Church search: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quote #2

Part of my "Church search" series...

What might surprise you or perhaps even worry you would be my theological thoughts and where they are leading, and here is where I really miss you very much. I don't know anyone else with whom I can talk about them and arrive at some clarity. What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words--whether with theological or with pious words--is past, as is the age of inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether. We are approaching a completely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as "religious" aren't really practicing that at all; they presumably mean something quite different by "religious." But our entire nineteen hundred years of Christian preaching and theology are built on the "religious a priori" in human beings. "Christianity" has always been a form (perhaps the true form) of "religion." Yet if it becomes obvious one day that this "a priori" doesn't exist, that it has been a historically conditioned and transitory form of human expression, then people really will become radically religionless--and I believe that this is already more or less the case (why, for example doesn't this war provoke a "religious" reaction like all the previous ones?)--what does that then mean for "Christianity"? The foundations are being pulled out from under all that "Christianity" has previously been for us, and the only people among whom we might end up in terms of "religion" are "the last of the knights" or a few intellectually dishonest people. Are these supposed to be the chosen few? Are we supposed to fall all over precisely this dubious lot of people in our zeal or disappointment or woe and try to peddle our wares to them? Or should we jump on a few unfortunates in their hour of weakness and commit, so to speak, religious rape? If we are unwilling to do any of that, and if we eventually must judge even the Western form of Christianity to be only a preliminary stage of a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well? Is there a such thing as a religionless Christian?...

The questions to be answered would be: What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life, mean in a religionless world? How do we talk about God--without religion, that is, without the temporarily conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, the inner life, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we can no longer even "speak" the way we used to) in a "worldly" way about "God"? How do we go about being "religionless-worldly" Christians, how can we be those who are called out, without understanding ourselves religiously as privileged, but instead seeing ourselves as belonging wholly to the world? Christ would then no longer be the object of religion, but something else entirely, truly lord of the world. In a religionless situation, what do ritual and prayer mean? Is this where the "arcane discipline" or the difference (which you've heard about from me before) between the penultimate and the ultimate, have new significance?...

The Pauline question of whether circumcision is a condition for justification is today, in my opinion, the question of whether religion is a condition for salvation. Freedom from circumcision is also freedom from religion. I often wonder why my "Christian instinct" frequently draws me more toward non-religious people than toward the religious, and I am sure it's not with missionary intent; instead, I'd almost call it a "brotherly" instinct. While I'm often reluctant to name the name of God to religious people--because somehow it doesn't ring true for me there, and I feel a bit dishonest saying it (it's especially bad when other people start talking in religious terminology; then I clam up almost completely and feel somehow uncomfortable and in a sweat)--yet on some occasions with nonreligious people I can speak God's name quite calmly, as a matter of course. Religious people speak of God at a point where human knowledge is at an end (or sometimes when they're too lazy to think further), or when human strength fails. Actually, it's a deus ex machina that they're always bringing on the scene, either to appear to solve insoluble problems or to provide strength when human powers fail, thus always exploiting human weakness or human limitations. Inevitably that lasts only until human beings become powerful enough to push the boundaries a bit further and God is no longer needed as deus ex machina. To me, talking about human boundaries has become a dubious proposition anyhow. (Is even death still really a boundary, since people today hardly fear it anymore, or sin, since people hardly comprehend it?) It always seems to me that we leave room for God only out of anxiety. I'd like to speak of God not at the boundaries but in the center, not in weakness but in strength, thus not in death and guilt but in human life and human goodness. When I reach my limits, it seems to me better not to say anything and to leave what can't be solved unsolved. Belief in the resurrection is not the "solution" to the problem of death. God's "beyond" is not what is beyond our cognition! Epistemological transcendence has nothing to do with God's transcendence. God is the beyond in the midst of our lives. The church stands not at the point where human powers fail, at the boundaries, but in the center of the village. That's the way it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we don't read the New Testament nearly enough in the light of the Old. I am thinking a great deal about what this religionless Christianity looks like, what form it takes, and I'll be writing you more about it soon.

 --Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his letter to Eberhard Bethge on April 30, 1944, from a Nazi prison less than a year before his execution (Published in the book Letters and Papers from Prison), bold text emphasized by me.

Church Search: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quote #1

Part of my "Church search" series...

Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.

A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves this dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.

When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first the accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

--Dietrich Bohoeffer, Life Together

When I first saw this quote, I only saw part of it (and yes, there's even more than I've quoted here, so look it up if you want to read more). It started from almost the middle of the third paragraph: "Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community..." This and other things I read affected my concept of what church should be. As I've talked about before, I found it so tiring when pastors would come up with one idea after another of how to reach out to the community and hopefully grow the church. It seemed like there should be a better, simpler way--something that is better at welcoming people in various places in their faith and practice, yet manages to unite without insisting that people need to get with the program.

This is still what I hope for. That hasn't changed, at least not much.

But eventually I read a bigger chunk of this quote. I hadn't seen the first couple of paragraphs before. That turned my attention onto my own wishes for a church community. If I find a church that seems alright but doesn't quite match what I hope for, do I leave? Do I insist that the church change? Or as Bonhoeffer said, a church that doesn't meet my expectations could be exactly what I need.

There's a time to leave a church and a time to stay. I'm not trying to say people should always put up with whatever church they happen to be in. I'm not even going to try to lay out a set of rules for deciding whether to stay or go. Certainly, I think people should leave churches that are toxic environments, but how do you define a toxic environment? And I left a church that I don't consider a toxic environment.

But I will conclude this post by repeating myself because I can't come up with a better ending: a church that doesn't meet my expectations could be exactly what I need.

God as the source of morality

Some people try to argue for the truth of Christianity or the existence of God based on the existence of a moral law: we know intuitively that there must be some sort of absolute standard of right and wrong, and that can only come from a higher power. I generally haven't found this convincing. Yes, it feels like certain things are right and wrong, but I don't think we have any hard evidence to say there really is right and wrong. I believe in moral absolutes because I believe in God, not the other way around. If I was an atheist, I think I'd be a moral person, and I'd advocate for certain causes, but I don't think I'd truly believe in any absolute moral law.

C.S. Lewis found the "moral law" argument quite convincing, and it was a big factor in his conversion from atheism to Christianity. I read his book Mere Christianity a few years ago, which devotes a few chapters to this topic. While most of it didn't seem like strong evidence for God's existence to me, there's part of it that I find myself pondering once in a while. I looked up that part, and here it is, from the chapter called "The Invasion:"

If Dualism [the idea that there are two higher powers, one good and one bad] is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons— either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong—only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We called sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted.

Is it possible to be bad for the mere sake of badness? If not, does that mean there is something at the most fundamental level of reality that is good?

At times, it seems more likely that whatever fundamentally exists without cause would be amoral (neither good nor bad) and not intelligent. It seems unrealistic that something good, or something intelligent, could exist without a cause, as Christians affirm. It almost seems to good to be true that the one thing whose existence is fundamental to all of reality would be good, and loving, and intelligent.

And yet, good seems to be able to exist on its own, but bad "is only spoiled goodness." At the very least, this would make a completely good God more plausible than a completely bad God.

I haven't said anything to defend the existence of an intelligent God, and possibly only a weak defense of a good God. But there's something compelling about this. And Christians take it further: we claim God loves each of us--tiny specs on a tiny spec in a tiny spec in an unimaginably huge universe. And soon, at Christmas, we will celebrate a time when we claim this good, intelligent, loving God actually visited us. Are we crazy? Or is God crazy in our eyes for doing things this way?

Highlights of "The Fidelity of Betrayal"

I finished reading the book, "The Fidelity of Betrayal" by Peter Rollins a while back. I already commented on it here before I finished it. Here are a few other highlights:

In reading Nietzsche [Dietrich Bonhoeffer] too became concerned that Christianity had become an anemic ideological expression that not only appealed to the infant within humanity but that fundamentally stood in the way of our becoming strong, intelligent, and courageous human beings who reflect our dignity as being formed in the image of God...

Bonhoeffer wondered whether it is possible to embrace God out of love and lightness of heart, out of a seduction that is caught up in the call of God rather than the need of God.

--page 102-103

The question is not whether God exists but rather what God has said.

--page 138

When thinking through issues to do with morality, religion, the world, and social action, people can introduce and employ the richest thoughts of the various intellectual disciplines, because the truth that Christianity affirms does not impact these discussions in terms of content but rather in terms of approach, demanding that the conclusions we come to bring liberation and healing.

