Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together makes much sense and no sense

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together makes much sense and no sense. Life Together is based on his experiences at the underground seminary he directed at Finkenwald, in what is now Poland, from 1935 to 1937. From then on, he was a marked man, eventually imprisoned in the concentration camp Flossenberg, where he was executed by order of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo just days before the camp was overrun by Allied forces. He was executed because he was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Previously a pacifist, Bonhoeffer came to recognize that extreme evil must sometimes be resisted by force.

Finkenwald was a community of theology teachers and their students who lived, worked, and ate together. From this experience he learned a number of lessons. Some of the lessons are simple but important, such as listening to each other, and helping each other, which often means bearing the burden of the other. This is actually quite insightful. Other lessons make no sense to me.

The good lessons

Bonhoeffer reminds us that God bore the burden of being tortured and murdered. “Human beings crushed God to the ground. But God stayed with them . . . In suffering and enduring human beings, God maintained community with them.” In the same way, we are obligated to maintain community with others. Yes, others can be a burden, but it is a burden we should take up gladly, remembering the burden Christ took up for us (pp 77-78).

Others aren’t just a burden because they demand much of us, or don’t do their share. Others are a burden because they are different and other. Humans naturally want to assimilate others to themselves, making others like them. In so doing we use others as objects. The only way of treating others as ends in themselves is to bear the burden of otherness and difference, seeing others first as fellow creatures of God.

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My Bright Abyss: Cancer, Poetry, and God

My Bright Abyss is narrative poetry by an award-winning poet with his back against the wall, diagnosed with an incurable cancer.* The book is not thematically organized; it reads more like a diary of a poet whose death will come too soon. Wiman writes about God, and thinks like a poet. I don’t, and there is a subtle grace to his thought that I am unable to convey. Not even the deep theologians I’ve written about have left me feeling more inadequate to the task of reviewing their work. The result is that I am going to treat his book as though it were a set of claims or theses about God, even as it reads more like a poem.

Wiman is an honest man, writing that his return to God has not lessened his terror of death. About his grandmother, a deeply religious woman all her life, Wiman describes “a pure spiritual terror in her eyes” as she tried to answer his question: “Are you scared?” But by then she could not speak. Years later he had a similar experience.

God has given me courage in the past — I have felt palpably lifted beyond my own ability to respond or react. But this most recent time in the hospital, when the cancer had become so much more aggressive and it seemed for a time as if I’d reached the end of my options, I felt only death. In retrospect it seems like a large and ominous failure. (loc 2141)

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The best book defending atheism isn’t great

The best book defending atheism isn’t great.

I keep looking for a good book defending atheism. It’s not easy. Jon Mills’ Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality is better than Grayling’s book, about which I posted a while back, but it’s not great.

Mills tries to do three things. First, to demonstrate that God does not exist. In this he joins a long line of aggressive atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens (2007), Sam Harris (2004), and Richard Dawkins (2006). Mills says he is not a “vociferous atheist,” but he could have fooled me with his remarks about “the believing masses [who] cannot accept the fact that we are ultimately alone.” (p 104)

The third thing Mills tries to do is construct a defense of a humanistic spirituality. He says a lot of good things about finding “intrinsic worth and meaning in living our lives for the present” (p 228), but the foundation of this claim was laid down by Camus and Sartre, and I don’t see where Mills adds a great deal to this argument. In Mills’ defense, it should be pointed out that this is not a book aimed at an academic audience, but to an educated public. Or at least that’s the way I read it.

The second thing Mills tries to do is construct a psychoanalytic argument explaining the need for God. He begins with Freud (1930), who argued that God is an infantile delusion of an enormously powerful father figure. I turn to another psychoanalyst to find a different way of thinking about God. I’ve posted about D. W. Winnicott before.

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Two stories about the natural law

Two stories about the natural law.

This post consists of two stories about the natural law. The first is about an experience of mine, the second is a thought experiment. What connects them is my belief that most of us assume the natural law exists; we just don’t know we know it. A previous post on Thomas Aquinas, deals with the foundations of the natural law. This post is more about practice than theory.

The county school board ethics committee, or “keep your body parts to yourself”

A number of years ago, I was invited to serve on the ethics curriculum advisory panel of a local county school board. The goal was to develop an ethics curriculum for the lower grades. Our advisory panel had representatives of all the good people in the community: ministers, rabbis, a couple of concerned parents, a couple of concerned teachers, and me, a university professor of ancient Greek ethics. What should an ideal ethics curriculum teach?

We never got anywhere. We got stuck at the very beginning. Should we teach students that they shouldn’t hit each other?

“How can we teach that?” said one committee member, echoing several more. “Some cultures value the physical expression of difference, and who are we to say otherwise?”

That’s where we got stuck, at the very beginning. The odd thing about this committee was that nobody thought that students should hit each other, and nobody knew of any culture anywhere that valued students hitting each other. It was just the very possibility that some culture somewhere valued “the physical expression of difference” that caused the committee members to lose confidence in their own beliefs. Continue reading Two stories about the natural law

What in the world is the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit (pneuma, πνεύμα) is part of the Trinity, and asserted in the Nicene Creed. “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” But I think the Holy Spirit gets short shrift, and almost always comes last in the trio: God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. I think I know (as far as an ordinary human can) what God is, and who Christ is. I’m just not sure about the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit seems to be an inspirational force that took the place of Christ after his death. It explains how a bunch of cowardly and disorganized apostles who fled the scene after Christ’s execution could, fifty days after his crucifixion, become the highly motivated and organized group who created Christianity. The Holy Spirit remains with us today; it’s part of believing in God and Jesus. If you believe in Jesus, then you believe in the Holy Spirit, so it’s worthwhile figuring out what it might be.

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Political theory of the Bible

Political theory of the Bible.

I taught both ancient and modern political theory for forty years, and it is widely held among experts in my field that the Bible contains no political theory. Political theory is a Greek invention. Only when God withdraws from this world is there room for human politics (Walzer, p 202). I disagree. There’s a lot of politics in the Bible, and while politics in the Old Testament differs from the New, the difference is one of degree.

Covenant and righteousness

The idea of covenant is the central political concept in the Old Testament. “God was thought to be a covenant-making, covenant-restoring, and covenant-fulfilling being.” (Ramsey, p 258) Conversely, human righteousness means sticking to the covenant. Period.

Though covenant plays a more central role in the Old Testament, both Old and New Testaments teach the same lesson about righteousness.

Biased in favor of the helpless, “justice” means care for the poor, the orphans, the widows, and aliens resident in the land. Why? Because the Bible measures what is required of man against the perfect righteousness of an utterly faithful, savior-God. (Ramsey, p 278)

Unlike ancient Greek thought, which so influences our own, justice or righteousness (both translations of the same Greek term, dikaiosynē) is neither corrective nor distributive. Justice neither punishes the thief nor restores what has been taken. Justice is redemptive, with a special bias in favor of the poor. This is as true of the Old Testament as the New.

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Navigating this website

The posts on this website scroll down in reverse chronological order. The most recent post comes first, the oldest post (Why I pray) comes last.

In the top left margin of the page (the black part) is a list of posts by category. These are:

Psychology and God
On some books of the Bible, from ones I like to ones that puzzle or thrill me
About me and this site
Topics, from grace to forgiveness to atheism to a whole lot more
Theologians (click arrow to get full list; it’s pretty long)
Natural Law

Or you can just start reading. Each post can stand alone.

Grace is not free

Grace is not free.

The Christian concept of grace (charis, Χάρις) has puzzled me for years. Its definition seems a good place to begin. Still, I hate to start with a definition, so I’ll start with a story.

During a British conference on comparative religions, the participants were heatedly discussing what’s unique about Christianity. C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” (Yancy, p 45) *

It’s a good point, but not strictly true. Hindus and Muslims believe in Grace, understood as God reaching out to humanity with love. Jews believe in chen (חֵן), a version of grace. Nevertheless, it is Christianity that has developed the concept most fully.

The standard definition

In Christianity, grace is the love and mercy given to us by God as a free gift. It is nothing we have earned.

Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become . . . partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. (Catechism of the Catholic Church)

This definition leads some to see grace as part of a faith over works teaching. It leads others to think that if grace is free then it must be easy. Both conclusions are wrong. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace.”

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