Category Archives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A Theology of Crisis: How a Doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilo Ought to Lead to Christ Concentration in Theological Reflection

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“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” –Genesis 1:1

Thomas Torrance makes much of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, as he should! The very freedom of God is at play in this doctrine, such that God remains free from the contingencies of this world, just as He is its Creator; but only first as He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As a result, knowledge of God remains contingent on God’s free choice to make Himself known to the world. Thus, systems of theology that attempt to think God discursively from His effects in nature, like Thomism does, are discounted from the get-go. To appropriate creatio ex nihilo in this way entails a theory of revelation wherein the world, and humanity as part of the world, is at God’s behest, and solely contingent upon its knowledge of Him insofar as He chooses to reveal Himself.

It isn’t just Torrance who thinks this way about God’s relation to the world, but prior to TFT, we get this from theologians like Karl Barth, in his theology of crisis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who in certain ways, although not in uncritical lockstep, is already thinking After Barth. Matthew Puffer writes the following with reference to Bonhoeffer’s own style of theology of crisis, and how that relates to a doctrine of creation, and more significantly, as this ties into a received doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and the attending doctrine of creatio continua (God’s continuing creative power deployed in its sustenance from moment to moment).

During the 1930/1 academic year as a Sloane Fellow at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer’s paper on ‘The Theology of Crisis and its Attitude Toward Philosophy and Science’ introduced American students and professors to recent developments in German theology, including ‘the position of the founder and most original thinker of the theology of crisis, of Karl Barth’ (DBWE 10: 462-3). Bonhoeffer presents a view of science and theology in which the two, properly practiced, cannot conflict due to their differing roles. Science, in this heuristic, is concerned only with what takes place within the realm of the physical world. Theology, on the other hand, is concerned to interpret what takes place in the physical world as science presents it. Bonhoeffer applies this schema to cosmology and creation.

In its pure sense cosmology presumes to know nothing about God and can only speak about the universe on the basis of naturalistic explanations. Cosmology is limited in that it can never get beyond the limits of human thinking and perception, albeit aided and constrained by technology. Cosmology may come to the end of its investigative powers in discovering the foundational principles or the first moments of all that is and, if it so chooses, call that which it assumes must be the cause behind these discoveries “God.” The theology of crisis argues that such a God cannot be the Christian God of whom the Bible speaks as the creator for two reasons.

Firstly: I know God as creator not without the revelation of Christ. For God’s being the creator means being the judge and the savior too; and I know all that only in Christ. Secondly: creation means creation by absolute freedom, creation out of nothing. So the relationship of God to the world is completely free, it has been set and is always set anew ‘creatio continua’ by God. Thus God is not the first cause, the ultimate ground of the world, but its free Lord and creator [and] as such he is not to be discovered by any cosmology, but he reveals himself in sovereign freedom wherever and whenever he wants. (DBWE 10: 475)

According to Bonhoeffer, the god of the cosmologists is not the Creator, the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer rightly ascribes to the Barth of Romans both creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua, and he gives no indication of any disagreement on his part. The creative act of God is always taking place beyond the empirical realm of natural science. God thus remains free with respect to creation, as the continuing creator, and cannot be discovered by means of human capacities and initiatives, whether by Christians or cosmologists. Only in Christ does God reveal Godself to be Creator, judge, and saviour. (In Ethics, Bonhoeffer’s language of Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer reflects Barth’s continuing influence in this matter [DBWE 6: 48, 402].)[1]

This dovetails nicely with a recent post vis-à-vis Bonhoeffer’s rejection of the analogia entis. Evangelicals, in particular, need to come to learn to think Christian Dogmatically about things; they need to understand that there is a theological taxis or order to the way various doctrines relate to each other, with particular reference to a theology proper.

But to the point of what was just said about Bonhoeffer by Puffer, if we think God radically as the God of creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua, we will come to better appreciate just why it is that many of us in this tradition repudiate natural theology at its core. We are contingent beings, as such our knowledge of God, the Creator, is contingent on His gracious willingness to make Himself known. This is why Evangelical Calvinism, as an iteration of this particular tradition, believes that a genuinely Christian theology can only unfold after Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’ [see Barth’s Göttingen Dogmatics]). There is no necessary linkage between our beings and God’s, not if our beings our contingent on His freedom in being for us first. As such this sort of theological ontology, in and order of being to knowing, implicates a theological epistemology. I.e. God first, then us, as He becomes us in Christ, and in this becoming we come to have a knowledge of God as we are participatio Christi (participants with Christ). The crisis of our situation, the anxiety produced by being a Gentile lot separated from God comes to an end, moment by moment, as God breaks down the veil, and makes one new humanity in the new humanity of His life for and with and in us, in Jesus Christ.

11 Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— 12 remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God bythe Spirit. –Ephesians 2:11-22

[1] Matthew Puffer, “Creation,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 182-3.

‘In Adam / In Christ’: Bonhoeffer’s Nein to Przywara’s Analogia Entis

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No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. –John 1:18

For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. –Galatians 1:12

The aforementioned passages point up an important reality in regard to the Christian’s capacity to know God. The ground for a Christian knowledge of God isn’t something internal to the person, rather it is an extra nos (outside of us) reality that is based in God’s free choice to be for and with us in Jesus Christ. Both the Apostles John and Paul knew, and experienced this as they were confronted by the living God robed in the humanity of the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. But this isn’t the way the classical tradition for knowledge of God has primarily developed within the Latin tradition of the Western church. Instead, we get something like Thomas Aquinas’ Prima Pars and his five proofs for God’s existence. The typical qualification here is that: Aquinas still situated his proofs of God in tandem with God’s Revelation, it’s just that his proofs become an exercise meeting his prior axiom of ‘grace perfecting nature’; i.e. there is a complimentary relationship between both grace and nature (‘two books of revelation’ as it were). But the above passages militate against this. They assert that knowledge of the Christian God is solely rooted in God’s Word for us, as He speaks that and lives that for us in Jesus Christ. That is, for the Apostles, there was no speculative frame for thinking God; it was purely grounded in the Hebraic concept of the God of Israel revealing Himself now in these last days through the Son.

