Christ without Religion?

If you happen to visit this blog regularly, besides experiencing the regular disappointment at my lack of content, you might recall that I am rather fond of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings and that I have recently read through his Letters & Papers from Prison (Fortress Press, 2010). I laughed when I compared the bulk of the new critical edition against the pocket-sized paperback edition in my father-in-law’s library (being about a quarter of the size), but the end still came too soon. Obviously, these letters are most famous (infamous?) for Bonhoeffer’s “new prison theology,” in which he begins to explore the idea of “religionless Christianity.” Though I am in no place to evaluate this idea within the wider scope of Christian theology in general, I have tried to understand Bonhoeffer on his own terms. As usual, I found that reading Bonhoeffer himself on the subject was far more edifying and enlightening than reading some of his interpreters.

Bonhoeffer’s letters read more like thoughtful and speculative conversations than a systematic defense of a clearly defined argument. This leaves the reader in something of a precarious position to determine precisely where he would have gone with his thoughts. Indeed, his expositions of his “theological topic” are conspicuously  and frustratingly truncated. (You can almost hear the collective groan each time he says, “More on this later.”)

The content of his “new theology” comes from his wrestling with questions such as, who is Jesus Christ for us today? what is the essence of Christianity? where is God in a world void of religion? His reflections on these questions produced the well-known phrase that is now inextricably connected with Bonhoeffer’s theology: “religionless Christianity in a world come of age.”

This is probably unfair to Bonhoeffer, since he was never afforded the opportunity to develop these thoughts or explore them in a more systematic way, nor was he able to relate these ideas to the wider scope of his theology. Nevertheless, his letters clearly reveal that the topic had occupied his thoughts for some time, and he must have spent a good deal of his time in prison thinking along these lines. According to him, “what keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” (362). He pursues this question with the underlying judgment that the world is becoming “radically religionless,” and wonders, “How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well?” (363). But it’s important, before we try to determine the value of this question, not to overlook what Bonhoeffer meant by religion.

Bonhoeffer was interested in answering the questions, “What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life, mean in a religionless world? How do we talk about God––without religion, that is, without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, the inner life, and so on? How do we speak . . . in a ‘worldly’ way about ‘God’?” (364). These questions alone already provide good insights into precisely what Bonhoeffer understood by “religion.” When people hear the phrase, “religionless Christianity,” most likely what springs to mind is a faith in Christ free from tradition, practice, hierarchy, and establishment; “religion” is synonymous with organized religion. But Bonhoeffer poses the question by asking about the relevance of certain “organized” phenomena – congregations, sermons, liturgy – and not in a way to question their relevance altogether but simply to locate it. So, for Bonhoeffer, religionless Christianity could not have meant the rejection of the empirical Christian church.

In my estimation, what Bonhoeffer meant by a “religionless age” can be roughly equated to Charles Taylor’s definition of the “secular age.” Taylor defines the secular age as the era in human thought where faith in God or the supernatural is not a given, but rather is only one option among many. Bonhoeffer contrasts the age of religion with the “world come of age,” by which he means the age when people are capable of addressing all of life’s questions and difficulties without resorting to “working hypothesis: God.” (If you’ve read my previous post on this, some of this might be redundant.) In Bonhoeffer’s understanding, “as a working hypothesis for morality, politics, and the natural sciences, God has been overcome and done away with, but also as a working hypothesis for philosophy and religion” (478). The religious attitude that repulsed him and against which he was contending was the attitude that treated God as a “stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge” (405-06). Religious thought was, for Bonhoeffer, characterized by the tendency to explain the unexplained with “working hypothesis: God.” His question was, what happens when people can satisfactorily answer the unexplained with a “godless” explanation? He contended that God cannot be thought of as a stopgap or a deus ex machina, because “when the boundaries of knowledge are pushed even further, God too is pushed further away and thus is ever on the retreat. We should find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants to be grasped by us not in unsolved questions but in those that have been solved” (406).

One of the more important factors in Bonhoeffer’s discussion about the difference between the “religious” person and the “worldly” person is that the religious person tends to treat God as a deus ex machina, a stopgap for the incompleteness of their knowledge. “God” is the generic answer to the unexplained. The worldly person is the one who has learned to live without this “working hypothesis” and manages to get by just fine as if there were no God. This is the main characteristic of the “world come of age.” Bonhoeffer thus saw a disparity between the questions being “solved” by Christian apologists and the questions most people were actually asking. The apologist was using “God” to fill in the gaps of human knowledge, but Bonhoeffer judged that no such gaps existed anymore. Like a ripple expanding outward, God had entered human thought in a sea of unknowns and rode the waves of intellectual and scientific development until he had been driven so far from the centre that he could scarcely be perceived. (So perhaps as Bonhoeffer understood it, if God had not been so incessantly presented as “stopgap,” the scientific revolution begun at the enlightenment would have posed no significant threat to Christian faith.)

This problem, which Bonhoeffer saw as the inevitable result of our fundamental “explanation” of God, could only be solved if we could learn to speak of God at the centre of our lives instead of the boundaries:

We must recognize God not only where we reach the limits of our possibilities. God wants to be recognized in the midst of our lives, in life and not only in dying, in health and strength and not only in suffering, in action and not only in sin. The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. God is the center of life and doesn’t just “turn up” when we have unsolved problems to be solved. Seen from the center of life, certain questions fall away completely and likewise the answers to such questions.

How do we go about seeing God at the centre of human life? That is a question Bonhoeffer always answers with the name of Jesus Christ. In his Ethics, God is not the answer to a metaphysical problem, but, in Jesus Christ, is the centre and origin of all Christian life; our humanity consists in participating in the reality of the true human, Jesus Christ.

The reason we have pushed God to the fringes is that we understand God to be the great Beyond. But, according to Bonhoeffer, people have mistakingly replaced God’s transcendence for something that is merely “beyondance”. “God’s ‘beyond’ is not what is beyond our cognition! Epistemological transcendence has nothing to do with God’s transcendence. God is the beyond in the midst of our lives” (367).

Bonhoeffer saw fit that Christ should encounter people where they actually are, not that they should first be transformed into a sinner so they might become a saint, nor a seeker that they might be found, nor a fool that they might become wise. What does this mean, then, in a religionless age? How does Christ confront the religionless? Is religion a prerequisite for Christianity, or is it okay that it has begun to fade away? Should its disappearance be discouraged, tolerated, or (dare I say) encouraged? What does this mean for the church? How might it change? Was Bonhoeffer onto something, or would we be better off, as Karl Barth suggested after reading LPP, to stick with Bonhoeffer’s earlier works?

Take and Eat! Sermon on John 6:25-35

25   When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”  26 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.  27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”  28 Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?”  29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  30 So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?  31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”  32 Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.  33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  34 They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” 35   Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

If you look back to the beginning of chapter six, you’ll see that this story takes place after the feeding of the five thousand. You’ll recall that Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand people with only five loaves of bread and two fish. You’ll also remember that after everyone had eaten their fill, there were twelve baskets of bread left over. After this miraculous feeding, the people declare that Jesus is “the Prophet” and they intend to take him and force him to be their king. Apparently this is not what Jesus wants, because he immediately retreats alone to the mountain. Following this, John records another miracle: the walking on water. Unlike the multiplying of the bread and the fish, Jesus’ next miracle is seen only by the disciples. After Jesus had gone to the mountain, the disciples left on a boat to cross the sea of Galilee. They are soon shocked to find Jesus walking on the water towards them. Afraid at first, once they realize who it is, they invite him into the boat and land together on the other side of the sea at Capernaum. The significance of this for the crowd is that they couldn’t figure out where Jesus went. They saw that the disciples had left without Jesus and that they had taken the only boat, so they must have assumed that Jesus stayed on the mountain. When Jesus wasn’t there, they went looking for him. Some other boats had come nearby since the disciples left, so the people took them across the sea to Capernaum, where they finally found Jesus.

When they find Jesus, they ask him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” (6:25). Jesus replies, but he doesn’t answer their question: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves” (6:26).  Jesus saw that they had been looking for him, but more importantly, he understood why: Not because they had seen signs, but because he had given them supper.

It’s interesting that Jesus told them that they hadn’t seen signs, because clearly they had seen a miracle. But in John’s Gospel, a sign is something more than just a miraculous event. A sign is something that points to Christ. A sign bears witness to who Jesus really is. When Jesus tells the crowd that they didn’t see signs, he isn’t telling them that they failed to see that the multiplication of the bread and fish was a miracle. Obviously they did. What he is telling them is that they didn’t understand the meaning of that event. They saw that Jesus could make lots of food out of a little food, but rather than allowing this event to shape their understanding of Jesus, they came looking for more food. Jesus recognized that they had come to him looking for what they could get. They came to Jesus looking for something other than Jesus himself. They saw him multiply food and took him to be something not unlike a magician, a person who could do things others couldn’t. They wanted Jesus only as a means to get at some other good.

