Faith in one God, and thus, theology is no longer felt as necessary. But it may be all for the best as the study will offer o authority over the people, but it’ll be an interlocutor offering interpretation without pretension.
Benjamin Dahlke describes a phenomenon that is difficult to deny: Catholic theology is losing its readers. The decline in the number of students, shrinking print runs, and the erosion of a culture of debate represent, for him, a real danger – not only for pastoral ministry, but for theology itself as a scientific discipline.
His concern is well-founded. If more and more is written while less and less is read, a scientific discipline will ultimately lose its space for resonance in the long term.
In response to this situation, my thesis is as follows: this is not merely a crisis of publications in academic theology, but a deeper crisis of the position and plausibility of religion in general and its ecclesial form in particular.
I write from the perspective of my work in a transformation program within a diocese in western Germany, which has been profoundly marked by social transformation for many years. Anyone who wants to shape change in the Church, or at least make it possible, quickly learns that any serious debate about the future must start from a clear-eyed view of the present religious reality.
Belonging to this present is also the observation, as simple as it is significant, that the religious foundations of our society are in a state of erosion. The diagnosis, therefore, remains incomplete if it is read primarily as a problem of the culture of publishing and reading demanding texts.
Indeed, currently, theology does not primarily lack readers; what it increasingly lacks is the place it once occupied as a necessary form of interpreting the world and faith.
“Apatheism” as a Sign of the Times
When one cites a book like Jan Loffeld’s When Nothing is Missing Where God is Missing as an example of a monograph that, bucking the trend, sparked a debate, one is implicitly also referring to this deeper level of the problem.
Loffeld’s central point is not merely that ecclesial structures are weakening or that religious practice is in decline. His diagnosis goes deeper: in large parts of contemporary society, religion is not only controversial, but for many people, subjectively, it is simply no longer necessary.
The question of God is no longer raised as a matter of course. What is truly unsettling is not religious contradiction, but religious indifference or even simple disinterest – defined by Jan Loffeld as “apatheism.”
If this is true, then Dahlke’s initial problem must be assessed differently. The question is not primarily: why are theological books being read less and less? But rather, why should theology still appear necessary in a cultural situation where many people do not feel anything is missing when God is missing? The decline in theological readership is therefore not the true cause of the crisis, but its visible symptom.
This does not diminish Dahlke’s observation, but rather sharpens it. Because he is obviously right to highlight the precarious state of theological publishing: reduced print runs, narrow circles of buyers, and an academic internal market where many things circulate without having a real effect. His desire that people read more than they write also strikes a nerve.
But the hope of solving the problem primarily through better formats, greater visibility, or a livelier culture of debate is probably insufficient. Visibility is not the same as plausibility. And a successful book presentation does not replace the experience that theological discourse actually holds significance for one’s own life.
Life Without God, But Not Without Meaning
This is precisely why Loffeld’s diagnosis is so useful. It forces us to abandon that tacit assumption on which ecclesial and theological self-affirmations have long been based: namely, that the question of God spontaneously emerges in the depths of every person sooner or later, and that the Church merely needs to be ready to respond.
Anyone who examines today’s religious reality more closely will have to note with greater clarity that many people live their lives as meaningful, morally oriented, and subjectively fulfilling, without feeling the absence of God, faith, or the Church as a loss.
This has far-reaching consequences for theology. For a discipline that, for centuries, could largely rely on its subject matter being culturally taken for granted, now faces the task of reflecting on this very loss of self-evidence. This means that today, theology must not only be precise in its content but also truthful in its diagnosis of the situation.
It cannot simply be blamed on a lack of attention, reading discipline, or academic mediation. It must confront the uncomfortable awareness that its problem runs deeper: its subject matter is no longer urgent for many people.
Paradoxically, however, an opportunity might lie precisely in this. Because if God no longer “rides” on social self-evidence, then theological discourse is freed from false certainties. It no longer has to pretend it can count on a latent religious need that merely needs to be managed better. It can become more sober, freer, and perhaps more honest.
Not by attenuating its subject matter, but also not by overloading it with functional meanings. A God who was interesting solely because he remedied human deficiencies would, after all, be merely a religious supporting construct. Loffeld’s reference to the non-necessity of God is therefore not simply defeatism, but potentially a theologically salutary correction.
This is why Dahlke’s text is important – but it should be explored more consistently in the direction he himself hints at. It is an expression of a deeper shift: theology is losing the cultural space for resonance in which its questions once made sense. One can respond to this at the level of publishing, but what is primarily needed is intellectual and spiritual sobriety that recognizes the gravity of this situation.
Learning to Speak Theologically Again
The appropriate conclusion, then, would perhaps not only be that theology must win back more readers. But rather, that it must learn again to speak theologically under conditions of religious indifference – so that its discourse does not live off past certainties, but off the strength to take seriously a present devoid of an apparent religious need.
This would have immediate consequences – not only for pastoral ministry, but also for how academic theology understands itself. In transformation processes, one of the first and simultaneously most painful steps to take is realizing that one does not change the situation by telling it more beautifully.
Anyone working with teams, committees, and local leaders notices this quickly: the decisive friction does not arise where people are “actually religious” but hard to reach, but rather where religion as a framework of reference simply can no longer be taken for granted. This changes everything: goals, language, formats, timeframes – and also the expectation of what “persuasiveness” actually means.
Perhaps it is still possible to sketch a cautious perspective on how academic theology might regain a place in the lives of an interested public – but only with one reservation: the question about solutions is perhaps itself already part of the described symptomatology.
Where theology primarily inquires about impact, reach, and connectivity, it risks inadvertently submitting to a functionalism that it should actually be critically reflecting upon. Precisely for this reason, a first step would not be a better communication strategy, but a conscious self-discipline: practicing public theology not as marketing, but as a form of intellectual hospitality – that is, in such a way that it does not merely comment on the real questions of the time, but receives them in their depth, clarifies them conceptually, interprets them spiritually, and also reveals its own blind spots.
Visibility, therefore, arises not from volume, but from reliability: through texts and formats that convey the impression that someone here does not only want to be right, but wants to understand reality.
Seriousness Instead of Opportunism
If, from a transformation perspective, there is a practical clue, then perhaps it is this: the reception of religious interpretive proposals and of theology will only occur where they are correlated with broadly perceptible social themes and areas of inquiry – not opportunistically, but with seriousness.
In the vision for the future of my diocese’s transformation program, this is formulated soberly: “The goal is to offer, in a predominantly secular world, the Christian faith as an option for living together in a fulfilling, supportive, and peaceful way in a limited and conflict-ridden world.”
This very logic – option instead of presupposition, offering instead of cultural self-evidence – marks, in my view, the direction: not to theologize every topic, but to intervene where many people are already on a “metaphysical” path, without calling it that: in questions concerning vulnerability and guilt, justice and fear, belonging, finitude, hope in the face of real crises.
Academic theology should invest more in translation: less internal communication, more forms of public argumentation (debates, public lectures, digital formats) that maintain the demand for scientific integrity while remaining “consumable.”
The attitude is crucial: not as an authority filling a gap, but as an interlocutor offering interpretation without pretension. Perhaps theology will not reconquer an old space for resonance this way, but it might open up a new one: not because “God is missing,” but because reality is not exhausted by what already works.
