Theological Journal – February 7 What Dietrich Bonhoeffer Would Say to the North American Church (3)

3. If we live in a religionless world we better be about the business of “Losing Our Religion” (REM). This is DB’s third word to us. His corollary might be the Mets’ former star relief pitcher Tug McGraw’s famous slogan during a pennant chase in 1973, “Ya Gotta Believe!”

Religion, which infected DB’s German Church infected as well much of the American church he was aware of. For him, religion consisted of

-a metaphysically dualistic world in which the immaterial, inner realm, the spiritual, the eternal, the otherworldly, was superior to the material and the goal of human longing.

-an individualistic orientation which privileges the other-worldly fate of the individual soul.

-a part of a person’s life rather the whole.

-belief in a “god of the gaps,” one who only comes into play where we cannot take care of ourselves (for example, death and guilt).

-a focus on the performance of the right things, religiously and morally, that keep God pleased with us.

-an alliance with the nation as a chaplain that uses faith to bolster and support the nation’s agenda and interests.

e are, indeed, in a very similar place to the German Christians DB knew and therefore vulnerable to his critique. And that critique was devastating. He called on us to “lose our religion.”

Orlando Costas, channeling DB, describes our religion this way:

"a conscience-soothing Jesus,

with an unscandalous cross,

an otherworldly kingdom,

a private, inwardly limited spirit,

a pocket God,

a spiritualized Bible,

and an escapist church.

Its goal is a happy, comfortable, and successful life, obtainable through the forgiveness of an abstract sinfulness by faith in an unhistorical Christ" (Costas, 2005, 80).

What does “believing” or faith mean for DB if we are reject this “religion”? In Discipleship he famously contrasts “cheap” and “costly” grace as a way to get at it. 

“CHEAP GRACE IS THE mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace . . . Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ” (DBWE 4:1022,1044).

Cheap grace seeks the privileges of relationship with God without the practice of that relationship. Religion speaks the language of cheap grace.

Costly grace, on the other hand, comes to those who actually follow Christ.

“It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live. It is costly, because it condemns sin; it is grace, because it justifies the sinner. Above all, grace is costly, because it was costly to God, because it costs God the life of God’s Son — ‘you were bought with a price'—and because nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God. Above all, it is grace because the life of God’s Son was not too costly for God to give in order to make us live. God did, indeed, give him up for us. Costly grace is the incarnation of God” (DBWE 4:1057).

Costly grace is the language of faith or believing. Cheap grace is religion. Playing off religion against faith can be misleading, particularly in our day where many claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” DB would have none of that however. His expectation of a renewed practice of the “arcane discipline” (see word eight) speaks conclusively to this. It is finding a new, fresh form of worship and church appropriate to a new time for which DB seeks. To be “spiritual” without commitment or accountability to a community of faith would be nonsense to him. 

The root of everything for Bonhoeffer is a living relationship with the risen Jesus Christ who is present and active in the world leading his people on their faithful way. In a way more radical than any other theologian I am aware of everything stands or falls for DB at this point. 

This relationship is behind his passion to live unreservedly immersed in the ebb and flow of daily life, to find God – the Bible’s God – present and active there, to live according to his own maxim that only those who obey believe and only those who believe obey, and to read the Bible anew in light of these convictions and the new world we inhabit, this is costly grace, and faith. This is the way we “gotta believe” according to DB in our post-Christendom world. The rest of his “words” to the church fill out what he means by this faith and shows how different it is from religion.

As an aside, a few words on DB’S thought about religion in a world-come-of-age. Religion in the West has not disappeared as he apparently thought it would. Rather, it has flourished. Was Bonhoeffer wrong? And if so, why should we pay attention to him on this point? Barry Harvey offers a judicious response (Taking Hold of the Real:3576): 

“As with other aspects of his theology, Bonhoeffer’s observations about the nature and fate of religion in a world come of age are at best incomplete, and at times they appear to miss the mark; thus they must not only be corrected and expanded, but in certain respects radicalized. Most obviously, reports of religion’s demise, which he seems to accept at face value, have been greatly exaggerated. Though its distinctive features have been modified somewhat, what is typically regarded as religion has not disappeared from the human landscape— indeed, far from it. But we must proceed cautiously with respect to these assertions about a religionless age, for (DB’s) primary concern has to do with the theological role this concept had played in the waning years of Christendom. Due to these social technologies, Christian ideas and images are no longer embodied in the habits and practices that form our day-to-day existence, but continue to be sequestered in carefully delimited realms. The fact that, save for the nations of Western Europe, the predicted waning of what is still thought of as religious belief and practice has not materialized does not negate the primary force of Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion or call for a religionless Christianity. Now, more than ever, the church needs to unseat this concept (religion) from its privileged place in the working grammar of Christian theology.”

I would put it like this. DB was not trying to develop a theology or sociology of world religions. He followed and developed Barth’s critique of religion in the Church Dogmatics. A critique he did not believe Barth carried through fully enough. The “religion” he is concerned with is not a general feature of human life. It is the chief feature of the Christianity he knew that could not find the resources to stand up against the Nazi blasphemy and its horrors. That is the religion we must lose in the interest of true belief or faith. Costly grace. The kind Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, which, he wrote to his brother, if taken seriously and lived out daily, could explode the whole Nazi phenomenon! “Ya gotta believe!”