Religion, Fundamentalism and Christianity
So there seems to be energy around Bonhoeffer still (even if it is just to say that we should move on from Bonhoeffer). Instead of continuing the ever-growing comment section of the last post I thought I would write some thoughts in a new post. This means that people don’t need to read 40 comments before writing something. Before I make my main point I will however say that I am surprised at myself for returning to Bonhoeffer, for if you asked me a few weeks ago what I thought of his later writings I would have likely said that I thought they were mere fragments of thought done to death in the 60’s and that other thinkers have done the work that Bonhoeffer signaled and hinted at (thus rendering the letters of interest only for their historical value). And while part of me still thinks that might be true another part of me thinks of him in the same way that I think about Feuerbach, i.e. as an important transitional thinker. In particular Bonhoeffer opened up a way of thinking (or at least expressed it) that was not exhausted in the Radical Theology of the 60’s but which is a prophetic utterance concerning a much more virulent strain of theology that is vibrant and historically significant (what I am about to say relates to the great comment by Ian below – BTW I think Moot is a wonderful example of a community exploring this stuff).
Interestingly, Bonhoeffer does not attack religion as such. However he reflects that in the 20th century (though he sees it beginning in the 17th century) religion has become possible for less and less people because it has been problematical. Not because it has changed but because human beings have entered into a different epoch (my words not his, he talks of “man come of age”). In this new historical situation a religious expression of Christianity places God at the edges of human life as the Deus ex machina. Why? Because religion, for Bonhoeffer, is the belief in a metaphysical absolute from which everything hangs (onto-theology), and as human knowledge increases the more things in our existence do not require this metaphysical explanation. Religion is now exposed as advocating a God of the gaps. In addition to this the God of religion is only for those who feel a need to ask the metaphysical question, “Why”, and in a ‘world come of age”, this question is asked by fewer and fewer (a Nietzschian point par exellence). Indeed Bonhoeffer attacks with great passion those believers who would use the idea of death and illness to get people back to that metaphysical question (and even implicates existentialism and psychoanalysis in the same insidious project – which I would, of course, take issue with).
Bonhoeffer’s great insight in LPP as far as I can see, was to dimly perceive that, while religion was a predominant guise for Christianity throughout history this did not need to be the case – that Christianity could affirm all its central tenants without religion as he defined it (God could be affirmed without metaphysics – again he was not saying that this was ontologically better but rather was becoming historically nessesary). He saw religion as having served its time well, but which had finally reached its twilight.
This is interesting to me because I think it allows us to understand Fundamentalism in a different way. Namely, as an impotent reaction to the loss of religion. The attempt to place it back in the centre. Fundamentalism can thus be seen as the very evidence of the growing redundancy of religion. It is the violent kickback against the continual loss of ground that religion has had to concede in recent years. But for Bonhoeffer there is a way beyond an anemic religious Christianity that places God at the edge and a violent fundamentalism which impotently seeks to place religion in the centre and this is what he was hinting at. It has been left to others to explore what this alternative is (but for Bonhoeffer it was deeply Christocentric and exhibited itself in an unwavering concern for the world – just to relate to the important question that Lori asked).
Tags: Aldea, Bonhoeffer, death of God, Fundamentalism, ikon, John Caputo, Nietzsche, Peter Rollins, religionless Christianity, weakness of God, worldly Christianity
June 26th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
If this last paragraph is true, then wouldn’t these Fundamentalists be or perhaps becoming more and more the “excluded and marginalized?” I don’t think that’s what you meant, but it could very easily be interpreted that way.
June 26th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Pete wrote, “But for Bonhoeffer there is a way beyond an anemic religious Christianity that places God at the edge and a violent fundamentalism which impotently seeks to place religion in the centre and this is what he was hinting at.”