There are other components involved in all of this; primary of which is engaging with a theological anthropology, and the noetic effects the Fall has had upon the human heart (the heart being the center of all that it means to be human before God, coram Deo). But for our purposes I simply want to refer us to a sketch of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thinking contra what has been called the analogia entis (analogy of being). I have written on this in published form, with some reference to Aquinas. But in this instance, we get a more modern treatment of this locus as 20th century Roman Catholic theologian, Erich Przywara, comes into view. Thus Przywara’s development of the analogy of being is the version that Bonhoeffer (along with Barth) had in mind as he presented his critique against it. If you are unaware of what the analogia entis entails you should get a feel for it as you read the following quote from Matthew Puffer. Here Puffer explains how and why Bonhoeffer repudiated Przywara’s version of the analogy of being in particular, and the analogia more generally. He writes:

In his Habilitationsschrift, Bonhoeffer writes, “There are in theology no ontological categories that are primarily based in creation and divorced from those latter concepts [sin and grace, “Adam” and Christ]’ (DBWE 2:32). The implications of this claim are on display in Bonhoeffer’s critiques of Erich Przywara’s analogia entis, or analogy of being. Bonhoeffer argues Przywara’s interpretation of the image of God as an analogia entis is flawed because it assumes ‘a continuity of the mode of being in status corruptionis and status gratiae’ (DBWE 2:74). Here Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran heritage is evident. As a former Augustinian priest, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis (1535/6 CE) had followed Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis (c. 401–16 CE) by interpreting Genesis 3 and Paul’s letters as teaching that human beings lost the image of God with Adam’s fall. According to Przywara, ‘[human] being, whether in the original state of Adam or in Christ, may always be certain of its analogy to God’s being (DBWE 2:75). Opposing this view on ontological grounds, Bonhoeffers asks rhetorically ‘whether there is in fact a being of human beings in general that is not already determined in every instance as their “being in Adam” or “being in Christ,” as their being-guilty or being-pardoned, and only as such could lead to an understanding of the being of human beings’ (DBWE 2:75). Bonhoeffer faults Przywara’s interpretation for positing a human nature that reflects—i.e. is the image of—the divine nature, without accounting for the biblical witness’s binary of two human conditions: either ‘in Adam’, a postlapsarian state of corruption, or ‘in Christ’, a state of grace in which the human image of God is renewed as a new creation (2 Cor. 3:18, 5:17; Eph. 4:23-4; Col. 3:9-10). This critique of Przywara would re-emerge in Bonhoeffer’s winter 1932/3 lectures on ‘Creation and Sin’ and ‘Theological Anthropology’ (see Howell, 2016).

According to Bonhoeffer, then, being in Adam is ontologically discontinuous with being in Christ. Those who reject the notion that they are sinners in need of Christ’s reconciliation are ‘in Adam’, whereas those who in faith confess their needed reconciliation are a new creation ‘in Christ’. Furthermore, only by faith in Christ is God recognized as Creator, the world as fallen creation, and human beings as God’s creatures (DBWE 2: 151). That we do not know God as Creator apart from Christ is nowhere more apparent than in Bonhoeffer’s 1931 lecture on the theology of crisis.[1]

As Puffer insightfully identifies in Bonhoeffer, we can clearly see that the analogia entis was anathema for Bonhoeffer. It isn’t difficult to see the role the Luther[an] simul justus et peccator plays in the binary vis-à-vis the ‘two Adam’s’ motif as that functions in Bonhoeffer’s development against a classical or even revised notion of an analogy of being. And this is to the point: for Bonhoeffer, as I think, for the Apostles, there is a discontinuity between the conditions of humanity we find in the first Adam versus the greater and second Adam who is the Christ. This contrasts quite starkly with the classical analogia as we find that in Aquinas; insofar that Przywara echoes Aquinas the same holds true for him.

The reduction is this: if there is a distinction between Adam and Christ, then the analogy of being cannot hold theological epistemological (nor ontological) water. If ‘grace perfects nature’ as it does for Aquinas et al. then an analogia entis not might only obtain, but it necessarily must insofar that a knowledge of God, in a God-world relation, is under consideration. If nothing else we can see how a priori theological commitments impinge on these questions. But I would maintain that the anti –analogia entis posture we find in Bonhoeffer (and Barth) comes not from a speculative a priori theological commitment, but instead from an a posteriori evangelical given as that comes immediately through God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, I maintain, along with Bonhoeffer (and Barth) that there is no knowledge of God outside of an encounter with Him which we realize by the very faith of Christ. That is, there is no objective knowledge of God apart from His subjective confrontation of us, moment-by-moment, through the ever-present Christus praesens that invades our lives by the Spirit. It is by the Spirit that we call Jesus Lord, and it is by the Lord that we have the liberty to finally see God for who He is in Himself for us; rather than speculating about what and who He might be from an analogy grounded in abstract nature from His (so the analogia entis).

[1] Matthew Puffer, “Creation,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 182.

