Today Everything is Different

An Adventure in Prayer and Action

Dirk G. Lange

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506433479
• eBook ISBN: 9781506438221
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In Today Everything Is Different Dirk Lange does not fail to deliver the "unexpected" in helping readers gain both a greater understanding of Christian spirituality and a path to it. On this adventure, an adventure of both the mind and heart, the reader will explore the foundational underpinnings of baptism, the impact of prayer in many forms--especially in community--and the insights of giants like Luther and Bonhoeffer. The great beauty of the book, however, is found in the incredibly moving stories Lange shares, including personal stories of the prayer groups and underground church in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In these, we see firsthand evidence of the spiritual power to be discovered as we simply, faithfully, and prayerfully embrace the gift given in baptism; live faithfully in our everyday lives; and respond to God's call as a community to walk arm in arm into the world alongside and for our neighbor.

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Baptismal Spirituality

Experientia

A theologian is made, Luther writes, not through “thinking, reading, and speculating” but through experience.^[1] The mystery that is God is experienced, but not in just any experience. Theologians—and here the definition of theologian is broad and encompassing—are formed not simply through the study of books but through a particular form of experience. What type of experience? Luther provides further insight when he writes, “No university crowns anyone like this [as a true theologian], only the Holy Spirit.”^[2] The experience to which Luther refers has something to do with the Holy Spirit’s work.

Knowledge is situated not in speculation but in experience.^[3] Luther often uses the Latin word experientia to describe this phenomenon, even when writing in German. The story of the underground prayer groups in Leipzig provides a glimpse into experientia, discerning a hidden reality (God’s presence and therefore action) in all the events of their lives, both in joy and in despair, both in hope and in suffering. Experientia defines a spiritual and a physical landscape. This chapter will look more closely at what it entails. I will use the Latin word to avoid any confusion with experience as it is usually understood—for example, when someone says, “Wow! What a great experience!” referring to a great vacation or adventure or other event.

This landscape is a place of struggle (Anfechtung) through all the ups and downs of living, and in that struggle a discovery is made: life is shaped by a singular event that resonates throughout time. Luther explains how life is shaped as he reflects on Paul’s verse in Romans, “Justus ex fide sua vivit.” Luther writes, “The righteous [person] draws [their] life out of [their] faith, and faith is that whereby [they are] counted righteous before God [Rom 1:17].”^[4] Life is engendered and held by faith. Faith as a gift reveals the boundaries, the beautiful field, the goodly heritage (Ps 16), the contours of life as God has determined. Within that field, God’s way becomes known, not as a concept grasped cognitively, but as something tangible, audible, visible, palatable, and fragrant.

The discovery of life through faith, literally drawing life out of faith, is experientia. Through experientia faith becomes a historically lived reality. Experientia is like a continual training or exercise that enables me to see both the visible and the invisible, the Holy Spirit active in this history around me. This exercise employs all my emotions, senses, and intelligence; it is knowing of the heart.

In this life, faith constitutes my relationship to God. Experientia names the way in which faith affects me in everyday life (as a historical reality). It is a daily dying and rising with the one who has died and is alive. Experientia describes the confrontation, disruption, and deconstruction of identity and the advent of new creation—secret and barely visible, but drawing me always deeper into a life and identity I never could have constructed for myself.

Faith is a very different type of knowing.

Faith is a very different type of knowing. It establishes a theological grammar that distinguishes what is of God and what comes from human beings. As a distinction that must not be blurred, this theological grammar breaks down the towers human beings want to build. This grammar could be rightly described as traumatic for the self-centered, introspective inclination in each person. This grammar names that singular event that is Jesus Christ, which cuts through identities, cultures, societies, histories, and myths, through the heart and the world humans create around themselves. It points to that event that irrupts unexpectedly in the midst of the most banal activities of the day and in the fathomless pits of the night. The event that irrupts, that keeps returning, remains always outside my ability to control it or hem it in. A singular, traumatic event continually affects my life.

The inability to capture or to know this event in all its dimensions (and its corresponding responsibility) witnesses to a different type of existence. It traces a different history. The impossibility of encircling, systematizing, or representing the traumatic points me to a different type of knowing, one beyond the cognitive, rational appropriation of facts or empirical data. It points to the life and knowing of faith.

It is characteristic of faith not to know and yet to know in ways so intimate that words fail. How is this possible? The traumatic event “consists not only in having confronted death but in having survived, precisely, without knowing it,” Cathy Caruth writes.^[5] There is something in the experience, in the singular event that cannot be grasped by understanding and that widens the horizons set by the categories of rationality. Cognitive knowing is not able to capture this event and categorize it because trauma “does not simply serve as record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned.”^[6]

The Christ event is never fully owned by history. Faith as knowing, however, is a continual awakening to the event that was not fully understood, a continual “becoming for us” of the event.^[7] Immediate understanding (knowing defined as immediate perception of the here and now) and even representational knowledge (that attempt to grasp and control a totality, as Michel de Certeau has shown)^[8] are displaced in this assertion or shown to be incomplete. Rather, connection to the past, to history, and to the present is through a discernment of something latent, something unobservable, something that makes itself known, that surfaces in unexpected ways. Trauma—the Christ event—is latent in every moment, in every event. It hides and reveals God’s hidden way, though always under guises, through contraries, even opposites. This is the way of the Spirit in the world, a history that the Spirit is writing through you and me and the community.

