Bonhoeffer on the magical powers of leadership

Thanks for the interest in my paper on Bonhoeffer's critique of leadership. This should eventually be published in a collection of essays resulting from the colloquium, so I'll let you know when it's available. In the mean time, here's another excerpt from the first part of the paper (before it gets into a detailed reading of Life Together – “God hates visionaries” and all that):

Bonhoeffer spent much of his life opposing leadership. When Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1933, Bonhoeffer was one of the first voices in Germany to urge for caution. Just two days after Hitler’s installation, 26-year-old Bonhoeffer gave a radio broadcast on “The Younger Generation’s Altered View of the Concept of Leader [Führer].” Bonhoeffer acknowledged that leadership is a normal and necessary part of life. “Naturally, there have always been leaders. Where there is community there is leadership.” But he argued that the concept of political leadership had been transformed in modern Germany; the German Youth Movement had dangerously projected all its longings and aspirations on to the concept of the Leader. Thus, Bonhoeffer said, “the originally prosaic idea of political authority is transformed into the political-messianic idea of leader that we see today.” Authentic leadership, in Bonhoeffer’s view, is the administration of an objective office. “The leader points to the office.” Where political leadership fuses with quasi-religious functions – giving people hope, investing their lives with meaning, awakening their spiritual yearnings – it becomes a dangerous and potentially unlimited power. Leadership becomes “personal and not objective.” In such circumstances, the leader (Führer) can very easily become the misleader (Verführer) – not so much because of anything innately bad in the leader, but because of the powerful illusory longings projected on to the leader. As a sort of definition of authentic leadership, Bonhoeffer remarks: “The true leader must always be able to disappoint.” Though the radio address was cut off before it finished, Bonhoeffer’s text concluded with the somber warning that all leaders are only “penultimate authorities” under the authority of God; the “leader and office that turn themselves into gods mock God.”

In the years that followed, Bonhoeffer applied his critique of political leadership to the question of leadership in Christian communities. In the 1933 Bethel Confession, drafted by Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, the nature of Christian ministry is defined in explicit contrast to leadership. “The power of the ministry,” the confession states, does not depend “on the powers with which a human soul may be gifted.” Hence “we … protest against the attempt to apply the modern leadership principle to the preaching ministry.” Christian ministry, as “service to the Word,” is indeed “the opposite of any magical powers of leadership.” Here the point seems to be that Christian ministry consists in responsibility to an objective office and an objective word that God has given; it does not depend on influence, charisma, or what Bonhoeffer elsewhere called the “melting together” of souls. 

Bonhoeffer's critique of leadership

On the weekend I'll be presenting a paper at a colloquium on interfaith persepectives on leadership. My paper (representing the Protestant tradition) is on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological critique of leadership in Life Together. Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

Eight decades later, Bonhoeffer’s dark warnings about the dangers of leadership sound eccentric to a culture marked by a seemingly boundless enthusiasm for leadership, charisma, and influence. The current neglect of a more cautionary perspective on leadership is hard to account for, given that the greatest and most charismatic leaders of the past century have also been responsible for the greatest wickedness. Bonhoeffer’s warnings – written before the beginning of the Second World War – sound today like prophecies. His critical perspective on leadership, informed by Protestant tradition and by keen observation of the political culture of 1930s Germany, remains a prophetic challenge to any account in which leadership as such is regarded as an unequivocal or unambiguous good. For Bonhoeffer, the good to which we ought to aspire is participation in an ordinary, flawed human community. What such a community needs is not vision or influence or psychological management, but “the one word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.”

Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, and Christian discernment

The new issue of Uniting Church Studies 16:1 (2010) is devoted to theological debate about the church's proposed constitutional preamble on indigenous Australians (which I've blogged about before). It includes my essay, "'In his own strange way': Indigenous Australians and the Church's Confession" – if you'd like a copy, just send me an email. I've posted a few excerpts on earlier occasions – here's one more small excerpt, where I discuss Bonhoeffer's relation to Gandhi (a topic I hope to explore in detail one of these days):

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This exercise of discernment once more involves the question of the church’s posture or position. Discernment is not an exercise of ecclesiastical power; it is not an expression of the church’s superior vantage point. Rather discernment opens the church to judgment. [...] It is an act of humiliating obedience; it is a dangerous and necessary enactment of the church’s confession—the confession that the church has nothing of itself, and everything from Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer [...] provides an instructive example of this practice of Christian discernment. In the early 1930s, amidst intense struggle with the Deutsche Christen, Bonhoeffer felt increasingly drawn to India. He wrote to Gandhi, asking if he could spend several months sitting at his feet and sharing in his pattern of daily life. Bonhoeffer wanted to form a monastic community in Germany—he believed the future of the German church depended on it—and he planned to use Gandhi as his model, including Gandhi’s commitment to ‘life together’, ascetic practices, nonviolent resistance, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. In a letter of 1934, Bonhoeffer describes his eagerness to learn from Gandhi:

It sometimes seems to me that there’s more Christianity in [India’s] ‘heathenism’ than in the whole of our Reich Church. Christianity did in fact come from the East originally, but it has become so westernised and so permeated by civilised thought that, as we can now see, it is almost lost to us. (Bonhoeffer, London, 1933-1935, 152)

In this surprising place, Bonhoeffer discerns the work of Christ. And this discernment is simultaneously an experience of judgment. The authentic ‘Christianity’ of a Hindu community becomes a mirror in which the western church perceives its own profligacy and degradation. Bonhoeffer does not wish to become a Hindu, nor is he interested in anything resembling interfaith dialogue. It is rather his exclusive commitment to Christ that drives him to Gandhi. He discerns Christ’s way in Gandhi; while the church crumbles to ruins all around him, Bonhoeffer perceives Jesus Christ living and active in India, and so he resolves to seek Christ there, to learn from the ‘heathens’ what it means to become a disciple of Christ.

As the church exercises discernment, it is thus judged and questioned from outside itself. It perceives surprising signs of Christ’s free and unprincipled activity in the world, and it finds its own life subjected to Christ’s searching and commanding Word. From this position—not a position of superior knowledge about God, but a position of judgment—the church hears Christ’s call and confesses. From this position, the church refuses to regard itself as the exclusive arena of God’s activity; it looks not to itself but to Jesus Christ.

Audio sermon on Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If you're interested, my sermon yesterday on Dietrich Bonhoeffer can be heard online. At the start I refer to a famous photograph from Sydney 1945 – "the dancing man":

On reading Bonhoeffer

This weekend, I'll be preaching a sermon about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (I was asked to preach on any historical saint or theologian, so I immediately replied, "Only if it's Bonhoeffer!")

The new edition of Bonoheffer's complete works has been my most enriching, challenging and disturbing theological experience over the past couple of years. Since I moved to Sydney, my teaching and writing have been hugely influenced by these books. Sometimes Bonhoeffer has even made me (seriously) consider quitting theology and finding an honest job – like Jeffrey Stout, who stopped going to church when he read Karl Barth's dogmatics (Barth made an honest man of him). I'm still undecided on this point.

