[AI translation] The great intellectual movement of the 16th century, which we are still gathered to commemorate today, and which we call "Reformation" for short, is wrongly called a renewal of faith, because the Reformers did not proclaim a new faith, but wanted to purify the old, the original, the Gospel, and make it accessible to all. The word itself, Reformation, means just that: reconversion. It means to restore something that has been distorted back to its original essence. In this sense, the Reformation did not actually begin on 31 October 1527, nor did it end with Luther, Calvin and Zwingli. The Reformation is a constant process in the Church. As the great reformers themselves put it: 'Ecclesia semper reformari debet' (The church must always be reformed). Because there is always something to reform, to purify, to improve. There is always some problem to be re-examined, to be reformulated, to be brought back to the measure of the Word, in which the Church needs to be reformed anew. In the sixteenth century, the problem of forgiveness of sins, justification, salvation, and the whole organization of the Church was the first to be purified. In the first centuries, the question of the Trinity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the urgency of coming to a living faith in the face of rigid dogmatism. In the twentieth century, two major problems are mainly in the foreground: one is the matter of the unity of the Church, the ecumenical endeavour, and the other is the problem of so-called secularisation. The ecumenical question has already been discussed many times between us - let me now try to outline the other, the question of secularisation.When we hear the word 'secularisation', the word 'secularisation' briefly comes to mind. The process we are witnessing all over the world: the separation of the masses from the Church and the secularisation of our entire culture. In the West, this is a much more recent process: this unchurching of people's thinking, of people's behaviour, of life as a whole. In our country, especially in the last decade, the same thing has become increasingly evident. How do we assess this process?
Religious people are generally inclined to blame everything that is wrong on secularisation. The chaos in the world, the lack of direction in culture, the moral disintegration, the brutality in politics, the general cynicism in people's thinking, all tend to be attributed to a single, all-explaining cause: secularisation. The meaning of the word itself was originally what we might call: the taking of church property by secular authorities. Today, in the philosophical sense of culture, secularisation is the removal from ecclesiastical influence, autonomy and freedom from all ecclesiastical and religious prejudices of cultural activities that used to be carried out by the Church, such as education, science, art, politics, lifestyle development, moral norms.
According to popular belief, this secularisation begins with the Renaissance. There the secularisation of the church culture of the Middle Ages begins. The Renaissance man discovered new worlds in heaven and earth, tore himself away from the scholastic system of thought that had hitherto dominated, shook off the tutelage of the Church and became his own creator and master. The Enlightenment brought the old religious attachments and ideas before the judgement of reason, leaving only what autonomous thought had confirmed. This process of secularisation had already prevailed in almost every field in the 19th century, so much so that Nietzsche announced to the world that God was dead! Man is a being independent of any higher power. Then came the First World War, in the immense suffering of which many people did indeed lose faith in God, but man still believed that he himself could do something good, man still believed in himself. And then came the Second World War, and in the senseless horrors of that war, even that faith was lost, faith in the goodness of man, faith in man's humanity. Behold, they say: the result of four centuries of secularization, man who had separated himself from the Church, from God, and wanted to rebuild the world according to his own understanding, finally lost faith in himself!
The Church has lamented much about this! I myself have read in European church magazines more than once a reproach to the world, the meaning of which was this: you see, mankind, what is the result of turning away from God? If you despise what the churches preach?! In our hearts too there is this kind of reproach against the world, even if it is not so conscious, and even if it is not always formulated in this way. But we are also willing to attribute all the troubles and confusion in the world to secularisation, that is, to the secularisation and de-Christianisation of humanity.
But is this view correct? Is secularisation really such a problem? Is it really the secularisation of culture that is the cause of all the evils that have occurred over four centuries, or vice versa: the Christianisation of culture in the wrong sense? Are not those who have turned away from a Christianity that has gone awry, a Christianity that in its individual trifles has been somehow professed by Christians, but in its great universal problems of humanity has been virtually denied by Christians? Are not those right who have turned away from a God whom those who believe in Him have presented to the world as the great policeman of the old world order, the helper and sanctioner of social injustice and exploitation?
I myself once saw, at an atheist exhibition in Zurich 30 years ago, among other things, a poster showing people in devout processions, in large crowds, singing, in praying armies, looking up to heaven, walking towards Jesus, up a mountainside, not realising that just as they were about to reach the floating figure of Jesus, they were on the edge of a precipice, falling down into the abyss, where they would fall into the gaping, horrible maw of the rich rulers of the world. And the problem is not that Jesus is portrayed in this way, but that there are people who have come to see Christianity in this way, as an alliance that hinders the cultural and social development of humanity. Whether it is true or not! That's how they knew it!
