"The struggle is real"

Time, time, time, see what's become of me...

The mention of Bonhoeffer leads me to this (which I quote in full, because it all deserves consideration):

Bonhoeffer is perhaps most famous for his "Christianity without religion" project, the attempt to give a non-religious interpretation to Christian categories. Although Bonhoeffer showed signs of shifting towards a non-religious interpretation in the Ethics, the main texts of the Christianity without religion program come from the letters he wrote to Eberhard Bethge while in prison. These letters show Bonhoeffer’s struggle to understand Christianity’s identity in the modern world: "What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today" (LPP 279). For Bonhoeffer, Christianity’s identity was a problem because the world had "come of age;" that is, the world had become conscious of itself and the laws that governed its existence, and thus it did not need the trappings of religion any longer:
The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience – and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more (LPP 279).
In a world where people "simply cannot be religious," Bonhoeffer wondered if there still was a place for Christ, if Christ could be Lord of the religionless. Bonhoeffer’s attempt to say ‘Yes’ both to the modern world and to Christ as Lord was the motivation for the project that he called "religionless Christianity" (LPP 280).

To understand what Bonhoeffer meant to affirm by religionless Christianity, his concept of ‘religion’ must first be grasped. In continuity with Feuerbach, Bonhoeffer regarded religion as human dependence upon God at the boundaries of life. He gave specific content to this by defining religion more precisely as individualism (the psychological attitude of a subject) and a metaphysical system (Gruchy 1991, 38). Both aspects of religion are faulty: individualism promotes an un-Christian retreat from the world, and religion’s attempt to provide a secure metaphysical explanation of salvation enables people to escape the challenge of the gospel (Gruchy 1991, 38). Moreover, in a world "come of age," religion’s psychologism and metaphysical claims about God simply cannot be accepted. Therefore, Bonhoeffer saw religion as a genuine hindrance to true faith in Jesus Christ.

According to Bonhoeffer, the church has failed in its mission to the modern world because it was not able to separate the message of Christ from religious trappings. The church used God as a metaphysical deus ex machina, a God of the gaps that filled the holes of our knowledge. Bonhoeffer noticed that as secularism increasingly permeated the lives of modern people, this metaphysical God of the gaps was being pushed further away into irrelevance. The Church’s response was to stake out the inner life of the person for God, thus summoning up God to answer "ultimate" questions like death and guilt. For Bonhoeffer, this signaled a retreat into subjectivism, into the personal categories of sin, despair, and anxiety over against the objective work done by God in Jesus Christ. Moreover, it only affirmed a God found in weakness, not in strength, a God at the periphery of our existence, not the center.

The purpose of the non-religious interpretation, then, was to allow the gospel to address humans in a secular age, and to do so without them having to become ‘religious’. Bonhoeffer felt that this interpretation was actually most in line with the gospel of the flesh-and-blood Lord. For Bonhoeffer, religionless Christianity did not need to presuppose humanity’s wickedness to be relevant; rather, it met humans at the center of their lives, both in their joys and sufferings:
[God] must be recognized at the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; it is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigour, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin. The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (LPP 312).
Bonhoeffer planned to write a book that gave a non-religious interpretation of Christian concepts, but before he had the chance he was executed for his part in the attempt to assassinate Hitler. The outline for this book (see handout) contains some of Bonhoeffer’s most seminal thoughts on the issue, including hints at his non-religious interpretation of God, Christ, and the church . It is important to note that the fragments from the outline clearly show that Bonhoeffer’s non-religious interpretation was a consistent development from his earlier thought. This affirms that when Bonhoeffer said "religionless", he in no way went "Christless" or "Godless"; quite the contrary, christology was as central to the religionless interpretation of Christianity as it was to Bonhoeffer’s earlier works.

Now let's quibble over details.  What would a "religionless religion" look like?  Something like Derrida's "negative atheology"?  Or not at all?

"The struggle continues"

Let's start with this comment, which is very nearly perfect:

Is it all right if I quote the Scriptures? :-)

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

He [Jesus] said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)

For me, the only way to begin to live the teachings I quoted is "in Christ". Some days, the only way I get out of bed in the morning is "in Christ" - Christ working in me. For me, that is salvation, which I need every single day.

If only because it incorporates the scriptures along with a trust in the reality of God that isn't dependent upon someone else's idea or assent, and that doesn't, equally, try to establish a hegemony from the idea of God.*

That sounds like a slap at everyone else, and I don't mean it that way; but I'll circle back to the point.

Texts and questions are like a Rorschach inkblot:  the answers reveal so much about the person answering.  Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity, for example, would probably in reality resemble Freemasonry (such is the way of the world).  What it would not resemble is the "liberal theologians" dream,  or Camus' world of plague, or be a religion without religion which would be...secularism?  Let me quote again what I quoted below.  Bonhoeffer starts with a question:

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today" (LPP 279). For Bonhoeffer, Christianity’s identity was a problem because the world had "come of age;" that is, the world had become conscious of itself and the laws that governed its existence, and thus it did not need the trappings of religion any longer:

The "trappings of religion" is the issue here.  What are the "trappings of religion"?  Buildings?  Spires?  Stained glass windows?  Pews?  Organs? Pulpits?  I know of churches which have done away with all of those things.  Is that the "religionless Christianity" Bonhoeffer meant?  Knowing his work, I daresay he'd think many of those churches were closer to Christian-less Christianity.  And that's not what he was advancing.  Why?  As he makes clear, the issue is much more subtle and complex than that:

The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience – and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more (LPP 279).

I apologize for the poor formatting in the previous post; it probably contributed to the confusion.  Bonhoeffer makes a sweeping critique here, but one I think many of us would agree with, especially in the present day.  I'm intrigued by the idea that "the time when people could be told everything by means of words...is over."  In this day of cable TV and the internet where everything, even streaming videos, depends so much on words (how else does FoxNews communicate?  Or the Tea Party?), I think Bonhoeffer is still right.

We could discuss that.

He goes on to say the "time of inwardness and conscience" is over, and so the "time of religion in general" passes with the passing of these two eras.  Obviously he has a specific concept of religion in mind, but we should all be specific.  Before we get to that last sentence, let's reflect a moment on what he doesn't mean.

To understand what Bonhoeffer meant to affirm by religionless Christianity, his concept of ‘religion’ must first be grasped. In continuity with Feuerbach, Bonhoeffer regarded religion as human dependence upon God at the boundaries of life. He gave specific content to this by defining religion more precisely as individualism (the psychological attitude of a subject) and a metaphysical system (Gruchy 1991, 38). Both aspects of religion are faulty: individualism promotes an un-Christian retreat from the world, and religion’s attempt to provide a secure metaphysical explanation of salvation enables people to escape the challenge of the gospel (Gruchy 1991, 38). Moreover, in a world "come of age," religion’s psychologism and metaphysical claims about God simply cannot be accepted. Therefore, Bonhoeffer saw religion as a genuine hindrance to true faith in Jesus Christ.

If this analysis is correct, Bonhoeffer is staying true to The Cost of Discipleship and, even more importantly, to his Ethics.  It is one of the benefits of old age (or at least to get past youth) to recognize that what was true and simple when you were young, is still true, but is not simple.  I'm especially intrigued by Bonhoeffer's idea of dependence on God at the boundaries of life.  It's an insight I had in seminary, and it's probably due to Bonhoeffer more than anyone else that I realized it. It leads to what I've labeled "vulture theology," a common expression among many pastors I know that while the church may lose the youth as soon as they are old enough to stay home on Sunday morning, that we'll get 'em back when they have kids, or need a funeral, or face a crisis (financial, personal, existential, doesn't matter).  It's a rather gruesome hope for sustaining an institution that's supposed to be upheld by the God of the living and of all life.

Notice there, too (and again, I blame the poor formatting on the last post; I don't know what went wrong there), Bonhoeffer defines religion in very negative ways.  It is individualism ("religion is a private matter!") and the metaphysical system.  Both, Bonhoeffer thought (rightly, I think) led individuals away from the claims of the Gospel to be in the world while not of the world (try it.  It's quite a struggle.  That struggle is real.)  Individualism promotes a retreat from the world to what makes me happy and comfortable; the metaphysical system makes salvation paramount and secures you from any of the challenges of the gospel.  After all, if I'm saved, if my one hope is in a metaphysic that puts my soul at the center of a cosmic system of divine justice and retribution, what need I care for my fellows, except as a random act of kindness?

And the more atheists fight with Christian concepts of a metaphysical realm more real than this one, where the true life is finally lived, the more we help them make religion a hindrance to true faith in Jesus Christ.

And what would true faith be?  What does the Lord require of you?