Anyway, I'm really excited about giving a sermon on Bonhoeffer. The lives of saints are a text – or rather, they are exegesis of the biblical text. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says, it's the ones who love God that really know something about God, so we ought to listen to the witness of their lives. In any case, the timing couldn't be better for a sermon on Bonoheffer. I've got three new Bonhoeffer books sitting by my bedside – you should try it sometime, it's like going to sleep with a stick of dynamite under your pillow:

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Bonhoeffer Works Vol. 8; Fortress 2010), 750 pp. – This whole series of volumes has rocked my world. So my hands trembled with anticipation when the latest volume arrived: the complete collection of Bonhoeffer's momentous and terrifying prison writings.
• Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance (T&T Clark 2010), 439 pp. – This looks like a great biography, the fruit of decades of work and reflection. It's premised on the fact that "Bonhoeffer did not want to be venerated; he wanted to be heard. Anyone who puts him up on a lonely pedestal is defusing that which, to this day, makes a thoughtful encounter with him worthwhile."
• Joel Lawrence, Bonhoeffer: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark), 134 pp. – This one looks quite good too. I'm glad to see he emphasises the centrality of Bonhoeffer's christological understanding of the church: "The church [is] the place where the life of Christ is being created in history by the work of the Holy Spirit."

There's also a new popularly written biography, which I haven't seen yet: Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson 2010). If Amazon sales are anything to go by, it looks like it's a big success. Anyone read it?

Why I (still) confess the filioque

In theology, Eastern Orthodoxy is the new black. These days it's harder and harder to find any serious Protestant commitment to the western confession of filioque. The denomination in which I'm teaching, for instance, omits the filioque from liturgical confessions of the Nicene Creed.

In recent Protestant theology, reluctance to confess the filioque seems to arise mainly from a general ecumenical sentiment on the one hand (as though such a confession would be impolite), and from an ill-informed and stereotyped criticism of Augustine on the other (as one finds everywhere in Colin Gunton's works, for example).

In one of my recent pneumatology classes, I tried to argue for the contemporary importance of the filioque. My argument was roughly as follows: In the preaching and worship of liberal Protestant churches, there is a good deal of emphasis on the autonomy of the Spirit. The Spirit is often invoked without reference to Christ, or to the biblical narrative, or to the events of salvation-history. We have hymns and prayers that celebrate "the Spirit" as a kind of generic Spirit of creation, a benevolent life-force that is universally active and available. The role of this Spirit, presumably, is to grant unmediated religious access to God – a kind of second saviour, an alternative to Christ. I once attended a particularly ghastly eucharist service, where the bread and wine were not once related to Christ, but simply to "the Spirit" who is at work in all the gifts of creation. Such a Spirit clearly could not be said to proceed "from the Son"!

It's precisely here that the filioque could function to safeguard the church's confession of the gospel. The role of the filioque is to tie the Spirit's work indissolubly to God's act in Christ; to confess that the action of the Spirit is part of the story of salvation-history, and not some independent avenue of God's presence in the world. A Spirit who proceeds simply "from the Father" can very easily be understood as a second way of salvation, operating remoto Christo and floating free of the events of salvation-history.

Karl Barth's defence of the filioque was partly motivated by this kind of concern. He wondered whether the Eastern church's refusal of the filioque is "a reflection of the very mystically oriented piety of the East, which, bypassing the revelation in the Son, would relate human beings directly to the original Revealer, the principium or fount of deity" (Göttingen Dogmatics, 1:129-30). (I look forward to learning much more about this when Ashgate releases David Guretzki's new book on Karl Barth and the Filioque – due out next month.)

This week I've also been immersed in Volumes 12 (Berlin, 1932-1933) and 13 (London, 1933-1935) of Bonhoeffer's Works. And I've been struck by the importance of the filioque in the struggle of the Confessing Church against the Deutsche Christen. The 1933 Bethel Confession (Bonhoeffer was one of its main writers) includes a section on the Holy Spirit which foregrounds the filioque:

"The church teaches that the Holy Spirit, true God for all eternity, is not created, not made, but proceeds from the Father and the Son.... We reject the false doctrine that the Holy Spirit can be recognized without Christ in the creation and its orders. For it is always as proceeding from the Son that the Holy Spirit judges this fallen world and establishes the new order, above all nations, of the church as the people of God. Only because the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son does the church receive its mission to all nations" (Bonhoeffer, Berlin, 1932-1933, p. 399).

The notes from a 1933 pastors' conference records a discussion of this confession between Bonhoeffer and others:

In National Socialism, it is "first nature's grace, then Christ's grace. First creation, then redemption. This goes back to liberal theology. What is decisive is that the filioque is missing. The filioque means that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The German Christians want to introduce a nature spirit, a folk [Volk] spirit, into the church, which is not judged by Christ but rather justifies itself." This is "German paganism" (Bonhoeffer, London, 1933-1935, p. 48).

As I've suggested before, liberal Protestant worship can easily degenerate into similar kinds of "paganism". A rediscovery of the theological significance of the filioque may be one way, in our time, of resisting this tendency and of preserving the christological shape of Christian confession of the Trinity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in New York

Over the past few days I had a delightful time reading Volume 10 of the new edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's works, Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931 (Fortress 2008), 764 pp. – a remarkable collection of letters, sermons, essays and lectures from his time as a vicar in Spain, a postdoctoral student in Berlin, and a visiting fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

After working as a pastor in Barcelona (where he even acquired what may have been an original Picasso!), Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to complete his postdoctoral dissertation, Act and Being, which presented a kind of Barthian-Kantian approach to theological anthropology, grounded in the empirical reality of the church. The ensuing American period is especially fascinating: 1930-31 was a hell of a time to be in New York City!

The young Bonhoeffer was taking courses with Reinhold Niebuhr and John Baillie, going to hear sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, studying pragmatism and American literature (he "read almost the entire philosophical works of William James, which really captivated me, then Dewey, Perry, Russell, and finally also J. B. Watson and the behaviorist literature"), worshipping in black churches, and corresponding with former teachers like Harnack and Seeberg.

His impressions of liberal American church life are generally quite scathing: "In New York, they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ.... So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that – who knows how? – claims the right to call itself 'Christian'. And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation. Anyone who has seen the weekly program of one of the large New York churches, with their daily, indeed almost hourly events, teas, lectures, concerts, charity events, opportunities for sports, games, bowling, dancing for every age group, anyone who has become acquainted with the embarrassing nervousness with which the pastor lobbies for membership – that person can well assess the character of such a church.... In order to balance out the feeling of inner emptiness that arises now and then (and partly also to refill the church's treasury), some congregations will if possible engage an evangelist for a 'revival' once a year" (pp. 313-14).

In this ecclesial ethos, "the church is really no longer the place where the congregation hears and preaches God's word, but rather the place where one acquires secondary significance as a social entity for this or that purpose" (p. 317).

Bonhoeffer was similarly dismayed by the students at Union Theological Seminary. The students "are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.... In contrast to our own [German] liberalism, which in its better representatives doubtless was a genuinely vigorous phenomenon, here all that has been frightfully sentimentalised, and with an almost naive know-it-all attitude" (pp. 265-66). Again, referring to Union Seminary: "A seminary in which numerous students openly laugh during a public lecture because they find it amusing when a passage on sin and forgiveness from Luther's de servo arbitrio is cited has obviously, despite its many advantages, forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for" (pp. 309-10).

Bonhoeffer also encountered the fundamentalist theology of J. Gresham Machen and his followers, especially in the Southern Baptist Church. This kind of theology, he remarked, revealed "a different side of the American character", namely, "an unrelenting harshness in holding on to one's possessions, possessions either of this or of the other world. I acquired this possession with trust in God, God made my success happen, so whoever infringes upon this possession is infringing upon God" (p. 317).

It was of course the black churches that won his warmest praise and admiration: "In contrast to the often lecturelike character of the 'white' sermon, the 'black Christ' is preached with captivating passion and vividness. Anyone who has heard and understood the Negro spirituals knows about [this] strange mixture of reserved melancholy and eruptive joy" (p. 315). Bonhoeffer would later introduce some of the Negro spirituals to the worship services at the illegal seminary in Finkenwalde (possibly one of the first places in Europe to introduce such songs).

The volume also contains the remarkable student papers that Bonhoeffer wrote for classes and seminars in New York – papers on William James, ethics, determinism, dogmatics. His paper on "the Christian idea of God" draws a sharp distinction between "history" and "decision": "Within the world of ideas there is no such thing as decision because I always bear already within myself the possibilities of understanding these ideas. They fit into my system but they do not challenge my whole existence" (p. 458).

A similar Kantian point is elaborated in his paper (written for Baillie) on Barth's use of neo-Kantian philosophy. Here, he argues that "the deepest antinomy" is "the antinomy between pure act and reflection"; God does not enter the realm of reflection, but "tears man out of this reflection into an actus directus toward God" (p. 474).

In sum, this is a wonderful, invigorating book, documenting an exciting and formative period of Bonhoeffer's life. We find him learning new languages, encountering new traditions and ideas, adapting to radically different ways of life – and returning again and again, with remarkable consistency, to the deep wellspring of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. As Bonhoeffer remarks in one of his letters to Seeberg: "there can be no doubt that only through active contact with other ways of thought is one led to the formation and comprehension of that which is unique to oneself" (p. 119). In the same way, even in some of his most negative assessments of American church life, one catches a glimpse of Bonhoeffer's own profound and developing ecclesiological and ethical commitments.

Who am I? Bonhoeffer's theology through his poetry

Bernd Wannenwetsch, ed., Who Am I? Bonhoeffer's Theology Through His Poetry (T&T Clark 2009), 259 pp. (thanks to T&T Clark for a copy)

I've been waiting eagerly for this book, and I wasn't disappointed. An impressive range of scholars – including Oliver O'Donovan, Stanley Hauerwas, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Hans Ulrich, Brian Brock, Philip Ziegler, and others – offer theological readings of Bonhoeffer's poetry.

The ten poems that Bonhoeffer wrote in Tegel prison in 1944 were among his last works. This book includes the text of the poems (German and English on facing pages), together with an essay on each poem. The kind of close reading modelled in these essays is unfortunately rare in contemporary theology; and the essays show that our own theological horizons can be extended through such a discipline of slow, attentive reading.

Of course, Bonhoeffer was scarcely a first-rate poet. Yet as Marilynne Robinson has observed, poetic language for Bonhoeffer "functions not as ornament but as ontology"; or as Philip Ziegler puts it, "even at its most stylized – as in the prison poems – [Bonhoeffer's] writing advances nothing less than decisive claims about reality" (p. 142). This does not mean that the poems should be regarded merely as "versified theology", as though they could be translated without remainder into prose. The contributors to the volume are aware of this, and so their aim is not so much to explain or interpret the poems as to think along with them and to see what theological possibilities they might open. Indeed, as Hauerwas very aptly remarks: "I do not, however, want to give the impression that the poem is an explanation.... For I assume that one of the tasks of poetry is to teach why 'explanations' are not all that interesting" (p. 101).

Three of the essays here really stand out. Hauerwas offers some incisive reflections on the poem "The Friend". This poem was written for Bonhoeffer's friend Eberhard Bethge; some early readers mistakenly took it to be a poem about a homosexual partnership. "Such an assumption," Hauerwas notes, betrays our own "impoverished understanding of friendship" (p. 100). For Bonhoeffer, friendship belongs not to the sphere of the orders of creation (work, marriage, government). It belongs instead to the sphere of freedom; it is grounded in nothing and has no necessity. It is not divinely mandated, nor is it a matter of ethics and obedience. But since friendship stands outside the mandates of creation, it is also able to transform these mandates, turning them from law to gospel. Marriage, for example, is divinely ordained; it requires obedience and responsibility. But marriage can be "given life by the realm of freedom in which friendship flourishes" (p. 106). It is thus friendship that "saves the mandates from their potential to be repressive" (p. 108). On this basis, Hauerwas goes on to argue that this poem evokes an alternative politics: "'The Friend' is Bonhoeffer's attempt not only to say, but to enact in a world of terror, that God's church exists making friendships possible" (p. 111).

Michael Northcott's essay explores the relation between human identity and spiritual disciplines in the poem "Who am I?" In a brilliant reading of the poem, he critiques the way Rowan Williams and Bernd Wannenwetsch (he might also have mentioned Hauerwas) have "enlisted Bonhoeffer ... in the post-liberal attempt to recover the moral self through the public worship and the politics of the body of Christ" (p. 15). In Northcott's view, Bonhoeffer is not trying to overturn the modern quest for interiority or authentic selfhood. He is comfortable using language of inwardness and individuality; but against modern narratives of the self, he argues "that moral responsibility is the mark of true personhood" (p. 17).

Another critique of postliberal ecclesiology appears in Hans Ulrich's remarkable essay on the poem "Stations on the Way to Freedom" – far and away the most powerful and compelling contribution to the book. Ulrich argues that Bonhoeffer's whole theology is pervaded by the theme of God's acting, God's presence. The poem indicates "the places of God's acting", the stations of God's presence in our lives: God is present where our lives are structured by the disciplines of discipleship; God is present where we act rightly; and God is present where we suffer because of our dedication to God. In ecclesiological terms, this means the church does not represent God's action, but is instead "the place holder for God's acting in the world". As a place holder, the church "does not become the new polis"; it is "the place of transformation, the place of change, the place of giving oneself over to God" (p. 165).

Ulrich thus argues that Bonhoeffer's political theology must be understood as a distinctively Lutheran theology of the cross: not a political theology in which the church represents God's gifts or action, but one in which "God stands in our place – and there happens our suffering because we cannot act any more" (p. 162). And it is only in this way that true freedom appears in our lives: not a freedom consisting in a plurality of options, but a kind of cruciform freedom, the suffering experience of God's presence, guidance and action.

I've highlighted just three of the essays here: but this whole collection is an exciting, creative, tightly focused exploration of Bonhoeffer's poetry and theology. It's not only an invaluable contribution to Bonhoeffer studies; it also contributes significantly to contemporary conversations about ecclesiology, ethics, politics, and human identity.

Discipleship and christology

Today I drove to Canberra to give a talk at the School of Discipleship, an annual theological conference/retreat for Australian university students. While I was there, I heard a gripping and compelling lecture on Jonah and Second Isaiah by one of the plenary speakers, the Quaker scholar Daniel Smith-Christopher. My own talk was a more or less impromptu reflection on practices of discipleship as the context within which christology emerges in the New Testament: the Christian life is itself the basic christological text. (I was helped here by a recent reading of Terrence Tilley’s excellent new book, The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology As Reconciling Practice.)

I find theology to be especially enjoyable in a setting like this: an impromptu discussion leaves room for movement and discovery; it’s more playful and impressionistic than a formal lecture, more inventive and exploratory than a scholarly paper.

Anyhow, it did my heart good to see such an impressive gathering of theologians and university students. The event seems to offer a vibrant and theologically robust alternative to both the colourless conservatism and limp liberalism that one so often encounters in Australian church life. Best of all, each year the School of Discipleship creates its own themed range of beers: this year they had the Barmen Collection, including the Hans Asmussen Golden and the Karl Barth Porter (pictured).

And speaking of Barmen and discipleship, I’ve decided to set one of Bonhoeffer’s books for my undergraduate course on ecclesiology this semester. (After the lecture each week, a selection from the book will be the focus of a one-hour discussion, so that we’ve pretty much explored the whole book by the end of semester.) But I still haven’t decided between Discipleship (a richer, deeper work) and Life Together (shorter, more practical and accessible). Anyone able to persuade me one way or another?

