Tag Archives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Trump and the ‘Thing-ification’ of Faith

The evangelical support for Donald Trump reflects how greatly imperiled the Christian tradition is in. True, evangelicals are only a portion of Christianity but most of the Christian tradition is based on rationality to the exclusion of experience which makes it more amenable to being a cultural artifact. When religion becomes a cultural artifact, it risks becoming what the Apostle Paul called “the wisdom of this world” to which he assigned the value of “sounding brass and tinkling symbols” or as comedian Jerry Seinfeld put it, “yada, yada, yada.”

One’s Christian faith can easily become a “thing” which facilitates the phenomenon known as the “Christian identity movement” in which one’s faith has become “thing-ified.” It reflects that the individual has succumbed to the influence of modern industrial civilization and learned to see and experience himself only as a “thing” and therefore his god…and god’s son…can only be a “thing.” Furthermore, one’s loved ones, one’s friends, even mother earth is only a “thing” and we all know that “things” are to be used, to be exploited without any concern for their separateness, for their own uniqueness and value, even for their own soul.

A good friend of mine recently shared with me his experience of realizing his own “thing-ification” in the whole of his life, especially with his faith. He was indoctrinated into the Christian tradition at an early age, pressured at an early age to become a minister, and his faith…as a “thing”…became his identity. He began to realize in his late teens that something was amiss, and began a decades long exploration of an emptiness in his soul that an addiction to this “thing-ification” had covered up. As he gradually began to find the courage to let this “thing” dissipate, the emptiness began to be more intense, and as the intensity increased he began to find a grounding which he realized was faith in a more genuine sense that he had ever imagined possible. He summed it up as, “I had to lose myself to find myself”. He further explained that he realized he had to, in an important sense, lose his faith to find his faith and this experience was very much related to finding faith in himself. “To believe in God is to believe in myself,” he summarized.

Christian tradition has become such a “tradition” that it is often nothing but sterile tradition, a medley of ideas devoid of any connection to human experience, i.e. “the body.” I call these Christians “Christian-oids” or “Christian-ettes” who each day more or less say, “Wind me up and watch me be Christian. This way of life is a habit, and a comfortable habit, so comfortable that it is hard to break. It is very painful to realize that giving up this “habit” is giving up the “letter of the law” in exchange for the “Spirit of the Law,” giving up “death” for “Life.” And a noble tradition that has become perfunctory is amenable to gross influence by unconscious forces allowing innocent and good intelligent people to find themselves enthralled by ideologies which are actually very dark. Shakespeare recognized that when any spiritual tradition becomes perfunctory like this, when it becomes an “enforced ceremony” it becomes deadly:

When love begins to sicken and decay,

It useth an enforcèd ceremony.

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,

Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.

When faith that was once heart-based, has “sickened and decayed” into empty rhetoric and ritual, there will be lots of loud and boisterous postering which will provide much fodder for late night comedians but will do nothing to assuage the ills of the social body or of the individual souls.

I dare to say that we have today a perfunctory Christian tradition very often and thus we see so many of them lining up behind a craven figure like Donald Trump and even declaring that God has “raised him up” to be President of the United States. This trivialization of the Christian tradition has led to a banalization of faith so that “easy believism” has replaced the “costly Grace” spoken of by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Consequently one can readily subscribe to a rationale creed, don the “Christian” attire, and bask in the social comfort that it affords without ever allowing it to delve into the heart and there, according to the Apostle Paul, “be a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

When love begins to sicken and decay,

It useth an enforcèd ceremony.

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,

Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.

Bonhoeffer’s Mystical Faith Experience

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In yesterday’s blog I expressed concern about the need for external reference with one’s life, especially with one’s belief system. Faith is, in a sense, a very narcissistic enterprise and always runs the risk of being merely a gross narcissistic indulgence. That has been the case with my faith so much of my life. And now my faith is taking a radically different direction and that gives me pause lest I too suddenly find myself all alone, believing in isolation, subscribing to some “unique” belief system for which there is no external validation. That is why it is important that I come across other people in my community, in my reading, and on the blog-o-sphere who have walked a similar path of faith or are doing so now. Yesterday, I discovered this marvelous quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer who so beautifully describes my faith. (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/):

A Reading from a letter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his friend Eberhard Bethge, written from Tegel Prison, dated 21, July, 1944

During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but simply a human being, as Jesus was human — in contrast, shall we say, to John the Baptist. I don’t mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness, characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.

I remember a conversation that I had in America thirteen years ago with a young French pastor. We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast. I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life, or something like it. I suppose I wrote The Cost of Discipleship as the end of that path. Today I can see the dangers of that book, though I still stand by what I wrote.

I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous person or an unrighteous one, a sick or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world — watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a human being and a Christian. How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?

I am glad to have been able to learn this, and I know I’ve been able to do so only along the road that I’ve travelled. So I’m grateful for the past and present, and content with them. You may be surprised at such a personal letter; but for once I want to say this kind of thing, to whom should I say it?

That “Time-and-Space” Bitch!

Bonheoffer, the Fall, & Time/Space Continuum

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(I posted this yesteday but forgot to include a title!)

Several days ago I discoursed re the time/space continuum and the human dilemma of being trapped (i.e. “lost”) therein. This is a very abstract notion and I recognize it probably sounds like a lot of non-sense to some. But I’d like to refer you to the work of Dietrich Bonheoffer who was one of the noted theologians of the 20th century; I think I could even safely place him in the evangelical pantheon of that era. In his book, Creation and Fall, he interpreted Genesis 1-3 and explained the extent of “the fall” in a similar vein to how I did in the aforementioned posting.

He posited the notion that the fall left mankind in this “time-space continuum” and that reason is itself a reflection of this fall and is intrinsically tainted by the experience. But mankind thinks he can “think” his way out of this existential predicament, not realizing that ultimately faith and hope have to have a role in the process if his rational quest is to have any ultimate meaning. Here Bonheoffer describes the circular reasoning that is the essence of this narcissistic endeavor:

…the thinking of fallen man has no beginning because it is a circle. We think in a circle. We feel and will in a circle. We exist in a circle. We might then say that in that case there is a beginning everywhere. We could equally say that there is no beginning at all; the decisive point is that thinking takes this circle for the infinite and original reality and entangles itself in a vicious circle. For where thinking directs itself upon itself as the original reality it sets itself up as an object, as an object of itself, and therefore withdraws itself behind this object again and again—or rather, thinking is antecedent to the object which it sets up.

Now I know this is convoluted. Let me try to interpret what he is saying. Bonheoffer is is echoing the words of Paul Tillich who said that “A religion within the bounds of reason is a mutilated religion.” And neither of them was disavowing reason (thinking); they were merely emphasizing its limitations. As long as mankind can keep his experience “reasonable” then he is safe in his illusion that he is in control. Spiritual teachers over the centuries have taught us that the experience of being “out of control”…momentarily, at least…is redemptive as it is in those moments that we can find an Anchor that transcends the mundane which is paradoxically immanent therein. But it/He is found only when we relinquish control and to the degree that we have done so.

And it is this “out of control” moment that teaches us the presence of a Beyond which graces the whole of our day to day life, a Beyond that gives meaning to all facets of human experience, including reason! Without this knowledge…and experience of this Beyond…we are reminded of the words of Goethe in Faust, “They call it Reason, using light celestial; just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

And again I am brought to a perfect object lesson in my country, the United States, and its current political impasse. We have so much confidence in “reason”, in “common sense”, in our political, military, and economic might. But we don’t pay any attention to this “Beyond” to which I make reference. If our leaders would pay the faintest attention to this Ultimate, they would at least be able to cooperate with each other well enough to address our issues like mature adults and not like two school-yard groups of thugs. Ultimately, our national issues…just like our personal issues…are resolved in the realm of the Spirit.

Creation and the Fall

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One of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the Apollo 8 mission to the moon on December 24, 1968, I was gripped by the majesty of this technological accomplishment and the sheer beauty of the moon from such a close perspective and even more so of the beautiful earth floating so freely in the void. This was a very humbling experience for me and I will never forget it. A very important part of the event was the stirring reading by the three astronauts of Genesis 1:1-10. I’ve always been captivated by those verses and have been even more so since that moment.

I love this creation story. I find creation stories in all human culture fascinating and revealing. We have always had this deep-seated need to explain our origin and thus make more sense out of what the hell we are doing here. It is very hard to accept that perhaps this information is not available to us, that “flaming cherubim and seraphim” keep us from returning there and revisiting the Garden of Eden.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a marvelous little book entitled Creation and the Fall in which he speculated about creation, the fall, and mankind’s quest to escape his existential predicament. He argued that mankind is aware that he is caught in the “in the middle” and is anxious about the beginning and the end. I’ve read others who have described this status as being caught in the “in between” or the “metaxy”. Mankind is obsessed with getting back to that beginning and understanding and explaining it and therefore “owning” it in some manner. But we are trapped, fated to wonder the earth knowing that “our little life is rounded in a sleep.” (Shakespeare)

T.S. Eliot offered a thought on this notion. He said, “Man’s curiosity searches past and future and clings to that dimension. ” For “past and future” is but a single dimension, the time-space continuum from which we cannot escape try as we may. I’m made to think of Jim Morrison’s song, “Break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side, break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side.” Morrison’s heart hungered to “break on through” and that is what drove him to drugs and alcohol. He could not accept being trapped like the rest of us, he could not accept “the fall” into space and time.

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