The people in our passage today came to Jesus hoping for bread. They sought Jesus because he was the means to satisfying their appetites. He could do something for them. I tend to come seeking after Jesus in a similar way. I have an appetite for study. I come to Jesus because I want to study him, think about him, talk about him. But am I actually seeking after Jesus, or just what I can get from him? I am constantly reminded that what I want is so much less than Jesus himself. Jesus recognizes this tendency in the crowd that came looking for him. He corrects them with these words (v. 27): “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”

Jesus distinguishes between two types of food: that which perishes and that which lasts forever. The food that perishes gives life for a little while; the food that endures forever gives life eternally. Jesus isn’t exactly telling the people that their desires are wrong, but just that they are too small. They saw that Jesus could feed five thousand people with a small amount of food, and they mistakingly thought that this was the main event. But they had stopped short of the truth. This has happened to me many times. I come to Jesus to talk about Jesus. I cry out to God just to hear the sound of my own voice. I ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom just long enough to write that wisdom down and be done with it. I keep stopping short of the fulness of life there is in Christ. Don’t get me wrong, our love of the good things that come from Christ is good. But the blessings of Christ ought always to direct us back to Christ himself. Theology is a gift from God: the fact that God has revealed himself and enables us to speak truthfully about him is an act of pure grace. But theology cannot take the place of God; it is only about God. Theology points not to itself, but to Jesus Christ. In the same way, the feeding of the five thousand was a good gift from Christ, but the event itself was about Christ, not about food. The people thought that the gift was the point, but the point was and still is the giver of all good gifts.

This is why Jesus tells the people not to “work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.” Their desire for bread wasn’t wrong in itself. The problem was that what they wanted from Jesus was so much less than he is. They wanted Jesus to give them regular bread to eat, but he wanted to give them himself, the bread of life who gives eternal life.

If we read on, we see that the people who came to seek Jesus weren’t exactly stubborn; they were just confused. They understood that they had come with the wrong question. They were supposed to work for the food that endures to eternal life.  Naturally, they want to know how. So they ask (v. 28), “What must we do to perform the works of God?” They want to know what they can do to work for this food that endures forever. Do you see what happened? Jesus had tried to draw their attention to himself, but they had reflected it back on themselves. They had heard clearly enough that there was better food to be found than the food they had shared with the five thousand, but they had turned it back on themselves, saying, “What can we do?”

They hadn’t understood that this food could not be gathered and eaten of their own efforts. Jesus had said (v. 27), “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” In other words, this food is a gift from Jesus. It is not a commodity like the food of this world: wheat can be grown, harvested, ground up into flour, kneaded, baked and eaten. The food that Jesus is talking about can only be given to us by Jesus himself.

When they ask, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answers them (v. 29), “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” They had asked about works; Jesus tells them of the one work, which is faith. What does it mean, then, to “believe in the one whom God has sent”? This brings us back to another verse in John, one of the most famous verses in the Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Again, we see the connection between faith and eternal life. This is a common pattern in John’s Gospel, which was written for a very specific purpose. John himself tells us exactly why he wrote his Gospel (20:31): “these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” So, in John, there is a clear connection between faith in Christ and eternal life.

But the question is: have we really left works behind? It still sounds like we have to do something to earn our heavenly bread, to earn eternal life: we have to believe. Another question: have we really abandoned the notion of coming to Christ only to get something from him? Is it right to come to Christ only for a blessing he can give, even if that blessing is something as wonderful as eternal life? What are we looking for in Jesus? What are we getting from him? What are we doing for him? These are the questions that the people brought to Jesus. But rather than indulge their questions, Jesus always answered by pointing to himself. “You came searching for bread. You should have come searching for me.” “You want to know what you can do. You should want to know who I am.”

Who is this Jesus? They were told to believe in him, being the one whom God sent, but they have more questions:

So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?  Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”  Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.  For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

Part of what’s going on in this conversation is that the Jews were expecting that the Messiah would reinstitute the sign of the manna. If Jesus was the Messiah, then what sign does he bring? Where’s the manna? Jesus explains first that it was not Moses who gave them bread from heaven, but God the Father. Second, though the manna seemed to come from heaven, it was not “heavenly bread.” In other words, manna appeared in a remarkable way, but the bread itself was an earthly sort of bread––it satisfied earthly hunger. Jesus says that only the Father gives true bread from heaven, and only this true bread of life gives true life to the world.

The people, who had originally followed Jesus because of the loaves, finally seem to get the point. There is bread better than the sort they had been seeking. They wanted this true bread of God, so they say (v. 34), “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus replies, “I am the bread of life” (6:35). The crowd had learned to desire the “bread of God.” Jesus ends their search by telling them that he himself is this bread. He does not merely know about the bread. He does not merely give this bread to others. He is this bread. He is the bread of life. What he gives to us is nothing less than he himself, and those who partake in this true bread will never be hungry, and those who believe in him will never be thirsty.

