Discipleship - God in the World

““I should like to speak of God, not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in the weaknesses but in strength, and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness”
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— -Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters and Papers from Prison

I have been a fan of Dietrich Bonhoeffer since first reading his book, The Cost of Discipleship, years ago. I even did an adult study on it here at Lord of Grace in 2012, so I’m probably due for another one. As a lifelong Christian who grew up loving the church, but watching so many of my classmates fall away from the church, I have been captivated by the why of it all? Why did it stick with me, but fade with so many others? Then I read this quote from his Cost of Discipleship, and it hit hard.

“The price we are having to pay to-day in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. We poured forth unending streams of grace. Bu the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.” (Cost of Discipleship, p.54)

I could go on, and on. It’s a wonderful book. And it comes to a conclusion much the opposite of our theories on growth and evangelism: that we are declining because we’ve made the Gospel less rigorous and expected too little. We’ve just dispensed with baptisms willy-nilly, lacking any requirements, and declared that since there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, why bother? Baptism is supposed to be preceded by clear change of mind and behavior (for adults), and be the beginning of a life of service and sacrifice, not the substitute it. If everyone believed that all that mattered was getting into heaven, and Jesus did that for me, and Baptism just seals the deal, why bother with anything else? You’re just wasting time. You go to the same place after you die, whether you worship or give or serve - or not, then why not just take the easy way? It’s perfectly rational. And not at all what Luther had intended.

So the whole German nation was baptized, whether they really wanted it or not. And the result was a nation that saw Jesus placing no demands on their lives, just being a cultural thing one does to be a good German and lock in a spot after you die. Hence, when the Nazis came around promising national pride and lower interest rates, they did not encounter a population of people ready to critically examine their practices compared to the radical love and sacrifice of Jesus. They found a population that had separated Jesus from ethical life decades ago. Politicians did not need to prove that they were improving the lives of the widow and orphan and alien. They just had to show that they would keep the funding stream going to the state church, and take out its critics and competition – a happy exchange of protecting the institutional/cultural religion for political power. A good analogy today is Bishop Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow, who seems utterly unconcerned with the deaths and atrocities in Ukraine, but enjoys a big, beautiful cathedral and Orthodox teachings in the public schools, courtesy of Vladimir Putin.

As I’ve said before, I believe that we Lutherans have taken the pendulum swing way too far in our concern for teaching “works righteousness”. This is the doctrine that I can make myself right before God through doing good things, that my good actions earn me salvation. Clearly that’s a bar of perfection we’ll never approach. So we teach that we are saved by grace through faith. We can’t earn it, only accept it. Our actions flow from being saved, not to get it.

As eloquent as that sounds, in common practice it quickly becomes one of apathy, of not even bothering with changing my life, of being against all rules and requirements for following Jesus (called antinomianism), and just figuring that avoiding killing and the most egregious crimes is all that’s needed to live like a “good person”. But most of the people who put Hitler in power were not out killing anyone themselves; they supported him through their votes and their inaction. Most would probably have been what we call “good people” today, in that they are not street criminals or child abusers. They obeyed the laws and shared sugar with their neighbors. And they voted for Hitler.

Bonhoeffer would rage at the way Jesus, who openly said that everyone who wants to be a disciple must take up a cross to follow him, would end up just being a symbol of proper middle class citizenship, that being saved had been reduced to the afterlife, that following him had been made infinitely subjective, and that the role of God in people’s lives had been seen as mattering only in the places where our knowledge or power failed us – in the gaps.

This comes out in his final writings, made while he was in prison. He ruminates about how God has become someone people turn to only when they can’t fix things themselves. God exists to help you when you suffer, comfort you in pain, fill you with awe when you don’t have answers, save you in the life after death – but is irrelevant in the daily life most of us live. If I’m not struggling, generally happy with things, and filling my head with scientific knowledge, why God? The gaps keep getting smaller, so does the need for God to fill them. Hence why northern Europe is so irreligious. They have high standards of living, good health care, clean streets, strong safety nets, lots of education. Life is so good without God, I don’t need him except in the afterlife, which doesn’t worry me at all. So other things take priority in life, and how I vote and spend have nothing to do with Jesus. It’s all just subjective interpretations anyways.

It's why I tend to preach about Jesus’ way of life and way of living, of what God expects from us, as well as what God does for us. But I don’t talk a lot about heaven. It’s just not that important to me. I believe I am saved. Heaven’s a given. Now what do I do? What is my cross to bear? How does that make my life better, even if it makes me less wealthy and potentially invites conflict from powers that be? And how do we find God in the heart of life, in joy and pleasure and excitement? Where is God in enriching life and making it more full and meaningful and good? Is God there when I’m having fun, or only when I’m sick?