Bonhoeffer on the task of the preacher

“It is wrong to assume that on the one hand there is a word, or a truth, and on the other hand there is a community existing as two separate entities, and that it would then be the task of the preacher to take this word, to manipulate and enliven it, in order to bring it within and apply it to the community. Rather, the Word moves along this path of its own accord. The preacher should and can do nothing more than be a servant of this movement inherent in the Word itself, and refrain from placing obstacles in its path.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Bonhoeffer Works Vol. 4; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 227-28.

How (not) to preach the parables

I’ve often been struck by the way Jesus’ parables are interpreted in Christian preaching. Several years ago, I heard an extended series of sermons on the parables, and after a while I realised that each sermon had the same basic structure: first, the parable was narrated (with a few observations about historical context and such); then the pastor proceeded, with great warmth and sensitivity, to provide a “balanced” ethical interpretation, carefully guarding against any “extreme” application of the parable. So when Jesus says to sell everything, it’s not about possessions, it’s about the state of your heart – and so on.

I still remember my own psychological response to these sermons. First, the parable would be told in all its starkness and simplicity: and I would feel my heart pounding in dread and anticipation at the challenge of Jesus’ words. Then, by the end of the sermon, all my fears would be alleviated – no need for alarm; God’s command isn’t so uncompromising; Jesus really demands nothing of me after all!

It’s a curious thing that pastors often find it so difficult to preach Jesus’ parables. In truth, the only hard thing about the parables is that they are so simple, so straightforward in what they claim and what they demand. They are so simple that we need to make them difficult in order to escape the piercing gaze of Jesus. Or perhaps some pastors feel they need to soften the parables in order to protect the congregation from God. After all, it is God himself who bursts through these stories, coming on the scene with the unaccountable strangeness of a seed in the ground, with the disruptive suddenness of a thief in the night.

In his great book on Discipleship, Bonhoeffer highlights our tendency to “interpret” the teaching of Jesus in a way that leaves us safe, comfortable, unchallenged. Referring to typical interpretations of the story of the rich young ruler, Bonhoeffer remarks (p. 79): “Everywhere it is the same – the deliberate avoidance of simple, literal obedience. How is such a reversal possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus has to endure this game? … Anywhere else in the world where commands are given, the situation is clear. A father says to his child: go to bed! The child knows exactly what to do. But a child drilled in pseudo-theology would have to argue thus: Father says go to bed. He means you are tired; he does not want me to be tired. But I can also overcome my tiredness by going to play. So, although father says go to bed, what he really means is go play.”

In a different context, Karl Barth once told a little parable of his own: “To what shall I liken the basic principles of [liberal] theology? Is it not like a clock which is so cleverly constructed that the hands move from right to left instead of from left to right?” Our preaching about Jesus is often “cleverly constructed” in exactly the same way.

By removing everything offensive from the teaching of Jesus, we might succeed in making it easier to enter the kingdom of heaven – but in this very act, the kingdom is turned into a bland mirror image of the status quo. If we want to preach the words of Jesus faithfully, perhaps we need to lose some of our cleverness, our talent for interpretive evasion, and work instead at making our proclamation simpler – not easier, but simpler.

Bonhoeffer on the space of the church

Well, I finally decided to bite the bullet and update my library with the new edition of Bonhoeffer’s works. So I’ve now got a pile of these lovely volumes on my desk, and I’m gradually working my way down the stack. I must say, I’m very impressed with this edition, and with the new English translations. It’s an editorial achievement of enormous scope and astonishing exactitude, and the publishers have produced the series beautifully. Right now, I’m reading Bonhoeffer’s magnificent Ethics – so here’s an excerpt from the opening section:

“When God in Jesus Christ claims space in the world – even space in a stable because ‘there was no other place in the inn’ – God embraces the whole reality of the world in this narrow space and reveals its ultimate foundation. So also the church of Jesus Christ is the place [Ort] – that is, the space [Raum] – in the world where the reign of Jesus Christ over the whole world is to be demonstrated and proclaimed. This space of the church does not, therefore, exist just for itself, but its existence is already always something that reaches far beyond it…. The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of its territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God. It is not true that the church intends to or must spread its space out over the space of the world. It desires no more space than its needs to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world’s reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ” (pp. 63-64).

Against marriage: or, why churches should stop performing weddings

In an interesting post, Jason argues for a religious understanding of marriage, and he cites P. T. Forsyth’s view that marriage is much more than a social contract: “the more one ponders the solemn implicates and slow effects of marriage, moral and spiritual, the more one feels that it has something sacramental in its nature.”

I think this is exactly the wrong thing to say about marriage. In fact, I’d like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage. The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the church: the state authorises a legal union, and then calls upon the church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity. Here, as elsewhere, the church proves itself to be the state’s faithful servant: yes, we will validate state authority with a harmless blessing; yes, we are only too pleased to sanctify the wedding ceremony, and to clothe the social functions of romantic love and family life with a saintly aura.

Notice that the church is not invited here to proclaim its own proper message of judgment and grace. The church is not invited to bear witness. Instead, we are simply asked to add God’s blessing to the social order and to the state’s authority. Here the situation is just the same as in those churches where all infants born into the nation-state are provided with baptism: the church’s witness is undermined completely by its willingness to serve as the state’s lapdog. We are like the comically odious Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice – that sycophantic clergyman who waits upon the pleasure of his exalted benefactress, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, and is only too pleased to do her bidding whenever the opportunity arises.

If there is anything distinctively Christian to say about marriage, then the first step should be the church’s flat refusal to co-operate in the grim and desperate business of wedding ceremonies, and a flat refusal to provide the state with any so-called “marriage altar.” As Karl Barth has put it, marriage “must be completely divested of the character of a religious doublet to the civil ceremony” (CD III/4, p. 228).

Indeed, far from merely authorising weddings with pious talk about the “spiritual and moral” depths of marital love, the church’s witness demands a critique of romantic love – yes, a critique of marriage itself! As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has incisively argued in Life Together, the sexual relationship is by no means “sacramental in nature.” Instead, in our own societies romantic love functions as an idol which demands absolute subservience.

Halden explores this theme in a brilliant engagement with Bonhoeffer: “The longing to be completed through immediate contact with another is the reigning mythos of romance in our age. It is the object of voracious, often violent pursuit at all costs…. The fact is that in our romantic imaginations we seem to remain disturbingly trapped in the Zeitgeist of our age, hoping that by journeying deeper into the abyss of our selfishness we will somehow find the community that we long for with the other.” In Bonhoeffer’s analysis, the marriage relationship is not “sacramental by nature,” but it is selfish and parasitic by nature. In its hidden depths one finds not the comforting glow of religious sanctity, but an abyss of violence and self-will, a voracious need to find my own image reflected in the face of another.

But such a bleak analysis is not the last word. If the church refuses to sanctify the social order and the state’s authority as “naturally” blessed, it is also true that the church is a community with its own proper practices, its own virtues, its own proclamation of the good as that which has interrupted and reconfigured the natural order through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

If we begin to refuse church participation in wedding ceremonies, perhaps the way will be opened for a renewed sacramental understanding of marriage. The church refuses to recognise the marital relationship – or, for that matter, “the family” – as the fundamental social unit. Instead, the Christian community recognises the body of Christ as the fundamental social order of the new creation. And within this new society, within this economy of friendship and hospitality and self-giving, the church also bears witness to particular instantiations of Christian friendship, to specially gifted loci of generosity and hospitality and self-giving love.

Here, Christian marriage is sacramental precisely because it bears witness to the incursion of the new creation. It interrupts the existing order with the glad tidings of God’s new world. It interrupts marriage itself – and all the parasitic violence of romantic love – with the joyful and generous reality of the peace of the body of Christ.

In short: let’s say No to church-sanctioned weddings, No to the culture of romance-at-any-cost, but Yes to the sacrament of marriage, Yes to the body of Christ. To paraphrase St Paul: For in Christ Jesus, neither marriage nor singleness is anything; what counts is a new creation.

Bonhoeffer blog conference

Halden has issued a call for papers for the inaugural Bonhoeffer Blog Conference, scheduled for November this year. The topic is “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Contemporary Theology.” The conference will place Bonhoeffer’s Ethics in conversation with trends and issues in contemporary theology. Submissions should be between 1500 and 2500 words, and should explore the implications of Bonhoeffer’s work for our contemporary theological, ecclesial, social, and political contexts.

Bonhoeffer blog conference

Halden is hosting a Bonhoeffer blog conference, focusing on “Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Contemporary Theology.” So if you enjoy a bit of Bonhoeffering, you might like to submit a proposal.

Bonhoeffer and the end of religion

“It is the advent of the reality of reconciliation – much more than the simple advance of secularisation – that has dissolved, for Bonhoeffer, the old antinomy of religious and secular. In the wake of God’s epoch-making incursion in Christ, the categories ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ no longer map onto reality as it has been remade.... It is possible for Christians to embrace the dissolution of religion as a historical development finally because human religion has already been abolished prospectively but ultimately in God’s act of justifying the ungodly.”

—Philip G. Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer – An Ethics of God’s Apocalypse?” Modern Theology 23:4 (2007), p. 589.

The wrong tree? Barth, Bonhoeffer, and knowledge of good and evil

A guest-post by Eric Meyer (who is currently researching Bonhoeffer’s ethics)

The glimmering moment of theological rapture that eventually launched my thesis found me buried in an armchair, well equipped with pens and coffee. Bonhoeffer’s phrase struck like Newton’s apple. “The knowledge of good and evil appears to be the goal of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to supercede [aufzuheben – cancel, dissolve] that knowledge” (Ethics, 299). The temerity required to dismiss a tradition that includes Kant and Mill still gives me shivers. Who knows if this bit of bravado would have been tamed for the final publication—it outlived its author in this form.

Accustomed to bucking the modern liberal establishment, Barth readily put similar audacity in print. Nigel Biggar’s book on Barth’s ethics begins, “When the serpent promised Adam and Eve that they would become as God, what he had in mind, according to Karl Barth was ‘the establishment of ethics’” (The Hastening That Waits, 7).

Here is the argument: Ethical systems of thought illegitimately put justification in human hands (to get the right effect you should almost spit the word “system”). To conclusively mark an action or person as right or wrong is to shove God off the judgment throne and presume to take a seat. Any abstract principle capable of substantial moral guidance is destructively deceptive because it promises the soothing self-sufficiency we have all been seeking since Adam and Eve strapped on fig leaves. We shelter ourselves by recruiting our own consciences to anticipate and obviate God’s judgment. “Why wait for God to sort things out when we’ve got the knowledge of good and evil right here – we’ll just get started and do it for him, eh?” Modern ethics, as an autonomous enterprise cut loose from “metaphysics and superstition,” is a wholehearted embrace of idolatry.

After thus taking the wheels off ethical casuistry, both Barth and Bonhoeffer tender a similar alternative. The fundamental ethical reality is God’s calling and command (and before that, his triune personality and character(s)). Ethics is obedience. As the positive response to God’s life-transforming call, ethics is a theological activity before it is anything else.

Put this simply, Bonhoeffer’s and Barth’s ethics are much easier to teach in Sunday School than Kant’s, but are unlikely to get positive attention anywhere else. Yet Bonhoeffer wrote Ethics as a pacifist involved in an assassination conspiracy; subtlety outstrips platitude by far.

An ethic centered on hearing and obeying God’s command is fodder for cynics, and I’m not sure that Bonhoeffer can (or should!) overcome all the criticism. The concreteness of God’s command (and tracing the epistemology behind it) remains thorny for both Barth and Bonhoeffer. The revelational alternative to modern ethics launches a host of questions:

How do we receive God’s command? Where do we go to listen? Given that direct epiphanies are rare (at best), how do we discern God’s voice from the multitude of other voices? Who speaks for God? How and when do I presume to speak God’s command? What ethical accountability do we have at hand when someone acts destructively with the conviction that they are following the command of God? Can there be any ethical conversation between Christians and those outside the church? On what common ground would such a conversation even begin?

The majority of Bonhoeffer’s writing life was devoted to these questions. The questions lurk beneath the surface of Discipleship, Life Together, Ethics, and even the Letters and Papers. Bonhoeffer strains to discern God’s command concretely, to proclaim it where he dares, and to describe the means by which others might take up the same labor.

Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran heritage (while he received it intermarried with hostile ideologies), encouraged him to recognize God’s commands concretely, perhaps more so than Barth. Luther’s affirmation that, by grace, the finite is capable of bearing the infinite undergirds all his writing, from the identification of the church as “Christ existing as a community” in his first dissertation, to his later conception of the “four mandates” – marriage, culture, government, and church as places to encounter Christ. His redefinition of the “natural” enables him to speak about human rights and the value of political and economic order without resorting to abstract or non-theological principles. Rather than a normative vestige of Eden, the natural is that which stands open to Christ’s return; the unnatural closes itself off or hides. Where there is hunger, injustice, pollution, alienation, or disregard for life, the gospel is hindered and Christ left unwelcomed. For Bonhoeffer, God’s command is inextricably social; ethics is no prayer-closet activity.

The ultimate goad toward concreteness in Bonhoeffer’s ethic of command remains the incarnation. Ethics means becoming conformed to the incarnate, crucified, and risen paradigm of real humanity; ethics is discipleship. Because God entered the complexity of human life in order to redeem and reconcile it, Christians cannot abandon any aspect of reality as irredeemable. In Christ, we can see God and the world clearly at the same time. Motives, principles, and consequences are all factors to be considered together in obedience (not isolated as single criteria). The “ultimate question” then is not one of moral justification – “how am I to heroically extricate myself from this situation without blame” – but of total responsibility – “how is the coming generation to live?” (Letters and Papers, 7).

As imago Christi, the responsible person acts for others without knowing her own good or evil. By joining the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer modeled his own enigmatic assertion that responsibility entails bearing guilt for others in trust and submission to God’s final judgment.

In his death, no less than his life, Bonhoeffer’s conformity to the Crucified witnesses to an ethic of courageous trust in God’s mercy rather than his own scruples. We can all be thankful that Barth’s witness took a less tragic shape. Both theologians help us begin to think ethically without biting into the knowledge of good and evil.

An interview with John Shelby Spong: "I am very orthodox after all!"

by Scott Stephens

My friend Scott Stephens, who recently posted a scathing critique of John Shelby Spong, also caught up with Bishop Spong for a Eureka Street interview. A small excerpt from the interview was published in today’s Eureka Street – and Scott has kindly allowed us to have the full transcript here. It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation – they discuss Benedict XVI, Rowan Williams, Paul Tillich, Peter Jensen, religion, gay ordination, fundamentalism, evolution, and – of course – Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

SS: Bishop Spong, this year has seen the publication of Benedict’s much-anticipated book, Jesus of Nazareth, as well as your own, Jesus for the Non-Religious. It would be difficult to imagine two more different treatments of the same subject, and yet both have generated a lot of public interest. I can’t resist asking whether you’ve had a chance to read Benedict’s book?

SPONG: I’m in the process of reading it now – probably about two-thirds of the way through.

SS: What do you think so far?

SPONG: I don’t think he and I live in the same century; certainly not in terms of biblical scholarship. It seems to me that he falls back on a kind of neo-fundamentalist mentality that says that you’ve got to test the truth of the Bible by the Bible. That is, you’ve got to view it as a whole, so that if you get a verse that doesn’t make much sense you’ve got to bring the whole Bible to bear in order to find out what the will of God is. To me, that’s simply a defensive mechanism that avoids facing the truth.

My publisher in America, HarperCollins, is going to put out the paperback edition of my book – probably in the second half of next year – and on the cover they’re going to market this book as “A Radical Alternative to Pope Benedict’s book on Jesus”! Now, I’m sure there will be a lot of people who disagree with me just like I disagree with the Pope. But that’s not what’s important to me. What’s important to me is that, if there are two polarities within the Christian world, the debate has to continue between these to polarities in order to get us closer to what I think is the realistic world we must enter as Christians in the twenty-first century.

SS: I can just picture getting on Amazon.com and discovering that you can purchase Benedict’s book and your own for a single low price if you buy them both together!

SPONG: [Laughs] I hadn’t thought of that! I’m not much into marketing. I just write. HarperCollins came up with the idea, and I told them to run with it.

SS: In your latest book, you reiterate the same pronouncement that you’ve been making for some years now: “The religion called Christianity is dying, the casualty of an expanded worldview. The God experience of Jesus – that experience upon which Christianity was built – is newly dawning and will in time create new forms through which that new vision can live.” I wonder, from your vantage point, are you heartened or rather more concerned by the recent prominence of such militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens?

SPONG: Oh yes, it gives me great heart. But so does the rise of this ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Christianity. As I see it, there are three responses to our contemporary crisis of faith. The first is the reaction of those extreme fundamentalists who close their minds and remain so fearful that they will ban or try to silence anybody that disagrees with them. The second is the emergence of what I call the “Church Alumni Association,” which is by far the fastest growing Christian movement – certainly much faster than right-wing fundamentalism in America, and I would bet in Australia too. These are people that can’t see an alternative to fundamentalism, and so they say that they just don’t want to be part of that whole ‘religious thing’. And the third response is this new wave of militant atheists who see religion as a positive evil. Now this is an enormous ferment, and I think it’s really an alive and fruitful and exciting time to be someone who is publicly addressing God and Christ and theological issues.

What I keep trying to find a way to do is to build a community between radical fundamentalism, or maybe rabid fundamentalism, and this disillusioned secularity. I happen to be what I would call a Christian humanist, because I think that the Christian faith, when fully understood, has got to be about enhancing the humanity of all people. I don’t believe that the way we’re proclaiming it today does that. My marching orders are in John’s description of Jesus’ purpose: “I’ve come that they might have life and have it abundantly.” I think that everything that the church does must be measured by whether it enhances life or diminishes life for anyone. That is central motivation behind my advocacy on behalf of homosexuals, and my struggle against the judgement that these are deviant people (as the Pope says) or that these are evil people (as some American evangelicals say). This is so desperately opposed to what I understand the Christian faith to be, that when I hear these kinds of declarations it is like a dagger to my heart.

While we’re on the subject, let me say that I’m a little jaundiced when it comes to people who threaten to split the church over these issues. I grew up in the South, and when black people came into the church there were all sorts of predictions that the church was going to split because white people weren’t going to put up with black people. And when we ordained our first women there were threats of a church split because Jesus didn’t have any female disciples, and this was a violation of two thousand years of sacred practice – I regard it as the lifting of two thousand years of sexist oppression. When we made women bishops there was outrage, but now we’ve elected a woman as presiding bishop, as Primate of the Episcopal Church in America! And then there was the furore surrounding the election of a gay man as bishop of New Hampshire…

Now, I know my church too well, Scott. I know that Gene Robinson is not the only gay bishop in the Episcopal Church right now. I won’t name the others, but I will say that among these gay bishops are some of the most homophobic voices that are raised within that church. I sit back and look at these people with bewilderment. I could name the gay bishops in the Anglican communion in England without any trouble. I know them! So it’s not that we have this new thing called a gay bishop. The only thing that’s new here is that we have an honest gay bishop. I won’t even begin to tell you about the feigned outrage and outright hypocrisy that surrounded Gene Robinson’s eventual election. And so when people threaten to leave the church over these kinds of issues, I feel like handing them their hat and saying, “What are you waiting for?” I’m not into blackmail.

Like I said, I grew up in the South, and I know that when there’s a moral principle involved – like slavery – you don’t compromise on that. Slavery is either right or it’s wrong. And you don’t keep unity in the church by keeping the slave owners happy. You’ve got to take a stand somewhere. The same principle holds today. I’ve said this to the Archbishop of Canterbury in person. If the issue were slavery he wouldn’t be waffling like he is. In my opinion, the issue of homosexuality is just as strong and just as morally serious.

So I see all these battles that we’re now caught up in, both inside and outside the church, as very exciting, even invigorating.

SS: Rowan Williams is an extraordinary theologian. And yet he seems to have refused to take that same acumen, that same imagination that distinguished him as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, and bring it to bear on the current crisis over gay ordination that is ravaging the Anglican Church worldwide. You must be disappointed.

SPONG: Very much so. I’ve known Rowan a long time, and he has been one of the strongest voices in support of ordaining gay people. He has ordained gay people. I don’t mind saying just how disappointed I am with him, and how disillusioned are the hopes that we had for him. The day that Rowan was appointed, I wrote a column for the newspaper saying that he was the best qualified Archbishop that we’ve seen for many decades. Maybe William Temple would be his equal. But we haven’t seen someone with Rowan’s academic ability and theological sophistication in that office in a long, long time. Not to mention that he was young – fifty-two years old – and so he could be Archbishop for maybe twenty years. I wrote that he has the opportunity really to shape the Anglican communion. But I closed that column by saying that I have only one anxiety: does he have to courage to stand up against opposition? I’ve never seen him able to do that. If he can’t, then he’s going to be a great disappointment.

In my opinion, he collapsed the day after he was appointed. He wrote a letter to all the Primates saying that as the Archbishop of Canterbury he would not act on his personal convictions but only on the Lambeth resolutions, which in effect gave away his leadership ability. The previous Archbishop, who was extremely homophobic, would never have done such a thing. He would never have said that he’s not going to act on his principles, because he believed that his principles were directly from God and it was therefore up to him to impose them on others. Liberals are always weak. Liberals can see two sides of an issue, and therefore are reluctant ever to impose a position on anybody. But if Rowan would just say: “This is my personal witness. I will try to preside over this institution with all of its foibles, but I need the world to know that discrimination against gay and lesbian people is wrong, and I think the church is wrong to be compromised on this issue…” This sort of position would still respectfully acknowledge the more conservative branches of the Anglican communion (for instance, in Nigeria and in Sydney), but it would severely limit them, cut off their ability to grow by refusing to be constrained by their bigotry.

So, yes, I am disappointed. Rowan has done some things that I find almost unconscionable. On account of his inconsistency, which at times borders on hypocrisy, he has infuriated liberals and the right-wing crazies in almost equal measure. I just don’t see how you can do leadership when you basically offend everybody because you don’t stand for anything!

SS: Let’s turn to your own work for a while. I often wonder about the ethical consequences of your version of Christianity, and why it is that your work has such appeal for so many people. Karl Marx was very aware that there is a kind of religious impulse or logic that is at the heart of capitalism. In other words, there are expressions of religion which are diabolically compatible with our modern self-centredness. These kinds are religion are idolatrous because they pose no real challenge to the way people live. For instance, aren’t Western Buddhism and even Pentecostalism disgustingly bourgeois forms of religion? With all of your talk of “being all that one can be,” of “the search for God as the search for oneself,” isn’t your vision of a “new Christianity” pandering to the same bourgeois temperament?

