Against the Stream

When Bonhoeffer Schooled Barth on Ethics

W. Travis McMacken at Die Evangelischen Theologen shares the story of when Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged Karl Barth on the ethical import of Christian theology (via Charles Marsh's Strange Glory):

Barth was explaining his understanding of theology’s peculiar place among the academic disciplines: theology is the science that ventures to speak a word about God . . . the second-order reflection on the church’s primary speech and practice, the writing that seeks to capture the bird in flight, to speak the impossible. Bonhoeffer asked what this had to do with reality (italics McMacken's)

Apart from the boldness of the challenge, it's striking that Bonhoeffer is raising these concerns with Barth, for whom he had enormous regard, in 1931, the year after he returned from studying at Union Theological Seminary in the United States. In New York, Bonhoeffer studied with, among others, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Marsh notes elsewhere that Niebuhr's lectures (combined with Bonhoeffer's direct experiences worshiping in the African American community in Harlem) seemed to have a fairly substantive impact on Bonhoeffer's subsequent thought. As Marsh writes:

Bonhoeffer was both moved and inspired by Niebuhr -- by the example of a theologian who engaged the social order with civil courage and ultimate honesty. For his part, Niebuhr found Bonhoeffer altogether sympathetic, despite his imperious gaze during class and habit of slowly laying down his pen a few minutes after the lecture began. Niebuhr appreciated Bonhoeffer's prodigious intellect, his intensity and ardor; and he understood what a rare thing it was that a German theologian, with all his native prejudices, should choose to spend a year in America. Niebuhr was also confident that he could assert a positive influence on the restless twenty-four year old Berliner who held two doctorates to Niebuhr's none.

Marsh goes on to suggest that at least some of Bonhoeffer's subsequent concentration on ethical issues, particularly in the midst of the crisis of Germany under the Nazis, was attributable to Niebuhr's "positive influence." And here we have an account of Bonhoeffer challenging Barth from the "realist" point of view the very next year. Marsh goes on to note that the disagreement between Barth and Bonhoeffer was not in terms of the essentials, but their application:

The student agreed with the master on most of the basics: the theologian must be a servant of the church, and the basis for thinking truthfully about God is Jesus Christ. But Bonhoeffer was now living with the conviction that theologians must be willing to speak clearly and have a personal stake in their claims. He found Barth impervious to the ethical and social dimensions of doctrine—in fact, irritatingly so.

McMacken is also at pains to note that Barth actually deals with ethical issues at numerous points throughout the  Church Dogmatics, stating that "[Barth} thinks Christians have this responsibility [to change society], just not theology as such." He also notes Marsh's account of the end of this exchanges, which was apparently very welcome by Barth:

Though Bonhoeffer worried about the impression he had made, he would be relieved to hear from a classmate that Barth had thoroughly enjoyed the exchange. The contrarian voice was perfectly welcome, and when the seminar resumed the next day, Barth asked Bonhoeffer to introduce himself to the other students. There soon followed an invitation to dine with the professor at home.

Captain Kirk, the Bible, and Hell

Fred Clark at Slacktivist makes an interesting analogy between Captain Kirk's love life and the way we read the Bible:

We remember it wrong because we see that green woman in the opening credits through the filter of our idea of James T. Kirk, Womanizer and that filter reshapes what we see, reinforcing the mistake.

Horáková calls this dismembered remembering “Kirk Drift,” and dives deep into the sources, mechanics, and repercussions of this pernicious, pervasive form of self-deception. It’s a long, twisting exploration of this phenomenon, full of wild tangents and asides that later turn out to be connections back to this central idea. I’m sure it will be read by Star Trek fans, but it also should be read by history students.

And by seminarians. Because, of course, this same dynamic of “Kirk Drift” is also at work whenever we read, and mis-read, the Bible. That text, perhaps more than any other, is colored by fans who read it full of certainty about what we imagine we know for sure, but just ain’t so.

Fred then connects this to the Christian conception of Hell, which, as it turns out, is not really in the Bible any more than Kirk seduced a green alien on Star Trek:

Maybe the biggest example of this for me, personally, had to do with the doctrine of Hell. I was sure that must be in there, in the text. It had to be, right? I mean, this is something I’d learned and absorbed for my entire life growing up in the church. Everybody knows it’s there in the Bible. Everybody knows that’s where it comes from, right?

Except it doesn’t. The word is in there, but the doctrine we’ve constructed out of and around that word just can’t be found in the text itself. That doctrine is something we carry to the text and then imagine we find there whenever we encounter the word — just the same way that our preconceptions and misconceptions about Captain Kirk get mistakenly reinforced every time we see that image of the green woman in the opening credits.

This is a common problem with the way we construct theology on "Biblical" grounds. Fred notes later in the article that even when he accepted a view of the Bible as infallible, he still recognized the human limitations in interpreting it. I'd go farther (and perhaps Fred would these days as well), and say that the text themselves are subject to that same fallibility. They weren't written by God, and they weren't preserved from error through any supernatural intercession. They are human testimonies to the presence and action of God in their lives, subject to all of the human limitations that those witnesses were burdened with.

