Thursday, December 04, 2003
Very Nearly Scrolled to Death
It would be a sad day indeed if Adam Kotsko were scrolled to death on the weblog hosted at adamkotsko.com, but if I don't post this, it may well happen.
I have been struggling with Bonhoeffer all semester. I am in a seminar class that provides good coverage of the whole corpus of his writings, although the class discussions often leave much to be desired. In my opinion, my classmates do not share enough common formation for discussion to be worthwhile -- we have students from three different seminaries and six different countries represented in one class, and everything everyone says seems to be pretty much at random. When coupled with the fact that Bonhoeffer died very young and was unable to fully clarify his ideas, it makes for a very confusing semester.
I liked, to some degree, the Bonhoeffer of Cost of Discipleship. He seemed very Kierkegaardian in the book, while at the same time being very concrete. I enjoyed the Bonhoeffer of Act and Being because of his engagement with philosophy. Most of all, though, I have loved the Bonhoeffer of the Letters and Papers from Prison. That fragmentary, incomplete work is the one that most speaks to me. Sitting in prison, having utterly failed in virtually all of his ambitions, having lost everything, Bonhoeffer writes letters in which he gives more than he has to give. Having devoted his life to the study of academic theology, he admits that theological claims are no longer convincing in our world. Having devoted his life to calling the church to task, he admits that modern man does not need religion.
Although he did not live to see it, certainly he could have predicted that at the end of the horrible moral crisis of the Nazi regime, the church would not be at the forefront of moral reflection. He saw for himself that the church was too caught up in self-preservation to say much of anything worthwhile about the most urgent moral issues of his time. Seeing that institutional Christianity did not have anything worth saving, the only route he could reasonably take was to ditch the whole thing and wait for a miracle -- a miracle that for him never came. As a reader of Kierkegaard, he knew that faith was not simply belief, not simply being able to sign, in good conscience, a form stating that the undersigned affirms all the clauses of the Nicene Creed. In Kierkegaard as in scripture, faith is an act of radical negativity, giving up not only everything one has, but even the self who gives everything else up. Faith is becoming completely abject, denied by one's friends, scapegoated by one's community, given up for dead -- waiting for a miracle that may very well not come.
Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" is the a rigorous form of the theology of the cross. The Christian is forced to give up even the content of Christianity in order to sacrifice it to the form -- when one cannot believe anything the church or the Bible says anymore, when the claims of Christianity are completely unconvincing and irrelevant, then one has some idea of what it means that salvation is by grace through faith.
I have never read anyone before who had such unflinching honesty about the place of Christianity in the modern world -- but then, I don't actually know anything about theology.