Sometimes I wonder about how to classify this blog. I'm a psychologist who blogs about theology. A believer who struggles with belief. And a Christian who wants to disown much of what passes for Christianity.

That said, one of the advantages of blogging outside of my academic discipline is that I'm rarely at a loss for material. Unlike most theological blogs I could launch into a series tomorrow reviewing, say, John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus. Most theological blogs would never devote that kind of time to a book they generally have to assume their readership knows very well. For my part, as an outsider, I don't assume anything. I will assume you've never heard of John Howard Yoder. This, I think, is a part of my "niche," a place where people can peep into my theological explorations, learning right along with me.

That said, sometimes I do try to make constructive, novel and positive theological proposals. Rather than summarizing or commenting on existing theological work I sometimes try to actually do some theological work, to say something new and original. Some of those attempts were on display in 2009:

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It has become very obvious over the years that I'm drawn to long posts (basically essays) and the multi-part series. This blog is kind of an antiblog. It doesn't invite surfing. I expect that drives a lot of people away. And I think that is a good thing. I think it helps to protect the conversations we have here. Any regular readers are going to have high investments given the length of the posts and series.

Two of my favorite series, both inspired by comic strips, came in 2008.

So here it is, the best of the year 2008:

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Generally speaking, I try not to get too self-indulgent with this blog. That is, I try not to blog about the blog. I can't imagine that anyone would find a blogger blogging about his blog to be remotely interesting.

But from the beginning of this blog, starting in 2007, I have done an end of the year round up of the year's writing on the blog, gathering, in my estimation (that's the self-indulgent part), my most favorite posts. Beyond a personal taking stock, these reviews have also been nice ways for newer readers to explore the early years of this blog.

So, leading up the New Year's review of 2010 over the next few days we will go back in time. Here, then, is the first year end wrap up from 2007:

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Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Two poems for you this Christmas. One famous, one just written.

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Santa is coming tonight!

I have two sons. One is 13, the other 10. I'm pretty confident that the thirteen year old knows the deal about Santa. The ten year old is on the edge, but he still believes in Santa. But I think this may be the last year of believing in Santa in the Beck household.

Is Santa Claus real? Last year I wrote a post about this question, comparing verificationist and pragmatic epistemologies on the question of Santa Claus. Being a student of William James I concluded that Santa was real:

"Belief" in Santa Claus is going to look different for my two boys. For the youngest the belief is going to take an ontological turn. That Santa exists. For my oldest the "belief" is starting to look like pretending, being in on the joke so to speak. But my ultimate hope is that this sense of pretending changes into one of participation and praxis. Santa isn't about ontology. It's about giving gifts and not taking credit for them. Learning the joy of finding the perfect gift for a loved one and watching them open it. To see the joy and surprise and tears when they open it. It's about learning to become Santa.

Epistemologically, then, I think Santa Claus is real. But real in the pragmatic sense, as a practice, rather than as an ontological category. Santa as a way of giving rather than a jolly old elf. Santa is participation in the Spirit of Christmas.

So in that sense, Santa is very real indeed.

You can follow Santa's worldwide progress this evening at the Official NORAD Santa Tracking Site.

Report from Pastor Olbricht to the High Church Council in Berlin updating the Council on the progress of his young assistant pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

January 1, 1929

He particularly devoted himself energetically and with kindness to the young people, who were enthusiastically devoted to him...In a truly exemplary fashion, he produced a nativity play in the church with the children on the Sunday before Christmas, a project with endless rehearsals and practice that demanded a great deal of hard work. It was enormously well attended by the German colony, and the play was performed to great satisfaction.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Tegel Prison:

November 21, 1943

To Eberhard Bethge:

Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other--things that are really of no consequence--the door is shut and can be opened only from the outside.

In researching for my posts on Bonhoeffer I came across two other translations of Bonhoeffer's poem "Christians and Pagans." The version I shared in the last post comes from the Letters and Papers from Prison. Here are two alternative translations:

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We've made quite a journey through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological letters from prison. We began by considering the central, Christological preoccupation of the letters, and then moved through the three dominant themes of the letters:

1. The World Come of Age
2. The Nonreligious Interpretation of Christianity
3. The Arcane Discipline

In light of our analysis of these themes we can now circle back to try to answer the central question of the letters: Who is Christ for us today?

