Bonhoeffer and the Crisis of the German Church

I recently finished reading Charles Marsh’s excellent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory. There is much to reflect on in the book, and I would commend it to any one not only interested in Bonhoeffer but also to anyone interested in the question of what difference theology might make in a given life or given historical moment.

Along those lines, I was particularly struck by Marsh’s damning critique of theological liberalism and the German Church’s complicity with and acceptance of National Socialism. Marsh writes, “The German Christian movement did not so much destroy as emerge from the ruins of the once-grand Protestant liberal architectonic. It was perhaps a predictable dénouement for a tradition that increasingly turned theology intro anthropology, surrounding the disciplined language of belief to the habit of speaking about God as if of human nature write large.” As a consequence of this anthropological reduction of theology, “the clerics of the German Christian Church would recast the Holy Spirit as an ethos instead of a person: ‘a nature spirit, a folk spirit, Germanness in its essence.’”

Marsh’s critique aligns with Bonhoeffer’s own misgivings about the German theological establishment, which Bonhoeffer harbored even in his own university days. But it is not just this theology that contributed to the German church’s fall to Nazism. As Marsh observes that theology was part of a dangerous cocktail that included Lutheran understandings of the relationship of Church and State, as well as the deep resentments within Germany in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, and perhaps most dangerously, the long standing legacies of Germanic warrior culture and blood and soil nationalism. In other words, bad theology may not have been the only cause, but it certainly didn’t help, and the bad theology had no resources of real protest, no prophetic counter-witness to offer.

So how to respond? That question sits at the center of Bonhoeffer’s own life work, and while a part of his response to these conditions was protest, more central in my view was his reimagined vision of theological education as a kind of Protestant monasticism centered on a rule of life and the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. Speaking of his written reflections on these issues, Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, Marsh observes that Bonhoeffer’s call to radical discipleship and his renewed emphasis on the Sermon the Mount is at one and the same time a needed corrective and an overstatement. On one hand the state church’s captivity to the Nazis and the underlying complacency of German Christianity needed to be challenged, as Bonhoeffer rightly does. But on the other hand, there is a danger within his vision of radical discipleship in laying “upon the individual soul not just his cross but the weight of the world.” Such a burden can “too easily (become) a recipe for a tortured soul or, worse, for an unforgiving perfectionism and sanctimonious bravado.” Despite these dangers, however, the book succeeds because “it was addressed to the crisis at hand.”

Addressing the crisis at hand, in other words, might, or maybe must, take the form of overstatement. This is a helpful reminder as we look at the past and assess Christian theology in different historical moments. What may have been the right book then, may not be the right book now or the right book for another moment with different challenges and conditions. Faithfulness does not necessarily look like a timeless response. It’s more like driving the conditions of the road.

The Mission of the Church: Moving Into and Through History

Further reflections on Balthasar’s essay, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”

In the last post I looked at Balthasar’s image of the tree of culture from his essay “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves. On the basis of this image, I described his admonition to receive from the past without overly romanticizing any given period, age, or thinker. In sum Balthasar argued, “Don’t so long for the past that you forget the moment that you actually live in.”

In this post I want to look at the same article and examine the larger argument he makes about the three great periods of Christianity, the patristic age, the scholastic age, and the modern age. In proposing this three fold division, Balthasar seeks to articulate what he discerns to be the inner core of each period. As he puts it, he wants, “To press on past all external and superficial features of each epoch, to focus on its innermost structural law, and then to measure each respective formal law according to the structural law of what is essentially Christian as we encounter this norm in the Gospel” (352).

Setting aside whether or not such a goal is even possible, especially in the span of a short essay, if we take his methodology at face value, the most important thing to determine is what he means by the “norm of the Gospel”. So what is the norm of the Gospel? It is that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and because the norm of the gospel is the Incarnation itself, it can never be an abstract principle. By extension this norm, “expresses itself in the level of history in ever-new forms without out being able thereby to call any one of these forms the absolute one” (352). Again he emphasizes that each age has sought to articulate the gospel faithfully, but even faithful articulation is never absolute. History changes so the forms the gospel takes must change too. So whether he fairly represents each period is in one sense slightly beside the point because his primary point has to do with the relationship between the Incarnation and history, a theme I wrote about in an earlier post about his book A Theology of History.

