Living Amongst the Ruins of the City: On Learning to Give Thanks

A Thanksgiving Day Sermon
The Anglican Parish of Almaguin-Emsdale
Oct. 7, 2007
Lam. 1:1-6; Lam. 3:19-26; 2 Tim. 1:1-14; Lk. 17:5-10

Lord of Creation, you who spoke light out of darkness, speak life into us this morning so that we may live lives of thanksgiving so that the world may know You. Amen.

We like Thanksgiving, don’t we? It’s a time of celebration and joyfulness for all that we have in abundance. Giving thanks is almost as natural as breathing, or at least it should be. Someone opens a door for you, you respond automatically with ‘thank you’. But we had to be taught to be thankful. When someone gave you a gift as a child, your parents hopefully taught you to offer them a heartfelt ‘thank you’. Well, our Scripture readings today, specifically the readings from the book of Lamentations, teach us that being thankful is not an easy or trivial thing to do, they challenge us to re-think what it means to be thankful in a world like ours—and in fact, I want to suggest that living a life of thanksgiving requires a lot of effort, and like all things worth working for, is itself an art form, a learned skill, it's something we all keep on learning—and this morning, the Hebrew poets of lament are our teachers.

In our reading from the book of Lamentations, we have what seems to be the exact opposite of giving thanks—we are here witnesses to the ancient Hebrew practice of poetic lament, that literary performance which gave public testimony to the deep grief of the Hebrew people over the destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. Israel, as a people, had experienced something they never expected, they lived through the ruin and devastation of Jerusalem and more pointedly, they experienced the annihilation of the Temple—the very thing that gave their lives, as Jews, meaning.

But nevertheless, in the middle of the poet’s darkest reflections—and even T.S. Eliot, at his most somber, doesn’t approach the sense of melancholy and sorrow expressed here by this Hebrew poet—even in the middle of all of this, the poet is able to articulate: ‘But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness’. Even in the midst of the tumultuousness of its life, Israel is grateful to her God for his goodness and his provision; even amongst the ruins of the city, Israel learns to give thanks, to acknowledge its hope in God’s mercy, his faithfulness and his steadfast love. The poet, in our canticle, comes to a resolution only as they reflect on God’s provision and his care for his people; the poet is able to wrestle life out of death because of God’s steadfast love.

Following the literary movement of this poet, from the depths of lament to hopefulness of God’s provision, I’m reminded of one of the most moving scenes in modern cinema, from Roberto Benigni’s 1998 movie Life is Beautiful—a movie which takes place during the rise of fascism in Italy during WWII. I’m reminded of the scene where the father and his young son are in the concentration camp, in the most horrible circumstances one can imagine. The father wants to protect his son from the reality of what they are facing and so tells him that the whole thing is just a big game and that the manual labour that he performs every day is just really a competition. In this way the father, a man who can find humor in the most bleak of situations, shields his son from the horrors of the camp which, in the end, saves the son. Here is a man, who in the heart of darkness, is so thankful and grateful for the life of his son, that he struggles to find the beauty of life in order to protect him. He is able to wrestle life out of death so that his son might have hope and not despair.

This is the reality of our lives as Christians, this is what the gospel of thanksgiving is all about! Thanksgiving, giving thanks to God in the middle of the hard things of our existence is an art learned in the living of it; true, deep biblical thanksgiving is a chastened gratitude for what God has given us, for what he had taken us through and for what he will take us through. The celebration of Thanksgiving is more than a one day affair, much more than a long-weekend spent with the family, but something, as Christians, that we live out with our lives, one day at a time.

It’s easy to thank God before meals and for our families (well, most of the time), or for prosperity and health or for the beauty of creation—but after this it gets a little difficult. It’s not an easy thing to live lives of thanksgiving when we have obstacles to be overcome, lessons to be learned, when we need to endure hardship, or to live with those people in our lives who are more thorns than they are roses. Sometimes it’s much easier to become disillusioned with our lives and so become bitter. But this morning, it is not a glib or superficial ‘thank you’ that we offer to God, but we offer our very lives in gratitude to God, as damaged, as broken and as bruised as our lives may be—we live them in thanksgiving to a God who struggled to find life in the heart of darkness, who wrestled life out of death in the life of his resurrected Son so that we might have hope and not despair. True thanksgiving is gratitude born in the full view of all the realities of life, in view of joy & sorrow, of love & brokenness, of pleasure & pain, of gratitude & lament, of life & of death.

So, as we prepare to come to this altar this morning, as we come to perform the church’s most central act of thanksgiving in celebrating the Eucharist—and eucharist itself literally means ‘gratitude’ or ‘thanksgiving’—let’s offer our thanks for God’s wonderful provision and for his beautiful creation we see all around us—for the marvelous colours of this fall season and for a bountiful harvest, but most of all, let us offer our thanks to God for wrestling life out of death.

Amen.

Abelard on Family Life

I came across this in Peter Abelard the other day:

"What man, intent on his religious or philosophical meditations, can possibly endure the whining of children, the lullabies of the nurse seeking to quiet them, or the noisy confusion of family life? Who can endure the continual untidiness of children?" (History of My Misfortunes, ch. 7)

Any of you academics working on your degrees with children present can surely relate to Abelard's concern, hee hee! Well, he never was married (duh!?) and did eventually get castrated by some really angry guys for sleeping with his collegue's daughter. Boy, if only theology faculties could live up to this sort of drama today!

The Upside-Down World of Jesus

A Sermon Preached at Church of the Epiphany, Sudbury ON, July 15, 2007

When my wife Renée and I were expecting the birth of our son William about three years ago now, we were given a popular book that many mothers swear by: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I’m sure that some of you recognize it. The cover has a picture of a young mother-to-be, rocking peacefully in a serene scene full of bliss and joy. It sounds nice doesn’t it. It didn’t take long after William was born—a couple of sleepless nights to be exact—for me to begin to think that there was something a little slick and slightly dishonest about the title. It’s not that I’m not grateful for books which try to prepare parents-to-be for what they are about to experience. It’s just that having a baby and becoming a parent is such an unexpected, interrupting and world-altering experience that by definition, expecting what’s going to happen is a stretch, to say the least.

We may go into life and the situations we encounter along the way with all sorts of expectations and, if we make the mistake of taking ourselves too seriously, we can be bound to those expectations—and we can get bitter if things don’t work out the way we want. When your world is turned upside-down by something like the birth of a child, you quickly realize that what you thought you recognized as the lay of the land, is actually a completely different landscape. It’s unsettling and it takes time for our eyes to adjust to our new surroundings.

Something similar is going on in today’s gospel with the lawyer we meet. We’re all somewhat familiar with this parable. The parable of the Good Samaritan has indeed seeped into our common vocabulary and popular culture. It’s just another example of the Golden Rule right? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?” This is usually what we think of when we read the parable—at least that’s the way it was always taught to me. It’s a moral lesson about being good to people, about helping others, about loving thy neighbour as thyself. It’s about being ‘good’ just like the Samaritan, right?

Well, that’s certainly part of it, but if we leave it at this we really miss the subversive nature of Jesus’ parable and indeed of the gospel as a whole. There’s something much more radical going on here—the parable, if we actually read it, or rather allow it to read us, is quite a challenging and unsettling one—it’s a world altering story. And here’s a tip: if we read one of Jesus’ parables and we feel comfortable and settled, chances are that we’ve misread it.

A lawyer, one soaked in the Hebrew law and Jewish religious customs, approaches Jesus, not with a question but with a challenge, with a test, with a public legal dispute. In the Greek we have a strong verb here—and with the tone we get the sense that the lawyer is trying to entrap Jesus—this certainly wouldn’t be the first time. There’s a sense of hostility here—this is no courteous conversation over a cup of tea. The lawyer means business, as they often do.

The lawyer came thinking he knew what to expect from Jesus—he knew what Jesus would say—he had it all figured out, this legal stuff. After all, he had studied the law for quite a long time. “Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The lawyer is asking the question, not in order to hear something—he didn’t come ready to listen to Jesus, rather he wanted to say something—he wanted to test Jesus’ fidelity to the law. This legal question may indeed be a veiled assault on Jesus’ ministry with the unclean, with those whom Jesus treated as his neighbours. The lawyer came expecting Jesus to play ball.

But instead of answering his question, Jesus throws it back to lawyer—“Well, you, lawyer, you know the law better than anyone—how do you read the law?” This is really a trick question on the part of Jesus and you can sense Jesus’ sarcasm here—of course any good Jew knew the law: 1) Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and 2) Love your neighbours as yourself. “Rabbi, that’s an easy answer!” “Well”, says Jesus, “you know the law, A+, bang on—do that, and you’ll find all the life you need.”

The lawyer’s feathers are ruffled, he wants to justify himself, to defend his case, he wants Jesus to meet his expectations. So he can’t just let it go at that. Loving God, well, that’s the easy part of the law…we all know who God is. But, on the neighbour thing, we’re a little less clear. “So, just who is my neighbour, exactly Rabbi”? His question is that of a point of legality and did in fact concern a central issue in Jewish law. Ancient Jews defined the neighbour in terms of insiders and outsiders and generally a neighbour for a Jew was considered to be a fellow Israelite. But this lawyer wanted an exact definition just in case the legal question of loving one ever came up. He wants to know who the law demands that he love. He wants boundaries, because boundaries make life easier to live. He wants a reality defined in terms of those inside and those outside. If we know who are neighbours are, we can offer them our love. We can meet the demands of the law if we know what the law demands.

But Jesus doesn’t answer his question...he doesn’t play ball here either. Instead, Jesus did what he did best: he told him a story. A traveler who was on his way to Jericho, is attacked, robbed, beaten and left for dead in a ditch. By chance, a priest and then a Levite pass by without offering any help. The priest and the Levite would have been two people extremely stringent on the law (in fact, many priests were also lawyers—a point certainly not lost on the lawyer questioning Jesus). They pass by, presumably, to avoid contamination and defilement by a dead, or a soon to be dead body—the only dead body a priest could defile himself with by touching was a member of his own immediate family for the purposes of burial.

But now a Samaritan came walking by, he had pity on the stranger, bandaged his wounds and brought him to an inn where he could get well and made sure that he did. We need to understand the radical nature of this dramatic turn of events. What Jesus’ audience would have understood is that the Jews saw the Samaritans as the lowest of the low. A neighbour was one on the inside and anyone outside of that circle was excluded from this category. Samaritans were definitely on the outside—no group was more unacceptable to the Jews of this time—they ranked lower on the scale than did Gentile slaves. For example, if a Samaritan volunteered to pay the temple tax, it was to be returned to them.

So, Jesus asks him point blank, who here was a neighbour to the man? Notice Luke’s intent: he reminds us again that Jesus is speaking to ‘the one who was an expert in the law, and so the expert answers “The one who showed mercy.” Luke wants us to appreciate the great shock of the lawyer’s confession. “Go and do likewise” Jesus tells him.

Jesus was very intentional in his choice of characters here. He chooses the most despised outsider who was unfit for friendship with a Jew as the hero of this parable to deliberately shock, provoke and scandalize his audience. What Jesus’ story does is to effectively turn the lawyer’s world upside-down and inside-out. The lawyer came expecting one thing, but he got another thing entirely—he is confronted, challenged and striped bare with this parable. Everything the lawyer takes for granted, everything he expects is put into question and revolutionized. And notice that Jesus never answers his question, “who is my neighbour” but with the parable, with the story he tells, he forces the lawyer to re-think his presuppositions behind his question. Jesus doesn’t answer his question because in Jesus’ world, the question is unanswerable and ought not even be asked in the first place.

In Jesus’ world, love doesn’t begin by defining its objects but rather discovers them. Jesus turns the question around and inside-out: he never gives the lawyer the boundaries, the restrictions he wants because “neighbourhood” is defined for Jesus not in terms of the object of love. Rather the identity of neighbour is caught up with the subject, the one who shows mercy. The identity of the neighbour shifts from the one who receives mercy (from who is eligible for our love and mercy) to the subject who shows mercy. The question is not, “who is my neighbour?”, but “who am I as a neighbour to those I encounter along life’s way?”—and by this shift Jesus effectively erases any boundaries—if a Jew could admit that the hated Samaritan was the neighbour in this case, then there are no boundaries, no working definition to make life easier. Jesus places the enemy in the position of the elect and becomes the example for the community. This is a mind-blowing, reality altering way of looking at the world and it’s a hard reality for the lawyer to swallow. And notice that we aren’t left knowing how the lawyer reacted to all of this. Jesus’ intent was to clearly change this man’s perspective on reality, but we’re never told how the story ends for the lawyer. Did he go and do likewise, or did he remain stuck in his way of doing things?