According to Bonhoeffer, the church has failed in its mission to the modern world because it was not able to separate the message of Christ from religious trappings. The church used God as a metaphysical deus ex machina, a God of the gaps that filled the holes of our knowledge. Bonhoeffer noticed that as secularism increasingly permeated the lives of modern people, this metaphysical God of the gaps was being pushed further away into irrelevance. The Church’s response was to stake out the inner life of the person for God, thus summoning up God to answer "ultimate" questions like death and guilt. For Bonhoeffer, this signaled a retreat into subjectivism, into the personal categories of sin, despair, and anxiety over against the objective work done by God in Jesus Christ. Moreover, it only affirmed a God found in weakness, not in strength, a God at the periphery of our existence, not the center.

Vulture theology is a subset of the "God of the gaps" theology.  If we cannot reconcile the classical metaphysical system with present-day science, we push God into the places science can't yet go, and all that does is allow secularism to push God further away.  God becomes the last resort, the place that, when we have to go there, God has to make us whole.  And when God fails to do even that, then what's the point of God?  And about this time the critique of "liberal theologians" kicks in.  God as the answer to "ultimate" questions is a direct swipe at Paul Tillich.  I'll say up front I'm no fan of Tillich.  His Systematic Theology is supposedly founded on Kierkegaard's thought, but the very first thing Kierkegaard opposed was the systematic thinking of Hegel, which is pretty much what Tillich brings to the discussion.  Had he been alive, Kierkegaard would have started a third round of his authorship just to oppose Tillich who, ironically, is the father of systematic theology as a course of study in most seminaries.  Bonhoeffer opposes this retreat into "subjectivism," an opposition I'm sure Kierkegaard would join him in (when S.K. wrote "Truth is subjective," he didn't mean it's personal).  And I certainly agree with Bonhoeffer's criticism that affirming God in weakness, the "God of the gaps," is putting God at the periphery of our existence, not at the center.

Which brings us back to the comment I started with.  When I was a pastor, I was working on the idea that worship had become, even for believing Christians (never mind the baptized heathens), a matter of a Sunday morning filling station.  That is, you came to church on Sunday morning to get your spiritual tank refilled, much as you have to refill the gas tank of your car from time to time.  Bathed in the comfort and reassurance that God loves you and wants you to be just as you are, without one plea (except "Please, sir, I want some more!", which God would surely grant), you go out into the world and struggle with it as a car struggles against friction, until your energy source is used up and you return for another refill, in a week.

God as endless commodity, in other words.

What I wanted to do was shift the perception, change the assumption:  what if, instead of coming into the presence of God for a spiritual recharge or refill, we came into the presence of the living God with fear and trembling?  Not the fear induced by horror movies or the thought of destruction or the loss of loved ones or a job, but the existential awe that creates an awfulness (in the old sense of the world, being filled with awe) at the nature of God, an awe that would put the world in perspective.  Sort of the positive version of "eat a live frog first thing everyday, and nothing worse will happen to you all day."  If, on one morning of the week, you encountered the living God, the one not present in the storm, though there is a storm, not present in the earthquake, though there is an earthquake, the one who made Sinai shake and tremble until the Hebrews told Moses to talk to God for them, because they were afraid; if you encountered the presence of that God, wouldn't your week be different?  Wouldn't what loomed so large suddenly seem small?  Wouldn't you be more inclined to think you don't need to sweat the small stuff, and that it's all small stuff?  What difference might it make if you came to worship wondering what the Lord requires of you, rather than what you require of the Lord?

Would that be a religionless Christianity?

*Any establishment of a system, especially for an idea about God, runs the risk of being established against other ideas, and implicitly declaring those ideas inferior; and on what basis, except preference?

We were talking/about the space between us all...

[n.b.--in the time since this was originally posted, obvious errors have been corrected (where they were spotted), and one italicized emendation made to move the emphasis away from the comments toward Bonhoeffer's ideas, which was the original intent. Further discussion of Bonhoeffer vis a vis S.K. is envisioned and encouraged.]

In comments below, left rev left this post card:

We want to know salvation; and we want to see it in this life.

In “The Penultimate” and “Preparing the Way,” Bonhoeffer is exploring the relationship between the ultimate, i.e. the Kingdom of God, and the penultimate, or the condition humanity finds itself in prior to being a part of the Kingdom of God. Within this question of eschatology is the concern of the responsibility of the Christian individual in the context of the penultimate, and the impact the ultimate may have on this responsibility.

Essentially, the ultimate is irrelevant in day to day dealings. The reality of the Church is the reality of its context in the world, which serves to justify the context of the world.

Of course, Bonhoeffer rejects both of these solutions as inadequate, although containing truth. The ultimate and the penultimate are not mutually exclusive but are in fact in existence together. The penultimate continues until such time as there is no context of a worldly reality. Yet into this reality there is an inbreaking of the Kingdom as living faith impacting the world around it.

The penultimate is actually defined by the ultimate. It is only through the knowledge and experience of the kingdom of God that Christians are aware of the time they are in as the penultimate. One must acknowledge the reality in which one dwells is not the ultimate; nevertheless, as we do not dwell in the ultimate yet, we must dwell in the penultimate to reach the ultimate. Justification by grace occurs within the context of penultimate. The penultimate prepares the way of the ultimate. I would refer to this as “almost realized eschatology.”

The Christian life straddles the reality of God and the reality of the world and participates in both. As the ultimate is known only by seeing it through the penultimate, the reality of God can only be known in the context of the world. However, a Christian’s actions in the penultimate should reflect the ultimate, and so prepare for the transformation of the reality of the world to become the reality of God. We know the kingdom through the context of God, but we know God, through the grace of God, in the context of the world.

In the emphasis of the penultimate as preparation for the ultimate, Bonhoeffer reflects the influence of Augustine’s teleological ethics that a Christian’s pursuit of a goal is carried out in the context of being in relationship with God. In a sense, the inner and outer conditions for receiving God's grace about which Bonhoeffer is concerned are reflective of the “true peace,” Augustine claims as the goal of Christian life. Specifically, the peace achieved in the penultimate is dependent upon seeing it within the context of the ultimate.

According to Bonhoeffer, a Christian acts in such a way as to prepare for the ultimate “for the love of Christ.” (266) This motivation implies an acceptance of the responsibility to respond to the commandment of loving your neighbor.

Certainly, there is an implication in Bonhoeffer that the common good and the eternal destiny are in someway connected in ultimate’s relationship to the penultimate and our relationships within the penultimate.

My take on Bonhoeffer's speculation in the context of SKs Knight of Faith is that although one lives in such a way as to seem divorced from the ultimate, in the sense that one does not focus on it, nevertheless, the ultimate will only be known in and through the act of living in the penultimate, a task the KoF addresses with joy and contentment.

In the picture of the KoF prsented in your post, there seems to be an abundance of material and physical complacency, but this does not correspond to a spiritual complacency. Indeed, his every act seems to stress an awareness and happiness with what goes on around him. Perhaps for SK, the KoF is risible in his lack of awareness of the ultimate, and Bonhoffer would probably agree that he does display this trait. Nevertheless, the embracing of the penultimate is imperative to attaining the ultimate. The KoF is as likely to do so as is the secluded ascthetic, for one can focus on God in one's heart, or in the faces of others, and both arrive in the Holy presence.
left rev., Jolly Menace

First: there is a direct line from Augustine through Luther (who was an Augustinian monk, until he decided on grace through faith) to Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer (both Lutheran pastors).

Second: there's something interestingly Hellenistic (nay, almost Zeno-like) about the concern with the penultimate that must be prior to the ultimate. This intrigues me, but I can do no more than point it out, here, and dash on. Like Josh Marshall, I'll get back to that. (Yeah, right!)

Have to tread carefully here, as left rev. has shifted us from soteriology to eschatology, and Bonhoeffer works from the assumption that the kingdom of God is adventus, but not yet present. My eschatological kerygma, on the other hand (well, as opposed to Bonhoeffer's, which probably derives from Barth's) is that the basiliea tou theou is present now, and needs only to be realized. I'm not sure where S.K. would stand on that, though I suspect he'd be more sympathetic to Bonhoeffer than to me. But I'm going to try to hold on to left rev.'s point (and if I don't, may I be corrected), and yet move us back to soteriology (salvation; apologies for lapsing into jargon).

Let's start at the beginning: is the ultimate irrelevant in the context of day to day living? Well, depends on which "ultimate" is "ultimate." I would not place it on eschatology, but on soteriology. That shifts the ultimate from the "end times" to the "here and now," which replaces the concern with apocalypse with concern over the mysterium tremendums. Fear and trembling takes on it's soteriological orientation, not just its survivalistic one.

Okay, we've gotten that far. Let's see what else we can do.