Spitting Out the Caricature-Water: An Anatomy Lesson on Pelagianism

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In my last two posts I have made reference to the theological heresy known, historically, as Pelagianism. In an effort to provide further theological development and engagement with this locus I want to refer us to a description of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the cor curvum in se (heart turned in on itself) provided for by Philip Ziegler. There is a facile understanding of so-called Pelagianism, by some (of my interlocutors), wherein they seem to think that the conceptuality that the language of Pelagianism signifies is theologically unproblematic. In other words, some of my interlocutors believe that if they can exonerate Pelagius himself from the ‘heretic-label’ that his teachings have gained via the councils of 2nd Orange, Ephesus, and Carthage, that they can espouse his teachings, in the main, and avoid the heretical label altogether (since in their view Pelagius wasn’t really a heretic anyway, particularly, because according to them Pelagius didn’t teach what the whole history of the Church believed he taught). But this naively misses the whole point: whether or not Pelagius taught the idea of a neutral morality and human-will, indeed in need of an aide of grace, is not the point of critique in regard to Pelagianism simpliciter. What is at stake is, oriented by biblical faithfulness vis-à-vis whether or not someone’s theological anthropology in fact coheres with the teaching of Scripture in toto. In other words, does Scripture teach that humanity simpliciter is born with a freewill that has the capaciousness to respond to the offer of the Gospel on its own strength or not? This is what some of my interlocutors have attempted to argue, all the while either by way of acquitting Pelagius himself, or by suggesting that they aren’t corollary with the historic tenets of Pelagianism proper; particularly as understood by almost ALL within Church history.

Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler’s accounting, maintained the common notion that Luther et al. have maintained in regard to the biblical anthropology of homo incurvatus in se. That is, “and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (Jn 3.19); further, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God” (Rom 3.11). The case can be made further, from Scripture, that the human problem is unsurpassable save someone extra nos (outside of us) entering into our incurved and sinful situation, and redeeming us from the inside out; guts and all. According to Ziegler this is what Bonhoeffer maintained; here is how Ziegler illumines that for us:

Whatever else will be meant by divine freedom and transcendence, in the first instance they mean that God is not at the disposal of fallen human reason, neither ‘to hand’ or ‘in hand’ to be deployed in schemes of metaphysical and existential explanation. Bonhoeffer conceives of human reason as such to be verkrümmten—warped and turned in upon itself—fully conformed to sin’s distortion of humanity…. As such it is ‘imprisoned in itself, it sees only itself, even when it sees another, even when it wants to see God (DBWE 2: 45). To the extent that such reason does think and speak of ‘God’ it can only do so as an epiphenomenon of its own religious ambitions, as an idea firmly resident in and subservient to its own self-reflection (DBWE 2: 44, 50, 51). Since, as Bonhoeffer explains, ‘thinking is as little able as good works to deliver the cor corvum in se from itself’ (DBWE 2: 80), the truth of God must come upon reason ‘from beyond and break in upon it in such a way that one is placed ‘into the truth by Christ in judgment and grace’ (DBWE 2: 96). Thus the axiom ‘deus non potest apprehendi nisis per verbum’ (it is impossible to apprehend God apart from the word), which Bonhoeffer approvingly cites from the Confessio Augustana (DBWE 2: 53, 67). The saving address of the Word has the form of God’s transcendent freedom: it is God giving himself ‘without precondition’ (DBWE 2: 89) to be known across the otherwise unbridgeable chasm of unlikeness, most concretely the unlikeness of human sin and divine righteousness (DBWE 2:54, 79).[1]

For Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler, and I would maintain for the teaching of Scripture itself, the human condition is so enslaved to sin that it has no hope in itself to surpass its condition. In other words, the fallen human being, which is what all human beings apart from Jesus Christ’s vicarious humanity are, is so trodden down by the effects of sin that there isn’t one part of it, not its affections, intellect, or will, that hasn’t become constrained by its own weight of ineptitude; that isn’t only always for the self rather than for God. And this is precisely why ‘He who knew no sin, assumed sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ The fact that it took God to become Theanthropos (Godman) ought to illumine the minds and hearts of those who would be tempted to think that they have anything in them (even if claimed to be from a God -givenness), that could say Yes or No to God; that this is utterly and biblically fallacious. And yet this is what some of my interlocutors want to maintain; and to do so with a straight (and even smug, at points) face.

The heresy of Pelagianism, in the history, apart from debates surrounding the man Pelagius, is what Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler maintained in the aforementioned. Some of my interlocutors will assert that Bonhoeffer is just a good Augustinian; but that reply is simply an attempt to poison the well with caricature-water. What Pelagianism, the doctrine, has come to signify is: that people have a God-given and grace aided capacity in themselves to respond positively or negatively to the Gospel offer; that is Pelagianism. Some of my interlocutors believe that this teaching is in fact the biblical teaching, eo ipso they are Pelagians, by any historic standard for understanding that terminology and the conceptuality it signifies. But the biblical teaching, as we have just been noticing, with help from Bonhoeffer, is that humanity requires resurrection and the new creation of Christ’s human body in order to have capacity to say Yes to God. Some of my interlocutors, though, have an anemic understanding of what the atonement entails (and this ironically is where they are in lockstep with the Calvinists they claim to be in critique of). The atonement involves ontological depth, as TF Torrance rightfully emphasizes; along with the Apostle Paul. This implies that the Gospel isn’t simply about whether or not someone gets to go to heaven or not; the Gospel, under this pressure, involves what it in fact means to be fully human coram Deo (before God) in the prosopon Christi (face of Christ). Some of my interlocutors don’t understand the depth dimension of the Gospel implications in regard to what it actually did; i.e. it fully recreated humanity by the resurrection humanity of Jesus Christ. This ought to enlighten some of my interlocutors; they ought to be able to infer that if the Gospel goes this deep, then it went this deep for a reason. The reach of sin has a primal orientation such that its effects denude the human capacity in itself, even if so-called God-given and aided by grace, in such a way that it takes God Himself to stoop down and recreate the capacity for us to be for God and not against Him in and through the Yes and Amen of His life for us (pro nobis) in Jesus Christ!

My next post, or some post in the near future will be in reference to the Apostle Paul against Pelagianism and its contemporary proponents. I’m afraid some of my interlocutors believe they have the scriptural teaching on their side, but they really don’t!

