Both modern liberal theology and secular totalitarianism
hold pretty much in common that the message of the Bible has to be
adapted more or less, to the requirements of a secular world. No
wonder, therefore, that the process of debasing Christianity as by
liberal theology led, in the long run, to a complete perversion and
falsification of the essence of Christian teaching by National
Socialism. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for those of you unfamiliar with him, was a
German Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazis in April
1945. He, Karl Barth, one of the other towering theological
conservatives of the time, and others founded the Confessing Church in
Germany, a church which they set up as a Christian resistance movement
to Nazism and as an alternative to the official Nazified Protestant
Reich Church.
Needless to say, the Confessing Church was a minority movement
within German Christianity during the Nazi era. But movements like it
and the White Rose, although they did little to noticeably thwart
Nazism, were noble expressions of extraordinary men and women of
conscience who were willing to pay the price to do what conscience
required them to do. Bonhoeffer is the coiner of the phrase "cheap
grace" and his book The Cost of Discipleship explores what "costly grace" means for people who are serious about being Christians.
People like Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, and
Dorothy Day interest me because their actions in the world would be applauded by most liberals, while the conservative nature of their
orthodox beliefs is something that most conservatives would applaud.
And yet their conservative faith played a huge role in inspiring and sustaining their
commitment to "liberal" causes–their opposition to powerful social systems, which in political terms are
usually called conservative. Because let’s face it, the word
‘conservative’, when you peel away all the self-justifying rhetoric, means, at least in the political sphere, serving the interests of wealth and power.
The all-too-common mistake made by religious conservatives is to think that to be a conservative in the
cultural sphere makes them a natural ally of the power and wealth
conservatives in the political sphere. That’s at the root of the con
that David Kuo writes about in his Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. To me it is rather obvious
that anyone who is a "serious" Christian is someone who feels to some
degree out of his element when having to operate in systems
structured according to the logic of power and money. And
for the Christian right to so blithely ally themselves with the power
conservatives was for them to bargain with the devil that has
consequences they are only beginning to understand.
So I have been thinking recently about Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church. I think about it as contrasted with the kind of right-wing Christianity that gets most of the publicity and is therefore the primary public face of Christianity. And I am dismayed at the way this kind of conservative Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic, has allied itself with the Republican party.
I have tremendous repect for principled, doctrinally conservative Christians, and I understand their problem with the kind of wishy-washy liberal Chritianity that feels more comfortable in seminar room than it does praying in a church. Liberal Christianity shares a kinship that is, in my opinion, too close to the a rationalist skepticism that is more
interested in demythologizing and in stripping Christianity of its
mythic and metpahysical power. Liberal theology is the
attempt to make the mysterium tremendum
fit into the nice, reasonable categories of modern thinking, and sees
traditional orthodox Christianity as a kind of primitive, syncretistic mythology with an
passable system of ethics.
So if you jettison the mythology (and metaphysics), and keep the
ethics, you can call yourself a liberal Christian. And that’s ok so
far as it goes, but it doesn’t do enough to give a person a strong
enough foothold to stand his ground when the wind starts to blow,
and so the influence of that which comes from above will always be
weaker for such a one than what comes from below. Because the Liberal Christian sets his feet on what lies below, whereas the MLKs, Bonhoeffers and Days set their feet in what lies above, and in that sense have an upside-down relationship to the world.
Liberal Christianity may not be comfortable with the right, but in its project to reduce or adapt the mystery to which the Biblical narrative points, it has things wrong side up. It seems more bent on reducing something large into categories that cannot hold it. And in doing so it sets the stage for the emergence of ecclesial organizations that are more concerned about various human agendas that have nothing to do with the biblical narrative even though they exploit its language. And exploiting for puropose of social control is one of the most common ways the biblical text is abused, and this leads to control-centered ecclesial organizations like the Reich Church and the kind of flim-flam that passes for Christianity on the
Dobson/Falwell right. To me that’s the point that Bonhoeffer is making
in the quote excerpted above.
Anybody can claim to be an
authentic Christian and can even sincerely believe he is one, even if he
isn’t. Who’s to say he’s not? By what standard can one judge? I’m not into setting up some tribunal to judge who is and who is not, but I do see it as an important task for our time to point out what is deep and what is superficial, to what is real and what is bogus. And when the powerful set up any of their variations of the Reich
Church to keep the Indians well behaved and on the reservation, to me that’s a pretty significant sign that something is bogus.
So my problem with the conservative Christians who vote Republican is
not that they see themselves in opposition to the banality of
a spent liberalism as it manifests during this decadent time. My problem lies
in its alliance with power and wealth and in its thinking that somehow their doing
so is going to save America’s soul. That this kind of thinking is
naive is the best thing you can say about it, and the publication of
David Kuo’s book might be the occasion to wake many of these
conservative Christians up to the fact.
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