A Finkenwalde Option
The
Need for a New Monasticism
Many
“options” for the survival/renewal of the church in North America are floating
around today. Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is the best known among them and
the touchstone for this recent flurry of other “options.” All of them share two
basic convictions:
-the American church is in dire trouble and needs a
fundamental reshaping, and
-this reshaping requires intentional community to resist
the world’s incursions.
Most
of them point to monasticism, a reform movement in the early church protesting
the accommodation of the church to ideas, ways, and mores of the Roman Empire,
as a model for the kind of reform needed. This is a sound instinct. The trick
is to discern the shape of the features of a monasticism fit for North America
in these times.
And
that’s been the catalyst for the discussion around Dreher’s book. Is it
Benedict, or Francis, or the Jesuits, or some other version of monasticism that
might serve us best in this time and place?
I
suggest that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s (DB) experiment to design a community to
both support and equip at Finkenwalde, the site of the Confessing Church’s
underground seminary, merits consideration. Dare we call it the Finkenwalde
Option?
In a letter to his
brother in early 1935, shortly before he took on the task of directing this
underground seminary to prepare pastors for Confessing Churches, he wrote, “...the
restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism
which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a
life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of
Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this...”[1]
In the context of the maelstrom ignited by Adolf
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 the thorough accommodation of the
church to German culture was evident to DB. He indicted his church in these
uncompromising words: "Our church, which has been fighting in
these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in
itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to
mankind and the world."[2]
It’s
no stretch to apply that same indictment to the American Church. Not suggesting
that America and it leadership are comparable to Hitler’ Nazism, the Third
Reich, but the reality of the church’s accommodation to our culture in
denaturing and debilitating ways sadly mimics the German church of DB’s time.
The Sermon on the Mount
As
noted, he turned to monasticism as a model for the renewal and reconstruction
of the church in Germany. He did not seek to reduplicate what Benedict and
others had done. He knew something new was required – the spirit and ethos of
monasticism. In his view, the Sermon on the Mount must be at the heart of this
effort. Indeed, in the above letter to his brother, he claimed that Jesus’
Sermon was “the only source of power capable of exploding the whole enchantment
and specter (Hitler and his rule) so that only a few burnt fragments are left
remaining from the fireworks.”[3]
The
Sermon on the Mount, far from being an impossible ideal we can never reach or a
teaching applicable only during the so-called Millennial reign of Christ on
earth after the defeat of Satan and evil, or for a special, higher class of
Christian, or any other evasion, Bonhoeffer fervently believed Jesus’ teaching
here was meant as practical guidance on living the life of God’s kingdom which
Jesus had inaugurated. His popular book Discipleship
(aka The Cost of Discipleship) makes
this clear. Glenn Stassen, a latter-day Bonhoefferian, has followed up DB’s
conviction that Jesus’ Sermon is concrete, practical guidance for his followers
today, with ground-breaking research that has confirmed this conviction made
even clearer the Sermon’s practical thrust.[4]
It would be quite possible, in my judgment, to gather Christian communities
around this description of life in God’s kingdom (which begins now in this
life) as a focal point of this new monastic life.
The Arcane Discipline
DB
later in his Letter and Papers from
Prison insisted on the need for the church to retrieve the ancient church’s
practice of the “arcane discipline.” They excluded outsiders from the practice
and celebration of its most intimate rites. This was to protect these rites
from misunderstanding and profanation and outsiders from gaining untutored perceptions
of what was happening. Even in the nonreligious Christianity DB was struggling
to articulate there remained a necessary place for formative worship.
We
could include here, I think, the development of spiritual disciplines[5]
aimed at buttressing our intention to resist the empire’s push to accommodate
the church to its needs and aspirations and instead inculcate the ethos and
ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s probably the best single “Empire-Buster”
we have in our Bibles. Jesus here contradicts or stands on their heads much of what
the Empire wants us to buy into and live our lives by. (Bonhoeffer and Stassen
are worthy guides for this endeavor.)
Christian
Education might be reconceived and implemented as vocational training. Our
needs and struggles as Christians attempting to live faithfully from one day to
the next is its curriculum. Wes Granberg-Michaelson has recently promoted
Finkenwalde as place for us to begin to begin thinking and acting toward a new
church.[6]
He identifies some of what we are up against in that effort as:
-chauvinistic nationalism,
-growing economic inequality,
-destabilizing climate
change,
-unprecedented forced
migration,
and
-increasing militarization
In a
world that at its best valorizes human effort and achievement and at its worst
gleefully entice us to long for, anticipate, and experiment with things most
would recognize as base and low (even if they dabble in them themselves), the
church will not lack grist for its reflection and training in living a Sermon
on the Mount-centered life.
This
arcane discipline reaches even further than this, though. It reaches into the
very core of who we are in Christ and with and for one another. In Life Together Bonhoeffer makes the
astonishing (to us modern westerners) claim that it is confession of sin, one
to another, that makes the church the church!
