CHRISTIAN FAITH IN THE 20TH CENTURY

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CHRISTIAN FAITH IN THE 20TH CENTURY

• The Witness of
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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St. Pauls Cathedral, London, during German
bombing of London, summer 1940
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I.   CHRISTIANITY TWELVE CRISES of the 20th
Century  
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1. Faith and SCIENCE

• Scientific Revolution (Galileo)
• Enlightenment (Deism)
• Darwin Evolution
• MUST FAITH AND SCIENCE BE ANTAGONISTS?

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2. Faith Secularism

• The Industrial Revolution (1750?)
• And the enormous prestige of the SECULAR
  OBJECTIVE
• Faith is fine as a subjective preference (much
  like preferring this kind of music over that
  kind), but has no objective value

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3. Faith Imperialism

• Mid-1800s newly rich countries (Western Europe,
  USA)
• Increasingly dominate world
• New Imperialism (1880 ? 1950s)
• Most Christian churches eagerly endorse
  Imperialism

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4. Faith the Great War

• 1914-1918 The Great War
• Vast majority of Christians participate in the
  war
• Gods Purpose in this great slaughter?

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WHY SUCH GHASTLY SUFFERING? IS GOD
SOVEREIGN? WILL EVIL BE UNCHECKED? CAN THE
CHURCH PLAY ANY ROLE IN THIS CATASTROPHE?
Walter Bonhoeffer, Dietrichs big brother, is
killed in World War I
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An Aside KARL BARTH

• b. 1886, Switzerland
• Educated in optimistic liberal theology (God
  loves the world, the world is moving toward God)
• WORLD WAR I
• Epistle to the Romans
• Human depravity Divine Sovereignty

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Barth

• Religion is a sociological phenomenon which may
  or may not express Gods Word
• Christians are not at home in the world
• The reality tremendous power of Sin
• The mystery of the Sovereignty of God
• THEOLOGY OF CRISIS

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5. Faith the Roaring Twenties

• 1918-1929 frantic effort to restore meanings to
  shattered lives
• Superficiality (Fads! Dances! Alcohol!)
• Yet deep despair

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Despair
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out
of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire,
stirring Dull roots with spring rain T. S.
Eliot, The Waste Land
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
Virginia Woolf
Ernest Hemingway
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I was always embarrassed by the words sacred,
glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in
vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in
the rain, almost out of earshot, so that only the
shouted words came through, and had read them, on
proclamations that were slapped up by
billposters over other proclamations, now for a
long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the
things that were glorious had no glory, and the
sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if
nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

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There were many words that you could not stand to
hear and finally only the names of places had
dignity Abstract words such as glory, honor,
courage or hallow were obscene beside the
concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads,
the names of rivers
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If people bring so much courage to this world,
the world has to kill them to break them, so of
course it kills them. The world breaks everyone
and afterwards many are strong at the broken
places. But those that will not break it kills.
It kills the very good and the very gentle and
the very brave impartially. If you are not one
of these you can be sure it will kill you too but
there will be no special hurry. Ernest
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
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6. Faith the Great Depression

• 1929 World Economy Crashes
• Where is faith in this economic catastrophe?

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7. Faith the Failure of Liberalism

• Optimism
• Faith and Modernity can be reconciled!
• Reform! Build the Kingdom!
• But now this optimism seems shallow

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8. Faith the Failure of Conservatism

• Pessimism about Modernity
• Confidence in TRADITION
• But, now, tradition seems shattered

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Aside Reinhold Niebuhr

• 1892-1971
• American Theologian
• An alternative to both Liberalism and
  Conservatism?
• Neo-Orthodoxy deep sense of human sin Divine
  Sovereignty
• Personalism limit State power limit
  violence beware of ideology defend individual
  persons

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IN THE USA ESPECIALLY R.N. HAS A HUGE
IMPACT CONSERVATIVE IN TEMPERAMENT deep sense
of sin need for redemption checks balances
limit violence PROGRESSIVE IN POLICY
pro-civil rights pro-Human Rights limits on
State deep caution about use of military force
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9. Faith COMMUNISM

• 1917 BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
• RADICAL LEFT
• A New Religion?

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10. Faith FASCISM

• 1922 Mussolini -- Italy
• 1933 Hitler in Germany
• RADICAL RIGHT
• Tradition! Patriotism! Authority Discipline!
  Law Order!
• A New Religion?

