The Possibility of Discipleship

Here's the first two introductory paragraphs to my seminar paper from this quarter...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings from Tegel prison are often describes as "the new theology."  His Letters and Papers from Prison contain wonderful and fresh theological insights and represent a serious attempt to reconcile the reality of the revelation of Jesus Christ with the growing effects of secularization on Western religion and culture.  Though unfortunately fragmented, the Letters and Papers represent some of Bonhoeffer’s most creative work.  They are the result of focused study and reflection on an impressive array of scholarship, including drama, literature, music, history, philosophy and physics.  He scoured the prison library for material and he managed to receive a regular supply of books from his family and friends, often smuggled into Tegel by a friendly prison guard.  Of the dozens of authors that Bonhoeffer read while in prison, three had a particularly strong influence on the development of his new theology.

            Bonhoeffer’s letters from the spring and early summer of 1944 represent the height of his theological reflections.  During this time he was giving particular attention to questions of the philosophies of history, human life and worldview and was looking to Wilhelm Dilthey, José Ortega y Gasset and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker for insight.  Dilthey and Ortega y Gasset provided a framework for Bonhoeffer to engage critically the historical emergence of science and its perceived companion secularization.  Their philosophies of the radical reality of human life in the interpretation of history offered Bonhoeffer a compelling hermeneutic for interpreting God’s place in the rise of human autonomy.  Weizsäcker, a physicist, argued that our evolving scientific view of the world has determined our perception of, and belief in, God; this led to an ever-retreating God of the gaps.  From these authors (and certainly others) Bonhoeffer is able to refine and articulate the central aspect of his new theology.  He embraces the modern world, calling it “a world come of age,” and declares that Jesus Christ has and always will be in its very midst.  The false claims of religion, exposed by secularization, open wide the possibilities of the recognition of God’s nearness and grace.  Bonhoeffer understands that the church can only truly follow Jesus Christ when religious constructs are shed from Christianity.  He calls this separation religionless Christianity, and it is the very possibility of discipleship in a world that has come of age.  This paper argues that Bonhoeffer’s understanding of this “possibility” emerges in part from his study of human life, history and worldview in Dilthey, Ortega y Gasset and Weizsäcker.  Each of these three figures will be examined in terms of how their particular writings influenced the development of Bonhoeffer’s emerging theology. 

From Tegel Prison...

"What I am driving at is that God should not be smuggled in somewhere, in the very last, secret place that is left.  Instead, one must simply recognize that the world and humankind have come of age.  One must not find fault with people in their worldliness but rather confront them with God where they are their strongest."

Bonhoeffer's July 8, 16 and 18, 1944 letters to Eberhard Bethge in Letters and Papers from Prison make for some fascinating reading.  The March 9 and June 8 letters provide important background as well.  These are concepts that we need to be seriously reflecting and acting upon today.

The Consequences of Intellectual Formation

This quarter I'm working on a paper (which hopefully will eventually turn into a chapter of my dissertation) on Bonhoeffer's intellectual formation.  It really is a fascinating study.  I'm specifically looking at what Bonhoeffer studied while he was in Tegel prison and how that impacted the formation of his concept of 'religionless' Christianity.  I'm amazed at the volume of material that Bonhoeffer worked through during his time in prison, and then the resulting productivity.  He was reading history, philosophy, theology, science, novels, poems and music.  I hardly know where to begin or how to focus my investigation.  And this is not to mention all of the other influences before his imprisonment.  Some important names are bubbling to the surface, though, including Wilhelm Dilthey, Jose Ortega y Gasset, C. F. von Weizsacker, G. W. F. Hegel, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth (just to name a few).  I'm still in the gathering stage of my research, so I don't have many conclusions to offer at this point.  But I can offer some thoughts on how this project is impacting me on a personal level.

You may remember that earlier this summer I read Paul Tillich's "A History of Christian Thought."  Now, the thing about studying history, is you begin to realize the incredible interconnectedness of the development of ideas.  Every historical figure is indebted to another historical figure.  Sometimes they are indebted in a negative sense, by being against a line of thinking.  Other times, a breakthrough occurs only because someone takes the next step beyond the previous great thinker.  But in every case, what comes next is only possible because of what came before.

All of this study of the development of ideas is making me think of my own influences.  The big one for me is, of course, Bonhoeffer.  After all, I am dedicating the next several years of my life to producing new scholarship on him.  Certainly I won't make it out the other end without his profound influence on my life (for better or for worse - I'm counting on for better).  And I have to admit, in large part I picked Bonhoeffer for my doctoral studies (and ThM studies for that matter) because I want to be influenced by him. 

I often have people ask me why I picked Bonhoeffer.  The short answer is that I needed something to study if I wanted to do doctoral work, and Bonhoeffer piqued my interest during my MDiv studies.  But the deeper answer is that in Bonhoeffer I find not only a theology but a life that profoundly illustrates the incredible potential of following Jesus Christ.  Bonhoeffer challenges me, and helps me, to think seriously about theology and about how theology should change the way I live.  Bonhoeffer convinces me that theology and life go together; there is just no way around it.  What I believe must have everything to do with how I act.  And if it doesn't, then I have to ask myself what I actually believe.

My interest in Bonhoeffer is certainly driven by intellectual curiosity; I wouldn't put myself through the pains of doctoral work if my mind didn't thoroughly enjoy the task at hand.  But, to be honest, studying Bonhoeffer can't be just an intellectual exercise for me.  I'm pouring my life into this because I am convinced that through and with Bonhoeffer the church can better understand its place in the midst of this world.  And this is where I arrive at the concept of discipleship. 

I certainly don't know how it will all come together, but my hope is that by the end of this leg of my journey, I will have a theology of discipleship to offer.  My dissertation will certainly be full of scholarly nuance and more footnotes than all but my examiners will probably read, but I want it to be something that equips me for a future of disciple-making.  I want to offer a way for people to think about how their belief in the triune God actually makes a difference in their daily lives.  And then I want to help students or church-goers or people just wondering about God to process their belief into a life of trust and hope in Jesus Christ.

This gets me thinking about one last thing.  I was talking to a friend this week about curriculum and curriculum development for the church.  And I can't help but think about how the concept of discipleship, which is so personalized, can be disseminated through educational ministries.  In my mind, the teaching ministry of the church is for disciple-making (this certainly is not a new idea).  But the difficulty lies in the difference between information and formation.  How is the curriculum we use to spread information involved in actual spiritual formation?  The answer certainly depends on a number of factors.  Perhaps the greatest of these factors is the commitment to discipleship of the teachers and leaders of our educational ministries.  When discipleship is a core value of a church, what is taught will be reflected in what is lived out within the congregation, and into the surrounding community and world.

Because what we think makes a profound difference in how we act.  At least that's what I get from Bonhoeffer.

The Religious Enlightenment

Well, I'm now two weeks into my first doctoral seminar, and I'm very happy with the course and with the trajectory of my PhD program.  My seminar is called The Church in Modern Society and is exploring the influence of the Enlightenment and secularization on the development of theology and the church (mostly in England and America) from the 17th through the 20th centuries.  It really is a fascinating and important topic to explore and understand.

One of the questions that we've been looking at these first two weeks is the notion that the Enlightenment and Christianity were historically over and against each other.  I know I at least remember learning that with the advance of reason in the Enlightenment, the church was put on the defensive and faith was characterized as struggling to hold out against the mighty forces of science and reason.  In some ways, this has been true in modern history; but in many ways this is certainly not the case.

Take John Locke, for example (no, not the John Locke from the TV show 'Lost,' but the philosopher-scientist John Locke from 17th c. England).  He has been widely looked to as one of the fathers of the science of reason and logic, and has therefore been understood as being against the Christian faith.  One of the questions we looked at in reading Locke in our seminar, then, was whether based on his writings we could discern if he was an 'orthodox' Christian.

We read his essay/book "The Reasonableness of Christianity."  That's a pretty 'Enlightened' title, isn't it?  In this book, Locke meticulously employs the modern constructs of reason to clearly argue for the truth of Christianity.  And what is the central question of truth for Locke?  It is whether or not Jesus Christ is the Messiah.  Now, Locke might end up straying slightly from some other traditional theological positions, but anyone who combs through the Bible to prove that Jesus is the Christ, and that to be a Christian means living in faith and obedience to Jesus, is in my mind on the right track.

There are more examples of Enlightened thinkers who actually see and use reason as proof of faith, and not the other way around.  Isaac Newton, for one, discovers and articulates an entirely new worldview using physics, and then offers the order of the cosmos as clear evidence of God's providence.  Newton then partners with other leading Christians and scientists to promote the Christian faith through reason and science (see the Boyle lectures beginning in 1691).

It can be argued, then, that the Enlightenment should really be called the Religious Enlightenment.  And what's amazing is that just in the last 30 or 40 years, historical scholars have been reassessing their interpretation of the Enlightenment as being embodied in reason against faith.  As we look more and more at the primary sources of Enlightenment ideas and notice that the fathers of the Enlightenment were employing reason with faith to understand biblical Christianity for their time, it becomes clear that this really was a Religious Enlightenment.

Now this is certainly not to say that the Enlightenment was completely religious through and through.  It is at this time, for example, that the deist movement and secularization begin to rise.  But we must be more careful and nuanced in how we understand the development of faith and reason, because how we understand history has (or at least should have) a profound effect on our current worldview and our vision of the future.

Bonhoeffer, Barth and Tillich's "A History of Christian Thought"

A History of Christian Thought (published in 1967) is actually a combination of two books of Paul Tillich’s lectures.  The first part, A History of Christian Thought, begins with the Graeco-Roman preparations for Christianity and ends with the post-Reformation development in Protestant theology.  The second part originally appeared as Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Protestant Theology.  This section covers a range of topics, beginning with the rise of the Enlightenment and ending with the theology of Karl Barth and modern existentialism. 

            Tillich understands the development of Christian history and theology in terms of kairos.  He explains that the appearance of Jesus Christ happened in one special moment of history when everything was ready for it to happen.  He reminds us that Paul speaks of the kairos in describing the feeling that the time was ripe, mature, or prepared.  Kairos, he reminds us, is just one of two ways that the Greeks had to describe the concept of time.  The other term is chronos, and is clock time, time which is measured.  “Kairos,” he says, “is not the quantitative time of the clock, but the qualitative time of the occasion, the right time” (1).  The story of the gospel is one of “the right time.”  And Tillich works in this first section of his book to show how the foundation for the ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ was being set through culture and philosophy.  Tillich then returns often to this concept throughout the book to remind us of God’s constant attention to kairos throughout Christian history.

            The first part of the book moves from this first section, The Preparation for Christianity, and eventually covers six major movements of Christian thought: Theological Developments in the Ancient Church, Trends in the Middle Ages, Roman Catholicism from Trent to the Present, The Theology of the Protestant Reformers, and The Development of Protestant Theology. The second part of the book covers five sections: Oscillating Emphases in Orthodoxy, Pietism and Rationalism, The Enlightenment and Its Problems, The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the Enlightenment, The Nature of Romanticism, The Classical Theological Synthesis: Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis, and New Ways of Mediation.

            One of the most helpful concepts that Tillich illuminated for me is the idea of positivism in theological thought.  He touches on this concept several times throughout the book, and offers particular insight around pages 254 and 398.  Tillich understands positive Christianity as historically given Christianity, meaning that things are simply taken as they are.  So, Luther, for example, understood providence as positivism.  Tillich explains that this means that the Stoic doctrine of natural law, which can be used as a criticism of the positive law has disappeared.  “Practically,” writes Tillich, “he [Luther] says that every Christian must put up with bad government because it comes from God providentially” (255).  And, put simply, Luther can maintain this because he says that God does two kinds of work: his own proper work, the work of love, mercy and grace, and his strange work, which is also a work of love, but a strange one. 

Now, move ahead to Schleiermacher and his positivistic definition of theology (cf. 398f).  Schleiermacher’s famous book The Christian Faith (first published in 1821) is significantly about what is in fact positively given, that is, the Christian faith as such.  “Thus,” says Tillich, “systematic theology is the description of the faith at its present in the Christian churches.  That is a positivist foundation of theology.  You do not have to decide about the truths or untruths of a religion in general or of Christianity in particular.  You find Christianity given as an empirical fact in history, and then you have to describe the meaning of the symbols within it” (399).  Schleiermacher worked to make a very sharp distinction between this empirical positive theology and the so-called rational theology of the Enlightenment.  Now Tillich thinks that the problem with all of this is that it completely leaves out – for the first time in the development of theology, by the way – the question of truth.  You can describe what is going on, then educate leaders of the church in this knowledge, and move forward, without ever decisively dealing with questions of truth.

There is clearly a lot going here, and I am still working to put all the pieces together.  But the reason I am sifting through all of this is because of Bonhoeffer (big surprise, right?).  There is this odd paragraph in Bonhoeffer’s May 5, 1944 letter to Eberhard Bethge in Letters and Papers from Prison that has been stumping me and some of my other Bonhoeffer classmates for quite some time.  This question came up in my Bonhoeffer course at Princeton, and we still had a hard time even with the professor and teaching assistants trying to decipher what Bonhoeffer is saying here.  This letter is one of his more famous ones, where he’s dealing with questions of ‘religionless Christianity.’  He writes, “Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his truly great merit; but he puts in its place a positivistic doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all.  That isn’t biblical.  There are degrees of knowledge and degrees of significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation.  The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith, and so mutilates what is – Christ’s incarnation – a gift for us!  In the place of religion there now stands the church – that is in itself biblical – but the world is left to its own devices, and that’s the mistake” (LPP, 286).

So, Tillich is helping me make sense of this paragraph of Bonhoeffer’s with some insight on the concept of ‘positivism.’  The question that stumped my Princeton colleagues and me was what does Bonhoeffer mean by ‘positivism’?  Of course Princeton being the holy ground for all things Barth, this was an important question – if Bonhoeffer was going to criticize Barth, we needed to know why!  Now, I don’t know if this is an accurate or fair criticism of Barth by Bonhoeffer, but it is certainly worth trying to better understand.  First of all, I’m fairly certain that Bonhoeffer is not advocating for the dismissal of such key doctrines as the Virgin birth or the Trinity.  Remember, this is Bonhoeffer jotting down ideas “in German script” – which he tells Bethge he normally only does for his own thoughts.  But the bigger picture of what he seems to be wrestling with has to do with how we understand, accept, and then apply theology.  The “positive theology” that was “handed down” to Bonhoeffer and others in the German/Lutheran church made a sharp distinction between the church and the state.  Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine (while largely misinterpreted) effectively split the world into a sacred and a secular sphere, with Christ and Christians in the sacred sphere beckoning those in the world to leave the secular and join the sacred.  This doctrine also allowed Christians to be in the sacred sphere on Sunday and the secular sphere on all other days.  The split of church and state had also bifurcated individual lives. 

Bonhoeffer says that this is not acceptable any more.  This may be positivistic theology, and thus may even be where Barth is arguing from, but all it does is leave the world to its own devices.  The church, affirms Bonhoeffer, stands not in a separate sphere, but stands with Jesus Christ in the very center of all reality.  Jesus Christ is for the world and exists in the midst of the world.  If our theology leads us to believe otherwise, be it positivistic or anything else, we need to re-evaluate our thinking based on what is biblical and revealed through the in-breaking of Jesus Christ.

Much more needs to be explored and investigated with all of this, but it is an exciting discovery nonetheless!

The prayer posted by my desk

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.  --- Thomas Merton, "Thoughts in Solitude"

I've been living with this prayer now for coming up on a year.  One of my professors at Princeton handed out a little card with this meditation on it in my Prayer class.  I started to read it and could hardly make it past the first line.  Here I was, having just moved across the country for more school, and deep down I knew that I had no idea where I was going.  I thought I knew where I was going; God knows I had been seeking where to go.  But I still had to admit that I was full of anxiety because I could not see the road ahead of me.

Following after Jesus Christ is all about trust - and here in my hands, finally, was a prayer of honest trust.  It was honest because, well, "the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so."  And it was a prayer of trust because, "I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you."  The fact is, I can't always know what the road looks like ahead of me.  But I can know that God is simply with me, always.

As life has tossed my family and me back and forth across the country this past year, I have become more confident than ever that God is with us, and will never leave us to face our perils alone.  What's more, when we find ourselves in calm water, there is the peace that God remains with us.  This is not a God of the gaps, who only shows up when things are bad.  We have a God who is ever with us and for us.

That is why this prayer has stayed on my desk for the past year, because it is a prayer I can always pray.  Even now, as I am finally beginning a PhD program and I can leave all the anxiety and questioning behind, I pray this prayer.  I still have to admit to myself that I really don't know where I'm going.  So, I still seek God, and trust that my desire to please him is enough.  There is nothing greater than the peace that comes from allowing God to be God.