Yeah, no doubt. It’s fascinating that when you examine Hitler’s religious attitudes, he was not against religion per se, nor was he against the cultural Christianity of Germany at the time, but he personally despised the actual Christian religion as a “religion for weaklings.” So he put the Christian churches under his own rules, and “dealt” with dissenting theologians such as Bonhoeffer. So this ties into Bonhoeffer’s ideas of the weakness of Christianity, because Hitler wanted a religion that was bombastic and warlike, whereas Bonhoeffer and the German dissenting church thought this was a betrayal of the church’s core calling of peace and reconciliation.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:47 am
That’s a very helpful additional point Pete; and I, too, enjoyed what Ian had to say at the end of the last post. But it does highlight the need for care and precision with language. Your original post, combined with the thoughts you have expressed on betrayal and the difficulties of speaking of God could be so easily interpreted outwith a christological centre. From my own engagement with Islam and other faiths, I’m increasingly conscious that “religion” is a problem. The very cry “Allahu Akbar” literally means “God is greatER!”. Greater than what? Greater than our religions and our institutions?….Well, yes. But the church is the key signal and repository of the story of which Jesus is the centre, in all its brokenness. Communities like IKON, Moot, I will add Sanctuary in Birmingham, Jesus mosques in Bangladesh etc etc are working with the story but, on their good days, aspiring and demonstrating the ongoing story of God with humanity…This is no mere belief system, club or institution. But part of the continuance of the story, in its very brokenness, is the embrace of the world church that includes the faithful that we may feel are stuck in their own “institution” of the church. One person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist…..One person’s faithful pilgrim is another’s heretic. To avoid that simplistic dialectic (where the new and the revolutionary becomes the blessed and the welcome), we embrace the whole of church in its trinitarian moorings: which make it cruciform. I’d love to see a bit more of the trinitarian moorings Pete, otherwise there’s some playful philosophising but very poor ecclesiology. I heard a gay, Muslim liberation theologian (yep, they do exist) say he’d “rather do violence to the text than violence to people”. I hear you say something like that Pete and it’s something of the dilemma Bonnhoeffer faced: what of my institutional faith needs to give to remain authentic in this extreme context? Any recovery of Bonnhoeffer would do well to recognise that we in the West are far from “in extremis” and be connecting with the historical and global church in a faithful betrayal of our privilege and decadence.
June 27th, 2008 at 3:56 am
While I agree (from my own experience) that the way churches function today is not appealing (at least, not to me), perhaps even not relevant, I am not sure that the best alternative to follow is the ‘religion-less’ Christianity as explained here. I am not sure whether I have understood this properly but it all sounds to me very much like J.A.T. Robinson’s agenda (in his Honest to God) to re-interpret Christianity and re-create a new vocabulary based on a new ontology (although pretending that no ontology is really there), taking Tillich, Bultmann and an interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s letters as the new theological sacred texts to follow.
I don’t have an obvious alternative to offer, so I suspect this message is going to feel uncomfortable to all those who are searching for answers. However, although Robinson’s way was once tempting to me, I have come to think that if I were to decide that, for example, Jesus didn’t resurrect (and I am currently struggling to decide something about it), I would rather leave Christianity altogether, rather than keep trying to find new ways to express and interpret it. If we are new people ‘come to age’, adults that have to live in the world ‘as if God wasn’t here’, and we decide that the main historical claims of Christianity are not true anymore, why should we keep trying to be tied to Christianity at all?
June 27th, 2008 at 4:25 am
Living in Northern Ireland I am all to aware that the motivational energy of Fundamentalism is fear – fear of the other,fear (terror) of God (no matter if He is claimed as a God of love),fear of losing one’s ‘Salvation’, fear of being ‘unorthodox’,fear of being ostracised by the ‘faith community’,fear of death (even though a blissful afterlife is claimed),fear of losing control etc – the list goes on.One can understand the mental health experts diagnosis of fundamentalist belief as a neurosis or in certain cases psychosis.All of this fear can be covered up with a whitewashed tomb like motivation to do all to the Glory of God i.e. trying to make God central – the One to blame for the war with secular humanism.Hence so much emphasis on ‘thrones ,sovereignty,rule,kingdom’etc.
