Friday, January 25, 2013

The Quest For A "Religionless Christianity"

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of his search for a "religionless Christianity". Every once in a while I return to his musings on this subject in his LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON. What he was grasping at seems supremely important and true. Yet his thoughts on the matter are raw and unformed, he never got to the point of really pulling it all together. He was viciously taken from this world before he could get to that point. Today I feel closer to seeing what he did than I ever have. Yet I feel I am nowhere close to putting forth anything like a model. I know it has something to do with the Holy Spirit and the power of God. I know it has something to do with the kind of experience John The Revelator had in that cave on Patmos. And the way the spiritual/secular divide disappears in Japanese culture. And the way apocalyptic imagery asserts itself in modern pop culture. And it is all about Jesus, that simple man on the cross. Maybe it's something like Grant Morrison's philosophy, but with truth that can only  be found in Christ. I have the pieces, or at least many of them. But I have no idea how to even begin to put them together. I will leave you with a few quotes from Bonhoeffer, that echo in my soul. I'll post more down the line.

"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
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4 comments:

  1. KatJanuary 25, 2013 at 2:32 PM

    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?

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  2. Joshua OrsakJanuary 25, 2013 at 5:38 PM

    Kat, what do you make of the religious-secular non-distinction in Japan? I suggest this paper:

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  3. Joshua OrsakJanuary 25, 2013 at 5:41 PM

    http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/Fitzgerald.html

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  4. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2013 at 1:57 AM

    I 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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