On the future of Christianity: the fourth hypothesis (Maurice Bellet)
I thank Bernard Ginisty for publishing this text on August 20, 2025, on the web page GARRIGUES ET SENTIERS. Espaces de liberté, de foi et de réflexion chrétiennes (https://www.garriguesetsentiers.org/2025/08/sur-l-avenir-du-christianisme-la-quatrieme-hypothese-maurice-bellet.html)
Does Christianity have a future? This is the theme that Maurice Bellet develops in a study titled The fourth hypothesis: On the future of Christianity[1]. Maurice Bellet, priest, theologian, philosopher and psychotherapist, followed a very original path in the Christian universe. Book after book, he charted new paths diverging away from the hackneyed debates in which contemporary Catholicism too often gets bogged down.
He invites us to experience a dawn, to feel our entire being stirred up by “good news” that will lift us out of sadness and death. If the word Gospel has any meaning, it can only be that of a new event, unexpected, radically “good” but nothing boring and repetitive. Certain forms of religious education can be the worst obstacle for the “good news”, preventing each one of us from personally experiencing a new word. Bellet writes: “The Gospel is, by its nature, the unheard of, that not yet heard of. It belongs to all times. Yet, our time gives a particular vigour to this unheard of. There is a dislocation with respect to established Christianity; a confrontation with post-Christianity; a relationship with the extremely strange (…). The power of the Gospel is to announce that each person’s path is their path, because the word is addressed to each person, that word which unleashes installation and leads far away: ‘you do not know where it goes’ “[2]
Religions are the mother tongues of the meaning of existence. They are not automatic guarantees. To those who proclaim themselves Abraham’s descendants, Christ told them: “From these stones, God can make children of Abraham”. No religious heritage, or education or chance of birth can dispense with conversion. Christ is not so much the founder of a new religion as that who invites us to radically question all our religions of birth in a personal adventure. To those who want to confine Him to Abrahamic descent, He replies: “Before Abraham existed, I am”. Every person must one day, in his or her manner, say this sentence which does not reduce anyone to his or her particular history or geography in order to recognize the gift of divine filiation and universal brotherhood.
Without Abraham’s experience of abandoning what is known to venture into the unknown, there is no access to the essential. From this perspective, Maurice Bellet demonstrates that the early Christians’ critical relationship with the religious institutions of their time is fundamental to the Gospel’s approach. According to Bellet, for those who experience the new Word, institutionalized Christianity can look like “the analogue of what was established Judaism at the time of the early Christians.”[3]
Bellet proposes several hypothesis for the future of Christianity:
1) Christianity disappears and with it so does the Christ of faith. The event foretold by the critics of the 18th and 19th centuries is fulfilled. Only historians’ writings and the works of art will remain.
2) Christianity is dissolved. It is not obliterated, but whatever it contributed to humanity becomes the common good and slips away from it. Christianity dissolves into human rights and an undifferentiated spiritualism.
3) Christianity continues as before. It is maintained, restored and reestablished. Internal battles continue to maintain the institution and control it.
4) Bellet chooses a fourth hypothesis. Yes, there is something that inexorably ends. It is a certain religious historical system. According to Bellet, it is “the end of Christianity, if it is like any of those isms that characterize modernity: [Christianism], idealism, marxism, materialism, existentialism, etc”. But the end of a historic system opens the possibility of awakening to a resurrection: “A man came among us, one among the rest of them, and he was given the opportunity to traverse the impossible, to transgress the obvious: the evidence of death. So, he descended to the depths of the deepest, and he lost God: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He died, we killed him. Some claim that he is alive. It is the unheard-of statement of a humanity that dares to prefer life to death. (…) How will I recognize this Christ in a living and concrete manner? Where else but in that agape, that love among brothers and sisters about which John the apostle dares to say that a person who so loves comes from God and knows God? Likewise, Paul declares in his first letter to the Corinthians (chapter 13) that everything will pass, faith included, and only the agape will remain forever. That is why eternal life is already here, in this resurrection where we have moved from relishing killing to the gift of life”[4]
At the end of his book, Maurice Bellet shows us a way: “Thus what I have called the fourth hypothesis is as follows. It does not judge the path that others can follow. The great Church is an anti-sect: there is a diversity of paths, of styles, of thinking. As far as teachers goes… ‘Do not call anybody father or teacher’. The only Church is that constituted by brothers and sisters that love and help each other (…)”[5]
Maurice Bellet’s book is a healthy reminder that the meaning of any religious institution is nothing else but to invite us to risk that second birth that Christ told Nicodemus (Jn 3, 1-12).
Bernard Ginisty (Published on August 20, 2025, by GARRIGUES ET SENTIERS. Spaces of freedom, faith, and Christian reflection)
[1] Maurice BELLET (1923-2018): La quatrième hypothèse. Sur l’avenir du christianisme, éditions Desclée de Brouwer, 2010
[2] Id. pp 30-31
[3] Id. p 21.
[4] Id. pp 119-120. This is the subject of Emmanuel Tourpe’s book: À l’amour que vous aurez les uns pour les autres… Le dernier mot de Dieu, éditions Artège 2024. It received the 2025 great prize of Catholic literature of the Association of Catholic writers in the French language.
[5] Id. pp 108-109