Bird Cages or Bird Baths – Some Late Night Musings

Some years ago the idea that the church should be a centered set rather than a bounded set. The latter is like a bird cage enclosed by metal bars and entered only through a small opening. The point is to get inside the metal enclosure and every effort is expended to police that entrance to keep the unqualified out. The former is like a bird bath. It has open boundaries at its edges. Those who enter move to the center where the deepest, coolest waters are to refresh and clean themselves. Helping those at the boundaries move to the center is the action desired here. Closed or barely permeable boundaries and clear differentiation between who is in and who is out or open boundaries with movement to the center by those who may or may not have clear commitments at the point of entering the bird bath.

The church in America has been largely a bird cage church. Getting people in and making sure their commitment is sound has been the norm. However, the day for this kind of church here is over. Some are struggling to figure out how to become more bird bath-like while others keep on trying to tweak the bird cage model (and failing).

Bonhoeffer accuses Barth and the Confessing Church of starting well but retreating to bird cage model in the end. Barth’s “positivism of revelation” which Bonhoeffer took as a “like it or lump it” approach, betokened the church taking the place of religion and leaving the world to rely on itself. “Whether it’s the virgin birth, the Trinity, or anything else,” he writes, “all are equally significant and necessary parts of the whole, which must be swallowed whole or not at all. That’s not biblical. There are degrees of cognition and degrees of significance. That means an “arcane discipline” must be reestablished, through which the mysteries of the Christian faith are sheltered against profanation” (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works) (p. 363). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition).

Elsewhere he presses the issue: “What do we really believe? I mean, believe in such a way that our lives depend on it? The problem of the Apostles’ Creed [Apostolikum]? What must I believe? wrong question. Outdated controversies, especially the interconfessional ones; the differences between Lutheran and Reformed (and to some extent Roman Catholic) are no longer real. Of course, they can be revived with passion at any time, but they are no longer convincing. There is no proof for this. One must simply be bold enough to start from this. The only thing we can prove is that the Christian-biblical faith does not live or depend on such differences . . . Saying that it depends not on me but on the church can be a cheap clerical excuse and is always perceived that way outside the church. It . . . do(es) not absolve us from being honest with ourselves. (Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works) (p. 486). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition).

Bonhoeffer’s “degrees of cognition and degrees of significance,” his awareness of the need for an “arcane discipline” to protect the mysteries of the faith from being mistreated (as entrance requirements for the church, and his claim that we must take ownership for what we truly believe instead of dishonestly hiding behind the time-honored answers that have divided us suggest more of bird bath approach. Take people where they are and help them to move to the center, live into the mysteries that connect to Christ and give us life to join in the sufferings of God in the world.

From a very different angle Michel de Certeau frames the church’s task in modernity as a simultaneous double movement (“How is Christianity Thinkable Today,” http://pastorkeithanderson.net/writing/blog/item/how-is-christianity-thinkable-today-2).

-the first movement is providing a place, a home with its necessary boundaries, rituals, institutions, stories, and behaviors. Place gives a point of orientation for its people to live by and live from. Jesus is that place for the church.

-the second movement is the transgression of that sense of place with its boundaries and limits the first movement creates and crossing those lines in the interest of reaching others.

Certeau writes “a coordination between necessary grounding points (languages, theories, institutions) and critical divergences (inventions, ‘prophetic’ actions, or displacements hidden within each Christian experience). But both these functions are equally necessary.”

Further, he says, “The Christian movement is always the recognizing of a particular situation – and the necessity of a new step forward. There is always a necessary risk in being different. It requires simultaneously a place and a ‘further,’ a ‘now’ and an ‘afterwards,’ a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere.’”

Finally, “Boundaries are the place of Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work.”

Certeau too seems to reflect a bird bath rather than a bird cage perspective here. Healthy institutional life for the church in an age like ours (Bonhoeffer’s “world-come-of-age”) appears to require an experimental, flexible approach to reaching our world. A dynamic of meeting people where they are, both in terms of location and spiritual commitment, and walking with them into the depths of the life of Christ at the center of the bath is the sine qua non. The forms will be as varied as our imaginations and needs. And we will learn and experience in a deeper way than ever before the wisdom of God, the depths of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit.