Religionless Christianity

By Ryan McBain

Preface and Introduction

            Unfortunately, I must preface my response with the following remarks: First, given the fact that there are only a couple weeks left of classes here at Gordon, almost all of my time has been dedicated to academic studies. As such, all the following are merely preliminary, inchoate speculations.  Secondly, it should be noted that the following discussion is an adaptation of my senior thesis paper on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  With that said, let us turn to the question at hand…

“What does it mean to be a Christian?”

            Quite obviously, such a question merits a voluminous response; any single- or two-page reply cannot help but present itself as highly superficial and offensively reductionistic.  In light of this, I’ve opted to circumvent the original question and address another that is more or less tangential to the first.  The question I will address is: What are one or two essential theological principles that must be incorporated into every Christian’s (i.e., those who are true believers in and followers of Christ) life, but are commonly overlooked or ignored?
            The primary theological concept I wish to address is religiousless Christianity and its natural outcome (this-worldliness), religiouslessness being a salient concept/teaching of the twentieth-century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Hence, I shall first explain the meaning of religiousless Christianity and its fruitful outcome (this-worldliness), and then apply these concepts to the central question Jeremy has proposed.

Religiousless-ness

Religious Christianity. To understand what Bonhoeffer meant by religiousless Christianity, we must first understand what he meant by religious Christianity.  Bonhoeffer wrote in his Letters and Papers from Prison:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.  The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inward and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now cannot honestly describe themselves as religious any more… “Christianity” has always been a form—perhaps the true form of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically-conditioned and transient form of self-expression, and if therefore mankind becomes radically religionless—and I think that is already more or less the case (how else, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any religious reaction?)—what does that mean for Christianity?[i]

            Hence, religious Christianity for Bohoeffer is self-expression of one’s faith (which in his view, has become distorted and egocentric).  In essence, religiosity does not originally possess a negative connotation.  However, the rationalism, technologism, industrialization, and war that he encountered in this world transformed this naïve, genuine religiousness into something disingenuous, artificially produced; hence, one begins to posture a disposition of religiousness that is essentially antithetical to religious experience.  For example, the historically-conditioned expression of Christianity may be a measurable sense of inward joy, or a hearty distancing from worldly concerns, or a perfectly fluid prayer that impresses those around us.  The Christian squeezes himself to conform to the perception of how he believes Christianity should be expressed, rather than allowing that expression to be an outflow of true experience.  And the more he squeezes himself to fit a role that contradicts the realities of existence, the more religious devises no longer comport with the actual dimensions of daily existence, and the more he is left with religious role playing, “religious” Christianity.[ii]  This is the same frustration Luther expressed in his objection to the Catholic Church: the Catholic Church had turned such things as confession into an outward religious practice. Confession as a sacrament had transformed repentance (the inward turning of one’s soul towards God) into a merely outward act.  Bonhoeffer often expressed his wariness of such an outward masquerade, what he called the “garment of Christianity.”  A prime example is found in another one of his letters from prison.  He writes:

While I am often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people—because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself slightly dishonest (it is particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable)—to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course.[iii] 

            On a yet another occasion he would write, “To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (e.g., a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man—not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us.”[iv]

Religiousless Christianity. Religiousless Christianity then, allows for the mystery of the inexplicable and overwhelming: it is Christianity “without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics.”[v] Here, religion is free from systematization and from a calculating “piety” in which one is conformed to a role that does not properly express inward faith.  Faith then, is never to be equated with religion; religion is a profanation of the mystery of faith.[vi]  It is for this reason that Bonhoeffer invoked the “discipline of the secret,” an unknown meaning of worship and praying which both returns to the Early
Church and still has yet to be discovered.[vii]
            In conclusion, religiousless Christianity, in Bonhoeffer’s own words, means “speaking in a new language…liberating and redeeming—as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of the new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace for people and the coming of God’s kingdom.”[viii] Religiouslessness allows the Christian into a genuine relationship with Christ, for it is a faith void of pretension, in which one can remain open to Christ’s call here and now. For Bonhoeffer, adoption of this concept would later permit him to openly hear Christ’s call in his life to actively rebel against Hitler.

This-Worldliness

Entering into Christ. The outcome of religiousless Christianity is identification both with Christ and the world. With Bonhoeffer, religion is replaced by the state of actually being in Christ, the Pauline concept of dying and rising from the dead with Christ: It is the state of being included in the messianic birth-pains of the Kingdom of God, which was inaugurated with the incarnation of Christ and will reach its culmination upon his Second Coming.  Thus, rather than experiencing Christ in special “religious” acts we enter into Christian faith through this life in the world.  Christian existence is “always in essence a lived-out interpretation of being-in-Christ.”[ix]  We see then that God is not the “stopgap” God that fills the holes in our life, but is rather a God who subsumes every aspect of our being, who lays before us and in us a life of sola gratia in which everything is from grace.