One form the gospel has taken on are the reigning philosophical systems of a given era. That the theology of the church takes on philosophic forms is both a kind of truism and a matter of heated debate. Everyone agrees that is does happen, but not everyone agrees to what extent it is a good or bad thing. Balthasar seems to argue that in one sense it must happen. The norm of the gospel must take on a form: “The Church has been sent to all peoples and to all times; and since she is expressly meant to speak in the form of the visible and the natural, she is also directed to take on the kaleidoscopic variety of the different situations of those times and peoples. Every epoch has its own language, world view, perspective; and the Church must make use of all these in order ’to become all things to all men and so to win all for Christ” (367). The “ever-new forms” include appropriating philosophical systems and concepts in order to articulate the Gospel. For him John’s use of the Logos concept to describe the Incarnation is the prime example of using this appropriation well.

Philosophical systems, such as Platonism for the Fathers and Aristotelianism for the Scholastics, are forms that theologians take on in order to articulate the gospel terms that make sense to a given culture, to a particular time and place. There are dangers in this, and Balthasar acknowledges this. With Platonism there is the possible danger of other worldliness, of escape from creation, and there is the possible danger of pantheism. With the Scholastics the danger is to naturalize everything. But this does not mean that the theologians of the those eras were wrong to adopt these forms.

Problems only arise when the philosophical appropriation becomes untethered from the Incarnation. And the temptation to untether is the problem of the Garden extending through history. The sin of Eden is for Balthasar the desire to ascend to God on our own terms, and philosophical forms can become just that. Gnosticism is the example par excellence. But that does not mean that using Platonic forms is inherently wrong or will inevitably lead to Gnosticism.

It comes back again and again as it so often does for Balthasar to the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh. Christ as the concrete universal, the form of forms by which we measure all other forms. And the movement of Christ into history becomes the norm of the church’s mission. The Incarnation is the movement of the Logos into history, the Word becoming flesh, and as Christ’s body the movement of the Church is into history, into the particulars of each time and place that she find herself in. The Church moves into and through history, not soaring above it or standing beside it, but into the midst of it. From the Garden onward we have tried to ascend to God on our own terms, but the scandal of the Gospel is that God descends to creation, enters history, and embraces the particularity of the human form.

It is worth keeping in mind that for Balthasar it is the perennial temptation to ascend to God on our own terms that most corrupts the gospel rather than a particular philosophical form per se. When we think about philosophical and psychological and cultural forms on offer in our day, using the norm of Gospel in the Incarnation can be an extremely helpful way to determine whether we are trying to ascend to God on our own terms or to descend with him into the particulars of history.

No Golden Age? No problem.

There is no golden age, and that is a good thing.

“We are living in a time when the images of the gods and idols are crashing all about us. The spiritual and cultural traditions of vast regions of the West are increasingly being called into question; indeed, we can go even further and say they are being liquidated, quickly and relatively painlessly. Just as a tree in autumn drops its leaves without pain or regret in order to gather once more new strength from within, to renew its powers in hibernal peace, so too the tree of culture is now being stripped of its leaves.”

So begins Hans Urs von Balthasar’s essay, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves”, an essay where Balthasar examines those specifically Christian streams of thinking, writing, reflection, and prayer that have nourished the tree of culture in the past.

But this opening points to something that is especially worth taking to heart: Look at the tree, he says. Stop looking at the dead leaves on the ground. Stop lamenting that you live in autumn. Look up. Though the season speaks of coming death, the tree isn’t going anywhere.

The point is worth taking because looking at the tree and rightly discerning the season in which we live helps us guard against a temptation Balthasar readily describes, namely the temptation to return to some golden era, some previous age that is imagined to be better and purer simply because it was prior. First is best, we might say. Earlier is purer. And because of this temptation we might lament living through autumn rather than spring. He argues that we are especially prone to look back to the Patristic period with “Romantic longing”. Why? Because the Fathers were first and are therefore purer. But to return to the image of the tree, the argument of first is best, first is purer, is like saying “I would rather have a sapling than a redwood.”