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, “God,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 140.

My Beef with Academic Theology is the Same as Bonhoeffer’s

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Peter Frick captures well from Bonhoeffer’s (and Barth’s) posture towards academic theology how DB felt about so-called academic theology indeed. Bonhoeffer’s “unease” with academic (or university) theology resonates with me deeply. I often, as you’ve noticed, rail against academic theology, and the academic theological subculture (of glory) that funds it. It is for the very same reasons that Bonhoeffer (and Barth) were not ultimately for it. Frick writes:

From his early teen years to the end of his life Bonhoeffer was shaped by theology and, posthumously, became known as a shaper of theology himself. Academic theology in an encyclopedic sense (drawing on philosophy, social philosophy, sociology) constituted for Bonhoeffer the backbone of his academic teaching in the university and the underground seminary. Indeed, with ease he moved from the university to the seminary. From London he wrote to his friend Erwin Sutz: ‘I no longer believe in the university; in fact I never really have believed in it—to your chagrin’ (DBWE 13: 217). The reason he no longer believed in the university is not that all of a sudden he rejected academic theology; what he rejected was a form of academic theology that in his view left a deep vacuum in the students’ own spiritual life and proved useless for the work of the pastor and preacher. Here he comes close to Barth once more; Barth wrote his Letter to the Romans out of his own uneasiness with academic theology. It was of his years at Finkenwalde, not surprisingly, that he said in retrospect that they were perhaps the most fulfilling time of his life. It was a time when he could teach theology unhindered and preach often.[1]

I think this exemplifies well what my issue has been. I am not, nor have I ever been against the ‘hand that feeds me,’ theologically. What I am against is the stultifying gamesmanship of academic theology wherein a person’s identity is given being by how many original ideas they have developed in papers and various manuscripts with their names on them one way or the other. I am against the culture of CV-building, even if that’s how the ‘game’ works (for career advancement etc.). The game needs to go ‘underground’ if that is what it takes for it to loose itself from the shackles of self-promotion. This is what I see in the ‘theological walk’ of someone like Bonhoeffer. For him theology was clearly a lifestyle, and not a job. I think this is ‘difficult teaching’ for many; too difficult. They might say a false dilemma; I beg to differ.

[1] Peter Frick, “Bonhoeffer The Academic Theologian,” edited by Matthew Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler, The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 51.

Bonhoeffer’s Impression of Union Theological Seminary as an Analogy for American Evangelicalism

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Theological virtuoso Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after already earning two PhDs in theology (by his mid-twenties), came abroad to diversify his theological portfolio. He landed on the shores of New York, and in the halls of Union Theological Seminary. He had been trained in the liberal theological tradition, where it was founded, in Germany by its greatest minds; its most premier, just as he was entering studies, was Adolf von Harnack. But after writing his PhD dissertation, Communio Sanctorum, and then his post-doctoral Habilitation, Act and Being, even while being critical of aspects of Karl Barth’s theology, in the main, Bonhoeffer took the Christocentric, and orthodox turn with Barth. This had all happened just prior to him ending up at Union. He had the real deal liberal theological training behind him (just as Barth did), and could sniff out a phony version of it better than anyone else. Even so, as noted, he had abandoned the premises of liberal theology through appropriating Barth’s broad contours, and made that significant turn. When he entered Union Theological Seminary he was anticipating finding more of the same in regard to liberal theology, but he had come to learn how to apply theology at the social (street) level; and Union had a stellar reputation for this. But what he found, and was shocked by, was just how far gone Union was. He realized that they were peddling an imposter’s version of liberal theology; to the point that they had completely gutted it of anything doctrinally or historically interesting. In the end he didn’t even think that what Union was offering was Christianity at all. This is interesting, and parallel to my own impression of American evangelicalism today. But before I share some of my impressions, let us hear further on Bonhoeffer at Union, and how Gary Dorrien frames things for us:

He said it bluntly to his friend Helmut Rößler in December 1930. American liberal Protestantism, Bonhoeffer wrote, was ‘infinitely depressing’ to him, ‘smiling in desperation’ without realizing it was desperate:

The almost frivolous attitude here is unprecedented, and my hope of finding Heb. 12:1 fulfilled has been bitterly disappointed. Moreover, theology in Germany seems infinitely provincial to them here; they just don’t understand it; they grin when you mention Luther     (DBWE 10: 261).

A week later, writing to German church superintendent Max Dietsel, Bonhoeffer allowed that American seminarians were certainly friendly; they even expected professors to be friendly. But conversations with American students and professors ‘almost never yielded anything of substance,’ because Americans were averse to substance and truth:

There is no theology here. Although I am basically taking classes and lectures in dogmatics and philosophy of religion, the impression is overwhelmingly negative. They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students—on the average twenty-five to thirty years old—are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.        (DBWE 10: 265-6)

Bonhoeffer struggled to convey how bad it was. He had groused about shallow students at Berlin, too, but he assured Diestel that this was much worse. Americans ‘dreadfully sentimentalized’ religion, they spouted their opinions with ‘an almost naïve know-it-all attitude,’ and any reference to Luther evoked insolent laughter. They were proud to be superficial, counting it as sophistication. With a glimmer of something important, Bonhoeffer said that most of the theologians and clergy at Union accepted James’ notion of a finite God: ‘They find it to be profound and modern and do not sense at all the impertinent frivolousness in all such talk.’ Local church services were much the same:

The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation, and that was delivered by a Negro (indeed, in general I’m increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality in Negroes)      (DBWE 10: 266)

That was another important glimmer; Bonhoeffer caught that gospel truths were existential to Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his African American congregation at Abyssinian Church. Overall, however, the case for despair was overwhelming. Bonhoeffer puzzled over how the usual fare in American churches could be called Christianity. The Federal Council of Churches, he reported, was equally frivolous: ‘People talked about everything, except about theology. Only rarely did anyone venture any comments really getting to the point, and if they did, the discussion quickly moved on to the daily agenda’ (DBWE 10: 266-67.[1]

There are interesting parallels, I think, between Bonhoeffer’s impression of American liberalism, and how American evangelicalism has come to operate today. I can only imagine Bonhoeffer running across a Progressive church today, or your typical American evangelical church, and walk away with the same impressions he did as he was exposed to the “Christianity” at Union Theological Seminary.