We come to church sometimes like the lawyer came to Jesus, don’t we? We may not be hostile (or, indeed sometimes we may). But we do come with our expectations of what church should be, how things should be done, and sometimes with a very strict definition of who is in and who is out. And, more often than not, we come thinking we know what Jesus is all about—we don’t expect to be confronted by Jesus. But, just like the lawyer who thought that he knew what’s what, Jesus doesn’t leave us, with our boundaries and definitions, and expectations unchallenged or unprovoked.

Jesus told this parable to turn the lawyer’s world upside-down and today this parable is for us an invitation to the quite unexpected world of Jesus where Samaritans, the despised outsiders of society and not the religious leaders of the day are the heroes of the story. Where enemies, those we consider to be on the outside are really on the inside. A world where we are shocked to find out that the first are really last and the last are in fact, first.

It is an invitation to a way of life, to a community that doesn’t seek to set boundaries of who is in and who is out—who we love and show mercy to, and who we leave in the ditch for dead. It’s an invitation to live as a follower of Jesus not with our expectations controlling our lives (for we all sometimes get caught up with the expectations we place on each other and on God or especially with the expectations we feel are made of us) but an invitation to have our lives overwhelmed, turned upside-down and inside-out by the miracle of God’s grace.

And just as we don’t know how the lawyer reacted to this provocation, to this quite unexpected turn of events, I don’t know how you’ve reacted to the reality altering world and ways of Jesus in your own life. The invitation to encounter this Jesus who transforms and revolutionizes our lives is open to everyone—and if we let him, he will turn our worlds upside-down.
Amen.

The Church as Eccentric Community

A Sermon Preached on the
Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 24th 2007
Church of the Epiphany, Sudbury, ON

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts and minds be pleasing unto You, O Lord our Saviour and Redeemer. Amen.

John the Baptist is certainly in the running for one of the strangest characters from scripture. True to the form of Old Testament prophets, John was, to say the least, an odd and peculiar person. He looked, and probably smelled, more like someone living on the street than any of us here today. In light of the reading from Luke’s Gospel this morning, where we are told that the one who will come to prepare the way of the Lord is the Prophet of the Most High, we are probably prone to expect something other than what we got in John the Baptist—someone important, well-connected, someone socially stable. But that’s not the way God works…He gave us John the Baptist—a man with animal skin for clothes, and with honey and locusts stuck in his beard; a smelly and grubby itinerant preacher from somewhere out in the wilderness. In a word, he gave us an “eccentric” witness.

Truth be told, we’d probably all rather not have him sitting next to us in church on Sunday morning. I’m sure that we can draw up all sorts of eccentric characters from the pool of our collective memories and experiences—someone who was always a little off-center—whether it’s a co-worker who doesn’t quite fit in, or someone from your childhood who was the class oddball, that weird kid that everybody picked on…or maybe you fell like you are the one of those people always sitting on the outside looking in.

What I would like us to consider this morning is that the church is called to be eccentric, much like John the Baptist was. Just so we’re clear here, I’m not suggesting that we are all called to wear ratty clothes and eat weird things and generally not look after ourselves. But what I do want to do is to play around with this word “eccentric”. What does this prophet have to teach us, gathered here this morning, about the church as an eccentric way of life?

First of all, the word eccentric carries with it the sense of being off center—to be out of center. In this way functions as the opposite of ego-centric: it means living ‘outside’ of ourselves in contrast to living a self-centered life. Karl Barth, the theological giant of the twentieth century, had a picture hung above his desk for his entire life. The picture, copied for you on the front of this week’s bulletin, was Matthias Grünewald’s crucifixion scene from his Isenheim altarpiece painted in the early 16th century. I want you to look at it and take it in. Barth was fond of this picture, not for the centrality of the crucifixion scene per se, but rather for Grünewald’s representation of John the Baptist. In this figure of the prophet, with the Holy Scriptures in one hand and the other, with finger outstretched toward the figure of the crucified, we have, Barth claimed, the very vision, the very identity of the church, of what it means to be a witnessing community.