SPONG: I think that’s probably a legitimate criticism, because that’s the kind of world I’m trying to speak to all the time. And I probably do couch my message in language that is resonant with that way of life.

But let me say that I think human beings are helplessly and hopelessly religious creatures. The reason for that is that we are the only self-conscious creatures in the world that we know of. And to be self-conscious means that you feel the ache of loneliness in a great big world that you don’t feel a part of, that you feel separated from. Human beings know that they’re going to die. All living things die, but only human beings anticipate it and plan for it. And so we have to live with the shadow of our mortality, which is one of the things that fuels this religious impulse. But maybe on a deeper level human beings also live with the question of whether life has any meaning. So we are driven to seek meaning because there is something about life that, if it’s meaningless, then you might as well commit suicide and get it over with. So the quest for meaning is also a deeply religious thing.

I don’t believe that the world will ever be a religion-less world. I think that what happens is that religion is always going to be changing its face and changing its forms. We’ve done that before in the Christian tradition. Just think of the various theological re-incarnations that have taken place in response to an ever-expanding worldview: the birth of Christianity in the Jewish world as part of the Jewish understanding of God, Augustine’s translation of the Christian faith into Platonic terms, Aquinas’ reconciliation of Christianity with Aristotelian thinking, the Reformation’s wrestling with the Renaissance, which represented a huge influx of new ideas about God and religion and the world from the East.

Since that time there has been another revolution that changed the whole way that we see the world, and Christianity has got to redefine itself in terms of this new world. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo destroyed the dwelling place of God above the sky, and in effect the theistic definition of God with it. After the destruction of this God, we’ve got to find a new way of talking about God beyond theism. The only alternative to theism that our world seems to know is atheism. We’ve got to find a way of getting beyond that opposition. We’ve got to find a new way of talking about God.

SS: That, of course, is the very problem that Paul Tillich grappled with.

SPONG: Oh yes. Tillich is one of my shaping theologians. The next person in this revolution was Isaac Newton, who showed us that the world operates according to very precise natural laws. There’s not much room in the world for miracles and magic. And finally comes Charles Darwin, and he changes the way we have to look at human life.

I’m working now on the subject of life after death, and I’m convinced that Darwin is the chief person who punctures the conviction that there is life after death in the Western world because he relates us to animals. Before that we had thought of ourselves as created in the image of God with an eternal soul, but now we see ourselves as just a little higher than the apes. We had never attributed any value to animal life, and now we see ourselves as identified with animals.

I also think that Darwin challenges the primary way in which the Christian story has been told. Before Darwin we told the story of the Christian faith in terms of human beings that were created perfect in God’s image, but who disobeyed God and fell into sin, thus corrupting the whole created order. Human beings couldn’t save themselves. The law tried and the prophets tried, and finally God enters the world in God’s good time in the form of a saviour-rescuer. And that’s the story about Jesus, how he pays the price for sin on the cross, and so restores the fallen creature to what God intended them to be in the first place. That essentially is the theology of the incarnation and atonement that we’ve talked about for years.

But it doesn’t work, and it’s not true. We never were created perfect in God’s image. We were created as single-cell units of life and we evolved over four-and-a-half to five billion years into various stages until at least we achieved self-consciousness. We are survival-oriented people because we wouldn’t have made it through the evolutionary process if we hadn’t been survival-oriented. And so we are radically self-centred, survival-orientated creatures, and we had to be to win the battle of evolution. But once we’ve won the battle, then there’s no more enemy except ourselves and so we turn our survival-instincts against one another – in genocide, for example. What got us to this position of dominance in the world is not sufficient to get us to whatever the next stage is. What Darwin suggests is that none of us need to be rescued from a fall that never happened, or restored to a status that we never possessed. That whole way of telling the Christian story simply doesn’t work.

So instead of seeing Jesus as the divine saviour-rescuer who pays the price of sin, I think we’ve got to turn our whole Christology toward seeing Jesus as the kind of humanity that enables us to get over being the kind of survival-oriented creatures that we are and begin to give our lives away. I think that is dramatically powerful, and something to which people would be willing to give themselves if they understood it. And this is beginning to address your question.

SS: Yes it is. I find what you’re saying extremely interesting…

I don’t think that what I’m advocating is an easy sort of bourgeois feel-good gospel. I think what I’m advocating is a new humanity that will deliver us from our deeply competitive, tribal, prejudiced attitudes toward other human beings, and indeed toward other religions. So I think the role of the church is not to rescue the sinners, but to empower people to become more fully human. This is why Christ is so important to me.

The way I see Christ is not as the incarnation of a theistic deity, but as so completely human that he becomes a channel through which the way I define God can live completely and perfectly. So I still have here Christ as “fully divine” and “fully human”, but I get at it in a very different way because I define God as the Source of Life, the Source of Love, the Ground of Being – all my Tillichian stuff comes out here. When I look at Jesus I see a human being that is so fully alive that the Source of Life is visible in him, so loving that the Source of Love is visible in him, so whole, so capable of being himself that the Ground of Being is visible in him. And then I watch him live out a new kind of humanity.

When I look at the cross I don’t see a sacrifice where a victim pays the price of sin. I see a life that is so whole that he can give himself away completely. It’s a tough battle, but I think we’ve got to get people out of tribal religion and get them into a redemptive process that enhances our humanity instead of rescues us and makes us grateful.

I think when we become fully human, then we share in the very meaning of God. It means that we live with God’s Life and we love with God’s Love and we are with God’s Being. The problem with humanity is that there is no one that we love more than ourselves. I look at Jesus and see that he is able to lay down his life “for the least of these.” That’s God presence to me; that’s not human. And when he’s dying, he’s not whining or begging or cussing or fighting or screaming. He’s saying, “God forgives you for nailing me to this cross.” He says “God comforts you in your own mortality” to the thief. He says “God cares for you” to his mother. He’s giving his life away! And I don’t care if those biblical portraits are accurate or not. That’s the way that the early Christians remembered Jesus: as the whole one who could give his life away.

And, just to finish up this sermon [laughing], Mark’s image in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel to me is a very powerful image. Jesus is dead and limp on the cross. A gentile soldier, who violates the boundary between Jew and Gentile, stands at the foot of that cross and points to that life and says, “That’s what God is like.” We translate that, “Truly this man was the Son of God,” as if he had just passed a test on Nicene orthodoxy. He didn’t know a thing about that kind of stuff. He was saying that in the kind of life he witnessed in Jesus, where he could give himself away, that’s the doorway that opens onto the way that God is and that’s the ultimate affirmation that God was in Christ. So you see I am very orthodox after all! I come back around to what is a very traditional, orthodox position, but my evangelical friends don’t see it because they see me as ‘eroding’ all of their security systems in the process.

SS: I’m going to have to pull you up here, because what you’ve just proposed is very different from one of your previous positions. If I may be perfectly blunt, your chapter on “Original Sin” in A New Christianity for a New World gave me a lot of trouble. In it you present a disturbingly New Age, quasi-Jungian image of the human being in which “God and Satan, light and darkness, good and evil, Jesus and Judas” etc. must be embraced as part of some greater “wholeness.” Now, I’m with you in your rejection of the traditional notion of original sin, and I am deep agreement with you in placing the Christian story against a Darwinian backdrop. But I don’t see how you can reconcile your compelling picture of human-animals caught in the survival-instinct, from which we must break away in Christ, with this amoral description of human wholeness. You’re saying very different things here, aren’t you?

