Monthly Archives: November 2011

Advent and the end of religion

Posted by on November 27, 2011 10 comments

There’s a somewhat famous quote from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (November 21, 1943, pp. 188-89) on the nature of Advent: “By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that — ultimately negligible things — the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”

Interestingly in the same letter Bonhoeffer mentions how much he misses table fellowship and how he’s begun praying Luther’s morning and evening blessing every day. He then says: “Don’t be alarmed! I will definitely not come out here as a ‘homo religiosus’! Quite the opposite: my suspicion and fear of ‘religiosity’ has become greater here than ever.” So then, perhaps we must say that Advent, according to Bonhoeffer’s prior analogy, as a prison cell that can only be opened from outside, should be seen as the end of religion. All religion must have a door that can, at least partially be opened from the inside. Advent proclaims the end of religion as such, speaking of a God who must come to us wholly from beyond us.

To retreat into the comfort of religiosity, the smooth apologetic for Christianity that arises from proclaiming homo religiosus (or its more trendy equivalent these days, homo liturgicus) is to retreat from the very hope of Advent itself, the hope against hope that cannot be satisfied by out own designs, but only by the earth-shattering coming of God in Jesus.

Shrinking from grief

Posted by on November 8, 2011 17 comments

Am I wrong to suspect that grief, the genuine and loud experience and expression of total strickenness and sorrow, is almost totally unacceptable today, both in and outside the church?

And correspondingly, whether or not we reject “all violence” on Christian principles, I wonder if the violence irrupting from grief, from anguish is for us the most unspeakable and reproachable violence. Violence for the sake of security, justice, or retribution, or that eminently understandable violence, the violence of order and reasonable process, perhaps these we might understand but the violence that springs from: ” By the rivers of Babylon we sit down and weep . . . How blessed will be the the one who grabs your babies and smashes them on a rock!” — this violence, the irrational violence of mothers, daughters, of sons, fathers, and friends, we shrink back from in disgust, in visceral fear. And in this shrinking, do we not turn our back on any possibility of speaking truth? I think so.

To become and to be a Christian

Posted by on November 4, 2011 3 comments

To become and to be a Christian is not at all an escape from the world as it is, nor is it a wistful longing for a “better” world, nor a commitment to generous charity, nor fondness for “moral and spiritual values” (whatever that may mean), nor self- serving positive thoughts, nor persuasion to splendid abstractions about God. It is, instead, the knowledge that there is no pain or privation, no humiliation or disaster, no scourge or distress or destitution or hunger, no striving or temptation, no wile or sickness or suffering or poverty which God has not known and borne for [humanity] in Jesus Christ. He has borne death itself on behalf of [humanity], and in that event he has broken the power of death once and for all.

That is the event which Christians confess and celebrate and witness in their daily work and worship for the sake of all [humanity].

To become to be a Christian is, therefore, to have the extraordinary freedom to share the burdens of the daily, common, ambiguous, transient, perishing existence of [humans beings], even to the point of actually taking the place of another [person], whether he be powerful or weak, in health or in sickness, clothed or naked, educated or illiterate, secure or persecuted, complacent or despondent, proud or forgotten, housed or homeless, fed or hungry, at liberty or in prison, young or old, white or Negro, rich or poor.

For a Christian to be poor and to work among the poor is not a conventional charity, but a use of the freedom for which Christ has set [humanity] free.

~ William Stringfellow, My People is the Enemy, 32.

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