Thursday, July 3, 2008

My reply to a thoughtful quote

Here's a quote from the thoughtful blogger Aedificium,

http://stbenedict.wordpress.com/

followed by my reply:

Bonhoeffer and the Weakness of God

I’m supposed to be working on the dissertation, but I’ve gotten bogged down in some nasty German linguistics. Last night I was doing some reading designed to kind of “wind me down” and came across what I see as a prophetic comment from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Letters and Papers from Prison. So much for winding down. I’d love to hear some thoughts on the implications of this for the church today. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

The quote from Bonhoeffer:

“And we cannot be honest unless we recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [even if there were no God]. And this is just what we do recognise - before God! God himself compels us to recognise it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering”.

And finally, my reply:

In his final sentence here Bonhoeffer reminds us of both the purpose and the method of Jesus’ coming to earth: that He might partake of the weakness of our flesh, the consequences of our sin, the experience of our separation from God–and that in so doing–by identifying with us in our weakness–He might conquer those limitations for us and give us the chance to partake of His victory. If we suffer with Him, we will be glorified with Him.

The implications of this for the church today are vast, and profound. To be very brief, we could at least start with this blog’s politics: it is an understatement to say that the antics of our American political candidates regarding public expressions of their religion are very far from the spirit of Bonhoeffer’s observations. But this goes far deeper into our private lives and the lives of our churches: our identification with Him in His weakness, in response to His identification with our weakness, readily cancels out all our attempts to make something or be somebody through our religion, and returns us to the place of being one with the poor and serving those who are most in need–the place Jesus consistently taught us to take if we are ever going to follow Him in any meaningful way.

Mr Obama said recently that if the Defense Department tried to operate on the priinciples of the Sermon on the Mount–well, he didn’t know if they could do it! But that’s the real issue, the real paradox here, the real scandal of the cross. And this is the distinctive contribution we can have as believers in Jesus in the midst of our tyrannical and “No-God” generation.

Respectfully,
Peter

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