For me personally, this is my impression of American evangelicalism in the main. I think of Christianity Today styled evangelicalism and juxtapose that with so-called Progressive American Christianity, and don’t see much difference. Maybe their doctrinal statements would differ, but their praxis reduces to the same; what Christian Smith and others have identified as a moralistic therapeutic deism. There is no real sense of the Christian, and thus concrete God of Jesus Christ present in most of American evangelicalism these days (whether that be on the progressive or mainline evangelical continuum). What we are exposed to are other purely pragmatic or flattened versions of the social gospel, with no reference to a God outside of the horizontal domain; or we get a pie-in-the-sky notion of God, who is there to help us feel good about ourselves, and present us with experiences that are supposed to elevate us to our best lives and self-actualized selves now.

[1] Gary Dorrien, “Bonhoeffer’s Assessment of Union Theological Seminary,” edited by Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler, The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 30.

Bonhoeffer’s Last Days as an Edification for Our Days

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The human desire is for stability, and yet we live in a transient world full of phantasms and illusions; often of our own projecting. This desire is not innate to us, but comes to us as we are created for God. The tumult of this world system tosses us here and there, at points giving us moments of an illusory stability, whether that is found in riches, health, or hedonist momentary gratifications. All illusions are gone now, the world no longer appears as light, but its darkness abounds. Theologian par excellence, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, experienced this sort of palpable darkness in his day. Just as he was getting started as a theologian for the church, in particular, his Lutheran church, his world was thrust into the Nazi Reich. As history knows, his participation in an attempted assassination of Hitler landed him in prison, where he would finally be executed towards the end of the conflagration. Timothy George describes the last days of Bonhoeffer’s journey this way:

A few days later followed a letter to his mother Paula Bonhoeffer, who marked her 68th birthday on December 30. He prays that the New Year “might bring us a glimmer of light, at least here and there,” and declares his belief that “these difficult years have forged an even closer bond between us than ever before.” The final words we have from Bonhoeffer’s hand are in a letter to his parents dated January 17, 1945. He instructs them to dispose of his clothes and other belongings: “Give away whatever anyone might need, without giving it a second thought. . . . after all, in the past two years I’ve learned how little a person needs to get by.” He hopes that Maria will bring him some books he has requested along with some matches, toothpaste, a few coffee beans, and a laxative. When the package finally came, however, Bonhoeffer was already gone. Unbeknownst to Maria and his parents, he had been taken to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where he would spend two months en route toward the destiny that awaited him at Flossenbürg.[1]

Bonhoeffer knew his time here was about to slide into the triune time of the living God. It is a tragic story, really, but one that serves edifying for us still here; as potential martyrs for the risen Christ, just as Bonhoeffer became. In keeping with the theme of Bonhoeffer’s edifying life for the church, George notes a poem that Bonhoeffer wrote while in prison:

In this letter he included a poem he had written during that Advent, Von guten Mächten (“By Gracious Powers”), which later became a hymn still sung today in churches around the world. The final stanza of the hymn reads:

By powers of good so wondrously protected, we wait with confidence, befall what may. God is with us at night and in the morning and oh, most certainly on each new day.[2]

Bonhoeffer’s stability, as evinced by the hymn, is not in the circumstances awash around him, but in the eternal life of God. He found comfort and hope in the midst of the darkness by way of resting in the everlasting arms of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of Jesus Christ his Lord and Savior.

I find great encouragement as I reflect on Bonhoeffer’s short but rich life. He was a Christian theologian who understood that God did not remain aloof in the heavens, but that the Christian God, his Lord, ‘humbled himself and became obedient, obedient to the point of death on a cross.’ As such Bonhoeffer lived a complex life that understood the import of the sacra doctrina, but recognized that this wasn’t a speculative or careful doctrine; he understood that the ‘law of Christ’ was one that impacted mundane life to the point of taking on flesh and blood. Bonhoeffer lived this reality out even as his homeland was mired down in the darkness of the evil one all around. He didn’t shrink back as others do, but he was a soldier for Christ; just as the Apostle Paul, facing down evil with the power of God, the Gospel of the risen Christ. He knew in this that there was a genuine hope that came to touch this world in concrete and lived fashion. This is how Bonhoeffer lived his life, all the way to the point that like his Savior it cost him his life. Just as Bonhoeffer was in union with Christ (unio cum Christo); just as Bonhoeffer was buried with Christ; so he was raised with Christ to the right hand of the Father. This is Bonhoeffer’s witness for Christ even now.

Bonhoeffer’s blood cries out from the grave that Jesus is Lord, and no amount of chaos, deception, or confusion can overcome that. This is timely for me to remember, and maybe it is timely for you too. We are all currently thrust into a world much like Bonhoeffer was; a world that has no stability, no certainty built into it. We are maneuvering around in a fog that causes all sides to grope about as if it had suddenly been thrust into a world where there is no light. Bonhoeffer didn’t shrink back from this world because he knew that this world has already been put to death in the death of Christ’s death for us. This is where Bonhoeffer found his way, truth, and life; this is where we, likewise, ought to find ours. Kyrie eleison

[1] Timothy George, Bonhoeffer’s Last Advent, accessed 11-30-2020.

[2] Ibid.