In each of these posts we've been examining how Bonhoeffer was trying to create a this-worldly spirituality, a spirituality that is to be found in the center of life. As Bonhoeffer wrote in the very first theological letter:

April 30, 1944

To Eberhard Bethge:

...God's "beyond" is not the beyond of our 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.

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And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

They hurried to the village and found Mary and Joseph. And there was the baby, lying in the manger.

One of my most favorite psychological studies was published in 1996 by Dov Cohen, Richard Nisbett, Brian Bowdle and Norbert Schwarz in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Titled Insult, aggression, and the southern culture of honor: An 'experimental ethnography' the study attempted to see how Southerners and Northerners in America responded to insult. The authors argued that a "culture of honor" had been, historically, more robust in the Southern United States (due to immigration patterns) making Southerners more sensitive to perceived affronts to their personal honor (e.g., being insulted or disrespected).

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Last year I posted about my favorite Advent painting, Luc Olivier Merson's Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1879). I love the poignancy of Mary and baby Jesus in the arms of the Sphinx. It reminds me of the homelessness of the Messiah. How his first memories were those of an immigrant, a displaced person, a stranger in a strange land. God is always showing up in the strangest of places. I doubt, in today's world, he'd even be speaking English, just like he didn't speak Latin.

Anyway, I thought of that painting again today (with its related theological associations) reading this story (H/T Daily Dish) which comes from a comment from rhoner on a Reddit thread about picking up hitchhikers:

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Eberhard and Renate Bethge named their son after Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In May of 1944 Dietrich Bethge was to be baptized. From prison Bonhoeffer wrote a baptismal homily for little Dietrich, just as he had written a wedding homily from prison for Eberhard and Renate's wedding.

Bonhoeffer wrote the baptismal homily at the same time he was writing his theological letters. So it's not surprising that some of those ideas were expressed in the homily he wrote for Dietrich Bethge's baptism. Toward the end of that homily Bonhoeffer wrote:

Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men.

When we think about Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity one of the concerns often expressed is that Christianity will be stripped clean of any arcane religious ritual and be reduced simply to prosocial ethical behavior, what Bonhoeffer calls in his homily "righteous action among men." No doubt this is a large part of what Bonhoeffer is trying to do. As we've seen, he is striving to create a this-worldly spirituality characterized by "being there" for others. But in his baptismal homily Bonhoeffer cites two characteristics of Christianity: prayer and righteous action.

This pair is a bit puzzling. Where does prayer, of all things, fit in with a religionless Christianity and a this-worldly spirituality? Isn't prayer and worship the epitome of other-worldly religious ritual?

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Very interesting analysis by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo:



H/T Daily Dish

In the last post we discussed Bonhoeffer's understanding of the "world come of age," specifically how the world come of age acts as a midwife to the gospel. In the world come of age we no longer look for God "out there" beyond the blue. The forces of secularism push God out of the world. Generally speaking, Christians have seen this development as a bad thing. But Bonhoeffer sees this as a good thing. We no longer look for God "out there" in a world come of age, so we are forced back into the daily affairs of this world. This is a positive development, because, according to Bonhoeffer, the God revealed in the gospels was never found "out there." Rather, God is always found in our midst, or suffering on the cross. Thus, we shouldn't be worried, as a church, that God is now overlooked in our world. Because that's how we find God treated in the gospels: Overlooked. In short, the God pushed out of the world is actually a "false God," a vision of God that occluded the God found in the gospels: the Crucified God. Thus, before God we live etsi deus non daretur, as if there were no "God." The missional objective in all this is to prevent other-worldliness, to force the church to find God in the world.

In this post I want to turn to Bonhoeffer's analysis of religion, particularly his discussions of a "religionless Christianity." What we'll discover in this analysis is a set of ideas very similar to the ones we encountered with the "world come of age."

To understand "religionless Christianity" we have to understand how Bonhoeffer is using the term "religion." What is the problem with "religion" that Bonhoeffer is trying to get around?

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To understand Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" we need to come to grips with Bonhoeffer's understanding of a "world come of age." Specifically, if a "nonreligious interpretation" is a part of the "solution" we need to understand what the "problem" or "diagnosis" might be.

