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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Who is Christ for our day?

This question was first framed for me by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell in Flossenburg, Germany, in 1945. This seminal Lutheran thinker had turned that cell into a worldwide pulpit as he awaited his execution at the hands of the Nazis. His question was not, Who is Christ? but rather, Who is Christ for us, for our day?

Bonhoeffer recognized, as so many religious people fail to do, that anything we say about Christ is subjective. We do not capture Christ. Our minds do not embrace Christ. Our words point to Christ. Our images interact with Christ.

• But our words and our images are products of our world, our cultural realities. They are not objective. They will not endure forever.

What is true of our words and images is also true of the words and images of every previous era, including the words and images of that century which experienced Christ in history. That century was not universal. The early Christians were not universal men and women. They thought in the frame of reference peculiar to the first century. Their minds were formed by the way first-century people comprehended reality. They were bound by the limits and subjectivity of their own language, their own history, and their own way of life...

I am not interested in preserving the doctrine of the Trinity. I do not believe that the ultimate truth of God has been captured in the trinitarian formula. I am passionately interested in understanding why the doctrine of the Trinity was a life-and-death issue during the early centuries of Christian history. I am eager to embrace the experience out of which the doctrine of the Trinity was forged and the truth to which this doctrine points.

• There is, however, nothing sacred or eternal for me about the words previous generations chose to be the bearers of their truth.

• Ecclesiastical claims to possess infallibility in any formulated version of Scripture and creed or in the articulations of any council, synod, or hierarchical figure are to me manifestations of idolatry. Such claims do not serve the truth. They serve only the power and control needs of the ecclesiastical institution.

The church must embrace the subjective and relative character of everything it says and does.

• If the church provides security, it cannot provide truth. This is the choice that faces Christians today.

I vote for insecurity and the pursuit of truth. The alternative, I believe, is security and the creation of a doomed idolatry.

The seminary in which I was trained had as its motto "Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will." For me those words are a call to walk into the truth of Christ. Alas, even that seminary seems today to be more interested in propaganda than in education, more concerned about orthodoxy than truth, more afraid of the future than welcoming of it, and more defensive for its version of Christianity than it is open to the leading of the Holy Spirit that the Bible suggests is the way into future truth.

• Like every institution, its primary concern is its own survival and viability. This is the inevitable result of institutional religion...
• My quarrel is not with Bible and creeds but with the freezing of these instruments in time or with the assumption that somehow the Bible or the creeds escaped the subjectivity of the era that created them.
• The Bible and the creeds are windows into truth. They are not themselves the truth...

They set parameters and call us to take those parameters seriously. But neither Bible nor creeds are to be taken literally or treated as if somehow objective truth has been captured in human words. Until that barrier of understanding has been crossed, the Bible and the creeds of Christianity have no chance to be live options or respected sources of truth as the twenty-first century dawns.

• My quarrel with fundamentalist and conservative Christians is not their right to believe as literally as they wish to believe. It is rather with their attempt to define Christianity so narrowly that only fundamentalists or conservatives can be included within the definition. It is their need to impose their truth on all Christians as the only truth that I resent.

At this point

• biblical fundamentalism and the official position of the Roman Catholic church with its defined orthodoxy and papal claims to infallibility are remarkably similar, if not in form at least in intention.

Both are, in my opinion, remarkably wrong and remarkably destructive to Christian truth and to a Christian future.

But who is Christ for us? ...

• To be a Christian, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his letters from prison, is not to be religious -- it is just "to be."

Religion is but one more mask that insecure people put on to cover their sense of personal inadequacy. The call of Christ is an eternal call to the affirmation of that which is. In the words of the popular commercial, it is a call to be all that one can be.

To have the courage to be oneself, to claim the ability to define oneself, to live one's life in freedom and with power is the essence of the human experience. "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly," said the Christ of the Fourth Gospel (John 10:10).

• True Christianity ultimately issues in a deeper humanism.

That is why any attitude that kills the being of another person is an affront to the meaning of Christ. To be a humanist is to affirm the sacredness of life. Jesus touched the depth of being, and the Christ experience is nothing less than our call to be who we are, inside the love of God.

I worship this Jesus when I claim my own being and live it out courageously and in the process call others to have the courage to be themselves...

• It is scary to be a follower of Jesus. It even elicits great anger from the religious establishment. It loosens the power of religious institutions to control behavior. It opens one to the immensity of human life, to new dimensions of consciousness and transcendence. To follow Jesus is to be called to walk into the very Being of God...
   
• I believe that the key to understanding how the Bible is the Word of God is found not by studying the literal text but rather by entering the experience out of which the literal text came to be written.

Those ancient words that have been employed to interpret the experience are themselves not holy. Indeed, they have frequently even blinded us from seeing and entering the experience they seek to describe because these words are always limited by their time, their culture, and their apprehension of reality.

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Question:

Have there been any people since Jesus who seemed similarly to be “God infused?” If so, who? If not, do you believe it is possible for me to evolve into the kind of selflessness that we see in Jesus?

Answer (from Dr. Spong):

Your question raises many others and reveals a pattern that needs to be broken open. How do we define God? Is God other than human? Is God a being, somehow akin or related to my being? Is the difference between humanity and divinity a difference in kind or in degree?

The “orthodox” position within Christianity is that Jesus is unique, different in kind from anyone who has lived before. Theologians like Paul Tillich, who died in 1965, would argue strongly against that notion. Other theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John A. T. Robinson are in agreement on the possibility that Jesus is different from others only in degree, not in kind. This conviction in turn opens up the potential for there to be many other “Christs,” both in the world today and throughout history. The Tillich/Bonhoeffer/Robinson point of view is certainly not new and can be located as a minority point of view dating back to the writings of Meister Eckhart in the 14th century. The creedal thinking that arose in the 4th and 5th centuries and produced the doctrines of the Incarnation first and the Holy Trinity second, tended to lock Christianity into the position of seeing Jesus as a unique, special life that somehow shared ontologically in the nature of God. That position, however, depended on a theistic definition of God. God in that era was clearly defined as a being who lived somewhere external to this world, who possessed supernatural power and who could and did regularly invade human history in miraculous ways. The life of Jesus was considered to be simply one of those divine interventions…

At one point in the development of the concept of messiah among the Jews, the messianic idea meant any life through whom the word of God is heard or in whom the will of God is lived out. Such a life could then be seen as “messiah” and could thus be called “the Christ.” That Christ principle has been seen many times in human history. I think of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela as examples of those who lived for others in this Christ-like way. Each of these persons would be surprised at that designation, but I think the time has come to separate the Christ principle from a single life and begin to see it as a God presence that can be lived out in various degrees…

Thank you for your question.  John Shelby Spong