During the Concilium World Congress in Brussels in 1970, J.B. Metz delivered a talk entitled ‘Toward the Presence of the Church in Society’. He sought to describe the theological basis for the topic as follows: “I would like to present the thesis that the Church must understand and verify herself in the ‘systems’ of our emancipatory society as the public witness to and bearer of a dangerous remembrance of freedom.” Christianity is the experience of infinite longings, of radical optimism, of unquenchable discontent, of the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, of the radical protest against everything, even death. But why were the Christians in Germany apathetic to Auschwitz? There are three reasons for it: 1. The cosmocentric definition of the self and the world implicit within the cultural fatality; 2.The privatisation of faith: The lack of social, political, and historical engagement on the part of modern Christianity; 3.The view of reason as technological and not moral.

1) Cultural Fatalism: Cultural cosmocentrism stifles the recognition and realization of Christian freedom through love, anthropocentrism makes it possible. History is cyclical without meaning, it repeats without meaning endlessly. We are caught in fate. Everyone continues to remain so in the face of ongoing world poverty and oppression. This fatalistic perspective is common in fundamentalist ideologies. Many do not realise history is not trapped within the cage of an eternal cosmos because of the new way of thinking about history and the future initiated by Christian eschatology. The orientation of the modern era to the future and the understanding of the world as history, which results from this orientation, is based upon the biblical belief in the promises of God. The question of why Christians remained apathetic in the face of the Holocaust suffering of the past, and why they continue to remain so in the face of ongoing third-world poverty and oppression is that they thoughtlessly flow in history

2) The privatization of the Christian message: The key to religious apathy lies in the privatization of the Christian message and the Christian person. Its cause lies in the privatization of the Christian message and the Christian person. From here on, the critique of religious apathy is a critique of privatization. Modern theology uncritically thinks of the self as an isolated monadic subjectivity, and of praxis as the private religious decision of that subjectivity. It fails fully to recognize the inter-subjective nature of the Christian act of faith. It neglects the fact that standing before God and being with others in solidarity are mutually interdependent moments of the Christian act of faith. From here on, the critique of religious apathy is a critique of privatization, God’s promised future for the imaginative power to break Christianity free from its captivity to the cultural cosmo-centrism, particularly the cultural notions of self and history. These notions contribute to a lack of social, political, and historical engagement on the part of modern Christianity.

3) The Primacy of technical reason: Bourgeois consciousness has gradually come to be taken for Christian consciousness. The bourgeois notion of reason, as primarily technical reason, for also serving, along with modern theories of history, is a compensatory mechanism for the historical impotence felt by the current generation. Rationality is no more a practical reason or a moral reason, but an objective scientific reason. Technical reason becomes the new authority of modern life because it controls, manipulates, and dominates. Christian rationality concerns receiving rather than controlling and manipulating, and its authority arises from the praxis of suffering discipleship and the knowledge of God and the self-discovered there in. The operative within bourgeois subjectivity: technical rationality. It too is a central factor in Christianity’s captivity to the bourgeois mentality. The modern worship of technical reason arises from the attempt to compensate for the fatalism and apathy gnawing at the souls of modern persons. We do not recognize how the dominance of technical reason, as a new authority, threatens the unique Christian understanding of religious authority based on tradition. Christians fail to recognize that technical reason is one side of the larger separation of reason into private and public. Public life is dominated by technical reason, private life by private moral reason. Technical reason contributes to an anthropological model of domination. Finally Metz asks: “Who answers the claim to freedom in part sufferings and hopes? Who answers the challenge of the dead and makes conscience sensitive to their freedom? Who cultivates solidarity with the dead to whom we shall belong someday after tomorrow? Finally, who can share his understanding of freedom even with those who do not die an emphatic death but who die a terribly banal and fatal everyday death?”