It is the finger of the Baptist draws our attention. Elongated and outstretched, he doesn’t seek to attract attention to himself, but wants our gaze to be cast upon the crucified Lord. John is not interested in himself but in the One who has come to put all things right. John’s disregard for himself was not a product of a self-imposed humility. Rather, John had the task of preparing the way of the Lord and His salvation—it was a job that required taking notice of Jesus and not of himself.

As members of God’s church we are called to the same ministry as John the Baptist. We are called to be witnesses to Christ in our world—not as self-interested people but as selfless ones. Our job is, like John’s, to point to Christ so that the world may know that salvation has come and this requires, to put it rather bluntly, that our egos are checked at the door. The church is not a community focused in on itself, but it is called to be a community centered on others. The church only exists as her true self when she exists for others.

More often than not, the church’s actual posture is one of pointing to ourselves, seeking our own attention, rather than the posture of the Baptist who points away from himself. Our communal life can all too easily slip into self-centeredness when we get caught up with ourselves, with our own individual desires, our own plans, when I want it my way. When we live such a self-centered life, individually and as a community, we miss the boat. We exist for others, plain and simple. When we think that being the church is all about us, that all of this is here for us, we miss our call to be an eccentric, other-centered community. When we live with our egos at the center, with our fingers pointed to ourselves, we blur and confuse our witness. John knew this as we read this morning from the book of Acts, “What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. No, but one is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of the sandals on his feet.” John knew that to be self-centered meant obscuring his witness to Christ. In fact, in the sometimes overwhelming temptation to be overly concerned with ourselves, we block out the image of the crucified, which is another way of saying that we sin.

And this brings me to the second sense in which the church is called to be eccentric, and here I mean it in a more corporate and social sense: Christ calls the church to live, not as an important social club—as a place where membership gets you some sort of credibility amongst your peers, or where you come to feel important or to maintain some sort of status. No, in a very real way, Christ calls us to exist like those eccentric and strange figures in our lives, at the fringes of society, at the outside of the social margin where God’s peace and tender mercy are all but invisible. We live there because that’s where Jesus lives caring for the poor and the hungry, suffering with the sick and the rejected.

We may think that we’re cultured, and well-to-do and important, but we belong to a body where all are welcomed, especially those people who make us uncomfortable, those people who make us shift a little in our sometimes all too comfortable pews. The church is the place where those who don’t ‘fit-in’ in the world are welcomed and accepted. It is the place where we exist as God’s living alternative to a world gone awry—and that’s often an uncomfortable and unpopular place to be.

It’s not easy to live as God’s alternative in a world that worships the idols of capital, the health of the market and the bottom line; in a world that treats people like statistics and holds the poorest of nations in debt; in a world that teaches us to value and protect our own self-interest over that of others, that it’s okay to exploit others in the name of self-preservation. It’s no accident that the New Testament word for witness is martyr—the very giving up of the self—something John the Baptist knew all too well. No, it’s not easy to live as a community that is supposed to embody God’s way of life. It’s not easy to cry in the wilderness, pointing to the crucified, “Here is your God!” The light of the dawn that breaks over us, the light that Zechariah prophesied about in Luke’s gospel is the light of God’s salvation that has come to shine on us and our world. It is our job to selflessly share this light with the world, a world that sits in darkness and in the shadow of death.

So being witnesses to Christ doesn’t mean being prim and proper, important or self-sufficient, least of all does it mean ‘upwardly mobile’ or ‘normal’ or ‘socially functional’. John the Baptist is our great example of what it means to exist as a witness, not because he had it all together (he most certainly did not), but because he was transparent to Christ. True eccentricity, true selfless living in the interest of others in the name of Jesus Christ is what it means to be God’s witnesses. It’s not easy, but that’s what we’re supposed to be all about.

Not because ‘we’ have it all together…we don’t and that’s the point exactly. Living eccentrically means that we’re not just a group of isolated self-interested individuals looking out for number one who occasionally bump into each other at church, but it means living as a community that exists for each other, both inside and outside of the walls of the church. It means life together for others. It means living for others with each other and when we do that we live as transparent witnesses to Christ. We live off-centered, outside of ourselves when we open our doors to all people and invite them to participate in our peculiar and eccentric way of life where self-centeredness crumbles under the weight of God’s redeeming grace, where conflict and bitterness are transformed into living for the sake of others, where the strangeness of God’s love overwhelms the normalcy of our lives, where our inward pointing fingers are turned from ourselves to the life giving cross of Jesus Christ.


for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. Amen.

