The Church as God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement
(A rough draft of a chapter from my forthcoming book on Bonhoeffer)
I
have argued that Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement captures the DNA of
God’s people in scripture and that the Submerging Church captures the form and
ethos the church needs today. This image, I argue, provides a compelling icon
for the church’s identity and vocation today and setting for scripture to
function authoritatively as God’s Word.
I
want to offer here a further description of such a community, particularly in
light of the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
This is not a model and certainly not a formula for doing church today.
It is rather a set of characteristics we might expect to find in all sorts of
different forms and configurations where the church embraces and attempts to live
out this “general campaign of sabotage” (as C. S. Lewis wonderfully put it)
against the disorder of the world.
1. A
prayer movement (DB’s arcane discipline)
a. “To
clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder
of the world.”[1] Karl
Barth
b. “Prayer is subversive activity. It involves a more or less act of defiance
against any claim by the current regime . . . [As we pray,] slowly but surely,
not culture, not family, not government, not job, not even the tyrannous self
can stand against the quiet power and creative influence of God’s sovereignty.
Every natural tie of family and race, every willed commitment to person and
nation is finally subordinated to the rule of God.”[2]
Eugene Peterson
c. Prayer engenders “common Christian acts . . . sacrificial love, justice,
and hope . . . If we develop a sense that sacrificial love, justice, and hope
are at the core of our identities—they go to our jobs with us each day, to our
families each night—then we are in fact subversive. You have to understand that
Christian subversion is nothing flashy. Subversives don’t win battles. All they
do is prepare the ground and change the mood just a little bit toward belief
and hope, so that when Christ appears, there are people waiting for him.”[3]
d. Prayer
begets a community of confession of sins one to another. According to DB in Life Together such confession is what makes
a church a church.[4]
2. A
community of cruciform witness (DB’s Church for others; seeing things from below)
a.
“God plants communities
amidst the despair and violence of the world that, by their sheer life in
Christ, witness to another reality. In the process they disrupt the Symbolic
Order (reigning ideologies), birth hope and prepare the way for something new.
This is what is made possible in Christ by the Holy Spirit.”[5]
b.
“Jesus
Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted
him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers.
For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the
Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the
thick of foes. There is his commission, his work. 'The kingdom is to be in the
midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of
the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and
lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and
betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have
been spared' (Luther).”[6]
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
c.
"Covenantal
existence eventuates in a community of uncommon generosity and mercy, a
community of fidelity and freedom, a community that is not seduced by [the]
absolutism [of fundamentalism] and that is not left unrestrained by [the]
autonomy [of liberalism]. It is a congregation of conservative covenanters and
liberal covenanters, all of whom are covenanters before they receive other
labels.
"So imagine a community of covenant,
set down in a society of usurpatious absolutism and self-indulgent autonomy
come to give self away, ready and able to receive more life from those who are
unlike us, ready for fidelity that takes the form of freedom that is
disciplined, ready for signs and acts and gestures of forgiveness and
hospitality and generosity, more ready to support than to judge..."[7]
Walter Brueggemann
d.
"Let not
men’s sin dishearten thee: love a man even in his sin, for that love is a
likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth. Love all God’s
creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of
light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou
love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once
thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller
understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a
love that will then be all-embracing and universal."[8] Fyodor Dostoevsky
e. This
witness is resistant, transgressive, and utopian.[9]
(DB’s Seeing from Below) It resists false and alienating ideologies,
transgresses unjust laws, boundaries, and taboos, and opens temporary spaces of
freedom and celebration (see Pirates’ Temporary Autonomous Zones).
3. Aim:
to infiltrate every community and living space with outposts of God’s SCRM
which serve as sign, sacrament, and servant of God’s cruciform rule.
a.
Sign – points beyond itself to God’s coming
kingdom and new creation
b.
Sacrament – provisional experience of that
kingdom pointed to
c.
Servant – enacting further planting of SCRM’s
4. Multidimensional,
local, and tactical (DB’s immersion in all of life)
a.
Focused on neighborhoods and local living
situations of the poor and helpless.
b.
Occurs in the closed circle of a committed
church fellowship, a dotted circle of extended fellowship (friends, relatives),
and a semi-circle of third places in the world where Christians may be guests.[10]
David Fitch
c.
This community shares life with its neighbors
as a parallel community, embodies a different way of life within that
shared life as an alternative community, and sometimes as a critique of
their shared life as a counter community. These three aspects, parallel,
alternative, and counter, are all features of the community simultaneously with
different aspects foregrounded under different circumstances and pressures.
d.
Being subversive means working within the
givens of the culture we live in. We have no grand strategy to seize the reins
of power and impose “God’s way” on everyone. Rather, in concert with the
powerless we do what we can, when we can, as often as we can to “help and
serve” (not dominate) them (Bonhoeffer) in finding ways to better themselves.
We learn from them the serpentine wisdom (Matt.10:16) the powerless have about
finding cracks and loopholes, gaming the system, underground resistance, and
similar tactics (de Certeau). It celebrates these typically small but real acts
of resistance as signs of the freedom from death granted us in Christ
(Stringfellow and the church as circus).
5. The Violence
of Love
a.
“We have never preached
violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the
violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such
cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the
sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the
violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.”
[11]
b.
Even when they call us mad,
when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on
us, we know that we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which
have turned everything upside down to proclaim blessed the poor, blessed the
thirsting for justice, blessed the suffering. (May 11, 1978)[12]
6. Realism.
a.
Cued by Jesus Christ,
who won by losing (in the world’s terms), we to go forth to live, love, serve,
and lose (in the world’s terms). It can hardly be other for a people who live
by a theology of the cross. Yet, this losing is, in the counter-intuitive
reality of God’s kingdom, winning, even if through suffering and death.
b.
Living by the reality of Christ is well exemplified by no less than J.
R. R. Tolkien: “Actually I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that
I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it
contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or
glimpses of final victory.”[13] A long defeat in the right
direction!
That’s at least the core of what I envision as God’s SCRM. Frederick
William Schmidt provides an excellent summary:
“Diminutive, small-minded, and timid visions of it will not
suffice. We are not called to strawberry festivals and handwringing. We are not
called to communities cut off from the world and closed to those around us. We
are not called to be the party of the left or the right. We are not the “United
Nations-lite” with stained glass language.
“We are
called to be the courageous, truthful, risk-taking, loving, forgiving,
extravagant expression of the work that was begun, that will be brought to
completion, and that is now expressed in the body of Jesus the Christ.”[14]
[1] Attributed to Barth in Kenneth Leech, True Prayer: In Invitation to
Christian Spirituality (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 1980), 68.
[2] Eugene Peterson, Where Your Treasure Is:
Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community (Downer Grove
IL: InterVarsity Press
[3] Rodney Clapp,
foreward to Eugene Peterson’s The
Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction
[5] David Fitch,
Facebook, 11.29.16.
[9] Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984).
[10] David Fitch, Faithful Presence (Downers Grove, IL:
IVP Books, 2016).
[12] Ibid.
[13] Carpenter,
Humphrey; Tolkien, Christopher. The
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Kindle Location 5443). HarperCollins
Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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