Discipleship is hard. I know I don’t do it well. One reaction in 2012 when we got through the book Cost of Discipleship was that we all felt like sell-outs. None of us were assassinating dictators or chaining ourselves to trees or protesting with the indigenous peoples. Whatever good we did never felt like enough. The paradox of Christian faith is that we find more meaning and fulfillment in living the life of giving and sacrifice than in self-indulgence and materialism. But that’s a hard sell, and a hard concept. When I’m in jail for a civil rights protest, it’s still a miserable time in a jail. I am making the world better, but it’s still a jail.

With all this in my head I made a series of videos last year for YouTube, about Bonhoeffer’s reflections in his letters from prison. The point was to show that he was not a nationalist or fundamentalist taking up arms – some sort of theological Clint Eastwood. He was not against a tax and spend social safety net, nor an enemy of gay marriage (he never wrote about it, so we don’t have hard proof of his thoughts). He was a Lutheran pastor trying to go back and correct abuses and get back to what being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Well, since spring of 2023 Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become a talked-about thing again. The movie, “Bonhoeffer: pastor, assassin, spy” came out, depicting him as having a moral crisis of only accepting that his calling was really to pick up that gun and kill for Jesus. Violence is the answer here, and you need to accept it, Dietrich, and get over your qualms, and take out the big bad guy. It was never that simple for him. He engaged in the plot to kill Hitler with massive thoughtfulness and moral struggle. He was always torn about it, and never saw it as more than a lesser evil. Nonetheless, the publicity has increased the searches on YouTube, and now those twelve videos, long and full of ruminations and drawings, are the most watched on the Lord of Grace channel. Who would have thunk it?

I encourage everyone to take a look at Bonhoeffer’s own writings, more than writings about him. He’s not hard to understand. The many biographies out there can be confusing, but you can get the best one from Bonhoeffer’s own friend Eberhard Bethge, who knew him personally. Avoid Erik Metaxas’ version, as that’s revisionist history – trying to make Bonhoeffer into some sort of right wing Christian Nationalist.

People followed Jesus not because it was easy, but because it was real. They could sense that God was with him, that his teachings were the real deal, that his power was from God, and that this was a life they wanted to emulate. It didn’t grow with clever strategies and better light shows. It was discipleship, a way of life, that offered an alternative to the life of the world around, driven by money and power and exploitation. It’s a life of Godliness, and a path to joy.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Experiencing God in Wilderness -pastor's column March 2023

These past few weeks I’ve been doing an online study of selected passages from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison. It’s been a fun experience to go back and look at one of my favorite writers and theologians, as well as someone I feel pretty comfortable recommending as a model of Christian faith. In case you aren’t familiar with him, he was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He taught for a while at Union Seminary in New York City, and decided to go back to Germany with the rise of Hitler. He could have stayed out the war, but he felt his Christian calling was not to avoid the cross of discipleship, but embrace it. I’m not sure I would have been as bold.

When he got to Germany he joined the Abwehr – German military intelligence. It gave him clearance to travel to gain secrets about the Allies, while also working as a sort of double-agent. He ended up joining a plot to kill Hitler, and when he was found out, was sent to the Tegel prison in Berlin. He stayed there 18 months before being quietly transferred to an SS camp, where he was interrogated, tortured, and, eventually, hung naked with piano wire a couple months before the war ended.

All this sacrifice has put a credibility behind his writings that most theologians don’t have. But there’s one part of him that is getting renewed attention these days, from an unlikely source: American fundamentalists.

When Bonhoeffer was in New York, there was a theological movement at the time in mainline churches called “liberalism”. Nowadays we call it “classical liberalism” because it isn’t the same as today. The word means different things. But back then it was about how we could build the kingdom of God here on earth through social programs and science, and that doctrine and beliefs were largely unimportant. What mattered was the social outcomes. This was a reaction to the “quietism” of so much of American Christianity then that taught, basically, forget about the world and prepare yourself for heaven. Actions have reactions.

What Bonhoeffer found disillusioned him on classical liberalism, as he felt it didn’t address the issues of discipleship and personal responsibility for one’s faith. But this is not to say he was a quietist, or against churches taking social stands. Here’s just one quote

“Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.”

He was not a social conservative, he just had issues with this particular brand of liberal Christianity.

Fast-forward to the early 2000’s, and suddenly you see his name being trumpeted by American Christian fundamentalists as one of their own. He’s now the doctrinal evangelical who died resisting the weak-kneed liberals who wouldn’t stand up to Hitler. So many things are wrong here, but most people wouldn’t catch them. In Germany, the Protestant “Lutheran” church actually calls itself the Evangelische Kirche. They don’t use the word “Lutheran”. In fact, our own doctrinal book, the Book of Concord, says “These are the writings of the Evangelical churches”. Lutheran was a nickname.

To conflate Dietrich Bonhoeffer with the modern evangelical movement, and all its literalism and politics, is simply wrong. He was anything but. Today he would go to a mainline Lutheran church, talk about “social justice” and “systemic injustice” along with the individual’s call to discipleship. He would in no way support the evolution-denying or science-denying politics of today’s evangelicals. But you have to dig a little to find that.

His earlier books, the Cost of Discipleship and Ethics have a heavy focus on the individual and the personal cost of being a follower of Jesus. They don’t delve as much into systemic and social things. It’s in his later writings, where he’s sitting in prison, with lots of time on his hands, that he starts to really rethink a lot of the Christian faith. It isn’t that he loses faith, even seeing WW2, it’s just that he gets disillusioned with how faith did not lead to action where it mattered. And so he begins to wonder if maybe the “religion” of his time – the practices, theology, unwritten belief systems, need to get jettisoned to get back to following Jesus. This is what he calls “religionless Christianity”, and this is what I’ve been exploring in the video series.

And yet, even here, his words got spun. You have fundamentalists talking about how they’re getting rid of “religion” to get “back to the heart”. And when pressed what that means, it’s something along the lines of: traditions, denominations, liturgy, robes, communion, written prayers – anything that might resemble Catholicism. They’re going to just sing and pray and listen to a sermon, and that’s “getting rid of religion”. The problem was, Bonhoeffer’s exploration of religionless Christianity has nothing to do with liturgy or bishops or robes, and everything to do with questions like:

• How can you talk about the cross if people are not believing in sin?

• Why is so much of “religion” just focused on life after death, instead of this world?

• What do we have to say that adds Christ to the world of experience and science, instead of saying that God is either not working in the world, or only is there to answer the questions we can’t (the God of the gaps)?

• Is it ethical to encourage people  to have an existential crisis so that you can solve it?

• What does it mean to talk about redemption if the world doesn’t think they need to be saved?

These are questions driven by the rise of secularism, science, atheism, philosophy. Nothing about robes or hymns or weekly communion. Nothing about Jesus “in your heart”. Much more deep.

Where I find the questions the most convicting and engaging for me center around the idea of finding God in the world, and not in what’s after or beyond. If God is only the answer to questions we can’t answer, the more science answers the less room there is for God. And in a world that could care less about hell and heaven, do we have something to say about life now?

There’s this common phrase I hear among my fellow wilderness-hiking-types that they don’t need to go to church because “nature is my church” and “I find God in nature/mountain/stream/rainbow/sunset”. I have spent a lot of time in nature, and while I feel that I can better connect with God there, because there is more beauty and less distractions, I have not found God. I missed the community, the Word, the communion, the songs. Just me and nature eventually got kind of lonely.

Ragged Top Mountain, in Ironwood Forest National Monument.

But I see where they’re coming from, and because of Bonhoeffer I understand it better. They’re not denying that God exists, or that there is more to life than the physical world, or that there is transcendent experience. They’re just placing it IN THE WORLD. Church, they believe, is all about after death and outside of experience. They want a richer experience of God IN NATURE, not a God who tells you to destroy it because it’s all going to hell in the rapture anyways. They want to find God now, not just after death. And they want more life now, not a deprived life now in order to prepare for the good one later.

With that, I can’t disagree.

But our music, our hymns, so much of what we do is not geared towards finding God IN the pleasure and beauty today. If anything, pious Christianity has viewed pleasure as the first step on a slippery slope to debauchery and hell. Better to hold it all in. And if you listen to the songs about after I die, they go on and on about the “far side of Jordan”, but nothing about the near side of my life.

It's made me rethink how we can talk about God with no reference to heaven and hell, afterlife, punishment. It’s made me rethink how to talk about Jesus as someone to find IN the experience of the world, not as an escape from it.

Jesus being tempted to rule the world by The Tester

And how do we do that, and keep Jesus distinctly Jesus, and not fall into “God is in everything, so everything is God” sort of mushy-ness? Bonhoeffer suggests going back to the Old Testament, where no one believed in hell or an afterlife, and where Jesus, he believes, considers that of minor importance (though he does believe in resurrection). The message is there, the way is there, but it will involve some re-experiencing the world around you.

My thoughts meander, but let me bring it all back. This Lent our theme is “wilderness”. You can take that a couple ways. One is that it’s a place of emptiness, disorientation, deprivation. In those places, like Jesus, we can hear the Spirit more clearly because of our lack of distractions. The other way is to look at the wilderness as a place of rich experience, peace, harmony, and presence of mind – a place where God is MORE present, and deprivation is less. In both cases, we can go on our journeys away from the endless to-do lists that kill any experience of holiness and transcendence, that separate us from daily experience of God.

We’ll explore this theme in our mid-week services through the use of meditation, conversation, and contemplation of visual art. God will be present in both the non-seeing, and in the rich visuals. The sermons on Sunday will emphacize this two-sided journey, and, I hope, we will all have a new perspective on faith as followers of Jesus in this world.

Peace,

Pastor Lars