--page 161

And when I wrote about this book before, I mentioned the glaring question: Why make an unconditional commitment to Christ? Well, here's one thing he says that seems to address that question, not necessarily the main thing he says on this topic:

While certain beliefs are affirmed as a means of reflecting upon the faith of Jesus, these beliefs can never take the place of, or fully describe, that faith. A metaphor that may help to illustrate this relationship concerns a beautiful, bright-white dove that, one day while flying through the air, imagines how high and fast she could soar if only the air, with all its resistance, did not exist. Never did this dove realize that it was the air she cursed, with all of its restrictive forces, that allowed her to rise up in the first place. We must endeavor to understand then how the common critique that Christianity offers a particular, "narrow" stance in relation to the transcendent fails to understand that this "constrictive" location is itself a privileged opening into the transcendent. It is only by locating oneself in a narrow particular site, perceived as such, that one can gaze beyond it.

--page 137

I find that many of Peter Rollins's ideas seem true based on my own experiences. Maybe I can't give logically defensible reasons for agreeing with him, but the things he said just resonate with my own issues with Christianity and help me move beyond these issues. Yeah, there are some things he says that I'm not so sure about, but don't take that as a criticism of the book. I agree with this book more than a lot of what I hear from Christians, including my own church.

The writing style is fairly academic, so at times that made it harder for it to keep my attention, but the ideas usually made up for it. I also wish he got more personal. We see very little of his own experiences here.

I recently started reading Shane Claiborne's book, "The Irresistible Revolution." The back of the book says, "This book will comfort the disturbed [and] disturb the comfortable." I think "The Fidelity of Betrayal" could have a similar effect. I'm a disturbed Christian, and I found the book refreshing. But to Christians who don't feel like they've ever had their illusions shattered, it could be disturbing.

What truth isn't

"What is truth?"
--Pontius Pilate

A couple of months ago, Irish philosopher / theologian / pastor Peter Rollins visited Edmonton. I first heard of him last year when the Wittenburg Door interviewed him. He intrigued me. (Sample quote: "God spoke to me, repeating four simple words: 'I do not exist.'") But I got quite sick when he was in Edmonton, so I didn't get to see him. I decided to order a book of his instead. The one I got is called, "The Fidelity of Betrayal." Here's an excerpt:

When the truth affirmed by Christianity is thought of as constituting a series of factual claims open to being assessed by intellectual experts, Christianity opens itself up to a corrosive form of doubt that threatens to destroy it...

Thus the truth affirmed by Christianity ends up being treated like any other set of factual claims, claims that are provisional and open to being proven wrong. Even if one believes that the various claims within the Bible are wholly accurate, it is always possible that a new discovery in archaeology, history, or biblical scholarship will overturn the current body of evidence. Apologetics, in its attempt to defend the factual claims of the Bible through the use of reason, thus implicitly affirms the very philosophical outlook that undermines its own project, placing the truth of Christianity in the realm of rational reflection and thus into the realm of reasonable doubt and provisionality.

This has the effect of placing the Christian idea of truth upon a very tentative and fragile foundation, one that could not possibly justify an individual's unconditional commitment--one that would not be able to embrace Jesus' statement that one ought to lay one's life down for one's faith.

--page 92-93

By the way, for those of you who don't speak Christianese, "apologetics" is the rational defense of Christian beliefs.

I can identify with this. I get pretty irritated when people use bad arguments for the truth of Christianity, but I've come to realize that I can't possibly thoroughly evaluate every argument for and against the existence of God, resurrection of Jesus, etc. Even if I put a ridiculously large amount of time into it, I probably wouldn't even come close, and meanwhile I'd miss out on actually living the life God created me to live. But when I am confident that a particular argument sucks, it makes me feel like these people want me to turn my back on my rationality.

The book makes it clear that we don't need to turn our backs on rationality, but our faith shouldn't be subject to rationality either.

This leaves a glaring question: why make an unconditional commitment to Christ? I haven't finished the book yet, but I think he's going to explore this question. I don't know if he's going to give a clear answer. But based on the track record of this guy and other writers who think like him (like Brian McLaren), I'm sure I'll find his reasoning more satisfying than Pascal's wager and plenty of other arguments for being a Christian.