Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theologian and Martyr 1945

Posted on by
2

Today marks the 66th anniversary of the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There’s a brief bio on the Holy Women, Holy Men blog. Bonhoeffer was both a powerful witness and martyr to the faith, and a challenging theologian.

A recent book by Martin Marty explores the history of his Letters and Papers from Prison, which his close friend, confidant, and biographer Eberhard Bethge edited and published. Here’s an excerpt. Here’s more on the series “The Lives of Great Religious Books” to which Marty’s book belongs.

Included in the Letters and Papers is the poem “Who am I.” Here’s an English translation that first appeared in the March 4, 1946 issue of Christianity and Crisis:

Who am I? They often tell me

I stepped from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,

Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me

I used to speak to my warders

Freely and friendly and clearly,

As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me

I bore the days of misfortune

Equally, smilingly, proudly,

Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I myself know of myself?

Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

Struggling for breath, as though hands were

compressing my throat,

Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,

Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,

Tossing in expectation of great events,

Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,

Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,

Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!

From Religion Online.

About those lead codices …

Posted on by
Reply

You may have seen the sensationalized reports last week of the discovery of lead codices in Jordan that seemed to contain early Christian writings, perhaps the earliest ever discovered. There’s already a fairly complete wikipedia article that details the press coverage, the back story and some of the significant questions regarding their authenticity.

Peter Thoneman, who teaches Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford, was shown photos of one of them several years ago and concluded it was a forgery, making use of a tomb inscription published decades ago. Here’s his article: The messiah codex decoded.

There’s much more complete coverage of the issues at Tom Verenna’s blog.

Short version? We’re coming up toward Easter; it’s time to round up another story about early Christian origins. Remember the Gospel of Judas?

Why College Students Are Losing Their Religion – Conor Friedersdorf – Politics – The Atlantic

Posted on by
1

Conor Friedersdorf writes in response to an essay by Dennis Prager that includes the line: “the agenda of Western universities is to produce (left-wing) secularists.” It’s a silly piece, for Prager probably hasn’t talked to a lot of undergrads since he left college. If he spent any time on a college campus, he would realize that students’ values are largely shaped by eighteen years of immersion in American consumer culture, and if they “lose their religion” in college, it is only because they have left family, home, and community, and encountered in college new avenues for consumerism such as alcohol.

Friedersdorf wants to be charitable to Prager; he labels him “as thoughtful a voice as you’ll find on talk radio.” For Friedersdorf, the chief culprit in the losing of religion is the fact that college students leave home, family, and community, and learn that their religious commitments were largely the product of family and social pressure, and the desire for community. I think he’s right to place much of the blame on churches themselves:

If you’re someone who wants to see organized religion do a better job of holding on to young people – I have no strong preference either way, having friends for whom religion is the best thing in life and others for whom it’s been a terrible burden – the most problematic part of Mr. Prager’s argument is the lack of agency he gives to religions and their congregations. They’re cast as powerless in the face of university influence that is somehow made out to be irresistible.

But if four years of college undo 18 years of parenting and religious affiliation, perhaps the faith community’s tenuous hold is the problem, not the particular place outside its bubble where that hold evaporates.

I think Friedersdorf is exactly right. But I also think that there is a more subtle dynamic at work, too. For many young people, college is a rite of passage, a way of disengaging from their childhood and family and make themselves anew as young adults. If religion can’t help them make that transition, but instead seems to impede it, then religion must also be jettisoned along with other childhood values. Friedersdorf’s essay is here: Why College Students Are Losing Their Religion.

First Monday at Grace (April)

Posted on by
Reply

Last night marked a major seasonal change for our first Mondays. The shelter switched to summer hours on March 20 and restrictions on the number of nights guests could stay also began to be enforced (Although because of the unseasonably cold weather the last couple of weeks of March, several nights continued to see numbers more typical of winter).

What that means for us is that we had fewer guests join us, probably about 100, including a large contingent of people who weren’t staying in the shelter last night. We served a little bit later, but we had just as much fun.

The food was Italian and the music was bluegrass.

The music was provided by members of the Oak Street Ramblers:

Even though it was late, and the NCAA finals were on, a couple of guys stayed to listen to the music. One was heard to say, “That’s hillbilly music, and I’m a hillbilly.”

As a follow-up to the  post about medical care, one guest came in wearing a surgical mask, and as he left, he told me that he had pneumonia.

As we prepared the meal, we could hear sounds from the rally going on at the Capitol. I popped out a couple of times to see the action. Several thousand people were there to hear Jesse Jackson speak on the anniversary of MLK’s assassination in 1968.