The gospel however shows a God who slipped into humanity by the back door (smelly stable), lived in the cultural backwoods of Gallile before ending up executed as a political/religious threat on a very ordinary Roman execution device.Motivation – compassion stemming from an Abba type understanding of Israel’s God and a belief that His ownbrokeness would be a door for the further breaking in of God.
If the ‘incarnation’ tells us anything it’s that the God who likes to hide and yet break into our world is quite comfortable dwelling with a humanity,bare and weak without the ‘Emperors’ clothes of religious piety and dare I say it ‘religious belief’.
This breaking in of the Divine in ‘unorthodox’ ways is impossible for fundamentalists to understand – God always keeps His own rules doesn’t He?The fundamentalist basis his world view on the rulebook even if the rest of humanity has moved on.Nobody tell them that the author of the rule book loves to break His own rules!
Charlie Boyd
June 27th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Lori’s great question, which for me cut to the chase and is worth repeating again:
“One early question: in How (Not) to Speak of God, [Pete] you reference (and strongly endorse) the prejudice of love. How might we approach LPP’s inherently heady endeavor from a perspective of love?”
And love, it seems to me, is the key. It can seem as hard, these days, to make love work as a fresh concept, as to make religion work. In fact, religion, so often, seems to be an exercise in avoiding the word ‘love’, or at least disarming it. Or everyone proceeds on the assumption that, being a part of the ‘in crowd’, we’ve already ‘got’ love, when the essence of love, surely, is that by its essence it slips every box we set up to keep it in.
Which is, no doubt, why ‘love’ has to be synonymous with ‘God’, and vice versa.
And there it is, like a grace-note. We don’t need to talk about God, because we have love to explore, which is an experience that, in some aspect, even its seeming absence, is common to everyone. I can certainly, even in my most atheistic days, continue to hang everything on the onto-theology of such a Love, and such a Love challenges me to think of it onto-theologically, even when I don’t want to.
If love is the key, then it is a key that stays still while the tumblers of the lock of the world turn around it. Perhaps fundamentalism is a snapshot of the lock frozen at a single point in time, or some attempt headily to identify with a third party, outside it all, forcing the key to turn faster, or rattling the lock, unaware or unwilling to accept that it is impossible not to be part of the lock and in some sense part of the key as well.
In the meantime, unhurriedly, the world-lock turns and the tumblers continue to open.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Responding to Richards comment
we embrace the whole of church in its trinitarian moorings: which make it cruciform. I’d love to see a bit more of the trinitarian moorings
Couldn’t agree more Richard. I have added a comment saying this on the end of the last discussion. Pete and I talked about this at length the last time we were together in Northern Ireland, and I am convinced as you are saying, that the basis of our starting place is the Trinity with its focus of living with the story of Christ in the context of God Creator, Redeemer and Companion as God models unity in diversity.
I am not sure where you are with Trinitarian moorings Pete – I think we agreed last time we met that the Christian imperfect construction of the Trinity is an important basis to faith, coming out of human experience of God as an event. But you may of just wanted to shut me up :>)
With this as a basis we can recover a less defensive threatened response to the complexity of the world. Fundamentalism being a defensive response of a community feeling threatened by the complexity of globalisation and fear of the other…..
A Trinitarian basis helps us explore the faith and forms of church in a post-religion, post-secular, post-modern context centred on a passion for the love of God. A Trinitarian mooring frees us to quest in a new context. I do think this is important. On my wee speaking tour of the States – I have met a few people who would rather than see the church and the faith die than have to change. I think a Trinitarian basis would not allow such people to hold such a view…
June 27th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
yes a good addition….and i just spent a lot of time tonight posting on the previous thread…well if anyone is minded read it there ;o) the joys of following a link to a post….but actually i do think the prevous comments worth reading so Ok really
July 31st, 2008 at 9:43 pm
[...] whole topic reminds me of Pete Rollins (I know I already quoted him in, like, the last 24 hours) on Bonhoeffer: “Interestingly, Bonhoeffer does not attack religion as such. However he reflects that in the [...]