"According to Bonhoeffer, a Christian acts in such a way as to prepare for the ultimate “for the love of Christ.” (266) This motivation implies an acceptance of the responsibility to respond to the commandment of loving your neighbor." But is "the love of Christ" separable from "loving your neighhor"? I don't ask that lightly, because this takes us back to the very Hellenestic (Zeno-like) distinction between "penultimate" and "ultimate." Is love of neighbor separable from love of God? Can I express one, without expressing the other? If so, what would that look like? I'm sure some distinction could be drawn, but is that distinction ultimately meaningful? Let me give an example: I had a neighbor once who was the epitome of Christian charity and love of neighbor, the absolute poster child for the concept; except (here's where the needle scratches across the record) he was an avowed atheist. The difference between him and a "knight of faith" was only in his profession of faith. But is that enough? If it is, then I can judge people based on their profession of faith. And yet even God tells Jeremiah: "I, God, test the heart" to learn what is in it, and Jesus says it is what comes out of a man that matters. If Luther couldn't know what was in his heart (that crisis of doubt led to his doctrine of justification by faith), how can I know what is in my neighbor's heart? Maybe he doesn't know himself! Maybe God is working through him, despite his lack of belief. Who am I to judge, except by what he does?

At this point this starts to sound like a meticulous take-down of "left rev.," and that's not the point at all. It has more to do with what I take to be Kierkegaard's point: why do we focus on the "ultimate" at all? In the case of the Knight of Faith, when we know it, what do we know? That the boundary is not so far from us after all? Why do we press to know what is at the boundaries? What do we hope to find there?

Which actually helps us pursue the discussion about soteriology.

"We Write with Both Hands"

The benefit of sitting in a doctor's examining room during finals week (a special time of year in the life of a teacher, I assure you!)(and nothing serious; just scheduling an exam I should have at this time in life's journey), the benefit, as I was saying, is that you get to read stuff like this:

For the death of God certainly means the dying off not only of ontotheology and of classical metaphysical theology but also of this notion of a supervening mystical unity conceived as the fulfillment or the crowning of metaphysical theology. The death of God entails the deconstruction not only of the ousia of classical metaphysics but also the hyperousios of Neoplatonic mysticism. The value of the notion of the death of God is that is gives a provocative name to an ancient and venerable tradition, the ongoing work of the critique of idols, one of which is certainly the idol of some naked prelinguistic ineffable given, which is pretty much what the hyperousios comes down to in classical mysticism. Mystics often claim to speak from within the heart of God, with a kind of absolute knowledge or absolute point of view. I value mysticism as an expression of our nonknowing, but my skepticism has to do with reaching this absolute point of view. One important thing we mean by the death of God is the death of the absolute center, of inhabiting an absolute point of view. That's the point of Derrida's critique of negative theology--which he calls hyperousiology--which is also why deconstruction is not negative theology.

That is John Caputo, from an interview titled "The Power of the Powerless," in a book I just found on my shelf, published in 2007, titled After the Death of God (ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins, New York: Columbia University Press 2007). I've read Caputo's book length treatment of Derrida and religion, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, so I must have absorbed the idea of the power of powerlessness from him as well as from Derrida (there is indeed nothing new under the sun! Bah! And here I thought I'd finally been almost original! Back to the drawing board!). This new book is edited, and introduced by, Jeffrey Robbins, who makes more than one interesting point in his introduction about the state of theology today. This, for example, should sound familiar to participants in any discussion of religion on the Internet:

...[T]he most prominent Enlightenment philosopher of them all, Immanuel Kant, defined the very project of Enlightenment by this most fundamental of all modern assumptions when he wrote that Enlightenment is the release from all forms self-incurred tutelage. What he had in mind, in addition to various forms of political authoritarianism, was the religious authoritarianism and dogmatism that for centuries had discouraged critical scientific inquiry. According to Kant, the enlightened subject would be one who could think for himself, and one in whom religion might still play a part, but only in the sphere of private morality.

How many fruitless arguments about religion have I engaged in with people repeating, in watered down form, this fundamentally 18th century idea, all the while imagining they are on the cutting edge of 21st century thought? Of course, that's usually a discussion with people who've never heard of Soren Kierkegaard or Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Bonhoeffer posed [the] possibility of a religionless Christianity while living out the final days of his life in a prison cell, before his martyrdom for his involvement in an assassination plot against Hitler. As such, his words had an added moral credibility, especially by those like the death of God theologians who were troubled by the moral ineptitude, if not outright complicity, of the church. For Bonhoeffer, this effort at purging Christianity of the comforts of religion would be a risky faith without assurances, one that severs the ties between Christ's call to discipleship and Christianity's association with the offices of power and the religious identification with the cultural trappings of civilization...

[Soren] Kierkegaard, like Bonhoeffer and the death of God theologians who followed, gave voice to the new anti-institutional, individualized Christian faith that stood in opposition to the easy alliance between religion and society. It was a radical faith purged of any vestige of authoritarianism and triumphalism that was unafraid to call into question the very meaning and purpose of the church both by being willing to admit the failure of its own tradition and by seeing the great success of the state churches as their great failure. In other words, for Kierkegaard, the apparent Christianization of culture and politics made it virtually impossible to live up to the radical existential demands of a truly biblical faith.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard in what Caputo says:

...[O]n the one hand, serious philosophy and theology involve a work of ceaseless critique of our capacity to deceive ourselves. They reminds us that everyone is on the same footing, that no one enjoys privileged access. This has a salutary ethical ethical and political import because it shows us that we're all in this together and nobody is hardwired up to the Secret. That produces a desirable ethical, political, and religious effect--an egalitarian effect.

But I think that philosophical and theological thinking have to be--beyond critique and uncertainty--affirmative. If all there is to thinking is critique and delimitation, skepticism and doubt, then it will not inspire us. It will simply be disruptive and negative. So I think that philosophy is always looking for a way to articulate what we love, what we desire, what drives us. That is the Augustinian side of my work, which is emblematized by what Augustine calls at the beginning of the Confessions the cor inquietum--the restless heart. We write with both hands. Radical critique and delimitation is the left hand, but the right hand is the affirmation of something that we desire with a desire beyond desire, which is the sum and substance of my argument in Prayers and Tears, which conceives of praying and weeping in a deeply affirmative way. Something can be affirmative--we can say yest to it, for that is what we love--without being positive. That is to say, we may lack a positive formula for what we affirm. Whenever someone erects a positive content, making our affirmation into a determinate object, that can always be deconstructed. Whatever is constructed can be deconstructed, otherwise it is a menace or an idol. But the affirmation itself is irreducible. So I would say philosophy--philosophical and theological thinking, really any kind of thinking at all--has to be driven by a radically affirmative energy, by a desire for what is undeconstructable.

Quite a bit to digest; but I detect Kierkegaard's "Concept of Irony" there, too. Socrates, as Kierkegaard showed, was intent on what we would now call deconstruction of whatever is constructed; but, as Kierkegaard also showed, Socrates was content to stop there, and to deny the validity of the undeconstructable. Upon that premise, if you want to boil it down to one thing, rests the entire post-modern enterprise. And yet that premise is not truth, either.

Searching for an earlier post, I inadvertently gathered this collection of posts, all items deserving of further discussion and more careful consideration. I'm leaving them here as a marker, or maybe a springboard. I just know I don't want to lose them soon.

A Titleless Blog Post Title

Oh, Teddy!  If only stuffed animals could feel Catholic guilt!

As Charles Ryder said to Lady Marchmain, the God she said gave commands to her and her family was purely a product of her desires; she decided what should happen and said it was God's will.*  It's an old and fairly valid critique of Christianity, and it would seem to support John Caputo's critique of Christianity, as well as the critiques Caputo relies on, of Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard.  But in reality, it proves such critiques weak and ill-informed:

Bonhoeffer posed [the] possibility of a religionless Christianity while living out the final days of his life in a prison cell, before his martyrdom for his involvement in an assassination plot against Hitler. As such, his words had an added moral credibility, especially by those like the death of God theologians who were troubled by the moral ineptitude, if not outright complicity, of the church. For Bonhoeffer, this effort at purging Christianity of the comforts of religion would be a risky faith without assurances, one that severs the ties between Christ's call to discipleship and Christianity's association with the offices of power and the religious identification with the cultural trappings of civilization...

[Soren] Kierkegaard, like Bonhoeffer and the death of God theologians who followed, gave voice to the new anti-institutional, individualized Christian faith that stood in opposition to the easy alliance between religion and society. It was a radical faith purged of any vestige of authoritarianism and triumphalism that was unafraid to call into question the very meaning and purpose of the church both by being willing to admit the failure of its own tradition and by seeing the great success of the state churches as their great failure. In other words, for Kierkegaard, the apparent Christianization of culture and politics made it virtually impossible to live up to the radical existential demands of a truly biblical faith.

That position is supported by this argument:

...[O]n the one hand, serious philosophy and theology involve a work of ceaseless critique of our capacity to deceive ourselves. They reminds us that everyone is on the same footing, that no one enjoys privileged access. This has a salutary ethical ethical and political import because it shows us that we're all in this together and nobody is hardwired up to the Secret. That produces a desirable ethical, political, and religious effect--an egalitarian effect.

