German theologian Johann Baptist Metz (died Dec 2) tried to re-craft Christian theology in light of the Holocaust and the horrors of history. His “political theology” countered the privatized theology of “bourgeois religion” which replaced faith with merely “believed-in faith.”
Conversation
"What makes Auschwitz unfathomable is not only the executioners…and not only the silence of God.. . It is the silence of men: the silence of all those who looked on and looked away and thereby handed over this people in its peril of death to an unutterable loneliness."
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"The Christian is not only responsible for what he does or fails to do, but also for what he allows to happen to others.”
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“The reason for the church’s loss of appeal is not that it demands too much from people, but that it offers, in fact, too little challenge or else does not presents its demands clearly enough as priorities of the gospel itself."
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He decried the loss of messianic hope, replaced with a dangerous triumphalism or “an optimism which is no longer really capable of perceiving radical disruptions….Christianity is not… a doctrine to be preserved in maximum ‘purity’ but a praxis to be lived more radically.”
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