To be clear Balthasar notes the ways in which there is a purity to Patristic thinking, a spring time newness to things. And there is a sense in which what they faithfully did, what they thought and what they died for, set the parameters and the terms of the conversation that continued in their wake. But they have not said everything. We must keep this in mind because of this temptation to look back on a particular historical moment or a particular thinker and believe that their way is the way, that their way is the only way to approach things.

This does not mean that we don’t have anything to learn from earlier ages and earlier thinkers. Quite the contrary. Take the example of Paul, though we must begin with understanding him in his context in order to faithfully preach what he preached, it is not enough to simply say,this is what Paul said, and then imagine that we have said everything there is to say. We must move to the next step, which is coming to terms with what Paul is saying to us in our time and in our place. Now what Paul is saying will not wholly contradict what Paul said. Remember the primary metaphors Balthasar employs are organic—the tree, the stream—so this is not about radical discontinuity and rupture. But being faithful to the word is something more than being able to say, this is what it meant. We have to be able to say also this is what it meant then, and this is what it means now, because the word of revelation is a living word.

I find Balthasar’s point about avoiding a naive nostalgia about the past especially interesting because I grew up in a context where the church of the book of Acts was held up as the golden age of the church. It was a variation on the argument that first is best, that first is purest. And Balthasar will have none of that thinking. I know people, and I myself have been guilty of this, who have traded the church of Acts as the ideal for the theology of the Fathers as the ideal, but Balthasar challenges both ways of thinking and says, yes, looking back is part of being faithful, and s we should look back, and we should read and learn and understand, but not so that we can perfectly replicate what they did in their time and place, but so that it might source our own faithful expression in our own time and place.

An historical example, he says, is only ever an analogy, and for him the inner paradox of analogy is that for all the similarity, there is always the ever greater difference, which means that we can glean things, yes, but we cannot perfectly replicate them, nor should we try. Take for example an argument that I hear a lot, namely that the time in which we are living in is like the fall of Rome. There is something to this argument that resonates with people, and we can readily find touch points, and it is a reason that some many are finding great nourishment in returning to Augustine and The City of God. Though we should read Augustine and learn what he is saying to us now, the analogy is never perfect. As Balthasar puts it, theology at its best in a given era is the the light of Truth breaking through “a vast number of mosaic shards of broken and smokey glass: in the thousands of many forms in which it is announced, systematized, humanized” (369). Which means that even in autumn, and even in a coming winter, the light comes and is coming into the world, and though we might only be a shard of broken glass, we are still able to let the light shine through. So the question becomes what might it mean to faithfully speak the living word in the midst of an autumn?

A Saint: Both an Answer and a Contradiction

“The Spirit meets the burning questions of the age with an utterance that is the key-word, the answer to the riddle.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History

If there is such a thing as revelation, if God has made himself known in various times and ways and has made himself supremely known in his Son, then at some point every person who takes these things seriously has to attempt to answer some version of the following questions. How does the life of Christ come into the world now? What does Christ’s life have to do with our lives in the present? What does his work have to do with our work? How does his mission become our mission? We might simply call these questions of application or livability. I believe the gospel. I believe the creed. I believe in the risen and ascended Lord, but how do I live like it’s true? Or to put the question in Han Urs von Balthasar’s terms from his book A Theology of History, how does the norm of Christ come to norm our own lives?

In a chapter called, “Christ the Norm of History”, Balthasar proposes three ways the norm of Christ becomes our norm: Ascension, sacrament, and mission. Ascension, sacrament, and mission are all Spirit permeated, Spirit mediated realties that bring Christ’s time into our time and can make his norm our norm. To briefly sum these up, first, Christ’s time does not simply wait for us in the future, but by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit permeates the now, and this is for Balthasar the ongoing meaning of the Ascension. Second, the sacraments are means of grace precisely because the Holy Spirit makes sacramental presence a reality. The sacramental life nourishes the life of the Church, making life under the norm of Christ both a possibility and a reality . Third, the Church as the Spirit-filled body is called to mission and empowered to do so by the Holy Spirit.

To push the third point a little further, through the Church the Spirit bring Christ’s time, Christ’s norm into the world. In this context Balthasar argues that the mission of the church finds its most concrete expression through the saints, holy ones made holy by the Holy Spirit. Here is a long and beautiful quote to that effect:

“Whenever the Spirit takes the Church by surprise with these gifts it is going to be, in the main, by the proclamation of some truth which has a far-reaching meaning for the particular age to which it is given, in both Church history and world history. The Spirit meets the burning questions of the age with an utterance that is the key-word, the answer to the riddle. Never in the form of an abstract statement (that being something that it is man’s business to draw up); almost always in the form of a new, concrete supernatural mission: the creation of a new saint whose life is a presentation to his own age of the message that heaven is sending to it, a man who is, here and now, the right and relevant interpretation of the Gospel, who is given to this particular age as its way of approach to the perennial truth of Christ. How else can life be expounded except by living? The saints are tradition at its most living, tradition as the word is meant whenever Scripture speaks of the unfolding of the riches of Christ, and the application to history of the norm which is Christ. Their missions are so exactly the answer from above to the questions from below that their immediate effect is often one of unintelligibility; they are signs to be contradicted in the name of every kind of right-thinking —until the proof of their power is brought forth. Saint Bernard and Saint Francis, Saint Ignatius and Saint Teresa were all of them proofs of that order: they were like volcanoes pouring forth molten fire from the inmost depths of Revelation; they were irrefutable proof, all horizontal tradition notwithstanding, of the vertical presence of the living Kyrios here, now and today.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History

Saints are those who are so formed by the norm of Christ that their lives are at one and the same time an answer to the deepest questions of an age and a living contradiction to that age. G.K. Chesterton makes a similar point in his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, but he emphasizes how saintly contradiction can expand beyond the age in which it emerged and begin to convert another age too. In speaking of the Victorian fascination with all things medieval and with St. Francis in particular, Chesterton points to the enduring power of contradiction:“Therefore it is a paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.” G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas

We need such saints, these living answers and contradictions. And we don’t just need those who have gone before, but more desperately, we need the Spirit to form and empower such people now. To take one of a thousand possible examples, as much as we can and should learn from St. Augustine, we should also pray for ones like St. Augustine to emerge. We don’t just need the St. Augustine, we need our own St. Augustine, one uniquely formed and trained to speak to the burning questions of our time. And my conviction is that we should pray like such things are possible. We should pray like such people can and should exist. We should pray like such people are not fixtures of the past but possibilities of the present. We should pray that in the power of the Spirit we might become such people ourselves. To put it in a pithy, and possibly snarky form, we don’t simply need a Benedict Option, we need a St. Benedict to enact a way of living that brings the life Christ, by the power of Spirit, into our time.

Here is my question, in all honesty, and I would love to invite conversation around it—who are the people who stand in contradiction to our age? Who says a simultaneous no to the world and a yes to Christ? Who stands in contradiction, not in simple and oppositional belligerence, but as a counter-witness, as a beckon of light amidst the darkness? Who are those that point in word and deed to higher and clearer and deeper things?

Every Tooth, Every Bone: The Dangers and Delights of Disarticulation

Every Tooth, Every Bone: The Delights and Dangers of Disarticulation

“We live on a little island of the articulable which we tend to mistake for reality itself.” Marilynne Robinson, When I Was Child I Read Books, “Imagination and Community”

“Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the depths in us. And, on the other side, he must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking, ‘But I never knew before. I never dreamed…’ I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, ‘It reminds me of straw.’” C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

My sister is an interior designer, so when she come to Dallas, she likes to take us with her to design shops and furniture stores she’s eager to visit. A couple of years ago we found ourselves in one such shop called Grange Hall. I had heard of the store, and knew that they had loose leaf tea, which excited me, and that they specialized in curiosities, which interested me, so walking in I expected to find quirky things, and what I found was certainly more Diagon Alley than Dallas, Texas. Among stuffed raccoons and bobcats with bared teeth were sculptures of blindfolded babies holding nail-pierced sacred hearts. On one wall there was a matrix of porcelain faces, forty to fifty in all, with Felix the Cat, Elvis, and Jesus all staring off into the middle distance.

For all that, I found one object especially curious. Hanging on a wall next to a distressed cabinet filled with crystal jewelry there was a wooden plaque covered in tiny, white bones, and on the bronze plate nailed to the bottom it said “Disarticulated Dog Skull.” I don’t know if the bones were real or if they were molds, but they were bleached white, the teeth perfect and unused, the bones ivory slick. The skull was complete from what I could tell, but every tooth, every bone was disjointed from those next to them and every piece was labeled in minuscule and immaculate Latin.

I have to say that before seeing that plaque I had never seen or thought about the word disarticulated, but that skull pulled apart and named only to be arrayed again as a complete thing suggested a concept to me that I had been struggling to name.

Anybody who thinks about words has thought about articulation, about the elegance and precision of the right words in the right order at the right time. Articulation also has to do with the pronunciation and sound of words, with the clarity and progress of musical notes, and with joints. By definition, then, to disarticulate means to disjoint, to take things that naturally or ideally go together and pull them apart. When it comes to bones, disarticulation can mean pain, and when it comes to communication or music disarticulation can mean confusion, the smearing of clarity. So in most cases the act of disarticulation is undesirable, the result of negligence, accident, or violence.

The skull, however, showed me that not all disarticulation is bad, that for the student of a given discipline disarticulation is invaluable. Without the ability to break a subject down into component parts, whether physically or conceptually, learning would be almost impossible. When learning or seeking to understand an idea or topic we need to be able to ask, what are the component parts? What are the smallest digestible logical pieces? For the veterinary student such a plaque would prove an immensely helpful study tool, and the knowledge gleaned from a disarticulated dog skull would prove a great aid in the actual care of actual dogs.

In the same vein, theology benefits from the mode of disarticulation. Thinking about the study of God and of His revelation, we can ask what are the component parts of the discipline, what are their names, what topics fall under them, and how do they all fit together? What comes first? What comes next? Is there pride of place, a privileging of order? There is knowledge that can only be gained from disarticulation and from the subsequent synthesis, from taking things apart and then attempting to explain the whole in terms of the constituent parts.

One way to think of the study of theology and especially the study of systematic theology is to think of them as exercises in disarticulation. In fact, one of the primary things that distinguishes one systematic theology from another is the way in which it disarticulates, the way it pulls apart the relevant topics and then names and arranges the parts. The resulting synthesis is driven by questions of shape and form, by asking how the pieces all fit together. A systematic theologian might ask, what happens when you begin theology with Christ at the center? What happens when you emphasize creation or ethics or community or the Trinity or sovereignty or freedom or beauty or drama?

There are two primary dangers, though, when it comes to the mode of disarticulation in theology. The first is a kind of tunnel vision created by the temptation to live at the level of pulling apart and naming so that all you ever have is parts and never a whole. Here the distinctions multiply. Hairs are split only to be split again. The things named become more innumerable and less distinguishable. Battles are waged over ever diminishing parcels of land. The second is the temptation to memorialize, to mount your theology on the wall like the dog skull, and let the meticulous placement of the bones and the tiny scrawl of names stand for theology in perpetuity, as if theology were a task that could be completed and not a continual response to the revelation of God.

And this is the thing I so often forget, the thing that the people I talk “theology” with so often forget–revelation itself does not change, but we do, and our ability to process it, to respond to it, to synthesize it does. Over time, for the individual or for a school of thought or for a movement, things must be reconsidered, things must be rebuilt from the ground up. This is what is so provocative about Lewis’s image of God as iconoclast because it so often God Himself who brings us to the point of reconsideration, and more specifically, to the point of disintegration. Just ask Job as he peers into the whirlwind. Ask Isaiah as he stands in the temple and experiences a kind existential disarticulation as he gazes on the majesty of God. Ask the everyday mystics who labor in prayer. Ask those people in your church who stand on the other side of trauma or tragedy.

The message is clear. While theologians engage in disarticulation, no one is immune or excluded from being disarticulated by God himself. We too can be undone by our encounters with revelation. As the writer of Hebrews puts it, God’s word itself is engaged in the work of disarticulation, taking apart what we assumed could not be taken apart, “piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow.” Theology is not itself revelation; it is rather our best accounting for revelation, and if we treat our theology like the the dog skull mounted on the wall, labeled and named for all time, and it will eventually only be useful as a curiosity or conversation piece. When we become comfortable, and make no mistake theologians and Christians alike are oh so prone to comfortability, God in His pleasure reserves the right to tear the pieces apart so that we have to start putting them back together again. Or as Jason Isbell sings,

You thought God was an architect, now you know
He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that’s all for show goes up in flames
In 24 frames

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