Synodality and the Setting in Life
Newsletter for May 16, 2025
Sitz im Leben is a German term used in biblical scholarship that roughly translates to “setting in life.” It refers to a critical method in which the social and historical context of a text or event is ascertained and applied to the process of interpretation. The Sitz im Leben of Matthew’s gospel, for instance, might include the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the relationship of Matthew’s community of emerging Christians to the Jewish world of the time, and the linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical markers of first-century Antioch, where the text was plausibly written. These are the historical circumstances that occasioned and conditioned the gospel—“the full, dynamic, living situation in which our subject matter is located,” to use the definition of Today’s American Catholic contributor Gene Ciarlo—and knowing something of them helps us understand the issues that motivated Matthew’s rendering of Christ and how his audience might have received it.
One wonders if we might apply this concept of Sitz im Leben not to a text but to the contemporary life of the church and world, and of the church within the world. Imagine there was a fifth Evangelist, one whose gospel landed in this particular moment. To whom would she orient her message? What social, political, and religious concerns would inform her portrayal of Christ? How might we conceive of the Sitz im Leben of our own time, as if looking at it objectively, from a distance?
Wayne A. Meeks explains in his Origins of Christian Morality that “Jesus did not arrive in Galilee proclaiming a complete, systematic, and novel Christian ethic, not even a compact set of fundamental principles that had only to be explicated by his apostles.” He continues:
What the ethnographer of early Christianity finds is only a record of experimentation, of trial and error, of tradition creatively misread and innovation wedged craftily into the cracks of custom, of the radically new mixed up with the familiar and old, of disputes and confrontation, of fervent assertions of unity amid distressing signs of schism, of opposite points of view on fundamental matters, of dialectic and change.
It sounds strangely familiar as the church enters its third millennium—one that Cardinal Mario Grech, in his address to a meeting of African theologians in Nairobi in 2022, said he hopes is “characterized by an ecclesiology of ‘synodality.’” Grech contrasted this with the communio ecclesiology of the first millennium and the top-down “hierarchology” of the second. Synodality finds its essence as a “community of communities,” small “cells” that work together to develop their particular function within the Mystical Body. In an American context, as Paul Lakeland pointed out in a review of Tomas Halík’s The Afternoon of Christianity, the location of those cells may open out from parishes to spiritual and retreat centers—places where the processes of direction and accompaniment are foregrounded, where there is less emphasis on membership and more on belonging, and where possibilities exist for more sustained interfaith dialogue.
Cosmic flourishing is only possible if Christians “find ways to affirm the narratives and rhythms of yet other peoples and traditions, once again revising and rehearing, but not abandoning, their own,” says Meeks. Where the first-millennium church looked inward to define itself, the second upward to define its structure, so the opportunity exists for the third to look outward, to learn and to listen, to offer itself as a sign of the path of greater inclusion. Thus the guiding image of the synod and the key to expressing its Sitz im Leben: a Christ who goes out to the peripheries, bearing nothing but his own receptivity in the Spirit.
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic