(12:16 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Failure of the Church

Bonhoeffer claims that the church is "Christ existing as community." When I hear this, I am always tempted to assume that he must be talking about some other church. And in point of fact, the context of his later work is not so much the established Lutheran church of Germany, but rather his smaller groups -- the ad hoc Confessing Church, the students at the underground seminary -- in the same way that Wesley's "church" eventually became identified with the splinter group that he was forming in distinction from the Actually Existing Church. Both attempt to get behind the compromise and apathy of the dominant forms of Christianity in order to get at the "good stuff" of the gospel, which is presumably the "truth" of the gospel.

But what if already in apostolic times we see both the good stuff (radical social critique, attention to economic matters, sexual equality) and the bad stuff? The most visible manifestation of this has to be the letters attributed to Paul -- in the early, "authentic" letters, we get all the radical ideas, but in the later, "pseudonymous" works, we get all the commendations of family values, female submission, and hierarchical rule. Indeed, to take it back a step further, what do we do with the fact that in the Old Testament we find truly amazing economic justice coupled with, to take just one example, divinely ordained genocide? Are we really supposed to take the good stuff and explain away the bad? Was this whole thing set up as a game, where we had to pick out all the materials that were really God's will and abstract out the all-too-human interpolations?

What if the Actually Existing Church does have it right about God? What if the fundamentalist nuts are right? We chant the mantra of "remember the cross" -- but what does that really do? Remember a God-ordained act of extreme violence on the cross? Remember God's impotence in the face of gross injustice? Remember that it's supposed to be okay because after you die...? We're talking about a religion where God himself was confronted with one of the most totalizing and oppressive social structures in world history and he just laid back and took it. We're talking about a religion that virtually deifies those who go quietly to their deaths. We're talking about a religion where the really elite and really spiritual thing to do is to renounce all earthly needs and desires, where for a thousand years, every image of an exemplary Christian looked like a corpse.

This is supposed to be subversive? This is supposed to embody God's justice? I'm supposed to take as my hermeneutical and ethical principle -- the cross? What the fuck? All for the sake of this cross, I put myself and a few different girls through emotional torture over my own sexual desires, and I spent years upon years wasting my intellectual energies arguing against people who can hardly be bothered to read a book and are proud of it, and I went to a school where publicly advocating the viewing of R-rated movies is very nearly grounds for dismissing a full professor. And I'm one of the lucky ones! I got off easy, because I'm a straight white male! What about all those battered women who stayed in their destructive relationships because God disapproves of divorce and because we're supposed to turn the other cheek? What about all those teenagers who are afraid they might be gay and think they'd be better off dead? What about those millions of slaves whose oppression was justified by an appeal not just to an obscure story in Genesis, but to Paul? What about the fact that half of the Jews in Europe were easily disposed of, against the background of two thousand years of anti-Semitism, promoted by such figures as Martin Luther? What about the wars and the gross economic inequality and the indifference toward the poor that are all openly and proudly advocated by Christians in our nation today?

What am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to be proud of myself for sticking with it? Am I supposed to talk about the fact that the group that has most often proved an insuperable obstacle to any feeling of community or openness toward others... is the only true source of community? Am I to say that a religion that has consistently tolerated and even enforced injustice... is the only true standard of justice? Am I supposed to be proud of myself because I belong to a religion in which very little is ever actually accomplished, but at least I'm not "just a liberal"? Or am I just a coward for staying? Did I learn the lesson of turning the other cheek a little too thoroughly, such that I'm going to keep turning and turning and waste my entire damn life among people who will never care about me and will never appreciate me and will always want to find a way to get rid of me?

Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord!

Oh, yes, congratulations -- by sticking with this, I'm following God's example! I will get my reward! Every other satisfaction (academic achievement, satisfying romance, a feeling of beloning and importance) pales in comparison with the satisfaction of martyrdom! Here in the torture chamber is where real life happens -- in fact, I envy those Palestinians, and those Congolese Christians, and all those who suffer, because man! That's the life! Oh, but wait -- for it to count, they have to be thinking about Jesus at the time. Sucks to be them. They don't realize how good they have it.

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