Special thanks to the Oak Street Ramblers for providing the music, to some students from St. Francis House (the Episcopal Chaplaincy at UW) who volunteered, and a happy birthday to Emma, who shared a birthday cake with volunteers after we were done serving.

See everyone next month!

Medical and Dental care for the homeless

Posted on by
1

Two articles on today’s Madison.com featuring doctors and dentists who provide free health and dental care for the homeless. One features Grace member Ben Farrow. If you can pay for dental care, Ben practices at Monroe St. Family Dental.

The other article introduces us to HEALTH, brainchild of Drs. Cate and Erik Ranheim. This group offers free clinics at various places, including once a month at Grace Church.

They aren’t the only ones offering medical care at Grace. Every week, students from the University of Wisconsin Medical School offer a clinic.

I’m surprised again and again in my encounters with homeless people and others seeking help, by the serious medical conditions that many of them are dealing with. I’m told repeatedly by people that it was a medical catastrophe that landed them on the street. Others have chronic conditions that require medications. The efforts of these doctors and dentists, as praiseworthy as they are, can do little to respond to the enormous needs on the street.

 

Who sinned? A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

Posted on by
Reply

Who Sinned?
4 Lent
April 3, 2011

We’ve all asked the question—sometimes for ourselves, but often on behalf suffering people we know and love. What did I do wrong, that God is punishing me? What did he, or she, do to deserve this? It’s a natural, human response to pain or misfortune. There must be some reason for it, and when we begin looking for a reason, we often seek the reason in a moral failing or weakness. This tendency, or temptation to blame someone’s misfortune on some personal failure is even more pronounced when it comes to people whom we don’t know. Continue reading →

Books I won’t be reading any time soon

Posted on by
Reply

Apparently, Bart Ehrman is getting cranky. His most recent book is Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors are not who we think they are.

His argument seems to be that certain of the authors of biblical texts intended to “defraud or bamboozle” their readers. In other words, he is attacking both conservatives, who think the texts were written by the authors named in them, or attributed to them by later tradition, as well as mainstream scholarship which has argued for centuries that many of the texts, such as several of the letters attributed to Paul, were written pseudonymously. Ben Witherington offers his take-down here. So Ehrman is going from writing about errors in the text to malicious biblical authors. It’s clear he has a few issues with scripture.

Another book I’m not going to read is Defending Constantine, by Peter J. Leithart. This is one part biography and one part attack on those who view Constantine’s conversion as an epochal shift, and not for the better, in the History of Christianity. His chief target is John Howard Yoder.

Constantine was a complex and enormously important figure and Leithart is correct in problematizing recent and not-so-recent historiography. But in his effort to do so, he seems to go a bit overboard and perhaps even distort the story. The sources are problematic and historians have debated for decades whether or when Constantine in fact converted. That he declared Christianity a licit religion is not in question. What is in question is the depth of Constantine’s own faith. The fact that he was baptized only on his deathbed gives many pause.

That his conversion changed the relationship of Christianity to the state is also clear. To go from being persecuted by an emperor to having an emperor sponsor the construction of churches and calling church councils in a little over a decade was amazing, and disorienting for Christians. There were gains as well as losses in the historical development that took place in the wake of Constantine.

We are living, once again, in a post-Constantinian age. Many Christians, especially on the right, seem not to recognize that the role of Christianity in contemporary culture has changed dramatically in the last fifty years (see my previous post). While there is much in Yoder with which I disagree, I think his call for the church to recognize this situation, to claim it as an opportunity to rethink the relationship of the church to the gospel, and to think creatively about what the church’s role in culture might be, is vital if we are to continue to be a faithful witness to the gospel in the twenty-first century.

There’s a somewhat favorable review of Defending Constantine here–and a takedown from the Yoder school here.

Hauerwas on the church–local and universal

Posted on by
Reply

Several weeks ago, I came across this essay by Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School: The place of the church: locality and catholicity – ABC Religion & Ethics – Opinion.

It begins with Constantinianism, post-Constantinianism and John Howard Yoder. Yoder argued that with the rise of Constantine, something important was lost in Christianity. It’s often assumed that Yoder viewed the church in the centuries after Constantine as completely fallen. That’s not the case. Hauerwas cites Yoder’s views concerning faithfulness in the Middle Ages, but he also thinks Yoder’s analysis went deeper than that:

For him the alternative to Constantinianism was not anti-Constantinianism, but locality and place. According to Yoder, locality and place are the forms of communal life necessary to express the particularity of Jesus through the visibility of the church. Only at the local level is the church able to engage in the discernment necessary to be prophetic.

Hauerwas’s essay is actually a review of Bruce Kaye’s Conflict and the Practice of Faith: The Anglican Experiment, in which Kaye uses the controversies in Anglicanism to explore the tension between locality and universality (catholicity) in the Christian faith.

Kaye is building on ideas of Rowan Williams. In defending the Church of England’s unique role in English society, Williams (according to Hauerwas) argues that:

the New Testament testifies to the creation of a pathway between earth and heaven that nothing can ever again close. A place has been cleared in which God and human reality can belong together without rivalry or fear.

For Williams, “the role of church is to take up space in the world, to inhabit a place, where Jesus’ priesthood can be exercised. Such a place unavoidably must be able to be located on a social map so that it does not have to be constantly reinvented.”

Hauerwas’ final sentences are provocative:

The culture that inhabits us – and by us I mean Christians – is a subtle and seductive one. It tempts us to believe we are free of place. It tempts us to believe that we do not have the time to do what needs to be done, so we must constantly hurry. These temptations are often assumed to be congruent with the gospel imperatives to have no permanent home.

But in the process we lose the visibility necessary to be witnesses to the One who made it possible to be Christians.

There’s something quite interesting here–and important for us to reflect on as we think about the role of the church in contemporary culture. But it’s more than that abstract question that I find interesting. It’s the concrete question: What is Grace Church’s role in our community?

We occupy a unique space that offers opportunities, challenges, and responsibilities. What does it mean to be church on Madison’s Capitol Square?

Back in the 1980s, Richard John Neuhaus wrote a book entitled The Naked Public Square. I don’t recall the gist of his argument (it’s been over 25 years!) but the image of a public arena in which religion had no role is a powerful one. We don’t live in a completely secular world, and religious voices continue to clamor for attention and influence policy. But at the same time, the church as an institution plays a much smaller role in our society than it did even a half-century ago.

But there’s something to be said for the reality of place. For what it’s worth, Grace Church still occupies a corner of Capitol Square. Whatever mission and ministry we do at Grace, part of what we do has to involve nurturing that space where heaven and earth meet, as Williams put it, “to inhabit a place where Jesus’ priesthood can be exercised.”

The Anglican Covenant, back in the news

Posted on by
1

The House of Bishops is meeting this week. Among the topics of conversation is the proposed Anglican Covenant. Bishop Kirk Smith live-tweeted the first set of conversations: Bishop Smith’s tweets. There’s also a brief and not very informative report from ENS.

But there have been other developments in recent months. The Church of Ireland held a colloquium recently with papers for and against, as well as proposals for that Church’s response. The papers are well-worth reading. The full report is here.

For background, Kate Turner’s essay is helpful. Jonathan Chatworthy argues against the covenant with several salient points. Among them, he argues that the definition of the church put forward in the document is “far too steeped in Reformation Protestantism,” and that the description of Anglicanism put forward in Sections 1-3 would become foundational for Anglicanism. He also argues convincingly that it would lead to centralization of power, limit provincial autonomy, and have dire implications for local initiative, theological development, and ecumenical efforts.

Chatworthy sees the covenant as introducing something quite new to Anglicanism–revolutionary, in fact. He describes the approach of classical Anglicanism in the following terms:

Classic Anglicans, on the other hand, expect the insights of modern research to shed light on current church debates. The way to resolve disagreements is to allow the different points of view to be publicly expressed, defended and criticised. Debate should continue until consensus is reached. Any attempt by church authorities to curtail debate and impose their own view would be to abuse power and suppress the search for truth.

For Classic Anglicans, therefore, the Covenant is equally unsatisfactory but for the opposite reason: not because it does not draw a clear enough line between two kinds of Anglican, but because it proposes to draw any line at all. The Covenant is at fault for seeking to pre-empt theological agreement by ecclesiastical decree.

His description of the way power is deployed in the covenant is illuminating:

Critics point out that it is like a school playground. You are free to do whatever you like, but if you don’t do what we tell you we’ll all walk away and we’ll have nothing more to do with you. At the very least it’s a power game.

If that’s not enough for you, the Church Times has produced a handy guide to the covenant: Anglican Covenant_18 March. Church of England dioceses are beginning to weigh in as well. The Diocese of Litchfield approved it; the Diocese of Wakefield rejected it.

Another view against it from Nathaniel Rugh: rugh_case.