This Might Make No Sense Unless You Study Bonhoeffer
There's been something going on in me this semester. Sure, we're only 2.5 weeks in, but the conditions are right, so it's moving quick. Everything is moving quick. Classes are busy, work as demanding as ever, and new things are on the horizon for the next few months. An internship with the ethicist at Grady and a Pilates teaching certification, to be precise.
In the meantime, two things are colliding for me that I feel are going to be extremely formative. It's kind of like I'm looking down on my inner landscape and watching it change in slow motion, which sounds so dramatic. But I have perspective on a couple things right now, and it's a profound thing to have perspective on the changing of your own inner landscape.
I have a class on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great martyr and theologian. He wrote a great deal about the church and our responsibility, about social issues like race and politics. He encountered the black Christians of the Harlem Renaissance, and took the race question with him to Nazi Germany where he was killed for opposing the regime and its genocide. And I don't know, there's a lot to say about his life and writings, but I'll save that for the classroom.
His writings have really been getting to me, though, really convicting me on a spiritual level and challenging me on a theological one. And I'm ripe for it - for the fresh insight and challenge, at a time when I'm exploring ecclesiology for myself and opening myself to sacrament and liturgy and community. Suddenly I'm looking up and realizing my work in theology has been leading me somewhere new with this thing called church. That's the second thing, the one colliding with Bonhoeffer. I've been visiting Episcopal churches and Catholic mass.
"You need to sanctify your seminary experience," Micah said. By getting lost in holiness and awe and presence that comes with high church expression and ecclesiological significance. Juxtaposed against the Bible idolatry and petty biblical criticism of a Baptist seminary. I need to sanctify my theological trajectory with real depth of expression, with justice work that is painfully particular and worldly (of which Bonhoeffer writes extensively), with asking the right questions of theology and ethics. And the stuff of Bonhoeffer does these things. It hits me right between the eyes, right in the heart, and through its evolution and contradiction over time gives meaning and permission to my own contradictory inner voices. My own inner struggle. The Bonhoeffer of 1929 is not the Bonhoeffer of '33, and in that I see God and myself. I see my wrestling with God - mind, body, and soul - like Jacob's wrestling at the Jabbok. And it gives me hope for us, that we won't be overcome by our many words and many errors, but that we can learn to be the holy community. Maybe. At the end of the day. Maybe we can at least get discipleship right, even if all our "head stuff" stays in academic halls and on library shelves.
Because what is the church, really? Is it where we go to sit quietly and receive all the right answers? Or is it a living body of Christ, and if so, what does that mean? Last Sunday at All Saints Episcopal, the person delivering the sermon said the church is a community of people that helps each other recognize God's work in the world, and in their lives. He said our main job was to recognize God at work, not to understand the Bible or theologize, and that resonated with me.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I want us to keep first things first, and really live into our identity as the church, valuing first level experience and communal expression more than all these academic endeavors that consume us. And what will save me is getting out of the Evangelical church at times, getting out of biblical criticism at times, and sanctifying my journey through the real and the particular.
Bonhoeffer got that. He is that. It all started when he visited the great cathedrals in Rome, and went to mass every day.
My prayer is that I would be sanctified as a follower of Christ, that I would be pulled from the wreckage of evangelicalism in 21st Century America, and become a witness to something more true than the empty words we've been taught. I pray that I will be a witness to what true discipleship looks like in this world, what following Jesus really looks like. I pray that God will sing through me a new song, like he did through Bonhoeffer.
Or at least a very, very old one.
In the meantime, two things are colliding for me that I feel are going to be extremely formative. It's kind of like I'm looking down on my inner landscape and watching it change in slow motion, which sounds so dramatic. But I have perspective on a couple things right now, and it's a profound thing to have perspective on the changing of your own inner landscape.
I have a class on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great martyr and theologian. He wrote a great deal about the church and our responsibility, about social issues like race and politics. He encountered the black Christians of the Harlem Renaissance, and took the race question with him to Nazi Germany where he was killed for opposing the regime and its genocide. And I don't know, there's a lot to say about his life and writings, but I'll save that for the classroom.
His writings have really been getting to me, though, really convicting me on a spiritual level and challenging me on a theological one. And I'm ripe for it - for the fresh insight and challenge, at a time when I'm exploring ecclesiology for myself and opening myself to sacrament and liturgy and community. Suddenly I'm looking up and realizing my work in theology has been leading me somewhere new with this thing called church. That's the second thing, the one colliding with Bonhoeffer. I've been visiting Episcopal churches and Catholic mass.
"You need to sanctify your seminary experience," Micah said. By getting lost in holiness and awe and presence that comes with high church expression and ecclesiological significance. Juxtaposed against the Bible idolatry and petty biblical criticism of a Baptist seminary. I need to sanctify my theological trajectory with real depth of expression, with justice work that is painfully particular and worldly (of which Bonhoeffer writes extensively), with asking the right questions of theology and ethics. And the stuff of Bonhoeffer does these things. It hits me right between the eyes, right in the heart, and through its evolution and contradiction over time gives meaning and permission to my own contradictory inner voices. My own inner struggle. The Bonhoeffer of 1929 is not the Bonhoeffer of '33, and in that I see God and myself. I see my wrestling with God - mind, body, and soul - like Jacob's wrestling at the Jabbok. And it gives me hope for us, that we won't be overcome by our many words and many errors, but that we can learn to be the holy community. Maybe. At the end of the day. Maybe we can at least get discipleship right, even if all our "head stuff" stays in academic halls and on library shelves.
Because what is the church, really? Is it where we go to sit quietly and receive all the right answers? Or is it a living body of Christ, and if so, what does that mean? Last Sunday at All Saints Episcopal, the person delivering the sermon said the church is a community of people that helps each other recognize God's work in the world, and in their lives. He said our main job was to recognize God at work, not to understand the Bible or theologize, and that resonated with me.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I want us to keep first things first, and really live into our identity as the church, valuing first level experience and communal expression more than all these academic endeavors that consume us. And what will save me is getting out of the Evangelical church at times, getting out of biblical criticism at times, and sanctifying my journey through the real and the particular.
Bonhoeffer got that. He is that. It all started when he visited the great cathedrals in Rome, and went to mass every day.
My prayer is that I would be sanctified as a follower of Christ, that I would be pulled from the wreckage of evangelicalism in 21st Century America, and become a witness to something more true than the empty words we've been taught. I pray that I will be a witness to what true discipleship looks like in this world, what following Jesus really looks like. I pray that God will sing through me a new song, like he did through Bonhoeffer.
Or at least a very, very old one.
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