The Need for a Confessing Church Among the Evangelical Churches and Seminaries of North America

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Yesterday I wrote the following on Facebook: “We need a Confessing Church to rise up in our post-secular culture; just as a Confessing Church rose up in Hitler’s Nazi Germany.” If you are unaware, the Confessing Church of Germany was the church that emerged in response to Hitler’s Third Reich; Dietrich Bonhoeffer was its most prominent, and formative leader and voice (in Germany). In response an FB friend, Nicholas Forti, wrote:

The Confessing Church in Nazi Germany was organized in opposition to the Aryan Paragraph in particular and the encroachment of the Nazi government in Church polity more generally. In other words, there were deep theological issues at stake, for sure, but the goals of the Confessing Church were largely practical: oppose the Aryan Paragraph in the Church; resist the involvement of the Nazi government represented by the leadership of the Reichsbishof Ludwig Müller, who had been appointed by Hitler to lead the unified Reichskirke; etc. What would this new Confessing Church be opposing or resisting in particular and more generally?

He is right about the history of the originating Confessing Church, but what I had in mind was prompted by a discussion I recently was having with a theologian-pastor friend. We were discussing the state of the evangelical (Free) churches in North America, with pointed reference to the evangelical bible colleges and seminaries he and I attended, respectively. He has a couple of PhDs, a couple of Masters degrees; and I have my Masters degree and BA degree; all from familiar evangelical institutions (except one of his PhDs is from a European Continental school). The point: we both have had exposure, and the necessary time to reflect back on where our schools once were, and where they are today. What is clear to both of us is that there has been significant ‘mission’ (and I’d say moral) drift that has taken place at our respective institutions of higher Christian education. Essentially, or of note what I am referring to is the inroads that progressive socio-cultural policies and moods have made into the very fabric of these once highly orthodox seminaries. Whether we want to label this drift: moralistic therapeutic deism, neo-Marxism, social justice orientation, openness (or softness) to the LGBTQ agenda; however we want to label this drift, it has clearly crept in and transformed these institutions into a mere shadow (at best) of their former selves.

Essentially, the concern is the obvious capitulation these institutions, and the churches who receive pastors and leaders from them, have given into in regard to the broader cultural shift to a so-called post-secular (or even still, secular) posture. In other words, the problem is, as is typical among God’s people, is that the seduction and ostensible sophistication of the surrounding cultures (or nations, in the Bible) seems to be too much to resist. Even beyond this, and I think this has a lot to do with the whole troubling scenario, there are real market forces at work. These schools, and churches who do the same (and they are legion!) perceive that if they don’t reposition themselves, as far as marketing and the types of degrees (emphases) they offer, that they will simply not be able to survive financially. So, in an attempt to cauterize this deep perceived bleeding, such schools (and churches) cave to the cultural forces at large, and in a sense give up the [Holy] ghost. They hire faculty that reflect the broader cultural mores, as those have taken shape in the churches; they retailor their degree packages; and as a result, trans-morph the whole culture of the campus into something they hope will attract more students, which will equal needed funding.

The Gospel is no longer front and center in such institutions. What is driving the school’s engines are the market forces of the culture at large. The culture at large is shaped by progressive ideology, at least in the university and higher learning contexts, and as such, what it means then to offer a quality education in such contexts will reflect these sorts of leanings and emphases. Sure, the Bible will still be touted as the ultimate grounding of the curriculum design, so on and so forth. But ultimately, what is underneath has more to do with a mood that is less Christ-centered, and more culture-centered; culture that is ultimately antagonistic to the foolishness of the Gospel.

This is why both me and my friend agreed that something like a Confessing Church is needed. Protestant Christianity actually has an orthodox and robust theological heritage and background that should be elevated not diminished. The Protestant heritage is one that venerates a theology of the Word of God, and sees that as the center-piece of all that is real and holy. The Protestant heritage does not capitulate to cultural or market forces; instead, it Protests and resists! The Protestant heritage emphasizes the theology of the cross (think, Martin Luther), and pushes into the depths of God’s hiddenness by focusing on His revealedness in Jesus Christ. There is no place for capitulating to cultural norms, or ideologies within this sort of Protestant framework.

For my money, the way I appropriate the Protestant heritage (as is well known by now) is even more radical and rejects all forms of natural theology. I take capitulation to cultural forces in the name of Christ as a gross form of natural theology. It is these Protestant hallmarks: 1) a heavy commitment to a theology of the Word, and 2) rejection of all forms of natural theology that drove the Confessing Church’s movement (both “practically” and theologically) against the Reich’s attempt to coopt the Christian churches. Clearly, there is a big difference, as far as overtness and intensity, between the German church’s capitulation to the Nazi (“cultural”) dogma, and what I am referring to in regard to the more passive cultural appropriation of the evangelical churches and institutions in North America (and elsewhere in the West). But over the long haul the ideology can have just as drastic of consequences. I am thinking on a continuum of greater to lesser intensity and evil that is associated with capitulating to the broader cultural norms. But in principle, the capitulation is the same. The Word of God loses its supremacy, and the ‘natural’ components of the culture at large are allowed to shift-shape the churches (and their schools) into a syncretistic hot-mess (I could refer us to many OT passages that might illustrate this ongoing problem for the covenant people of God).

These are some of the reasons I believe we need a Confessing Church in North America (and elsewhere in the Western world). As the Apostle Paul so eloquently writes: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek” (Rom 1.16). The power of God is the Word of God; Jesus Christ is the Word of God; Jesus Christ is the Gospel. The Word of God capitulates to no cultural norm, it contradicts and confronts it in its heart. It really is this simple / but such simplicity is foolishness to the sophisticants among us. Let me leave us with the document produced by the Confessing Church of Germany; primarily written by Karl Barth (as he remained in exile from Germany in his Swiss homeland) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I leave you with the Barmen Declaration (circa 1934).