But I think that philosophical and theological thinking have to be--beyond critique and uncertainty--affirmative. If all there is to thinking is critique and delimitation, skepticism and doubt, then it will not inspire us. It will simply be disruptive and negative. So I think that philosophy is always looking for a way to articulate what we love, what we desire, what drives us. That is the Augustinian side of my work, which is emblematized by what Augustine calls at the beginning of the Confessions the cor inquietum--the restless heart. We write with both hands. Radical critique and delimitation is the left hand, but the right hand is the affirmation of something that we desire with a desire beyond desire, which is the sum and substance of my argument in Prayers and Tears, which conceives of praying and weeping in a deeply affirmative way. Something can be affirmative--we can say yest to it, for that is what we love--without being positive. That is to say, we may lack a positive formula for what we affirm. Whenever someone erects a positive content, making our affirmation into a determinate object, that can always be deconstructed. Whatever is constructed can be deconstructed, otherwise it is a menace or an idol. But the affirmation itself is irreducible. So I would say philosophy--philosophical and theological thinking, really any kind of thinking at all--has to be driven by a radically affirmative energy, by a desire for what is undeconstructable.

Which is perfectly sound, but leaves out the most important question:  where does this relentless critique come from, if not from outside the individual?

Consider:  Lady Marchmain is a Roman Catholic; she is, in fact, "more Catholic than the Pope."  A perhaps understandable condition, living as a woman of great importance (Brideshead makes Downton Abbey look like a country manor house) in C of E England.  But she has her own chapel, where she leads her children in prayer daily.  She has a "kept" priest who clearly never dares to contradict her on anything.  She has, in other words, no institution to keep her in check.  If she represents a state church because her position in society makes her virtually a part of the state, how would even a religionless religion change things for her?  The hierarchy and weight of the Roman Catholic church is not behind her:  she creates, as Charles rightly observes, her own ideas of what God's will is, constructed out of bits and pieces of church doctrine but mostly out of Lady Marchmain's own preferences. She already has her "religionless religion."  And where is her salvation?

There is a simple and wonderful truth here:  "Whatever is constructed can be deconstructed, otherwise it is a menace or an idol."  And the corollary, like a kind of Murphy's Law, is that is will be deconstructed; if not by philosophy, then by life itself.  Lady Marchmain's personal views are cruelly deconstructed by events of the novel, and she dies without knowing that there was a kind of reconstruction of her family, a reclamation, but it was achieved not by her strength of personality, but by the persistance of the Roman church.  And in the end the Roman church doesn't even have a direct involvement in the turn of the family:  it is their adherence, even by Lord Marchmain who has lived in Italy hating the Church, to the teachings of the Church.

Which, yes, is Waugh's preferred ending as he was a Roman Catholic among the Anglicans; but if praying and weeping are indeed deeply affirmative (and I think they are), they do not become affirmative because of radical individualism.  Indeed, that way lies the TV evangelists of America.  Radical individualism is what produces the know-nothingism of American culture, the idea as Isaac Asimov described it, "that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'."  So Bonhoeffer and Derrida may imagine a religion without religion, but they do so from the relative comforts of European culture; those of us in America who have seen that experiment first hand shudder with recognition, and withdraw in horror from the very idea.  Praying and weeping have to be, not public acts meant to inspire sympathy; but private acts, meant to humble and make us truly vulnerable to something outside of us.  And where do we go to test that experience, and understand it, if not to a group, a community of some measure or another; and, in the case of a spiritual experience, to a religious community?

Unless Mr. Caputo is suggesting we set up philosophy as that church of which all can be members.

Yeah, like that'll happen.....

*I saw the most recent film version of Brideshead Revisited on T.V. recently, so I'm going from memory.  My copy of Waugh's novel, with the PBS tie-in to the John Mortimer version (far superior to this more recent one) cover seems to have been lost in the sands of time.

How Can I Miss A Chance To Post A Bonhoeffer Reference?

Rep. Brandon Gill: "We particularly need the left to tone down the rhetoric ... somebody is gonna listen and believe they are the next Dietrich Bonhoeffer and act on that and that's what we're seeing here." pic.twitter.com/vtZgBKTgfC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026

Bonhoeffer died in prison, because he was part of a conspiracy to murder Hitler.

Is Rep. Gill comparing Trump to Hitler?

The Cost of Discipleship

A Christian group of Bonhoeffer scholars calls for the end of Trump’s presidency. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian executed for being part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and his legacy has been claimed by evangelicals all along the political spectrum. https://t.co/IxChpG7uyC

— Ruth Graham (@publicroad) January 17, 2020

I post this to direct you to the statement from the Bonhoeffer Society, and the article by Jim Wallis. It is a fine response from an evangelical to the "Evangelicals for Trump."

"It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith."-Dietrich Bonhoffer

I stepped forward on a day in May, 19**, raised my right hand, and took an oath that confirmed my willingness to be inducted into service in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. Immediately afterwards, I was shipped away to spend eight weeks learning how to utilize the many devices designed specifically for the taking of a human life in an armed conflict. I had been told that I was signing a legal contract by joining the Army, and I was warned to be quite certain that I knew to what I was committing. I did not.

My service in the military was relatively short and uneventful. I emerged from it thankful that it had been. By the time it was complete, I knew that I would never take that oath if I had it to do all over again.

I’ve given this issue a great deal of thought and it weighs very heavily on my mind. I can only speak for myself as an individual striving to be who God calls me to be and as a citizen of a nation currently at war. I do tend to conflate my understanding of person responsibility with that of social responsibility, but it is in the context of human society and covenential relationships, not specifically in the context of being an American citizen. Now…on to it.

I am greatly attracted to the pacifistic stance. If I was called to make a decision about which stance, pacifistic or just war, was a more perfect way to be a Christian, I would give the nod to pacifism. I would also have to admit that I am not perfect, and that the context in which I am engaged in ethical thinking and action bears far more resemblance to the just war context that Cahill describes as “ relations of citizens and states in the political world.”

I am still at the place of reluctance to embrace the witnessing approach to social responsibility. This is related to the sense that the church, or myself as a pacifist, is a witness to the world without being a part of the world. On the extreme end of this approach are those churches that are sects, not recognizing the world outside of their community as a valid reality in which to know and experience God. There are variations of degrees to which a separation of church and society determine the responsibility of Christians within society. While some remain dedicated to the living of the Kingdom ideal, they feel that they are serving the world through their beliefs and their example, and that, therefore, they should be involved in world affairs, particularly politics. This is their sense of social responsibility.

However, there is still the barrier of the context. While the ultimate goal is the same (as all Christians hope to participate in the Kingdom of God), the context that the witnessing pacifists are in is one that rejects what they see as a compromise of the Kingdom by accepting the standards of the world. As witnessing pacifists present an alternate reality, one that I would embrace with all thankfulness and joy, we still live in the reality that is. Ideally, a witnessing pacifist whose witness does not consist of withdrawing from the world would hope that their alternative reality would shine uncompromisingly on reality as it is and bring about a new reality.

It is similar to Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the ultimate and the penultimate. To simplify to a perhaps inexcusable degree, just war thinkers live in the penultimate; pacifists are trying to live in the ultimate. Some pacifists have taken the radical stance of rejecting the penultimate altogether, others lean more towards a compromise stance which is still extremely radical.
The task of living in the penultimate, however, is to live in such a way that prepares for the ultimate. A question that looms large in my mind is which stance is more preparatory in nature. And in this, despite my personal preference, the paradigm underlying just war thinking is still a candidate.

For Bonhoeffer, the proper action for a Christian is one which takes seriously the commandment to “love your neighbor,” by living covententially, providing for the needs of the other. There is a strand of pacifism that embodies this, according to Cahill, known as Compassionate Pacifism. However, in rejecting all forms of violence, a pacifist places herself in a place wherein lies the potential of being unable to provide for the needs of another, if she is unable to come to the defense of another. Although Bonhoeffer did not specifically mention the use of violence in providing for one’s neighbor, given the context in which he was writing, and the circumstances surrounding his eventual demise, he did not reject it outright.

It is the absolute uncompromising nature of pacifism that prevents me from fully embracing it-not because pacifism should compromise, but because I hold out for the possibility that I might. Although I frankly agree that pacifism is a more perfect approach to discipleship, I can foresee circumstances in which I would feel called to defend another. I simply could not maintain the high standard of discipleship that is required for pacifism, yet.

Although pacifists may legitimately dispute this, particularly in light of the situation we find ourselves in today, I think that just war thinking, when used extremely critically and to its fullest extent, essentially attempts to avert the necessity of armed conflict, and hopefully, change the reality in which we live. My premise as a just war thinker would be that war is never desirable, nor is it ever the best way to achieve a just result. The burden of proof is always on those who would engage in conflict.