In his theological letters, which began on April 30, 1944, Bohoeffer's first mention of the "world come of age" appears in a letter dated June 8 (LPP pp. 324-329):

June 8, 1944

To Eberhard Bethge:

...I'll try to define my position from the historical angle.

The movement that began about the thirteenth century (I'm not going to get involved in any argument about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the "working hypothesis" called "God." In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without "God"--and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, "God" is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground.

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Luke 2.8-14

they did not seem to notice,
grazing, oblivious
that the sky was burning,
that this world was ending.
above
each icy fleck
grew and warmed,
and exploded into this conflagration of heaven.
nor did they seem to hear,
grazing, deaf
to the melody cascading
over the grass and ceders.
a Song
that seemed so very old
and ancient,
but News to us.

What does Bonhoeffer mean by "religionless Christianity"?

As noted in Part 1, there has been a great deal of speculation about Bonhoeffers's theological letters from prison. For example, many of the "death of God" theologians in the 1960s saw Bonhoeffer as their patron theologian.

But most theologians tend to follow the interpretation of Eberhard Bethge, the man to whom the letters were addressed, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, and the man who wrote the definitive biography of Bonhoeffer.

According to Bethge, the key to unlocking the enigmatic letters from prison is to focus on the central question Bonhoeffer raises in the very first letter from April 30:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.

In short, the central issue behind the letters is Christology, the question "Who is Christ for us today?"

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My favorite song from Derek Webb's Mockingbird (video H/T Jesus Creed):

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The Church exists for the sake of the world into which God enters and in which He acts and for which He expends His own life. One who is a participant in the Church, one who is incorporated into this Body, one who is baptised into this company has not only the personal freedom to expend his own life without guile or calculation or fear of death – or any more minor prudence – but also, characteristically, he is indifferent to whether or not the churches maintain an amiable reputation in society, or whether or not the churches have much wealth and a sound investment program, or whether or not the churches, or the ecclesiastical authorities, have much political influence. On the contrary, the Christian is suspicious of respectability and moderation and success and popularity. And this is so because the genius of the Christian life, both for a person and for the company of Christians, is the freedom constantly to be engaged in giving up its own life in order to give the world new life. All the questions of status and power and reputation, and all defensive, conservative and self-serving questions about preserving the institutional existence of the churches are matters of some indifference except insofar as they impede the ministry of the Body of Christ, entice men into false religion and a wrong understanding of what the Christian society is, and lure them into misleading notions of what the Christian life is all about.

--William Stringfellow, A Public and Private Faith

Over the summer I read Eric Metaxes' recent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. This week I finished Ferdinand Schlingensiepen's recent biography Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance. And a few years ago I read the seminal biography of Bonhoeffer, the one written by his close friend Eberhard Bethge.

Reading through these biographies, particularly this week finishing Schlingensiepen's biography, I've been once again pondering Bonhoeffer's enigmatic letters from prison regarding "religionless Christianity." Upon their publication in 1951-1952 these letters have stimulated a great deal of speculation, commentary, and head scratching. Some were disturbed (then and now) by what seemed to be a liberal turn in Bonhoeffer's thinking. It bothered people like Karl Barth that Bonhoeffer seemed to be saying things that sounded like Tillich and Bultmann. For many, it was hard to reconcile the "liberal" Bonhoeffer of the Letters and Papers from Prison with the "orthodox" Bonhoeffer of The Cost of Discipleship. Even today, evangelicals are drawn to Discipleship while liberals are drawn to the Letters.

So would the real Dietrich Bonhoeffer please stand up?

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Thanks to all of you for the conversation related to my last post. I also appreciate those of you who are from Reformed traditions who took my comments in stride and with a grain of salt. I certainly didn't mean to give offense, but I can see how one might have taken it that way. My apologies.

And to be honest, I'm also a bit confused about the theology of my last post. I'm not sure what I was after. That's what you get with blogging and from a blog entitled "experimental theology." I actually can't believe I made an argument for a works based soteriology. Sometimes I say the strangest things...

Having lived with my post and your reactions for 24 hours let me try to articulate and summarize what I think I was trying to say:

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