Entering into the World. Participation in the reality of Christ by living in the world is most clearly found in his Papers and Letters from Prison.  On one occasion he writes:

The difference for the Christian hope of resurrection and a mythological hope is that the former sends man back to his life on Earth in a wholly new way which is even more sharply defined than it is in the Old Testament.  The Christians, unlike the devotees of the redemption myths, has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the Eternal, but like Christ himself (my God why hast thou forsaken me?), must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is crucified and risen with Christ.  This world must not prematurely be cut off… But Christ takes hold of a man in the center of his life.[x] 

            The word prematurely should especially be noticed here.  Participation in this world is never the ultimate (but rather the penultimate) for Bonhoeffer.  However, it is necessarily required for participating in the life and sufferings of Christ, and therefore integral to discipleship (As costly-grace).  This understanding is drawn out explicitly in Ethics in Bonhoeffer’s categories of the “penultimate and ultimate.”  Dietrich goes on to say later in his Letters, “It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life,” and again, “[we] are to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, thus fulfilling Isaiah 53.” [xi] We see then that living in Christ involves living and suffering in the world. 

This-Worldliness as Postmodern. This-Worldliness is postmodern in that it rejects the modernist proclivity for the demystification and objectification of God.  Bonhoeffer insists upon maintain a God who is both (in the words of Barth) “Wholly Other,” and astoundingly immanent and intimate. Bonhoeffer writes:

God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science, has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion.  For the sake of intellectual honest, that the working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible eliminated.  A scientist or physician who sets out to edify is a hybrid.

            Anxious souls will ask what room there is left for God now; and as they know no answer to the question, they condemn the whole development that has brought them to such straits.  I wrote to you before about the various emergency exits that have been contrived; and we ought to add to them the death-leap back into the Middle Ages.  But this principle of the Middle Ages is heteronomy in the form of clericalism; a return to that can be a counsel of despair, but it would be at the cost of intellectual honesty.[xii]

            Bonhoeffer here is destroying the possibility of God as a “working hypothesis.”  God as a working hypothesis means that God is forced to conform to a system or paradigm.  This, however, does not mean that God ceases to exist; for several weeks later, Bonhoeffer writes, “But all the time God still reigns in heaven… he remains the Lord of Earth, he preserves his church, constantly renewing our faith and not laying on us more than we can bear, gladdening us with his nearness and help, hearing our prayers…”[xiii]  This thought was already developed in his Act and Being when he wrote, “God is the supramundane reality transcending consciousness, the Creator and Lord.  This sentence is the unconditional requirement of Christian theology…”[xiv]  In light of such assertions, we see that Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the primacy of metaphysics does not call the Christian to accept relativism and despair, but to return to the revelation of Christ in the Bible as the only possible grounding for our being: “It is in being known by God that human beings know God.  But to be known by God means to become a new person.  It is the justified and sinner in one who knows God.  It is not because the word of God is in itself meaning that it affects the existence of human beings, but because it is God’s word.”[xv]  This acceptance of a ‘theology of revelation’ insists upon a returning to this world; for it is in our suffering in this world that we most closely identify with and enter into Christ.  Bonhoeffer’s dialectical approach comes to the fore: in one instance, he can testify, “Become weak in the world and let God be your Lord,” while later declaring in the same lecture “whoever flees the world will not find God…whoever flees the world to find God only finds himself.”[xvi]

Conclusions

            Perhaps the applicational conclusions of these concepts are overwhelmingly obvious: We see in terms of religiouslessness that to be Christian means first and foremost to be candid before Christ, to reject mere external moralisms and pietistic tendencies toted by “religion,” and instead to open ourselves to the intimate call of Christ on our lives and in the moment.  In terms of this-worldliness, we see that the Christian does not conform himself to Christ who is the perfect moral exemplar, but rather the Christian mystically enters into Christ and participates in Christ’s sufferings when he (the Christian) participates and suffers in this world.  It is through this re-entry into the world that the Christian is able to identify with Christ and therefore grow in faith.  Lastly, in terms of the postmodern leanings present in the concept of this-worldliness, we see that the Christian must insist upon Christ as the very ground for his being.  To grant primacy to anything else is to raise up an idol.

Ryan McBain for AcrossTheGap May ‘06

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[i] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 140.

[ii] Huntemann, An Evangelical Reassessment, p. 106.

[iii] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 141.

[iv] Ibid., p. 190.

[v] Ibid, p. 141.

[vi] Kelly, The Cost of Moral Leadership, p. 42.

[vii] Ibid, p. 16-17.

[viii] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 161.

[ix] Huntemann, An Evangelical Reassessment, p. 74.

[x] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 176-177.

[xi] Ibid., p. 190.

[xii] Ibid., p. 187.

[xiii] Ibid., p. 205.

[xiv] Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, p. 57.

[xv] Ibid., p. 134.

[xvi] As quoted in Huntemann, An Evangelical Reassessment, p. 142.