I disagree with those who would say that war is ever “an expression of faith in God, loyal discipleship to Jesus Christ, and love for all one’s neighbors.” On this point, I agree with the pacifists. I will agree that the nature of humanity has a tendency towards conflict that must be taken into account within relationships. There are times in which a response to the needs of another occurs within a context of conflict. If there is no alternative with which to meet the needs of another outside of armed conflict, then that is preferable to not trying to meet the needs of another. But let’s not fool ourselves; when we make that decision, we’re reacting from a standpoint of no hope, and we will have much to repent for, especially if we try to tell ourselves that this is what God desires of us.

By accepting the context in which we live, we try to do our best within it. That is what just war thinking is about. The hope is that, through just war thinking, we will engage in fewer wars, not more. We will also have in front of us the price of war as we make the decisions and will perhaps be motivated to seek solutions that will change the context in which we live. War cannot do that. Pacifism tries to do that from the distance of witnessing.

My own approach to just war thinking would involve tightening the criteria. My experience in the military did not expose me to high ethical standards, and I have grave doubts concerning the necessity of a standing army. Preemptive strikes are the embodiment of “do unto others before they do unto you.” Legitimate authority is helpful only in that it stresses the need to place in authority people with empathy, compassion, imagination and the ability to look for hope in a situation rather than be resigned to hopelessness. No authority exists on this earth that I acknowledge as having the right to demand that I help one person by killing another. That is a responsibility I do not abdicate.

What concerns me is that the criteria can become a checklist to justify a war, rather than a check to prevent one. As an extremely reluctant just war thinker, my tendency would always be to err on the side of caution and seek other alternatives. Quite frankly, once a war is deemed justified by use of these criteria, I doubt there is much effort involved in finding alternatives, as all energy is focused on the determined option. I do not believe war is a necessary condition of humanity; I do believe that it is easier than the struggle to heal our brokeness and one overarching aspect of our brokeness is our tendency to take the path of least resistance. Just war thinking is a battle against the path of least resistance, if used conscientiously, consistently and at the highest levels of decision.

My conclusion that I am, however reluctantly, not a pacifist, is based on my teleological goal of acting in such a way as to change this reality in which I live, while I live in it. I acknowledge that pacifism can do this, and I hope that my discussion of the detachment required on a practical basis by a pacifist does not leave the impression that I feel that a pacifist is disengaged or oblivious to the reality that is. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is also based on the knowledge that I do not yet have the ability to manifest the virtues of compassion, mercy, and especially, forgiveness, to the extent that would enable me to live under the standards of discipleship required for a Christian pacifist. Therefore, I will continue to struggle through the moral issues surrounding the decision to react with violence, always attempting to maintain hope in a time and a context in which violence will no longer be a part of where I am.

Notes toward a discussion of Modern Christianity

I like Chris Hayes (I liked his show better when it was on Saturday mornings; he works best in a long discussion format), but honestly he can be such an earnest little geek sometimes.

I have this excerpt from a review of Bonhoeffer's Letter and Papers from Prison on the back of my paperback copy:

Bonhoeffer is teaching a few Protestants what it means to say 'yes' to the 20th entry and still somehow stay recognizably Protestant.  A look at a few of his seminal ideas will make this clear.  The significant works are the ETHICS [sic]...and, most important of all, LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON [sic]....Three central ideas from this book are in the process of becoming part of the general intellectual equipment of a good many younger observers of the American scene, both those with and those without an interest in what is usually called theology.

It was a review written by William Hamilton, published in "The Nation"; the magazine in which Chris Hayes rose to prominence and obtained a TV show.

I don't know more about the review than that, except that the last copyright date on my copy of Letters is 1971, so the review is probably older than Chris Hayes.  It recalls a time when even the left in America could openly discuss the ideas of Christianity:  of Niebuhr (who made the cover of Time magazine) and Tillich, if not Bultmann and Feuerbach.  Maybe giants don't roam the earth anymore.  Or maybe, as the character Dana Scully said at the end of a memorable "X-Files" episode:  maybe God is speaking, and no one is listening.

I pick on Chris Hayes, not out of animus, but simply as an example.  He was shocked to learn that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a universally beloved spokesman for civil rights in his lifetime; that what he advocated was not immediately embraced and championed by all but the most entrenched white supremacists.  That, of course, is how we remember King now; but we only remember King for his "I have a dream" speech.  Nobody even notices that the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was written to churches from a church leader, or that the entire civil rights movement was grounded in, and supported by, the black churches of America.  We have quite effectively pushed church and religion, if not out of the public square, then out of legitimate recognition.  And we have done it in one generation.

If ever there was an object lesson in the fragility of memory and the eradicability of history, this would be it.  I can't imagine Chris Hayes having an in-depth discussion of the impact of Christianity on public policy, because I can't imagine Chris Hayes knowing anything about Christianity or Christian theology.

True, Jerry Falwell rushed in to fill the gap created by the indifference to church of the Boomers, but even as the Moral Majority was claiming control of American politics (a control it never really had), it was clear that was a rearguard effort, the blush on the cheek of a dying age.  Even as "A Man Called Peter" symbolized the rush back to church that swelled the pews after World War II, Niebuhr and like-minded theologians were doing the work outlined by Barth, trying to reconcile the world and Christianity, recognizing that neither was in control of the other, or should be.

And then we just gave up on church.

I am familiar with the statistics about how "millenials" have all left church behind, and how much better the country is for it, and how it is a harbinger of what is to come.  Once again, the millenials (or their apologists) imagine the world new-born at the moment of their birth, and all history before them irrelevant or a mere burden of a generation that messed everything up (even that attitude is not original or unique to the "new" generation).  Everything millenials tell me now signals the death of the church, is what boomers were practicing when I was still in high school.  The more things change....

So I discard the idea that this abandonment of Christianity began at the turn of the century.  This movement away from cultural roots has been going on for over a century.  Eliot recognized it, and the tools of the dislocation and deconstruction were apparent in the 1920's.    The computer didn't invent this; television didn't invent this.  Its roots, in fact, are in 19th century Europe, the real century of revolution.

We are all still rattling from the earthquakes that happened then.

The truth is, we gave up on church in the 19th century, when the elites decided that fear of God was all well and good for the masses, and even necessary (and fear of God was the only relationship with God that mattered), but for thinking persons such notions were superstition and mythology.  We haven't even invented a new vocabulary for this, even as anthropology has taught us mythology is not the simplistic fantastical explanation of natural forces that we all think it is.  The effort, however, began then, not with the invention of the internet, or the Bomb, or the devastation of France in World War II (hello, Jean Paul!).  The masses are just now starting to catch up with the elites of 2 centuries ago, and, as they did so now we do, and throw out the baby with the bathwater.

So that a review of modern theology in "The Nation" is unthinkable; because the idea that church could matter, that Christianity could matter, except as an obstacle to the ideas promoted by "The Nation," is unthinkable.  Almost, dare I say, inconceivable.

As I said sometime back when I began this blog, this is more a publicly accessible notebook than it is a polished publication.  So consider these the thoughts I woke up with, the preliminaries to an appreciation and examination of a few ideas found in Bonhoeffer which I want to get around to discussing, or at least presenting.

We'll see where it leads....

Serendipity? Synchronicity?

Partly because I agree with Rick:

The gentleman in the originally-cited post is concerned that the Episcopal catechism, which seems to have been carefully drafted with modern sensibilities in mind, is offensive to his post-modern mind. He is looking to see if he can find any communion conformable to himself before forming his own denomination. I do not put him beyond God's mercy or the Church's welcome. But I think his attitude, a very common American one, perhaps the most common, is a stumbling block.
Rick Allen

Partly because I had some time to kill yesterday in the church library. Connecting nothing with nothing, as is my wont, I offer these observations.

Church libraries are like time capsules:

"Echoing Jesus' polemic against the religious institution of his day, Father James Kavanaugh presents a devastating yet deeply moving account of what pharisees and high priest have done in the church of our generation."--Father Gregory Baum, O.S.A.

"One of the most soul-searching and progressive statements I have read in years. It will move millions of hears and minds."--Rabbi Samuel M. Silver, National Chaplain, Jewish War Veterans

"Here is what millions have felt and desperately needed to be said. A superbly written and courageous book. It is the religious book of our generation. This book will move the world."--Mary Harrington Hall, Managing Editor, Psychology Today*

"It is the most powerful, most persuasive plea of this kind that I have ever read."--Rev. Richard C. Grant, Retired Professor, Union Theological Seminary

The book? A Modern Priest Looks at his Outdated Church, by Father James Kavanaugh (New York: Trident Press 1967) Yes, James Kavanaugh the poet. Apparently his poetry (no comment) had more impact on the world than his theological views. But the importance of hype in American culture is not really the point here (but it is the elephant in the room, isn't it? I'm intrigued by the call of humility of Christianity and the call to hyperbole of American culture, especially since we are "a Christian nation." But, as usual, I digress...) Kavanaugh obviously was not the Bishop Spong of his generation, and more than Bishop Spong speaks for any identifiable generation. What really struck me was how quaint things look from only a short distance.