The crowd came with a transactional idea of Jesus, coming to him first hoping to receive something (food), then hoping to offer something (works). Both times Jesus corrects them, urging them not to seek earthly gain nor to attempt earthly works, both of which are fundamentally different from Jesus himself, the true source of that gain and the true sanctifier of those works. We are constantly taking our eyes off of Christ and putting them on ourselves. Jesus calls us to seek him alone. We don’t need to look for anything outside of him. We don’t need to find satisfaction in addition to Christ, for he is the bread of life. Knowing him, we don’t need to find the truth, for he is the truth. Following him, we don’t need to find the way, for he is the way. United to him, we don’t need to find life, for he is the resurrection and the life.

When we seek Christ alone, we may receive earthly blessing and we may do good works. But both endeavors, if sought in and of themselves, treat Christ as means to an end. Christ is the end, centre, source and goal of all life. He is not a means to some blessing nor an object upon which to heap good works. Come to Christ asking for blessing and you might receive it; come to him with an offering of good works and he might accept it––but make no mistake, it will not end here. What Christ has given us is nothing less than himself. Indeed, we are broken, and our reasons for coming to Christ are equally broken – even our coming to Jesus must be taken up and redeemed by Jesus himself. However, when we draw near to Christ, it is only because he has drawn near to us, and as we allow him to come closer, he will only come closer still. We cannot have some part of Christ and not his whole person too, which is to say we cannot allow Christ to have some part of us and not our whole person too. Christ has given us the bread of life; he has given us himself. So come, take and eat!

Some thoughts on theology as science

I am currently reading through T. F. Torrance’s classic book, Theological Science. It functions more or less as his prolegomena to theology, many tidbits of which are found scattered through his other books. It has made me start thinking more about how we can know God, how we can know we can know God, and why it matters.

Most people would reject theology as a science with haste and probably a condescending smile. “It’s nice that you’re trying to take your religion seriously,” they might say, “but the realm of science is reserved for the study of things we can actually measure and observe.” Probably what they have in mind with this statement is a sort of speculative or natural theology, wherein human thinkers conjure up a more or less arbitrary picture of God, based on a transcendental projection of the natural world or, worse yet, based purely on their own desires – a God in our own image. This empty speculation they contrast with hard science, which takes concrete observable data, subjects it to repeatable and reliable tests, and draws conclusions based on fixed behaviour.

Science is an inquiry into the reality of an object as it presents itself to us. Theology can  thus be considered a science only insofar as it deals with an objective reality as it is presented to us and as it yields observations that are true to the nature of the object of study. The observations must conform to the nature of the observed, yet this nature cannot be known so long as it remains unobserved. All sciences, therefore, require something of a “leap of faith” wherein an inquiry is made as to the nature or behaviour of a particular object that presents itself to the observer, and if the conclusions reached on the basis of this inquiry are incongruous with the nature of its results, the mode of inquiry must be exchanged for a new one. If, however, the inquiry yields results and conclusions that are congruous with one another, then this method may be pursued further until either it proves to be inappropriate or it becomes recognized as a suitable method. All of this, however, presupposes that we are dealing with a concrete reality. This is the difference between hypothesis and speculation. Hypothesis, like speculation, may or may not prove correct, but, unlike speculation, hypothesis is always directed by reality.

How do we speak of reality in the realm of theology? After all, it seems to stand apart from all other sciences by having no ultimate claim to truth, not only in its findings (in this respect all sciences are open to reevaluation), but even in its own validity. Can we call something “science” if the reality of its object of inquiry cannot be confirmed? Indeed, the theological question, “who is God?” assumes the postulate, “there is a God.” So perhaps it will be said, “first prove that there is a God, and then we can talk about whether or not this God can be known.” But this sort of argument departs from science altogether. Even mathematics, the purest of the sciences, the one which often lays exclusive claim to absolute truth, cannot survive under this scrutiny. “First prove that numbers exist, and then we can look into their study,” will be to no avail, for it would seem that numbers only exist as they are studied, and it is only after we have come a long way in their study that we can determine whether or not they “really exist.” This is why “epistemology has its proper place not at the beginning but at the end, for the logical questions it raises have normative rather than constitutive significance for knowledge” (Torrance, 3). All the sciences, in this way, are “self authenticating.” They assume their own validity, and any query thereinto always points back to the science itself.

So, when we speak of “reality” in theology, we do not refer first to proofs of God’s existence, but rather we refer to the objective reality of God as it is presented to us. This is why speculative theology cannot lead to knowledge of the true God; it does not correspond to any objective reality, but only to the endless fancies of the imagination. The objective reality on which all theological reflection must fix its eyes and to which it must conform is the concrete acts of God in history. For it is only here that we encounter the true and living God in a true and living way. In this way, theological science is always an encounter and interaction with God’s living Word. Apart from God’s Word – incarnate, written, and proclaimed – no amount of theological reflection can produce real knowledge of the reality of God.