Theological Journal – February 15 What Dietrich Bonhoeffer Would Say to the North American Church (8)

8.       Eighthly, I believe Bonhoeffer would tell us to pay close attention to the sound of silence (Simon and Garfunkel). He spoke of the need for the church to maintain what he called the “arcane discipline” in their life amid the world. He writes, “That means an “arcane discipline” must be reestablished, through which the mysteries of the Christian faith are sheltered against profanation” (DBWE 8:10562-10564).

What in the world is an “arcane discipline”? In the ancient church this was the practice of shielding the worship of the church and the mysteries of faith that sustained and nurtured it from the world which lacked the necessary formation to understand them and would inevitably distort it. 

What are these mysteries that need such protection? DB probably had in mind things like the trinity, incarnation, Eucharist, things sure to be misunderstood by a world not properly initiated into them. It also included time for the church to reflect on and reformulate its understanding of the gospel. Nor DB this meant the church reflecting on its gospel in light of the death of Christendom and awareness that it lives in a new mission field, the world come of age. Included in this process are recognition and repentance of the ways we have allowed the gospel to become polluted. He writes to his church:

“But we too are being thrown back all the way to the beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love of one's enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us, we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it or express it. This is our own fault.” (DBWE 8:10986).

Hard to imagine Bonhoeffer would not expect the American church needs a similar time of reflection and reorientation.

As we undergo this reorientation to our true identity and vocation, Bonhoeffer says we should busy ourselves with two things: prayer and good deeds. Not a bad idea for us, eh?

This is NOT a call to withdraw from the world into a religious conclave. DB insists that: “Just as the reality of God has entered the reality of the world in Christ, what is Christian cannot be had otherwise than in what is worldly, the ‘supernatural’ only in the natural, the holy only in the profane, the revelational only in the rational” (DBWE 6:1904). 

It is within our immersion in the daily life and struggles of the people that this arcane discipline occurs. An image for this DB might approve of is a monastery in the midst of the world. In a letter to his brother in 1935 he wrote: “The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of new monasticism which has in common with the old only the uncompromising attitude of a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount in the following of Christ. I believe it is now time to call people to this” (Testament of Freedom, 1990, 424). Life in the world and life in worship are organically related to each other as an integral rhythm. Here, the reality of the world gained through immersion in life, is brought to the truth of God in worship to be assessed, critiqued, and addressed in light of Christ in the interests of faithfulness in returning to life in the world equipped and sustain for further involvement.

Religionless Christianity, as DB conceives it, then, requires a double immersion:

First, his signature call for “living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities—then one takes seriously no longer one’s own sufferings but rather the suffering of God in the world” (DBWE 8: 13867-13868).

And second, “We must immerse ourselves again and again, for a long time and quite calmly, in Jesus’s life, his sayings, actions, suffering, and dying in order to recognize what God promises and fulfills” (DBWE 8: 14754-14756).

Bonhoeffer sees the world post-fall as not only natural, penultimate, needing and awaiting the ultimate, the kingdom of God to take it up, heal, restore, and reconcile it to God, and render it the “theater of the glory of God” (Calvin) it was always meant to be. This has happened in Christ. In the time between Christ and his return his people live, love, and serve this natural, penultimate world as Christ-in-community, the transcendence of God in the midst of people’s lives and history. And this all for the sake of that natural, penultimate world that God does not and will not reject but been instead fully redeems for our life together with him throughout the ages!

I don’t have a pithy corollary for this Word but I do have a story. Will Willimon tells of being invited to preach in a black church where a friend was pastor. Worship lasted over two hours. Willimon asked his friend afterward why black worship lasted so long.

“'Unemployment runs nearly 50 percent here. For our youth, the unemployment rate is much higher. That means, that when our people go about during the week, everything they see, everything they hear tells them, 'You are a failure. You are nobody. You got nothing because you do not have a good job, you do not have a fine car, you have no money.'

“'So I must gather them here, once a week, and get their heads straight. I get them together, here, in the church, and through the hymns, the prayers, the preaching say, 'That is a lie. You are somebody. You are royalty! God has bought you with a price and loves you as his Chosen People.'

“It takes me so long to get them straight because the world perverts them so terribly'” (Hauerwas, 2014, 154-155).

Even if we are not poor and the world's perversion of us as described above take a different tone and texture, it happens to all of us. You can check out the perversion of the affluent in the risen Christ's message to the church at Laodicea in Revelation 3:14-20.