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11. Faith the German Catastrophe

• 1933-1945 Nazi Germany
• War Against the World
• Genocide

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The Churches Hitler

• CATHOLICS
• Concordat with the Vatican (33)
• Mit brennender Sorge (37) (Pope Pius XI)
• Opposition to Euthanasia (39)
• But Withdrawal, collaboration, survival

• PROTESTANTS
• Majority passive
• Pro-Hitler German Christian Movement
• Minority The Confessing Church -
• Barmen Declaration
• But Withdrawal, collaboration, survival

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12. Faith World War II and the Holocaust

• 1937 (Asia)/ 1939 (Europe) 1945
• A Second Explosion of Global Violence

Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941
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Concluding with the Ultimate Weapon
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The Holocaust
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Where was God during the Holocaust?
Buchenwald, 1945 the novelist Elie Wiesel is in
the second row, the last face
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II.    BONHOEFFERA Paradoxical Brief Life
      

• 1906 1945
• A privileged life
• 27 (1933) Hitler in power
• 33 (1939) World War
• Into the Resistance
• 39 (1945) Hanged

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Paradoxes

• Little known while alive
• Immense influence in death
• A brilliant theologian but theology in drafts,
  fragments, letters
• A pacifist who finally accepted tyrannicide
• Traitor? Saint?

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BONHOEFFER Some themes of his thought
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A.  Shaken Foundations

• One may ask whether there have ever before in
  human history been people with so little ground
  under their feet people to whom every available
  alternative seemed equally intolerable, repugnant
  (Letters Papers from Prison, 3)

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B. Death of the god of the gaps

• How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the
  incompleteness of our knowledge We are to find
  God in what we know, not in what we dont know
  God is no stop-gap rather, God must be
  recognized as our center, and not simply when
  weve run out of alternatives.  God is the God of
  our life, not simply where we run when faced with
  death.  God is the god of health and vigor, not
  simply the God of weakness and sin. (L P, 311)

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C.  The Church as Christ existing as community

• One has to live for some time in a community to
  understand how Christ is formed in it (Gal.
  419) (L P, 359) The Body of Jesus Christ
  has now become the ground of our salvation
  only through this Body can we find acceptance and
  salvation the solidarity of and participation
  in the body of Christ, which we receive as the
  disciples received it in the early days, is the
  sign and pledge that we are with Christ and in
  Christ, and the Christ is in us.  (Cost of
  Discipleship, 265)

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D. Christ as the person-for-others

• There is a very real danger of our drifting into
  an attitude of contempt for others we must
  learn to regard people less in the light of what
  they do or omit to do, and more in the light of
  what they suffer.  The only profitable
  relationship to others and especially to our
  weaker brothers and sisters is one of love, and
  that means the will to hold fellowship with
  them.  After all, God did not despise humanity,
  but became human for humanitys sake. (L P,
  9-10)

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E. Christ the Center

• That God loved the world and reconciled it with
  Himself in Christ is the central message
  proclaimed in the New Testament. (Ethics,
  204-5) Christ is THE new creature Christ is
  truly the center of human existence, the center
  of history and now also the center of nature.
  (Christ the Center 64-5).

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F. Cheap grace/ Costly grace

• Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church
  cheap grace means grace sold on the market like
  flea-market wares cheap grace is the preaching
  of forgiveness without repentance, baptism
  without Church discipline, Communion without
  confession, absolution without personal
  confession.  Cheap grace is grace without
  discipleship, grace without the cross, grace
  without Jesus Christ (Cost of Discipleship,
  45).

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G. World come of age

• I therefore want to start from the premise that
  God shouldnt be smuggled into some last secret
  place, but that we should frankly recognize that
  the world, and people, have come of age, that we
  shouldnt run people down because theyre
  worldly, but rather confront people with God
  not at their weakest points, but precisely at
  their strongest points (L P, 346)

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H. Religion-less Christianity

• To be a Christian does not mean to be religious
  in some particular way but rather to be a human
  being, a person the person Christ creates in
  us.  It is not some religious act that makes us
  Christian, but rather the participation in Gods
  sufferings in the actual, secular, human world.
  (L P, 361-2)

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I. The View from Below

• There remains an experience of incomparable
  value.  We have for once learned to see the great
  events of world history from below, from the
  perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the
  maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the
  reviled in short, from the perspective of those
  who suffer (L P, 17)

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What does it mean to be a Christian today?
Ruins of Coventry Cathedral, bombed during World
War II