W.H. Auden's Horae Canonicae

For those of you who enjoy the poetry of W.H. Auden, BBC Radio 3 had a reading of his marvelous lenten poem, Horae Canonicae (The Canonical Hours) read by Tom Durham with introductions by Archbishop Rowan Williams. You can listen here.

You can get the text of the poem here.

Maximus the Confessor

I'm currently reading the collection of Maximus the Confessor's writings, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. As this is my first foray into Maximus, I'm wondering if any of you who may happen upon this post know of any top notch secondary sources that will help to place Maximus into his theological/historical/political environment.

As for secondary resources, I'm reading Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Cosmic Liturgy: the Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, Andrew Louth's Maximus the Confessor, and Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (esp. chp. 7). I also know of Thunberg's work and will eventually look at it. I'm also open to French language sources. Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated. As well, if any of you know any good patristic theology blogs, pass them along. Thanks.

Toward a Post-Liberal Theology?: The Architecture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology and Ecclesiology

Part IV: The Perils of Christus als Gemeinde existierend

Bonhoeffer’s contribution offers much in response to theological liberalism. Yet we are left with some nagging suspicions that, left on its own, the architecture of Bonhoeffer’s Christology and ecclesiology cannot fully afford what it wishes to purchase—a ticket to outbid theological liberalism.

We return to some of his early programmatic statements: "the church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God" (SC, 138, emphasis mine). He goes on to qualify this: "one must not think of a second incarnation of Christ…but rather of a form of revelation that may be called 'Christ existing as church-community'" (SC, 138, emphasis mine). The difficulty within Bonhoeffer’s description is that we are inevitably led—even against his best efforts to not think of the church as a second incarnation—to think of the church as, at the very least, an extension of the incarnation. Without parsing the discontinuity between the identity and presence of Jesus Christ as say Barth or more precisely as Hans Frei has done, we are left with a number of difficulties (both potential and actual). Here the danger is that the identity of Jesus is not only dislodged from its own unique narratively rendered description (which is a weighty, but different concern) but is so fused with his presence that his identity (his act and being) is too easily confused with a phenonmenologically rendered description—the visible and sociologically describable gemeinde, grounded earlier, within Sanctorum Communio, in a sociologically and philosophically describable “personhood” and “community”.

Take the following, from Discipleship, for example:

In his grace, [Jesus] has left something unfinished in his suffering, which his church-community is to complete in this last period before his second coming. This suffering will benefit the body of Christ, the church. Whether this suffering of Christians also has the power to atone for sin (1 Peter 4:1) remains an open question. What is clear, however, is that those suffering in the power of the body of Christ suffer in a vicariously representative action ‘for’ the church-community, ‘for’ the body of Christ (Discipleship, 222).

The issue here is not about the activity requisite of the church, for it is indeed called to follow Christ precisely in his suffering and so, it too suffers. The issue at hand is that Bonhoeffer missteps when he claims that we complete the work of Christ to the point of leaving the question of the vicarious and atoning suffering of the community for sin an open one—which is a clear outcome of not attentively distinguishing the identity of Christ from that of the church (here we have a deep division between Barth and Bonhoeffer). To speak of the community as “completing” the work of Christ introduces within that community’s activity a certain active promeity, which it shares with the promeity of Christ. We are close—and let me be clear here that this is against Bonhoeffer’s best intentions—to the ancient heresy of Pelagianism wherein human activity bears soteriological consequence. If Bonhoeffer wants a genuine human activity and at the same time to avoid Pelagianism, as I believe him to, he needs to delineate in what way human activity participates in divine activity without usurping that activity and domesticating it to a flat phenomenological account of divine activity. Furthermore, without fully considering the full and complete work of Christ, the work of Christ, as pro me activity is in danger of being evacuated of its full promeity. That is, the relation between the activity of Christ and the activity of the church is, on this score, a shared activity—and what’s more—a shared salvific activity, for the community becomes the Stellvertretung. The community thus does not correspond to the vicarious activity of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit but rather, in some sense, constitutes that activity in its own activity (which is but a form of ecclesiastical triumphalism).