The
practical putting to death of the old nature (especially it chief expression as
pride), assuaging our loneliness, assurance of forgiveness, breakthroughs to
community and new life, all this happens as one person confesses their sins to
another. Not a priest, not to God alone, but to another Christian. All God’s
gracious gifts to us breathe their life from this center. For in meeting with
and confessing to another person, we are confessing, receiving pardon, and being
filled with new life by Christ himself who stands between us as the center of
our relationship.[7]
Such
confession prepares for the central act of worship, the Lord’s Supper. Here’s
how Bonhoeffer sums it up:
“The day of the Lord’s Supper is a joyous
occasion for the Christian community. Reconciled in their hearts with God and
one another, the community of faith receives the gift of Jesus Christ’s body
and blood, therein receiving forgiveness, new life, and salvation. New
community with God and one another is given to it. The community of the holy
Lord’s Supper is above all the fulfillment of Christian community. Just as the
members of the community of faith are united in body and blood at the table of
the Lord, so they will be together in eternity. Here the community has reached
its goal. Here joy in Christ and Christ’s community is complete. The life
together of Christians under the Word has reached its fulfillment in
the sacrament.”[8]
The
Three Circles of the Church’s Life
DB is famous, of course, for
his insistence that the church be deeply involved in all dimensions of
life, “helping and serving,” rather than dominating as he puts it in Letters and Papers.[9]
In his book Faithful Presence, David
Fitch articulates a vision for the church’s immersion in the world that is
consonant with Bonhoeffer’s insight. He proposes three concentric circles in
which the church engages it community
-the close circle is gathered community of
the committed. Perhaps this would be Bonhoeffer’s “arcane discipline,” his term
for the worship of the church in a world-come-of-age. Note Fitch does not say a
“closed” circle. He focuses on the quality of relationship in the group rather
than its boundaries.
-the dotted circle is a place in the
neighborhood where Christians host others beyond the close circle. Perhaps it’s
a home gathering, or perhaps a gathering in some other place where Christians
offer others the chance to see and experience what goes on in the circle.
-the half circle encompasses the places of
hurt and brokenness we encounter. Here the Christian is a guest who extends the
presence of Christ into a situation where it may or may not be accepted.
This a helpful way to order our thinking about being immersed in
the world as DB advises. Now Bonhoeffer believes we are in a period when the
church’s verbal witness has lost credibility and we ought to express our faith
during this time with our deeds alone. As Walker Percy put it in The Thanatos Syndrome, our words “no
longer signify.” Fitch does not have such a reservation but both are united in insisting
the presence, sharing, helping, and serving others is a necessary precursor to
valid testimony.
A Finkenwalde Option
Truth is, the Finkenwalde Option Bonhoeffer innovated failed. Or,
rather, aborted. The Gestapo closed the seminary in 1937. Two years does not a community
of resistance to the kind of forces identified above. So it remains an open
question whether we can do it, either. It requires a different way of thinking and
certainly different structures for doing church this way. In all honesty the
present adult generations in America will not entertain a Finkenwalde Option.
We (and I include myself here) are incapable of breaking free from the bonds of
reputation, consumerism, and comfort. But if we will own that, and make an effort
to nurture younger generations to transition to this way of being church, well,
there may be hope down the line.
When Bonhoeffer announced his intention to find a career in the
church, his siblings teased and taunted him over the church’s boring, stodgy
irrelevance. He brashly shot back, “Well, then, I shall reform it!” And in ways
unimaginable nor predictable, he did. Or at least played his part. His
indispensable role. And because we have the record we do of his efforts, we
have impetus enough to take up his aborted reform of the church and begin
working it through in our own very different time and place. We won’t likely
see the fruit of it, us older generation folks, but in my judgment, it’s the right
thing to do and past the right time to do it. So, thanks be to God for the work
and witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and we thank him by taking up and doing what
he saw and began – a Finkenwalde Option.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament of Freedom, Geoffrey B. Kelly
and F. Burton Nelson, eds. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 424.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
"Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger
Bethge," Letters and Papers from
Prison: DBW 8 (Augsburg Fortress. Kindle Edition), 11000.
[3] Bonhoeffer, Testament of Freedom, 424.
[4]
Glen H. Stassen,
Living the Sermon on the Mount: A Practical
Hope for Grace and Deliverance (Jossey-Bass, 2009).
[5] David Fitch has seven
helpful disciplines in his Faithful
Presence: the Lord’s Table, Reconciliation, Proclaiming the Gospel, Being
with the ‘Least of These’, Being with Children, the Fivefold Gifting, Kingdom
Prayer.
[6] “From Wittenburg to
Finkenwalde,” http://wcrc.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/GC2017-WesGMAddress.pdf/
[7] Bonhoeffer expounds
this understanding of our humanity as centered in Christ in his book Sanctorum Communio (“Communion of Saints”).
[8] Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook
of the Bible DBWE 5 (Fortress
Press. Kindle Edition: 2578.
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