Taking Hold of the Real

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Profound Worldliness of Christianity

Harvey

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498273565
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in one of his last prison letters that he had "come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity." In Taking Hold of the Real, Barry Harvey engages in constructive conversation with Bonhoeffer, contending that the "shallow and banal this-worldliness" of modern society is ordered to a significant degree around the social technologies of religion, culture, and race. These mechanisms displace human beings from their traditional connections with particular locales, and relocate them in their "proper places" as determined by the nation-state and capitalist markets. Christians are called to participate in the profound this-worldliness that breaks into the world in the apocalyptic action of Jesus Christ, a form of life that requires discipline and an understanding of death and resurrection. The church is a sacrament of this new humanity, performing for all to hear the polyphony of life that was prefigured in the Old Testament and now is realized in Christ. Unable to find a faithful form of this-worldliness in wartime Germany, Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy against Hitler, a decision aptly contrasted with a small French church that, prepared by its life together over many generations, saved thousands of Jewish lives.

1

A Sacramental This-Worldliness

“Yes’m,” The Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus thrown everything off balance.”

—Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

In Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos, the wealthiest man in Vienna hosts a grand banquet, to be followed by two performances—one a tragic grand opera based on the Ariadne legend, the other an example of Italian commedia dell’arte, featuring a cast of harlequins, nymphs, and buffoons. This is disconcerting to the young composer of the opera, given that the theme of his work is “the expression of ultimate solitude,” a subject he thinks unsuitable for pairing with a vulgar comedy. Matters are only made worse when it is announced that the lord of the manor wishes that the two performances be staged simultaneously, in part to leave time for a fireworks display afterwards, but also because, after watching the rehearsals, he was also “most displeased that such a well-furnished establishment as his has been forced to accommodate a scene as miserable as a desert island.” His plan was to liven up the somber character of the tragedy with characters from the comedy.

After an extended prologue in which the story and characters are introduced, the tragic production begins with the spotlight on Ariadne, who is grieving after being abandoned by her lover, Theseus. She declares that she will wait for Hermes, the messenger of death, to bring her suffering to an end by taking her to the underworld, the realm of death. Her lament is brusquely interrupted by the dance troupe, led by Zerbinetta, who is accomplished at improvisation, says the dance master, “as she always plays herself, you see. She can fit into any kind of mise en scène.” Zerbinetta tells Ariadne that what she actually desires is not death but a new lover. At that moment Bacchus comes onto the scene, whom Ariadne initially mistakes for Hermes. She is caught up in the advances of the deity of wine and eternal renewal, and turns her back on death. Bacchus speaks the last word: “Your pain has made me rich indeed; / my body is bathed in immortal desire / and Death will extinguish the stars in the heavens, / ere you perish in my embrace.”73

The staging of two different performances in one space, at the same time, with the music, characters, and plot of one intruding on and interacting with those of the other, affords a superb illustration—or better yet, a splendid allegory—first for investigating what Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes as an essential feature of Christianity, and then for going on and going further with that description. From the time he returns from New York until his execution by the Gestapo, he contends against a conceptual framework that had entrenched itself in the Christian imagination in the modern era, which stipulates that faith occupies a sphere of operations utterly separate from the “worldly” concerns of politics, economics, and the like.74 This framework assumes that there is one and only one public space created by the institution of the nation-state on which the grand theatre of the human is to be played out. The church is one of many voluntary associations that are permitted a limited role within this one performance, so long as it keeps to its proper place.75 Bonhoeffer rejects this assumption in the strongest possible terms and contends instead for what he calls “the profound this-worldliness [die tiefe Diesseitigkeit] of Christianity.”76

There are several aspects to this designation of what Bonhoeffer regards as central for Christian faith that need to be explicated at the outset, the first of which is that “world” is not a synonym for created reality as such. For human beings the world is both a material and a linguistic reality, and thus it can never be taken as simply a given, but always as something that we human beings fashion for ourselves. The various and conflicting ways we have configured our common life, the structures that divide us, mean that “world” is an essentially contested concept. To borrow an expression from Sarah Coakley, “worldliness” is not natural, but always “performed.” Which performance we take to be decisive therefore makes all the difference.77

Second, the meaning of profound worldliness is therefore not to be found in the production of sermons, biblical commentaries, systematic theologies, scholarly monographs, or works of fiction. The reading and writing of texts do play an important role, says Nicholas Lash, but the fundamental form of interpreting the wager of faith subsists in patterns of human action and passion: what was said, done, and suffered by those in biblical Israel, culminating with the life and passion of Jesus and the early church, and what is said, done, and suffered by those who are presently caught up in the counterpoint78 of revelation that these people and events initiated. These patterns, says Lash, render the one “whose words and deeds, discourse and suffering, ‘rendered’ the truth of God in human history.”79

Third, Bonhoeffer understands that if these patterns of worldliness are to be visible for all to see, the church needs its own space for its distinctive performance, as it were, on the world stage. He points out that a truth, doctrine, or religion does not need a space of its own, for as with all such things these notional entities are bodiless. They need only to be heard, learned, and understood. By contrast, the incarnate Son of God needs not just ears and hearts but actual, living human beings who are his followers, for he calls to himself a community that everyone can see: “Those who had been called could no longer remain hidden; they were the light which has to shine, the city on a hill which is bound to be seen.” Standing over both Lord and followers in this visibility is the cross, and thus for the sake of their fellowship with Christ the disciples had to give up everything and take on suffering and persecution, all the while receiving back in visible form all that they had given up: brothers and sisters, fields and houses (Mark 10:28–31).80

Finally and crucially, Bonhoeffer invariably juxtaposes the idea of profound this-worldliness, not just to conceptions of Christianity that are focused on otherworldly realms, but also to deficient and deceptive performances of what it means to be worldly. He thus sketches a very different picture of what it means to be “worldly” from that configured by the modern age. The world as such is the stage on which two distinct productions are being presented. The church performs what Bonhoeffer calls the polyphony of life in the midst of a world come of age, which is also a social performance that is orchestrated by “technological organization of all kinds,”81 foremost among which are the nation-state and global capitalism. Both performances occupy the same stage and make use of the same goods, and both are concerned with the same questions: “What is the purpose of human life? How should human life be ordered to achieve that purpose?”82 Like the intrusion of the comedy troupe into the young composer’s tragic opera, the church intrudes on godless...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Great Wager
• Chapter 1: A Sacramental This-Worldliness
• Chapter 2: The Ironic Myth of a World Come of Age
• Chapter 3: The Future of a Technological Illusion
• Chapter 4: The End(s) of “Religion”
• Chapter 5: Culture, or Accounting for the Merely Different
• Chapter 6: A Social Economy of Whiteness
• Chapter 7: Reading the New in Light of the Old
• Chapter 8: Polyphonic Worldliness
• Chapter 9: A Tale of Two Pastors
• Bibliography