Tomáš Halík’s The Afternoon of Christianity is a wonderful read. Rooted in deep faith and theology, it still manages to be exciting, surprising, even audacious. There are page-turning “wow” moments, and quiet “if only” sighs of longing. You’ll find yourself underlining whole paragraphs and thinking, Yes! That’s it. That’s what I’ve been trying to say—but better said, and more courageously.
In a Nutshell
Halík describes these times as the Afternoon of Christianity. He doesn’t mean it’s the Death of Christianity. Drawing on Carl Jung’s image of the human life cycle, he suggests that this is a time of maturation—not decline. The morning of the Church was about energy, structure, identity. The afternoon is about integration, humility, and transformation. We are being invited—forced, even—into a deeper, more honest kind of faith. Not louder, but truer.
We have reached this point, because the church has succeeded and now needs to step further along the road. This Afternoon moment is not for fixing or returning. It is for listening, discerning, letting go, and finding Christ again—not in triumph, but in tenderness, brokenness, and mystery.
Halik himself grew up in Prague under Communist rule. Most abandoned Christianity, but there was a strong underground Church which Halik joined. They were tight and strong community, holding strictly to Rome and the Church for which they could be imprisoned and killed. He studied and was a psychotherapist. Then he studied for the priesthood and was ordained. When Communist rule lifted, he found himself in a most atheistic society, and many of the former Catholics fell away. But, he realised, many still yearned and searched to find connect, to find meaning in something Transcendent.
This is the Church we’ve inherited
We’ve inherited a Church shaped by the long centuries of Christendom—an era when Christianity was allied with state power, cultural dominance, moral authority, and doctrinal certainty. It gave us theological brilliance, great beauty, and heroic witness—but also clericalism, moralism, and an often unlistening rigidity.
Faith was often presented as hierarchy ,acceptance of dogma, the commandments. We rejoiced in having the Truth. Doubt was mistrusted. Structures held sway. For many, the Church became more about belonging to an institution than embarking on a spiritual journey.
But the World Has Changed
Halík names with clarity what many of us intuit: much of the inherited language and form of the Church no longer speaks to the soul of the modern West. In a pluralistic, post-modern, global world, some try to escape back to the certainties of the former ways. For others “No Religious Belief “is the fastest growing response on national census. The decline in religious affiliation, especially among younger people, is not just a social change—it’s a theological moment. This of course may not be the case for the Churches in Asia, Africa or Latin America. They have different questions in different contexts – they didn’t emerge from Christendom.
So many, old and young, are disillusioned by scandal or confused by the rapid cultural shifts. Millennials and Gen Z—many of whom identify as “spiritual but not religious” or as “Nones”—aren’t rejecting God; they’re simply unable to find God in the Church’s current forms. And we, the Church, haven’t yet learned to speak their language.
The old models—of apologetics, of moral policing, of offering neat answers—feel increasingly hollow. And yet, Halík insists, this loss of certainty and authority can be a grace. In the shadows of doubt, in the silence of empty churches, God may be doing a new thing.
This is the path going forward
Rather than clinging to what is fading, Halík proposes we let go with grace—and open ourselves to the Spirit’s new work. The Church we knew, had its faults, but there was excitement and hopes after Vatican 11, the pilgrim Church. The Church of the Afternoon is not a fortress but a communion of people searching for Faith, rather than Religion. Our task is not to restore what was, but to companion those who seek, even in the wilderness. We are called not to hand down answers, but to create spaces of encounter.
This means a Church that listens more than it speaks. A Church willing to be wounded. A Church that believes God is present in the world’s questions, not just its traditions. It means rediscovering the mystical, contemplative heart of Christianity. It means moving from “teaching religion” to nurturing faith.
There are myriads of books for rebuilding the church, Divine Renovation, Alpha Programs, neo-Catechumens. For clergy and pastoral workers, this book is a call to conversion. It suggests that our most important ministry today may not be preserving or recovering a lost orthodoxy or filling pews—but walking with those who doubt, grieve, search, or feel exiled. To be with them, as Jesus was with the disciples on the road to Emmaus—listening, explaining, breaking bread.
Faithful, Hopeful, RealHalik is a straight talker. But he is never cynical or dismissive about the Church as it has been, while acknowledging its faults. His book is deeply fait-full—perhaps more so than many defensive apologetics or revivalist cries. Halík believes in Christ, in grace, in the Church—but not as it was, and not as a self-sufficient system. He believes in a Church that grows old with grace and finds God afresh in her afternoon light.
It’s a book for pastors, seekers, teachers, and anyone who’s ever felt disoriented by what the Church has become, but not yet ready to give up on what it could be.
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