Do we not feel that the problem is not secularisation, or at least not the concept of secularisation as we have been talking about it? The problem is not the separation of the world from the Church, but the secularisation of the Church, not the de-Christianisation of the world, but the secularisation of Christianity. In other words, secularisation did not actually begin in the world, but in the Church. This is the tragic secularisation: that is, the secularisation of the Church, the secularisation of the Christian religion, and not the liberation of cultural functions from the tutelage of the Church!
Do you know what the biblical meaning of secularisation is? It comes from the word saeculum, meaning age, eon in the original language of the Bible. The coming of Jesus Christ into this world means the end of the old world age (saeculum, eon). With him a new eon begins, the age of the kingdom of God. This is why he always said, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye, and believe in my gospel" (Mk 1,15). The new eon, the kingdom of God, which is already here with Jesus Christ, will completely replace the old eon at His return. Now the church of Christ is the very people of this new eon; believers are citizens of the kingdom of God, living in the old but belonging to the new. They are in this world, but they are not of this world. This is why the warning to the followers of Jesus is repeated again and again, as in our basic verse: 'Do not conform yourselves to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that you may discern what is good, acceptable and perfect in the will of God'. I could say: do not allow yourselves to be secularized! So, the biblical content of secularisation is this: to think and live in the pattern of the old world order, to conform to the world, instead of conforming to the will of God. Accordingly, secularization did not begin with the Renaissance, but was already present in the Roman church. In fact, as long as the Church of Christ, as long as the believer in Christ lives in the old eon, he will always be tempted by secularisation, by the desire to conform to the world.
In the course of history, the fateful step towards the secularisation of the Church was taken with Constantine the Great. For the Church was supposed to be the harbinger of the coming kingdom of God, the new eon, and instead this movement for the kingdom of God became a state church. Instead of waiting and preparing for the kingdom of God, the main focus became the organisation of earthly power and the Christian organisation of this world. What has been taken out of Christianity is the consciousness that "we have no permanent city here, but we are looking for the future" (Heb 13,14), that we are strangers and aliens in this eon, and that "our kingdom is in heaven, from which we also look for the Lord Jesus Christ who saves us" (Phil 3,20).
This is the essence of secularisation. That is, when the church establishes itself in this world, acquires political and social influence such as the authorities have, accumulates wealth, manages estates, and seeks to establish all the things of the world under Christian patronage, under its own guardianship. That is how it happened that even wars were fought with ecclesiastical sanctification, that churches launched crusades, fought religious wars, fought ideological battles, sanctified cannons. This is how a so-called 'Christian era' and, more recently, a 'pre-Christian era' and the so-called Corpus Christianum, a secularised caricature of the kingdom of God, came into being.
The problem, then, is not secularisation, which consists in the de-Christianisation of culture, but in the wrong Christianisation of culture, that is to say, the confusion of the Church with the world, the total secularisation of the Church. For the consequence of this is that Christianity has become an unleavened salt, of which Jesus says: it is good for nothing but to be thrown away, to be trampled underfoot. The process of secularisation that we are seeing in the world today, that is, the turning away of the masses from the Lord, means that the masses of nominal Christians - yes - will leave the Church, and a Church will emerge that is diminished in numbers but strengthened from within. And the world will throw off the Christian mantle and unmistakably want to be the world.
The exhortation of our Word - "Do not conform yourselves to the world" - means precisely that the Church should also want to be the Church without ambiguity. In other words, a team of Jesus whose main concern is not self-stabilisation, but working for the kingdom of God, which is not for itself in this world, but for this world. Which seeks not to rule the world, but to serve this world. Which does not fight for its own rights, but for the reign of God, whose chief strength is not violent power, but servant love! The historic judgments which the Church is going through on this earth today mean precisely that God is purging from the Church that which is not Church in her, that which is a remnant of the old eon in her, that which is of the world in her.
God is today bringing His church back into the service of His kingdom, worldwide, throughout the earth! This renewal is the most actual reformation of Christ's church today. Though we ourselves personally may be instruments, not obstacles, to this reformation.
Amen
Date: 31 October 1961 Reformation.