Why I'm Here (working on another degree, that is)

The summer before my senior year at Seattle Pacific University, I found myself in Taizé, France.  Despite being a bit shy and introverted, I quickly became friends with Joel, a 17 year-old from Sweden.  We were in a bible study together, and one morning he simply asked me what I thought about Jesus.  He had very little knowledge of Christianity, and so throughout the rest of the week, we spent hours walking around the village, sitting under shady trees, and even camping out under the stars talking about faith and life.  Joel was truly wrestling with the question of what it could mean to follow Jesus Christ.  One night, I wandered out of the village and into the countryside to pray.  Suddenly, the weight of God’s compassion for Joel, and for the world, overwhelmed me, and I felt my heart break.  Joel was full of so much wonder and curiosity, and even faith.  He longed for Jesus, but was not sure how to reconcile such a faith with his life.  Walking alone in the moonlight that night, God assured me that Joel would not be forgotten when he ventured back to Sweden.

A few years later, I was an M.Div. student at Fuller Theological Seminary’s northwest campus and a pastor of small groups and adult education at a relatively new church plant in Seattle.  One Sunday morning I was leading a class discussion about faith and doubt when Melissa, a biology student from the University of Washington, shared her hesitation with Christianity.  She talked about how she wanted to believe in Jesus, but couldn’t accept the biblical story of seven-day creation, and so reasoned that she couldn’t become a Christian.  I asked her, what if the first chapters of Genesis weren’t about how the earth was created?  What if they were about who God is?  Her eyes bulged, and she smiled a little.  We opened the story and talked about what we could learn about a God who creates with love and purpose, and who is ultimately interested in redeeming all of humanity.  She left class that day with new hope in a faith she desperately wanted to believe in.  I left class with renewed resolve that small group and education ministries needed to work hand in hand, addressing the very real and relevant questions of what it means to follow Jesus Christ, today.

As I was finishing up my M.Div., I realized that my calling to the teaching ministry was shifting from the church and into the academy.  To help affirm this calling, I spent a year and a half as a teaching assistant to Ed Smyth, professor of educational ministry at Seattle Pacific.  Ed gave me the opportunity to gain confidence giving lectures and assessing student work, even allowing me the opportunity to teach solo on a few occasions.  While I can picture myself teaching in either a university or seminary setting, my time with Ed at Seattle Pacific really ignited a passion for Christian liberal arts undergraduate teaching.  One of my main goals in my time with Ed was to see if deliberate ministry could be carried out in an academic setting.  I felt that my calling was as much to ministry as it was to teaching and wanted to see how this could practically work out.  For 23 years, Ed has led a men’s discipleship group out of his home on Thursday nights.  For him, teaching is a window to discipleship.  Ed is an excellent teacher.  But his legacy at the school will be the hundreds of young men who have prayed on their knees on Thursday nights in his basement.  Wherever God calls me to teach, I want to leave a similar legacy of excellent teaching, creative scholarship and passionate ministry.

Lately, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been extremely helpful as I think about what it means for individuals and the church to follow Jesus Christ.  I am realizing that discipleship cannot be just a question of personal piety.  It certainly was more than this for Bonhoeffer.  The question of discipleship – what does it mean to follow Jesus Christ – is just as much a sociological, ecclesial or ethical question as it is a theological one.  Indeed, discipleship is even a question of religionless Christianity.  These are important questions for the academy and the church to consider.  What does it mean for Joel to follow Jesus from Taizé back to Sweden?  How does the church walk with Melissa as she grapples with her understanding of the Bible?  How can a university or seminary equip its students with the tools and ideas to not just think about God, but to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth? 

But there are more questions: questions of tragedy, of ethics, of culture…  What does it mean to follow Jesus Christ for the abused, for the Wall Street executive, for the iPhone toting teenager?  And how can the church foster a culture of discipleship for those who are seeking Jesus, both inside and outside of the church?  My task, then, is to express an understanding of discipleship that is grounded theologically, functions socially, ministers ethically and embraces the culture, in participation with God’s mission to world.

This is no small task.  And so I find myself working towards yet another academic degree – but for a clear purpose, and with a clear calling.  I am convinced that discipleship is playing a key role in God's continued restoration of the church today, and I cannot wait to see where the Spirit leads.

It is an exciting time to be a young theologian.