SPONG: That was the most difficult chapter that I wrote in that book, and I was wrestling deeply with Carl Jung’s book, The Answer to Job. I am convinced that you don’t become whole by simply suppressing your dark-side but by accepting it as part of your being and redeeming it and living through it. And that’s really what I was trying to say in that chapter. I don’t know how it fits together. I’ve had people say, “That’s the dumbest chapter you’ve ever written,” and others say, “That’s a profound chapter that moved me more than any other.”

Retrospectively, I’m not sure that I knew what I was writing, to be perfectly blunt back at you. Except that I still believe that Jung was right when he said that it was a great day for Christianity when the Roman Catholics promulgated the doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary, because for the first time Mary was lifted into the sense of the divine. And then he said that God will finally be complete when the devil is lifted back into God and so God’s dark-side is also embraced in what is ultimately holy. That’s what I was trying to say about human life.

I think the problem with liberals is that they always minimize evil. It’s a historic problem for liberals, and I don’t want to be guilty of that. Evil is very apparent to me in this world. I think human beings do awful things to each other and they do these things so often in the name of “God”. Evil is easy enough to document, but the real question is what is its source, what is its cure? In the same way that President Bush will never destroy terrorism by killing terrorists, I don’t think Christians will ever reduce evil by condemning it. Christians can only reduce evil by understanding its source, by addressing its causes.

SS: I want to press you a little further on this. You most often refer to God, following Paul Tillich, as “the Ground of Being” and insist that we participate in God by becoming fully ourselves, by being all that we can be. But even Tillich was keenly aware that there are ways of “being” which are in fact delusional, inauthentic, even idolatrous. In your previous work you don’t seem to have factored in this aspect of Tillich’s thought. Haven’t you left the door open for all kinds of self-seeking idolatry in the name of one’s search for God?

SPONG: I don’t know quite how to respond to that. But I may have the makings of an answer. I’m currently working on the question of whether someone with my theological understanding can have a belief in life-after-death. And my answer is yes. Now, I’ve got to figure out a way of saying that, and I think that will be my next book. But along the way I’ve examined what life-after-death means to most people, and it is a fiercely self-centred kind of idolatry. Only recently, within the last month, I’ve reached the place in my thought about this subject that I don’t need life-after-death to be authentic, and I can let it go. But I still believe in it.

If the only motivation in my life for living fully and loving wastefully and being all that I can be is that I’ll get the reward of heaven or escape the punishment of hell, in whatever form you might look at either of those things, then it’s still nothing except a self-centred act. It’s a survival-oriented act, and I think the only way we get humanity to a new place is to get it over every part of its survival mentality. That is a form of idolatry the must be overcome.

If we can get to that place where true humanity is found not in just surviving but in freely giving its life away, and if we can get to the place where life-after-death is not just about reward or punishment, or even about the completion of an unfinished life, when it is something that we can say we no longer need, then I think we can start understanding what such a life-after-death really is.

SS: Bravo!

SPONG: I keep telling my publisher that I’m trying to describe something that is beyond time and space, and I haven’t yet found a language for it. And so this may be a one paragraph book! It’s easier to say what life-after-death isn’t rather than what it is. Maybe that’s the way I’ve got to go, and then leave the final paragraph of the book vague but hopeful. Not only is that the next step in my writing, it’s the next step in my personal pilgrimage, which I think is increasingly beyond any theological system into a kind of wordless mysticism.

SS: To conclude, I really must ask you about your relationship to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The title of your new book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, is clearly invoking Bonhoeffer’s vision of a “religion-less Christianity.” And you are even presented as the heir to Bonhoeffer’s theological legacy. But here’s my problem: what Bonhoeffer means by “religion” and what you seem to mean by “religion” are two very different things. You seem to have in mind received orthodoxies, rigid church structures, organised religion, and so on. But, for Bonhoeffer, “religion” referred to the way that a complicit church and cheap grace had been absorbed into the bloodstream of German culture. The problem with “religious Christianity” was that it emptied the Christian faith of its ethical power and conviction, and became a way of indiscriminately baptising all of the godlessness of culture. And so, for Bonhoeffer, the solution to the perversion of religion was to make Christian liturgy less obscure, to make the Christian faith more concrete by wrapping it around “the Crucified” and the love for one’s neighbour. You however, in Bonhoeffer’s name, seem to be wanting to make the Christian faith and our understanding of God more obscure, more abstract. Don’t you think Bonhoeffer would have been opposed to your revision of the Christian faith?

SPONG: We may very well be working at cross purposes. I don’t know. The title of this book was certainly inspired by Bonhoeffer, and the idea of the Christian faith that had to emerge out of Judaism at one point and that now has to emerge out of religion in order to live is very appealing to me. But I really do think of myself much more as the heir to John A. T. Robinson than I do Bonhoeffer.

But let me say something about church structures, just to be absolutely clear. I am deeply committed to the church. The fascinating thing about my life, Scott, is that I don’t believe you can change the church unless you’re in it and I don’t give up on its structures. And I’m comforted by the biblical images that it only takes a saving remnant to be the salt in the soup and the leaven in the lump. You don’t have to win over the whole body. And out of the dying institution there always emerges the new “reformation” – whatever that word might mean.

In the Jesus Seminar in America, of which I’m a member, Marcus Borg and I are regarded as the two conservatives because we really believe that the church can be redeemed. For if you don’t have some kind of incarnate structure then everything about our faith dissipates into vapidness. It just disappears. I don’t believe you can ever start a new church. I think you’ve always got to evolve out of what you are into something new. And I don’t worry about whether it’s a big movement or a little movement so long as it’s a faithful remnant that will keep alive the hope of ultimate reformation. Maybe that’s the point where Bonhoeffer and I intersect.

You see, Bonhoeffer lived in a place where the Catholics were silent and the Lutheran Church was generally coopted by the Nazi government. So he saw no hope for religion as he was experiencing it. But I think Bonhoeffer was also a voice that rose within Lutheranism, and that in his death he acquired a greater pulpit than all of the other cooperative German Lutherans ever could. And that’s what I keep coming back to.

John Robinson said something in one of his last books that I agree with – I certainly think it’s true of me. He said that in another generation or two, the criticism of John Robinson or of me will not be that we went too far, but that we didn’t go far enough. It is up to the next generation to press boundaries that I cannot even imagine going beyond. That’s why I insist that the church is an evolving institution. If you stop the evolution, it dies. And that’s why the negativity of the right-wing is so frightening to me. They want to stops things where they are, which would be a death sentence over the church.

As I began by saying, I think that we – both of these polar opposites within the church – really need one another. We must keep this debate going. And so I even feel very appreciative of [the Archbishop of Sydney] Peter Jensen! I had an experience just this week that’s worth sharing. There is a person I met – I won’t tell you his name because it would be immediately recognised in Australian political circles – who bought my book after some of Peter’s attacks on me. He read it and called me up on the last day that we were in Sydney, and invited Christine and me out to his house for dinner.

This was a genuine invitation from somebody it would be nice to know even if the conversation was dull, and so we went. Over dinner, this man said that he had been a comfortable atheist for twenty-five years, and that the church means nothing to him. But he said that when he heard Peter Jensen declaring that what I say ought to be banned from churches, he decided that maybe I was someone worth reading! So he went out and bought my book. Then he told us, “You destabilised my atheism, and didn’t think that was possible.”

I don’t know where all this is going to lead that man. But this man is very wealthy, very well known, and politically related. His wife is very well known, and she’s politically related. But for them to find that the emptiness of their lives still cries out for something, and the fact that I’ve given them at least the possibility that they might find it in the church, that’s what I live for.