And this is certainly the case when it comes to the idea of Hell. What is actually a mishmash of different terms and ideas got squeezed together into a theological monstrosity that then got taken for granted as the Biblical view of the issue. Of course, it may still be the case that there is some form of eternal separation from God. But the "fire and brimstone" view of Hell that has become the predominant view, and remains central to the theology of many evangelicals, is simply not there in the Bible. It is a construct, and not a very good one at that. What's more, I would argue strongly that it is a construct which undermines and diminishes precisely what is most central to Christian faith -- the centrality of God's grace as manifested in Jesus Christ.

Mike Pence and the Billy Graham Rule

By now the story of how Mike Pence refuses to dine with women other than his wife has been covered extensively. I was struck, however, by this passage explaining the origin of the "Billy Graham Rule" at the blog Ain't I A Woman:

Originating during a conversation between Graham, the well-known evangelist, and three of his male ministerial friends, they decided the things that tempted them the most were money and sexual immorality. Because they wanted to avoid falling into temptation, they decided to avoid situations where they might succumb to the latter. Hence, don’t eat alone with women.

What struck me about this in particular was how studious Graham and his colleagues were about setting up a rule to save them from sexual temptation, but not from the temptation of money. I mean, sure they're both temptations, but let's get our priorities straight, right?

And that, I think, is how we wound up with decade upon decade of evangelical preachers rolling around in huge piles of cash while lauding their own Christian virtue. And of course, they still wound up in sex scandal after sex scandal!

Ultimately though, this is what it comes down to:

The reason evangelicals are surprised by the pushback over this revelation is that chivalry toward women is regularly confused with treating women with respect. Many evangelicals think that “protecting” women from the harsh realities of the world demonstrates how much they value women. Of course underlying this assumption is that this is entirely a male perspective. Much like the meeting between Graham and his friends, they extrapolate from their experience, a rule that in their minds applies to all people, regardless of the fact that women are not included except as people to be acted upon. In other words, women are objects, mostly sexual ones.

For my part, I've always thought the way to show respect to women is to treat them like human beings, equals with autonomy.

Who Does Not Work Shall Not Eat

Frequently in arguments over social policy, conservatives will haul out Paul's admonition in 2 Thessalonians "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat" in order to justify cutting or eliminating welfare programs, on the ground that such programs promote "idleness" among the poor.

In Religion Dispatches, Dan Schultz critiques those arguments, first by noting some of the inherent problems that both those on the right and the left face in translating scripture into social policy, but then by noting how misapplied the this particular passage is:

Paul wasn’t writing to a “sect.” It was a particular church at Thessalonica, and he was writing to correct a mistake of his own creation. In 1 Thessalonians, he tells the church that Jesus will be coming soon. That encourages some of the members to give up their jobs in preparation for the parousia, living off the community while they wait. Those are the people Paul says should get back to work: Jesus may be coming, but not so quickly that you don’t have to contribute to society.

Perhaps Rep. Arrington knows of a widespread problem with people receiving SNAP benefits who refuse to work because they think the second coming is just around the corner, but I sort of doubt it.

I’m going to give the edge to Protas here. Generalizing away from specific passages, the unmistakable pattern in scripture is meaningful social care for the poor. That doesn’t command government intervention, of course, but neither does it rule it out.

Schultz rightly notes that plucking this passage out of its context in order to justify refusing support for the poor does violence to both the situation in which Paul was writing, and to the overall tenor of both Judaism and Christianity with respect to care for the poor. It is also worth noting, in passing the context of both Greek and Roman society at large, which were based on the widespread use of slave labor. For most of the privileged classes, "idleness" was not a problem for the poor, but a problem for the wealthy. The poor had no choice but to work if they wanted to eat, and in the case of slaves had no real choice at all. But in the case of the rich, the landed, the elite, who were often also the ruling classes, the legislators, the statesmen and the philosophers, idleness was a fact of life. They relied on the labor of the poor and of slaves in order to support their idleness.

However, the larger point remains vital and relevant: How should we use scripture in the formulation of public policy. On the one hand, in a pluralistic democratic society, the answer is "we shouldn't" at least in the sense that, just because we believe the Bible says something is not, in itself, a reason we should enact that thing as law. On the other hand, however, as Schultz notes, for people of faith, the traditions to which they belong, including scripture, form their moral predispositions and attitudes in inescapable ways. We learn who we are as moral beings through our engagement with those texts and traditions, so they inevitably shape our attitude toward social policy.

But in that case, it's vitally important that we understand and interpret those texts properly, in their own contexts and with respect to their relevance to our time and place. Without a robust hermeneutic that can allows us to move from the time and place of those texts to our own, at best we will misinterpret the social implications of the Bible, and at worst, we will use those misinterpretations in ways that harm the poorest and the most vulnerable among us.

Darth Pelagius?

Via James McGrath, the Tragedy of Darth Pelagius the Wise:

Of course, Pelagianism is much with us to this day, though it seems no one can agree on who is Pelagian, pseudo-Pelagian, crypto-Pelagian, etc. It always seems to be one of those accusations you make against someone you disagree with theologically, when you can't think of anything else to disagree with them about.