That which is latent is precisely that which was not known, not immediately perceived in the moment of the event. In his second Psalms commentary, Luther writes about this latency as an absence, one that is somehow “apprehended” but only by faith: “Verba enim spiritus sunt annunciata de re absente et non apparente, per fidem apprehendenenda” (The words of the Spirit announce an absent thing, not to be seen, but apprehended by faith).^[9] The Spirit points to that which is latent in the event, the traumatic thread that constitutes history and that only faith discerns. Experientia is a continual living into that which is latent, absent to reason: a secret that is nonetheless for all the world.

This strange type of knowing that is faith displaces me as a subject. The categories of the cognitive, representational knowledge, which impose their own schema on the data of experience, are left behind. The knowing that is faith is more like entering into a powerlessness, living in an incompleteness without fear or desire—a possibility born out of God’s reconciling act (God reconciled all to Godself). This knowing (grounded in reconciliation) is a mutual dependence on others, a bearing of others and being carried by them. This is the astounding feature of the hidden way: communion. The witnesses in East Germany have lived it; the way of the Spirit, a spiritual life, is not about me but for and with the other in an adventure only God can trace.

The treasure found in the field, Jesus Christ, is a treasure of mercy, immeasurable goodness, forgiveness, reconciliation, and new beginnings that defines all life and from which all of life is drawn out. When experientia is understood, as the field in which the Holy Spirit exercises the seeking one ever more deeply in faith, the radical move Luther accomplishes when he displaces illumination in favor of tentatio or Anfechtung becomes more accessible. Experientia is this displacement of illumination by Anfechtung, and it is good to spend some time with this displacement and dig deeper into the struggle that Anfechtung describes.

In the Psalms, as noted earlier, the heart of the saints is revealed. Their struggle and joys, their arguments with and against God, and their praise, resistance, and submission—handing all over to God—is shared. Through the words of their struggle and their joys recorded in the Psalms, the “finest example” Luther writes that the words of the psalms record the saints’ struggle and joys. The psalms serve as the finest example for the reader, the pray-er, not only to see but to enter truly into their experientia.

What are these struggles at the heart of prayer? Perhaps the simplest manner to approach these questions is through the lens of the first commandment: you shall have no other gods. Faith is the subject of the first commandment, a trust poured out into hearts. When life is drawn from this faith, when life is meditating on God’s law day and night, a way opens up, one new and totally unexpected. But when trust is placed in other things that are valued above God, competing gods are created,^[10] and trust is continually diminished to the size of those gods. This is the opposite of faith. A trust misplaced, what Luther calls unbelief, shapes life, curving one in on oneself or on that small group that is valued. A trust misplaced closes spaces and attempts to create its own righteousness, its own justification, its own expression and identity. Faith, on the other hand, shapes life toward original righteousness, the beautiful field, the open spaces that God has established.

Faith, on the other hand, shapes life toward original righteousness, the beautiful field, the open spaces that God has established.

There is no middle road: faith in God or unbelief. Throughout his life, Luther comes back to this point in his ongoing commentary on Psalm 1. Already in the first Psalms commentary (1513–15), Luther defines the way of the sinner as the way of the godless. The foolish one, who does not rely on God’s law, simply follows the trends of the time.^[11] In the second commentary (1519–21), Luther sharpens his position. Not only is the distinction drawn between those who have faith in God (piety) and those who “think bad” about God (the godless), but these positions take root deep in their persons. Piety and godlessness are not just moral positions; they describe the very “source of morals” in the heart.^[12] In other words, you and I draw out from this source (faith/piety or hatred of God) the very manner of living in the world.

Then later, in the 1540s, Luther insists even more adamantly on the distinction. The godless are those who mix up or blur the distinction between what is human and what is of God.^[13] They like to make what is theirs into something godly, endowing it with divine or holy traits. In other words, for those who believe, God is simply an object to put into their lives like a puzzle piece. Rather than the one who alone is, God becomes simply part of their identity, part of their life. Their own identity and context remain front and center.

This situation is encouraged by the evil one (or, to employ Luther’s personification, devil or Satan—terms I will...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Spirituality
• Today: Everything Is Different
• Faith and Prayer
• Baptismal Spirituality
• Communal Prayer
• Patterns Interrupted
• Postlude: Prayer in a Time of Physical Distancing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments