Jan Patočka the Czech thinker wrote: “By virtue of this foundation in the abysmal deepening of the soul, Christianity remains thus far the greatest, unsurpassed but also un-thought-through human outreach that enabled humans to struggle against decadence.” Christianity is the principal agent of the tradition of caring for the soul and the driving force of the human spiritual movement. Christianity not only challenges Greek philosophy and significantly contributes to the concept of the soul as we read earlier in his Heretical Essays, but most importantly Christianity redirects attention from the truth of beings to the truth of Being; that is, from the external to the internal being of one’s Being. For Patočka, the crisis of European decadence is not an agonistic, apocalyptic vision. The decline in Christianity is as if a turn backward could help us go forward. Christianity shares a good deal of responsibility for this crisis of humanity as well. As much as Christianity contributed to the emergence of modern science due to its belief in the possibility of rational understanding about the world, the more practical orientation of modern theology, based on the principle of ‘having the world’ instead of ‘contemplating it,’ resulted in a forgetfulness of the core of Christianity.

For him “Religion exists once the secret of the sacred, orgiastic, or demonic mystery has been integrated, subjected to the sphere of responsibility… Religion (history) is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility.” Christianity, in this context is presented as the drive of human existence, which has not yet been adequately thought through. The concept of the un-thought refers to something that has not yet been thought through. The un-thought is something forgotten, omitted, something which has not been taken into account because of ignorance. It could have even been intentionally erased. Or, the un-thought is perhaps something that cannot be thought through because of a particular historical situation, which constrains the possibilities of its appearance. We are “converted” through the decision of responsibility. Analysing the notion of responsibility, Derrida insists on the fact that “the history of responsibility is tied to the history of religion” and that there is no other way out of this. The orgiastic becomes responsibility through an intense discipline of the soul as an attentive anticipation of death. This anticipation manifests itself as a sort of thaumaturgy, an art of healing for a life threatened by decadence.

As the disciples on the way to Emmaus did not have an answer beforehand but one was disclosed to them only after, so does the spiritual life proclaimed by Christianity after Caesars’ Christendom await its transformation on its way towards finitude – the openness to the possibility of a transformation to come. Christianity after Christendom is no more a colonising exercise, but a human mode of being in the openness of love. Absolute values, absolute meaning, hope of absolute truth, be it in infinity, hope of absolute justice in the Christian paradise—all of this has vanished with the smoke from the conflagrations lit by the wars of the twentieth century.

The mutual crossing of the theological and the philosophical in the concept of Christianity after Christendom is best captured in the call of thinking, that is, the task or vocation of thinking. Thinking what? Thinking finitude and its transformation to responsibility. The theological answer for it is: Thinking transcendence as transformation. We shall conclude that Christianity after Christendom is this much-needed conversion in the time of crisis and nihilism. One does not yet hear the call to explain oneself, one’s actions, one’s thoughts, to respond to the other and answer for oneself before the others.

Christianity is not only a Christianity after Christendom in a chronological sense, but also, and more importantly, in the sense of an-after-Christianity, the historical movement inscribed within the very mode of Christian being-in-the-world and its search for meaning. This is much more than a repetition of Christianity after Christendom. The proposed project is drawn from the manifestation of Christianity and its core, that is, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God becoming man, and thus transforming our being human. The task of thinking that is at the centre of Christianity after Christendom is nothing but thinking and understanding the human call to responsibility.