In view of the errors of the “German Christians” and of the present Reich Church Administration, which are ravaging the Church and at the same time also shattering the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths:

    1. “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold through the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved.” John 10:1,9

Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.

    1. “Jesus Christ has been made wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption for us by God.” 1 Cor. 1:30

As Jesus Christ is God’s comforting pronouncement of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, with equal seriousness, he is also God’s vigorous announcement of his claim upon our whole life. Through him there comes to us joyful liberation from the godless ties of this world for free, grateful service to his creatures.

We reject the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords, areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.

    1. “Let us, however, speak the truth in love, and in every respect grow into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body is joined together.” Eph. 4:15-16

The Christian Church is the community of brethren in which, in Word and Sacrament, through the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ acts in the present as Lord. With both its faith and its obedience, with both its message and its order, it has to testify in the midst of the sinful world, as the Church of pardoned sinners, that it belongs to him alone and lives and may live by his comfort and under his direction alone, in expectation of his appearing.

We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.

    1. “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to have authority over you must be your servant.” Matt. 20:25-26

The various offices in the Church do not provide a basis for some to exercise authority over others but for the ministry [lit., “service”] with which the whole community has been entrusted and charged to be carried out.

We reject the false doctrine that, apart from this ministry, the Church could, and could have permission to, give itself or allow itself to be given special leaders [Führer] vested with ruling authority.

    1. “Fear God. Honor the Emperor.” 1 Pet. 2:17

Scripture tells us that by divine appointment the State, in this still unredeemed world in which also the Church is situated, has the task of maintaining justice and peace, so far as human discernment and human ability make this possible, by means of the threat and use of force. The Church acknowledges with gratitude and reverence toward God the benefit of this, his appointment. It draws attention to God’s Dominion [Reich], God’s commandment and justice, and with these the responsibility of those who rule and those who are ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfil the vocation of the Church as well.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the Church should and could take on the nature, tasks and dignity which belong to the State and thus become itself an organ of the State.

    1. “See, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matt. 28:20 “God’s Word is not fettered.” 2 Tim. 2:9

The Church’s commission, which is the foundation of its freedom, consists in this: in Christ’s stead, and so in the service of his own Word and work, to deliver all people, through preaching and sacrament, the message of the free grace of God.

We reject the false doctrine that with human vainglory the Church could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of self-chosen desires, purposes and plans.

The Confessing Synod of the German Evangelical Church declares that it sees in the acknowledgment of these truths and in the rejection of these errors the indispensable theological basis of the German Evangelical Church as a confederation of Confessing Churches. It calls upon all who can stand in solidarity with its Declaration to be mindful of these theological findings in all their decisions concerning Church and State. It appeals to all concerned to return to unity in faith, hope and love.

Verbum Dei manet in aeternum.
The Word of God will last forever.

 

The Confessing Church’s Barmen Declaration Against Hitler, the Nazi Church, and Natural Theology

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The Barmen Declaration, largely written by Karl Barth in concert with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a ‘declaration’ of the Confessing Church in contrast to the Nazi Church of Adolf Hitler, articulates a theological preamble that is solely rooted in revelational theology in contradistinction to natural theology. Here is how it opens up in its material aspect:

8.10 – 1. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” (John 14.6). “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. . . . I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” (John 10:1, 9.)
8.11 Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.
8.12 We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.[1]

Notice the distinction this makes between the Church’s voice and Christ’s. The distinction it makes between the Church and God’s Word, who is the Christ. It is this reality that I continuously uphold and affirm as a Protestant and Confessing Christian in my own Anglophone context. The Reformation principle of Scripture, and the Word of God is of up-most importance for Christians today. The Church in North America, and the Western world in general, I would contend, is largely enmeshed in a ‘Babylonian Captivity.’ It isn’t the Church, though, who has the resource to remove itself from this sort of cultural bondage; instead, just as in the days of the early Protestant Reformation, it is the Word of God who has the power to break in and break up this bondage and captivation to the culture.

The theology that most of the Reformed evangelical theologians of today are retrieving for Western Christians is rooted in Thomist realism. A realism that operates in and from natural law and the idea that there is a hierarchy of being that is absolutely and causally interconnected and thus collapses God’s being into the structures of the Church itself. It is this sort of ecclesiological and metaphysical reality that Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Church was struggling against. The Barmen Declaration, as you read it in whole, is a confession against a Church that claimed its right of authority from the very ‘nature’ of its natural existence as the Church; as if this in itself gave it an inherent authority from God. The Confessing Church understood, though, as did the early reformers, that the Word of God stands over against His Church, and speaks to it His Lordly voice which calls for repentance and obedience afresh and anew each and every day. Thomist and other like theological superstructures do not have the capacity to make this radical distinction between the Church and the Word of God, and as such only fall prey to elevating the Church to the place that in point of fact only the Word of God should and does indeed have.

We will visit more of the Barmen Declaration in days to come. But I wanted to briefly offer this up for consideration.

 

[1] Source.

Closing Loops: How to Think Christianly From a Unity of Knowledge Rather than Profanely From a Duality of Knowledges

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Let me double down on some comments I made in my last post (you’ll have to go to the comment thread to read). Philosophy and Theology, in my approach, are two distinct things; as such my theory of knowledge/epistemology is going to necessarily start with a theological ontology (thus repudiating philosophy proper as a non-starting mode for Christian intellection). My theory of knowledge with reference to God, and thus all of reality implicated, will start with the doctrine of the primacy of Jesus Christ and his antecedent reality as the Logos asarkos in the Triune life. In other words, the ‘ground’ of knowledge, for me, is rooted in the reality that creation’s inner reality is the covenant of God’s gracious life to not be God without us but with us; as such, there isn’t a speckle of creation that moves and breathes outwith God’s breath and domain in Christ. These commitments necessarily supplant any notion of naturum purum (pure nature), or of abstract human agents as ontic units of their own. In other words, human agents, in my view, because of my theological commitments have no Pelagian, no morally neutral position from whence they might  find capaciousness to cognize; viz. from my view human beings either think from ‘the kingdom of darkness’ or ‘the Kingdom of the Son of His love’ (cf. Col. 1.13). Human agents, by definition vis-à-vis God are contingent dyadic (v monadic) beings who have an ontology (and thus regnant epistemology) outsourced to them either by God or by an incurved enslavement to a faux-possessed self. All of the above means that God’s Self-Revelation, God’s Self-Exegesis (cf. Jn 1.18) is the space wherein all genuine knowledge of the living God is given; given as pure gift, and gift over and again, moment by moment as the heart beats as the Spirit is shed abroad.