3 years before publishing this book, as Kavanaugh himself admits in it, he published a pseudonymous article in The Saturday Evening Post (back when that was the magazine in America; even I still mourn its demise, though probably I shouldn't), about why he, a Catholic priest, should be allowed to marry. That one, of course, is still around; the controversy, I mean. It was the hype on the book jacket (quoted above) that really caught my attention. Clearly the more things change...

..Except things have changed. Another book on the shelf was a history of the Episcopal Church (to be clear, the one in America, not to be confused with the Anglican Communion). This I needed to read, so I sat down with it, and quickly found a reference to another book I'd just seen on the shelf (small world, indeed!): The Secular Meaning of the Gospel: An Original Enquiry, by Paul M. Van Buren. This title, the history book told me, had gained Van Buren some notoreity, not to say almost infamy, and gotten him dubbed a "death of God" theologian. As all of that was recent history for the history book, little more was said. But Van Buren's book, published in 1963, had a lot more to say.

In the introduction alone there are references to Rudolf Bultmann, Shubert Ogden (one of Bultmann's students), Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is a fairly serious attempt at theology for the non-theologian. Van Buren starts, as everyone did, wiht Bultmann's critique of theology by challenging modern humanity's ability to assimilate a 1st century world view in which heaven could be understand in terms of 7 ascending spheres and God's transcendence cannot be decribed in terms of the modern understanding of the world. To encapsulate this, he starts with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Honesty demands that we recognize that we must live in the world as if there were no God. And this is just what we do recognize--before God! God himself drives us to this realization.--God makes us know that we must live as men who can get along without Him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34)! We stand continually in the presence of the God who makes us live in the world without the God-hypothesis."

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1951), p. 241, tr. Paul Van Buren, quoted in Paul M. Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York, The Macmillan Company 1963), p. 1.

You can see where the "Death of God" label came from. In fact, though I haven't studied it (it was considered obsolete shortly after it was labeled), this is probably where it started: with the Lutheran theologian who proclaimed the absolute necessity of discipleships and who plotted to kill Hitler. Ironies abound.

Van Buren represents the theologians of the 1960's who were concerned that "modernity" was leaving them behind. But, it turns out, the future isn't what it used to be. Part of that is attributable, in part no doubt, to faulty analysis. Despite the explicit reliance of Bultmann on Kierkegaard in the former's magnum opus, The Gospel of John, there is no mention of Kierkegaard in this book at all. Those studies were just about to break forth and institute changes Van Buren and the theologians of his time could not foresee. But the other cause is just as unforeseeable: these theologians, seeking to respond to reality, also sought to reshape it. So they pushed reality: and reality pushed back.

Some of that is just failure of vision. You can't read Niebuhr's work in the 1950's and catch even a glimmer of the Civil Rights movement, and while King clearly read Niebuhr in seminary (as Taylor Branch records), he doesn't often cite Niebuhr or Bonhoeffer in his speeches or letters, except to drive a point home to his fellow pastors about the importance of justice. No one who marched in the South was discussing the "Death of God" as a motivation for their activism. Neither, of course, would they have gone far listening to the Gospel as preached by Jerry Falwell or Joel Osteen. But the assumption that modern man was forged in the image of either Immanuel Kant (Van Buren mentions the Idealist philosophers of Germany) or phenomenology (Van Buren mentions Heidegger, but Sartre and Levinas and French phenomenology would soon rush the stage) or Anglo-American empiricism, simply hasn't proven true.

And that's the fight many of us are still fighting. Having chosen sides with either Dawkins-Dennett-Sam Harris, Spong-Crossan-Borg, or Falwell-Osteen-Dobson, we continue to fight over the "soul" of "modern humanity." But is that the fight at all? Given our propensity for hype and outrageous categorical statements, is perhaps the problem one of our own making?


*I can't help but note I think I read that encomium, in a review of Sam Harris' The End of Faith. Obviously going in a different direction, but basically the same idea.

"Nietzsche is dead."--God

I haven't read the book (and don't intend to; life is too short), but according to the early reviews, Peter Watson's "intellectual history" The Age of Atheists starts with Nietzsche and ends with the three horsemen of the New Atheist apocalypse:  Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.  Funny, that; starting with a philologist and influential philosopher, and ending with three dilettantes:

Thanks to such discoveries we will eventually be able to say, objectively, that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, because once we put religion in its place, “[w]ell-being captures all that we can intelligibly value.”

Watson is referring to Sam Harris there.  Since he starts with Neitzsche, I wonder if Watson bothers to mention the "God is Dead" theological movement of the '60's, one inspired more by the late thinking of Bonhoeffer than by the mad German.  It was a movement trying to take seriously Bonhoeffer's idea that God was about to become irrelevant to the modern world; if so, the thinking went, maybe we can establish a "religionless Christianity" by accepting that God, or at least all the "old" ideas about God, are (is) dead.  I still think those ashes might be worth stirring, but I haven't seen anything indicate Watson took any interest.

As for this evaluation of Harris:  Thanks, but I've seen Omelas, and I don't want to live there.  Besides, I wasn't aware that any religiously grounded ethic was not based on what "we can intelligibly value."  The conflict, as ever, is over what those terms mean:  both "value" and "intelligibly."  And that has been true since at least Euripides' "Medea." But then we are dealing with remarkably ignorant men:

Harris argued from the failures of the kibbutzim in Israel that some forms of social life are less moral than others; that conservative societies have higher rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy and pornography; that it is societies whose members are allowed to maximize themselves and others that are the most successful changing morally, and improving, he emphasized—for instance, we are less prepared than we used to be to accept collateral damage in conflict situations.

Harris as sociologist makes out no better than Harris as philosopher, or as observer of current events.  I'll notify the people of Pakistan immediately that the drone strikes have stopped because Americans are now too moral to accept the casual deaths of foreigners.  As soon as that actually happens, anyway.

One of his prime conclusions was that “there may be nothing more important than human cooperation.”

Honestly, this is so stupid it's criminal. This is not an argument, it's the plea of Rodney King:  "Why can't we just all get along?"  Except for Harris, the plea is followed by "Kill all the noncooperators!  That'll fix it!"  And no, I'm not exaggerating.  This argument is also pretty much the claim of everyone from the Roman Empire to 20th century fascism and communism.  The only problem is when some people think there is something more important than cooperation; and what do we do with those troublemakers?  Then again, Harris doesn't seem to have much problem with imperialism, so long as it is on his side.  But from a purely practical point of view, cooperation is the problem; how, precisely, do we attain it?  (I also think Watson's reading of Harris and Dawkins is absolute bunkum; but that's yet another matter.)

As for "improving" morally; don't make me laugh; especially since Harris clearly thinks all Muslims and Christian fundamentalists present a clear and present danger, and should be wiped from the face of the earth.  All in the name of being morally superior, of course.

Gee, who else has taken that stance against other groups of people within living memory?  Sit down, Mr. Godwin, you aren't needed here.  The thing speaks for itself, as the lawyers say.

Or there's this, from the year 1984:

Dawkins then went on to quote from his colleague Peter Atkins’s book The Second Law(1984) [i.e., of thermodynamics]: “We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”

Which is on the cutting edge of 1843:

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling.

Been there, done that, gone through it with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus.  A.N. Wilson covered it in popular form in 1999, for pity's sake.  Watson's book is supposedly a history that takes this all into account, at least according to the reviews.  How can anyone seriously argue that Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris are blazing a new path, except  to do so from truly benighted ignorance?

G.E.Moore.  Aristotle.  Boethius.  Cicero.  I can name philosophers ancient and modern who have essayed systems of ethical behavior without reference to religious beliefs or mores, and I haven't even touched on Eastern philosophy.  Per the reviews, Watson can, too; but there's nothing of that in this excerpt.  Why do these "atheists" insist they have just now discovered fire and invented the wheel when all they have is disdain for an imagined "other" and a philosophical tool as useful as a wet noodle?   I am convinced the only reason these people post and publish is to find someone they can look down on so they can feel superior.  Stenger conflates all religions with some version of Christianity he keeps in his head so he can stick pins in it, and clergy with theologians, a distinction and difference any clergy would insist on.  From Dawkins to Dennett to Watson they all seem to be fighting with the ghost of Jerry Falwell, when they aren't still wrestling with issues from the Victorian era (issues wrestled among public intellectuals, too; not so much among ethicists, theologians, or philosophers).  None of them want to engage a serious discussion (Dawkins likens knowing anything about theology or philosophy of religion to being well informed about fairies and unicorns).  All they do is parade their ignorance and set fire to straw men of their own imagining.

It's pathetic, really.  But it is also what passes for public intellectual discourse in America, where Stephen Pinker gets more regard than Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Dennett is more likely to be quoted than Jacques Derrida.

