guarantee him/meanwhile perhaps one day there will be simply god there again while in between happened nothing."

Surveys have been telling us for years that it is the younger generation which is undergoing a dramatically radical change with regard to religion, moving further away from the church and the Christians’ God. This may be true overall, but there are also other trends. At the Protestant Kirchentag (Church Convention) in Stuttgart last June there was much more demand for the lectures which dealt with Christian answers to questions of ultimate meaning than for the presentations on social policy issues, particularly from the young participants who were in the majority. At Schwerin Cathedral (in East Germany) on Christmas Eve the attendance is always 6000 at the four worship services. At least 3000 come to the 10:30p.m. service alone, mostly young people. "Probably 2800 of them are not members of the church", estimates the cathedral pastor, Andreas Weiss. However, they come, year after year, to the unheated cathedral, looking for warmth that they don’t find anywhere else, least of all at home in their godless families.

In West Germany, where most people still grow up with Christian rituals, church life often provokes antipathy. East Germans react differently, once they have overcome their distinct lack of interest in the church. Many are discovering Christian traditions for the first time, for example when they happen to be present at a first communion or confirmation and can compare it with the "Jugendweihe" (youth ceremony propagated under Communism), which is becoming ever more empty of content. "God", says Pastor Weiss of Schwerin Cathedral, "is an idea most of these people have never thought about before." Whether they now begin to think about the previously unthought of depends as always on their personal encounters with Christians, and also depends on the language used by Christian preachers.

But where can one meet Christians who can talk about their faith clearly, understandably and convincingly? This is more likely in the East than in the West German federal states. For in the East German local churches are many lay persons who were in the habit of witnessing to their faith openly even under the Communist government. It is not unusual for lay persons to use clearer language than those who proclaim the Gospel full-time. Too many sermons are the sort of which Karl Barth would have said that references to God were tossed like chips, "any old way according to one’s mood, onto the gaming table of common talk".

If people today are looking for a meaning which is beyond all our ability to achieve, surely this is also because they cannot bear the apparent limitlessness of our age. An epoch has dawned upon us which is not only geographically boundless, but also without barriers and without measure. The delusion of our ability to achieve has long since held human beings in its grip. Two years ago Rüdiger Saffranski, a philosopher and Heidegger’s biographer, warned in his book on Evil (Das Boese) science against trying to "improve" humankind. Saffranski foresaw a "bio-fascism", "working on the human substance in a spirit of limitless achieve-ability". It is as if he had a presentiment that before the end of the millennium, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in Karlsruhe would be muttering about "zoos for humans", "breeding humans", and "selection".

A consensus which has been unquestioned until now is beginning to crumble: that human existence is ultimately beyond analysis, unexplainable. For despite all scientific and technical progress, in the end the human person is an unfathomable mystery, with his or her loves, hopes fulfilled and unfulfilled, crises and moments of happiness. Humans are profoundly needy beings, for at the end each of us must face our own dying, our own mortality. We remain human either within this limitation, or not at all.

In this epoch of limitlessness, in which our humanity as human beings is at stake, who or what can offer us something to hold onto, an orientation? Marcel Reich-Ranicki would answer: literature. It is the interior handrail which has guided his life, and which helped him to survive the Nazi-terror years. Others, such as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is almost a hundred years old, insist that human beings need religion, to help them accept the lack of ultimate certainty and security. And what do we need God for?

In the 30’s and 40’s, Bert Brecht was writing his "stories of those who know" (Keuner-Geschichten), including this one: "Someone asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. answered, "I advise you to consider whether the answer to that question would change your behaviour. If it does not, we can forget about the question. If it does, then I can help you at least to the extent of telling you that you have already made a decision: you need a God.’"

Johannes Weiss, lawyer and Protestant theologian, is Director of German Southwest Radio (SWR)’s TV and radio programme department "Religion, Church and Society". This article appeared in the journal Publik-Forum, 24/99. Translation for publication in Ecumenical Dialogue 1/2000.