Let me close this brief précis by quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer (h/t Paul Hinlicky Paths Not Taken, p. 59):

The division of the total reality into a sacred and profane sphere, a Christian and a secular sphere, creates the possibility of existence in a single one of these spheres, a spiritual existence which has no part in secular existence, and a secular existence which can claim autonomy for itself and can exercise this right of autonomy in dealings with the spiritual sphere. The monk and the 19th century Protestant secularist typify these two possibilities . . . the modern age is characterized by an ever increasing independence of the secular in its relation with the spiritual . . . [even though] it is quite certain that [thinking in terms of two spheres] is in profound contradiction to the thought of the Bible and to the thought of the Reformation, which think of one world created and redeemed in Jesus Christ.[1]

I guess I’m finding it hard to shed my modern location. As such theologians who are cognizant of the challenges that the modern presents—even if that presentation is bankrupt—still impinges upon my own anxieties. Even so, while we often demarcate periods into periods it is not as if there aren’t common themes that dissect all periods of human being. Indeed, the Patristics fought the Hellenists by flipping the Hellenists on their heads even while using Hellenic forms to produce new forms as if there was a new world of resurrection where such sui generis forms were possible; a world where reversal of the old world has become normative. These sorts of paradigms have marched on throughout every period. Barth contra Kant represents an example of someone flipping the Teutonic on its head using it against itself; reifying its forms under the pressures found in the new creation and the eschatos of God’s life in Jesus Christ. These battles, for those involved actively in the church militant will continue. Why not become active?

 

 

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. N.H. Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 196-97.

A Message for the Churches From Kyle Strobel and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: God’s Power in the Lamb that was Slain

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I just listened to a very convicting message by Brother Kyle Strobel. He is offering a compressed message from his co-authored book with Jamin Goggin titled  The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It to a conference being held by the Calvary Global Network (Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa — my former church from years past). He is referring people to a genuinely Gospel conditioned notion of power and wisdom; what Martin Luther might call a theology of the cross. It is this reality that gripped my heart many years ago—which I fall short of more than I want to admit—and why I wrote my master’s thesis on a key passage in this area I Corinthians 1.17-25. It’s a conception of power that flips the wisdom of the world on its head; it is power in weakness. Unfortunately just as in the cosmopolitan church of Corinth, so too in the cosmopolitan church of evangelical North America worldly wisdom, worldly power has entered into the gates of the church and subverted the genuine power that God has supplied for his church through the broken veins of his Son, Jesus Christ. Please watch Kyle’s message here.

As a dovetail and corollary with the message that Kyle has brought the churches I just finished a book where in the last chapter of that book a contributing author offered the following quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It fits very well with Kyle’s message; with the Apostle Paul’s message; with Jesus’s message about power, and what that ought to look like in his church. Note:

God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science, has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!). For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible eliminated…. Anxious souls will ask what room is left for God now; and as they know of no answer to the question, they condemn the whole development that has brought them to such straits. I wrote … before about the various emergency exits that have been contrived; and we ought to add to them the salto mortale (death-leap) back into the Middle Ages is heteronomy in the form of clericalism; a return to that can be a counsel of despair, and it would be at the cost of intellectually honesty. It’s a dream that reminds one of the Song O wüsst’ ich doch den Wegzurück, den wieten Weg ins Kinderland [commonly translated “Oh, I wish I knew the way back, the way into childhood”]. There is no such way—at any rate not if it means deliberately abandoning our mental integrity; the only way is that of Matt. 18.3, i.e. through repentance, through ultimate honesty. And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [commonly translated “as if God did not exist”]. And this is just what we do recognize—before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which He is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; God is the deux ex machine. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may that the development towards the world’s coming of age outline above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness.[1]

If we look at the evangelical churches in North America, and beyond (into other movements and traditions in the churches), we don’t see ‘God’s weakness’ characterizing the type of ‘power’ that the churches seek to operate from; we see, as Strobel emphasizes for us, the demonic power that comes from below. There are plenty of good intentions operative in the churches, but it’s no mistake that the adage says ‘the path to hell is paved by good intentions.’ We ought to recognize that we are at God’s mercy in Jesus Christ in every step that we take. We ought to recognize as thinkers and leaders in the church of Jesus Christ, as everyday Christians, that we can operate with all the piety and speak with all the Christianese available; but absent the death and life of Christ in our lives, as the sustenance that serves as our ‘adequacy’ we will be injecting into the leaven of the Gospel a de-leavening agent that mitigates and pollutes the genuine transformative power of the Gospel that God intends for his church; that God desires that the world see in the guarantee of his Kingdom resident in the heart of his new creation.

Let’s be convicted.

 

[1] Bonhoeffer, “Letters & Papers From Prison,” (New York: Simon&Schuster, 1997) cited by Jospeh Minich, “Classical Theism In A World Come Of Age,” in Bradford LittleJohn ed., God of our Fathers: Classical Theism for the Contemporary Church (Moscow, ID: The Davenant Institute, 2018), Loc 4542, 4551, 4558, 4563 kindle version.