"What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God-- without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak in a 'secular' way about 'God'? In what way are we religionless-secular Christians, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does this mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? Does the secret discipline, or alternatively the difference between penultimate and ultimate, take on new importance here?"
"God's 'beyond' is not the beyond of cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something that I'm thinking about a great deal..."
I feel like I will only really understand the Gospels if I ever fully grasp what Bonhoeffer saw in them while in those Nazi prisons
If you are a religious person, and your religion is a part of your life and who you are, then can you ever really have a religionless situation?
ReplyDeleteKat, what do you make of the religious-secular non-distinction in Japan? I suggest this paper:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/Fitzgerald.html
ReplyDeleteI feel religion is a boundary. Similar to boundaries you may have in elementary school. However, as you mature, as you age, your boundaries widen and there become more opportunities available to you. You can always utilize the rules and discipline you used in elementary school, but now you get to venure into the unknown. Religion is a great start, but it shouldn't be the end all; it should only be the beginning. The difficult part for me when I first realized all the opportunities avaliable to me, was the wide open space for improvement into my relationship with God was SO BIG...lol! I am slowly learning how to focus on specific areas (prayer, charity, studying, etc.) and after the past few years I can even focus on a few items within one day. I even found myself worrying that there was not enough time in one life to learn everyhting I wanted/needed to, but I have learned to sustain from that and take it in as it comes. I have even began studying religions outside Christianity and found little similarities in sacrafice, self-giving, forgiveness. But I can honestly say, for me no religion has the compassion and the love of Christianity.
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