In the past few decades, both evolutionary biologists like Dawkins and cosmologists—physicists and astronomers—have mounted a spirited attack on the basic dimensions of religion, in particular the main monotheisms, and in doing so have tried hard to reshape what—for the sake of a better phrase—we may call our spiritual predicament.

Really?  We're doomed to repeat the 19th century all over again?  Or did you miss it the first time?  Because I think we've had that discussion, and by the 1920's it sort of came to a head, and we all moved on.

Or having learned nothing from history, are you determined to repeat it?

One of the comments at Salon refers to Pinker's assertions about the decline in violence in history as "Victorian triumphalism."  So maybe it's appropriate our public intellectuals are now atheists and philosophers who have the respect of the Victorians among us.  Frankly I always preferred Browning and Hardy over Tennyson.  ("Christmas:  1924" beats "In Memoriam" all to heck and gone for pungent insight; much as I still like portions of the latter.)  And I dare say this kerfuffle looks very serious to Very Important People, but the fact is the fears of Victorian England about a meltdown in social order were vastly overblown (and self-interested; those in power worried, as ever, about retaining their power) and the meltdown that finally came (thanks largely to World War I, which shattered the European ideal of decency and good order on the Continent) was well behind us all by the 1960's.

It's about time the "New Atheists" joined the 21st century, and quit wishing for the return of the 19th (is it any coincidence so many of the "leading lights" of the New Atheists are either British or products of elite East Coast institutions?).  And the sooner they actually learn half as much as Nietzsche knew, the better for the rest of us they insist on pestering.

Sunday Morning very bright....

This isn't exactly finished, but I stopped writing on it, and then I thought: "It's a blog post. What the heck?"

Fr. Jake (bless him!) reminds me of a theological point I don't spend enough time dwelling on:

And what is it all about? Grace. We are forgiven before we believe; before we confess. We are raised up before we even know we are dead.

I like to think I've talked about cheap grace here before. Bonhoeffer had a very distinctive understanding of it in The Cost of Discipleship, but my understanding of it is radically different from his (and even Bonhoeffer changed his mind on the subject before he died). Grace has to be cheap, because there's no way we could afford it. It has to be beyond price in order to be grace. And if we pay anything for it, then we buy it, and it isn't a gift at all, as Derrida reminds us. But Derrida takes us further: if we even know we've received grace, we haven't received a gift at all. How, then, are we to take grace?

Only, as Capon says, in death; or in dieing. There is no other reasonable option that isn't an option offered by the world. People asked me, in seminary and out of it: why Christianity? What does it offer? And I was troubled by the question, because all I knew of Christianity was that it offered a theory of damnation which first had to be accepted, in order to accept the theory of salvation that came later. And that theory of salvation came only be a conviction of the mind, not necessarily the heart, unless any conviction from a terrorized heart was a sound conviction at all, and a basis for a gospel of love and grace. But I had rejected that theory of damnation, so what was left? A salvation you didn't really need to take, because hell was no longer an option, no longer the non-believer's fate?

But if Christianity speaks directly to the human condition, and offers an option no one else can grant, or even think about? What then? And so:

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.

--Terry Eagleton.

It's true; but what hope is offered in that? And what Capon says about the parable he's reviewing can as good be said about almost any parable Jesus taught:

Now you ask yourself a question. Do you like that parable? Of course, you don't like it. The point is that it violates every sense you and I have about the fact that we really are basically doing fairly well. If only other people were as nice and considerate and as wonderful as we are, the world would be a better place to live in and God says, "No. That will not work." It can't be done that way. It can't be done by people who think they are winners. It can only be done by people who are willing to admit they are losers and then who are willing to trust God in the death of their losing to do it for them, to deliver them the gift of a reconciliation with God...

...We have a God, in Jesus' proclamation, a God who couldn't get a union card in the God union, who couldn't make it because we have set up the rules for God. A God has to be a punisher; a God has to be a judge; a God has to be a respectable God. He has to do all the things that enforce morality, and God doesn't. On the cross, in Jesus, He drops dead to the whole subject of sin and shuts up about the whole subject of condemnation. It is over. As St. Paul says in the beginning of the 8th Chapter of Romans: "There is, therefore, now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus."

Because, as I know I've said on more than one occassion, there is no power without resistance; and the gospel of Jesus is the gospel of powerlessness over power. Now that becomes a wildly radical gospel that calls into question whether any power can ever be good; whether pacificism is merely a distorted version of the Gospels based on a Renaissance humanism, or is actually the undistorted vision of the early church, of those who knew Jesus best.

I have to admit, again, the answer to that one is not easy. Re-watching a recent Dr. Who episode, where the eponymous character had to perform a moral act of defense of the Earth by giving those who threatened it the choice not to attack (even though he knew, by their very nature, they would never take the option), I thought almost unbidden of the words of John's Gospel: "Greater love has no man, than he lay down his life for a friend." But that's a moral act of sacrifice, not the moral act of compelling others to sacrifice; maybe the difference lies there. Still, Niebuhr's point was that the church could not call on people not to sacrifice in the face of the threat of Nazi Germany; could it, however, call on people to sacrifice? Where is our moral obligation in the face of death?

Obedience

Abraham came to see Ares, and while they were sitting together, a brother came and asked Ares, "Tell me, what must I do to be saved?" The hermit said, 'Go, eat bread and salt every evening for a whole year, then come back, and I will talk to you again.' So the brother went away and did so, and at the end of the year came again to see Ares. By chance, Abraham was with him again. This time Ares said to the brother, 'Go, fast for a year, and eat every second day.' When he had gone, Abraham said to Ares, 'Why, when you put a light yoke on all the brothers, have you laid such a grievous burden on this brother?' Ares replied, 'Other brothers come to ask questions and go away just as they came. But this brother comes to hear a word for God's sake, and he is one who works hard for the Lord and takes the greatest trouble to do whatever I tell him. That is why I speak the word of God to him.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote: "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." What is lost in that conception is the idea that Christ does not call every Christian to such service. Christ spoke to, blessed, taught, corrected, smiled on, healed, and benefited, many people in his earthly ministry. He called 12, and then 72, and then at least two who, it turned out, weren't fit to be disciples.

But he didn't call us all to "come and die" (as even Bonhoeffer later recognized). This story, and this one are good reminders of what obedience means:

Arsenius, of blessed memory, once said to Alexander, 'When you've finished your palm leaves, come and have supper with me. But if pilgrims arrive, eat with them.' Alexander worked away gently and unhurriedly. At supper time he had not finished his palm leaves. Though he was hungry he wanted to obey the order of Arsenius, so he went on until he had finished the palm leaves. Arsenius noticed that he was late and had his own supper for he thought that perhaps pilgrims had come, and that Alexander was eating with them. Alexander finished his task, and in the evening came to see Arenius. Arsenius said to him, 'Did pilgrims come?' He replied, 'No.' Arsenius said, 'Then why didn't you come?' He replied, 'Because you told me to come when I had finished the palm leaves. I did what you told me and di not come because I have only just finished the work.' Arsenius admired the exactness of his obedience, and said to him, 'You should lay aside your work sooner, so as to say your psalms, and fetch water for yourself, otherwise your body will soon grow weak.'

"I can connect/Nothing with nothing...."

The picture of the Knight of Faith Johannes de Silentio presents in Fear and Trembling is often related to the experience of Christian mystics who find that total immersion in the Godhead leads not to an otherworldly contemplation of perfection (a la Plato's telos of the soul: to venerate the Good and remain in its presence forever, because any movement away from the good is a movement away from perfection and so toward imperfection; an incomprehensible movement to Plato's Hellenistic mind), but to deeper relationship with the world, like Thomas Merton's famous experience on the street corner in Louisville, Kentucky (one of my favorite cities; someone someday may declare that corner "holy ground.") This experience not only undermines the Platonism inherent in Christian doctrine, but undergirds left rev.'s point here:

My take on Bonhoeffer's speculation in the context of SKs Knight of Faith is that although one lives in such a way as to seem divorced from the ultimate, in the sense that one does not focus on it, nevertheless, the ultimate will only be known in and through the act of living in the penultimate, a task the KoF addresses with joy and contentment.

But we are still stuck with the concepts of ultimate and penultimate, and I want to see if we can unstick ourselves from those.

The sense of that boundary, of course, goes back at least to Augustine. He didn't originate it, but he gave it its strongest argument, basing it as he did on his perception of the flesh as the obstacle to the soul's contemplation of God (the "ultimate," for Bonhoeffer; the telos of the soul for Plato). This is, in turn, no accident, as Augustine is in some ways the most "Platonic" of the Church Fathers, and Plato all but argues for complete asceticism in the Phaedo (a point often lost in drawing lessons from this dialogue is that without the body and the world, the soul can never recover the knowledge it needs to escape the wheel of reincarnation and ascend to the realm of the Good.) Perhaps that position was forced on him by his need to refute Manichee. No matter, because the question is: is the sense of boundary really so critical to our sense of God? Because focus on boundaries is what leads to exclusion, and exclusion is not the experience of the Christian mystics (whereas Plato's hypothesis of the contemplation of the good is not the experience of anyone since, like death itself, that is a bourne from which no traveller returns.). The mystical experience is that focus on God eradicates boundaries, much as it did for Merton on that street corner. So, while taking up Plato's Hellenism within Christian theology, we have reason to lay it down again almost immediately.

