A Call for Quiet
Charles
Marsh (http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/harvard-divinity-bulletin/articles/a-call-for-quiet)
In
a concentration camp in 1944, where he was imprisoned for his participation in
the resistance movement against the Nazis, the theologian and pastor Dietrich
Bonhoeffer pondered the future of the church in Germany as it lay in the ruins
of its fatal allegiance to Hitler. "The time of words is over," he
wrote. The language of the Christian faith had lost its credibility and power,
and, as a result, being a Christian would now need to be limited to the quiet
practices of "prayer and righteous action." I wonder whether it is
not time to give Bonhoeffer's meditation a new hearing.
American
patriotism has become a cult of self-worship consecrated by court prophets
robed in pin-striped suits. Forgetting the crucial difference between
discipleship to Jesus Christ and loyalty to nation, the God most Americans
trust is a simulacrum of the holy and righteous God, a reification of the
American way of life. The hundreds of sermons preached in support of the United
States invasion of Iraq had the effect of baptizing military ambition in the
shallow waters of civil piety and showing utter contempt for the global and
ecumenical church.
The
public debate on religion and moral values that followed last fall's election
introduced many Americans to a forgotten discourse of the Christian left. In
particular, the success of Jim Wallis's book God's Politics has revealed
a culture of progressive Christians ready to revitalize the Democratic Party
and purchase books in large quantities. Yet this movement to reclaim the soul
of politics, while refreshing to many of us, has not fully reckoned with the
grave, systemic results of the religious saturation of the public square, with
the theological meaning of this saturation, and the
death-by-a-thousand-equivocations of the language of faith. The hope of a more
compelling public discourse of faith may then be naïve on our part: making room
at the table for both the Christian right and the left appears to be producing
as much cacophony as clarity.
"There is too much talk," wrote
Bonhoeffer.
What
should Christians do in response to the desecration of religious language in
its recent political and public rehearsals? The question is an urgent one, is
it not? For we have seen Christian Coalition activists in Ohio holding high a
cross with the words "Bush-Cheney" painted in red across white beams,
and we have heard the chilling new catechisms of American Christendom—"Our
God is pro-war," said Jerry Falwell—and we find ourselves unable to
imagine any public argument capable of restoring integrity and depth to the
sacred symbols of the faith. What shall we then do? "All Christian
thinking and speaking" must be born anew out of the discipline of holy
silence, Bonhoeffer wrote. We must have the courage and the humility to
recognize that God is most certainly tired of our talk. We must learn to be
quiet in a nation of noisy believers. Only then will the day come "that
people will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will
be changed and renewed by it.
"Holy
silence is not then the same as the withdrawal of religion from the public
square, the kind strongly recommended by the philosopher Richard Rorty, who
dismisses religious claims as "conversation stoppers" and inherently
irrational. Rather, holy silence is shaped by a passion for faith's integrity,
and it hides faith's mysteries in acts of compassion and preserves them in
prayer, liturgy, devotional life, and worship. Holy silence is a season of
concentrated attention to faith's essential affirmations, during which we bear
witness to the authenticity of our faith in the practices we keep: showing
hospitality to strangers and outcasts; affirming the unity of the created
order; reclaiming the ideals of beauty, love, honesty, and truth, embracing the
preferential option for nonviolence, and learning to live in the world in a way
that is participatory rather than manipulative. The discipline of holy silence
prepares us for a time when we may speak of God once more as one who comes to
us from a country far from our own.
Let
us then live with passionate worldliness in our anxious and violent age, and
may the convictions of our faith be nurtured in the audacity of our hope and
the generosity of our love. The hour is late. Let's get busy and keep silent.
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