This line of critique could be extended but what is at the root of the problem is an underdeveloped account of divine activity vis-à-vis the church, and such underdevelopment is but symptomatic of Bonhoeffer’s neglect of the doctrine of God proper—there is in fact no fully operative doctrine of God (doctrine of the Trinity) in Bonhoeffer’s corpus (for instance, a developed pneumatology would go a long way in avoiding the above problems).

To expand upon this critique, let us remember that “relationality” is derived, not from God’s relationality in se, but in an economy characterized and controlled by a phenomenologically achieved definition (an inheritance of 19th century liberal theology). That is, the problem that presents the difficulty with regards to Bonhoeffer’s Christology and ecclesiology is a neglect of the “relationality” of the Trinitarian economy. Barth offers us a keen assessment of the difficulty:

Theological thought is distinguished from philosophical thought by the fact that it does not regard the incarnation of the Word as the truth of a state, e.g., the truth of the unity of subject and object, of the man-relatedness of God or the God-relatedness of man, which is then an underlying principle of dogmatics that has to be exegeted…but regards it rather as the truth of a divine act. But if it is understood as an act, then the terminus a quo (‘God in Himself’) and the terminus as quem (‘man in himself’) must be differentiated and then interelated in the description of the act as such. What would ‘God for us’ mean if it were not said against the background of ‘God in Himself’?” (CD I/1, 170 emphasis mine).

Barth’s concern is that in order to properly take account of the divine economic activity ad extra, and so to appropriately gauge the human-divine relationship, proper attention must be paid to the activity of God ad intra. What indeed would it mean to say “God for us” without saying “God in himself”? This is essentially what Bonhoeffer does—he says “God for us” without taking account of “God in Himself”. The danger is that “relationality” and all of its correlates (“community”, “person”, “the other”) are read phenomenologically.

So we come full circle in that the methodology that ruled Sanctorum Communio, an arguably classic liberal methodology, was never really overcome even in spite of a rich and strenuously orthodox christological development. Not only that but this methodological move was never deemed necessary to overcome in the first place! That methodology, as we discussed earlier but which only now can be fully appreciated, asserted that a Christian concept of community (ecclesiology) is funded either via a concept of God or via a concept of person (which always has a concept of God in view), and that both are equally valid. This is precisely the classic liberal dichotomy within theological method precipitated by the turn to the subject in later nineteenth century theological discourse! This is specifically what funds his distressing paucity with regards to reflection upon the doctrine of the Trinity (let us remember what weight the doctrine of the Trinity held in Schleiermacher’s theology!). Not only that, but Bonhoeffer’s ontology from Act and Being is inadequate to the degree that it offers him little help in parsing the difficulty of taking account of divine and human activity (that is, the act and being of Christ and church) with regards to the identity of Christ and his church. Is Christ exhaustively identified with the community? Does the community partake in some sort of hypostatic union with Christ such that it has both a human and divine dimension? As we tentatively answered above, Christ and church are identified but not to the point that Christ is identified with the church without remainder—this is Bonhoeffer’s intention. Yet there is a tension here that is not adequately resolved and so the question of the fusion of identities and the consequences therein need to remain open as an extension or possibility inherent within Bonhoeffer’s theological contribution.

While Bonhoeffer gains mileage on the tradition of theological liberalism in his effort to outbid that tradition, he remains, in certain important respects imbedded within that tradition. Without a full-blown doctrine of God funding his ecclesiological and christological moves, especially an account of the activity of the Holy Spirit in relation to ecclesiological concerns, Bonhoeffer’s contribution remains an inadequate attempt to mount a successful response to the nineteenth century’s shortfalls. This is not to discount the ground that Bonhoeffer makes up in his Christology lectures—which is significant. In this sense Bonhoeffer is a legitimate forerunner of postliberal theology as many of his concerns in his Christology lectures parallel, to a great degree, the concerns of someone like Hans Frei. Yet he remains a precursor of postliberal theology who could not really shed his liberal skin completely (and this may indeed be why he is largely overlooked in contemporary postliberal theology). To do so, his contribution needs to be properly supplemented with a robust doctrine of God wherein he could properly take account of the human activity of the church without falling into the above problematique.