The Knight of Faith does seem to live in the penultimate, in anticipation of the ultimate, but the problem is the Knight of Faith does something quite impossible for the rest of us: he relinquishes despair by grasping completely the thorn of despair. He yields completely the notion of grasping the ultimate, and thereby, paradoxically, grasps it. Except he doesn't, of course. That's the purpose of de Silentio's meditation of the akedeh of Abraham. The individual grasps eternity; but eternity is the one thing we cannot grasp at all.

Abraham sacrifices Isaac fully, says de Silentio. He lets go of Isaac before the knife comes down. If not for the angel stopping his hand, Isaac's life would be taken from him. Isaac is bound following the ritual for binding a sacrificial animal, the akedeh. Isaac's life is already offered to God before Abraham can raise the knife. All that is left is to complete the deed, and only in that is he stopped. God, as was said to Jeremiah, tests the heart to find out what is in it. In Abraham's heart, Isaac is gone. How does he ever get his son back?

That's the question of the teleological suspension of the ethical, the context in which the entire discussion of Fear and Trembling takes place. And that very issue, the issue of the effect of the ultimate (in Tillich's sense of ultimate concern, or source of being) being known in human existence, is the mysterium tremendum that shakes an individual to her very core, and which never stops shaking it. Do we ever, in other words, reach a stage of harmony with such a condition? Or are we left in the state of fear, and trembling?

The philosophical character, de Silentio, is pursuing that question from the outside, looking in. He describes the ideal person who would represent the telos he is seeking. But that person is not a mystic, not a contemplative, not apparently more religious than anyone else, at all. That person is not even Abraham, because even Abraham was uprooted from his world by the call of God, and flung headlong into the unknown; flung into the unknown, in fact, over and over again. Even the connection between Abraham and the Knight of Faith is an ironic one. It is philosophy undermining reality, trying to reduce it to a system that can be contained and comprehended within a narrow sphere. One can never read Kierkegaard without being aware of his antipathy for the systematizing of Hegel, and his awareness of the corrosive irony of Socrates (an acid which ultimately destroys all and leaves not even itself behind).

This doesn't quite get us to left rev.'s point (you will have noticed), that we only know the ultimate through living in the penultimate. But we're at least slouching toward that goal. In the meantime, we have another question from the left rev. to answer: "If we had no eschatology, would we have need of a soteriology?" So, unless we are distracted again, that's where we will go next.

To be is to do? Or to do is to be?

You can assess any position in philosophy by the relationship it proposes between being and knowing. Some traditions, like the Greek one of Plato and Aristotle, place ontology in the center, while others, like the modern period inaugurated by Descartes, put the emphasis on epistemology. Clearly, however, a complete philosophy will have to do justice to both. Unfortunately, there is a deep and irreducible tension between the two perspectives that makes a reconciliation difficult to achieve. The ontological perspective, "the view from nowhere" (to exploit Thomas Nagel's evocative phrase) seems to leave no room for "the world as I found it" (to borrow an expression from Wittgenstein). If we note further that the world as we experience it, "our world," is essentially temporal, whereas the logical and empirical conditions for experience as such are more spatial, in the most general sense, than temporal, we begin to take a true measure of the problem Godel set for himself. (Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time. I'm away from my home computer; the page no. will show up this afternoon).

This is the dividing line now between "Continental" philosophers and "analytical" ones. By nationality, the former is primarily French, the latter primarily Anglo-American, which is as convenient a place to draw the line as any other, actually, and in some ways more illuminating. Napoleon is supposed to have dismissed the British as "a nation of shopkeepers," and in some ways he was certainly right, and that is certainly the heritage carried to fullest flower in American culture where the only way to determine the value of anything is by what it will fetch in the marketplace. But that, too, reduces to an issue of ontology, or epistemology; if you care to look at it that way.

Epistemology concerns the questions of what we can know, while ontology concerns the questions of what we are. Obviously the two overlap each other, and it is impossible to consider one apart from the other; the question, as usual, is one of emphasis. But it is also a question of practice, praxis as the seminaries teach us to call it. And that, to me, is the most interesting issue. With the elevation of a new Pope, questions of religious comity and ecumenism are suddenly in the air; hopes and questions about reconciliation abound. But, as Yourgrau says, "there is a deep and irreducible tension between the two perspectives that makes a reconciliation difficult to achieve." That tension is over the issue of belief: is religion a matter of faith? or is it a matter of practice? What we know? Or what we are?

The Western emphasis, going back to Hellenestic Greece, has been on epistemology. What we know, determines who we are. This is the stance of Socrates in the Phaedo, where he elucidates the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and of reincarnation, and of learning enough to achieve the "good" (the parable of the cave, usually considered the "heart" of Plato's epistemology, seems to me to be a refinement of thought from the Phaedo, although scholarship may prove my conjecture completely wrong). It is our knowledge that perfects us, that makes us more wholly who we are meant to be. "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free," says Jesus in John's gospel, the most Hellenistic of the four canonicals. By our age, via Romanticism, this becomes the doctrince of "self-actualization," one paved in part by that most Romantic of religious thinkers and theologians, Søren Kierkegaard. As Romanticism taught us, itself reaching back across the centuries to, like the Enlightenment, to the Greeks, our solitary goal is to become most wholly who we are. The twist Romanticism supplied, in the face of the dehumanizing of humanity because of the rise of the machines, was to separate the individual even from society, to set the Byronic figure even against the gods themselves. The Industrial Revolution shattered the Great Chain of Being, and the Romantics kicked it away defiantly. Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer after him, and countless Protestant theologians in between, despised the trappings of Christendom that required no personal commitment on the part of the individual. Christendom that flowered into a world religion because of the conversion of Constantine was now to be seen as the domain only of those faithful enough to struggle with the paradox and the pain of seeing themselves in the hands of the living God. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die," Bonhoeffer famously stated (and later reconsidered). Kierkegaard, who had written his aesthetic and religious works and planned to retire to a rural Danish Lutheran church (he was a Lutheran seminary student), instead wrote his brutal assault on Bishop Mynster following the latter's death, and upon the state church itself, in his Attack upon 'Christendom.' "What comes out of a person" became the most important thing; but what good could possibly come out of a person with no faith? Faith without works is dead, but works without faith is surely without justification, too.

Which was not, and has not been, the only understanding of Christianity in the world. It has been, rather, the primary Western understanding. The tension has actually been between practice (though not necessarily praxis), and belief. The "liturgical" Western churches, following more or less on the lines of the Roman Catholic church, have always felt a tension between theology (matters of belief) and liturgy (matters of prayer and practice). Even now, a question already arising from the nascent papacy of Benedict XVI is: will he reinstate the Latin mass? A question of practice, informed by questions of theology. But does the practice inform the theology; or the theology, the practice?

Protestant churches feel the same tension, but prefer to emphasize practice arising from belief. The true believer expresses their belief in the practice of worship, preferably by the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions, although in vigor, not tranquility. The emphasis is on the practice, which in turn informs the theology.

But the Eastern churches have followed a different course. The Eastern worship, to begin with (and to speak most generally) centers not on the experience of the individual, but on the atmosphere appropriate to the one being worshipped. Western liturgy tries to recreate, anew and again, the vision of the throne room from First Isaiah. Eastern worship assumes the throne room, and proceeds to honor the presence of the cosmic King. Emphasis is not on personal experience so much as presence. What is in the heart, as God tells Jeremiah, is a mystery even to God. But the person who can practice the prayers and discipline of the religious life is never very far from the true presence.

You may ask: but what if the practice is hollow? But that is a very Western question. Even Tariq Ali, a self-described atheist, says that growing up in Pakistan he was a Muslim simply because everyone was a Muslim. This offends our Western sensibilities, because we consider religion a "private" matter but one the individual must accept or reject. In Eastern cultures, however, the question of acceptance, and its obverse coin face, rejection, simply never occur, says Ali. He was an atheist; and he was a Muslim; and he sees no contradiction in those positions.

Which brings us back to Yourgrau: is it a question of being, or a question of knowing? Most criticism of religion in the Western world focusses on the question of knowing. If we don't know God exists, or don't know exactly what God wants, or don't know for sure which rules of God apply, or how to interpret them, how then do we claim as Christians to know anything at all? Likewise, if we do know these things, how do we restrain from imposing them on everyone else, from defining our truth as the truth absolute and even if we are tolerant of other truths, of not measuring them against ours and finding them, inevitably and if we are honest, wanting?

But what if it is a question of being, instead?