FROM THE ARCHIVES: NOT THE BANDAGE BUT THE WOUND:

The greatest reward lies not in 'religion' but in acceptance of faith. (Bruce Barber. 3/3/03, Online Opinion)

The word "religion" originally meant something positive as "that which binds". If it still means this, that bind seems now increasingly to be read as a negative.

Sixty years ago a European theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose whole intellectual life was spent wrestling with the ambiguities of religion, wrote from his Nazi prison cell how in Western societies the time of religion was coming to an end. What did he mean?

Well, he meant by religion those fundamentally human activities attempting to reach the beyond: the postulate of a deity, in order to get help and protection if so wanted. Bonhoeffer identified four characteristics of this religious activity.

First, religion as inwardness. This could take the form of ascetism, or it could be an abandoning of the world for the inward journey.

Second, metaphysics. The transcendence that is sought for the completion necessary for this world - God as the superstructure for being, which inescapably leads into thinking in two realms and the understanding that "reality" - the natural - must be completed by the supernatural.

Third, that thinking which regards religion as a province of life, a sector of the whole, that is interesting and socially and psychologically valuable. God as a problem solver, a gap filler, a fulfiller of human needs. Is this the Christian God, dwelling in a dark and ever-smaller province, driven out from one department after another in dreadful secularisation?

Fourth, the concept of the god of the machine at the end of the Greek tragedies. Wheeled in to provide answers, solutions, protection and help, religion might be likened to a spiritual chemist shop.

So much for the analysis, what of the alternative?

Bonhoeffer's response was a call to non-religious interpretation of the Bible, which fundamentally meant a call to follow Jesus in his way of discipleship, whereby the four distinguishing marks of religion become anachronistic.

In place of the lonely individual, intent on the inward journey, Jesus is revealed as the man for others. Gregarious from the start, the only time he is alone is in his death, the awfulness of which is an enforced loneliness and forsakenness without any way of a transcendent escape. Thus for Jesus, if we might adopt the marvellous imagery of Dennis Potter, God is not the bandage, God is the wound. But remember, the hand that inflicts the wound also holds the cure. So the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus is the establishing, now not of a localised but of a universal presence which opens up the whole of life as the sphere of human worship of God.

Mr. Bonhoeffer expressed all this in a poem:

CHRISTIANS AND UNBELIEVERS

Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning or dead:
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.
Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead:
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.
God goeth to every man when sore bestead,
Feedeth body and spirit with his bread,
For Christians, heathens alike he hangeth dead:
And both alike forgiving.

In a letter of July 18, 1944, he offered his own analysis of the ideas he was trying to develop in these verses:

The poem about Christians and Unbelievers embodies an idea you will recognize: 'Christians range themselves with God in his suffering; that is what distinguishes them from the heathen.' As Jesus asked in Gethsemane, 'Could ye not watch with me one hour?' That is the exact opposite of what the religious man expects from God. Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.

He must therefore plunge himself into the life of a godless world, without attempting to gloss over its ungodliness with a veneer of religion or trying to transfigure it. He must live a 'worldly' life and so participate in the suffering of God. He may live a worldly life as one emancipated from all false religions and obligations. To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent or a saint), but to be a man. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.

Regardless of one's beliefs, this seems a powerful message, that we can not merely withdraw into ourselves, as liberal democracy and the accompanying welfare state encourage us to do, but must instead participate in the lives of our fellow men. The danger inherent in religion is when it becomes too particular, narrowing us down to gropups or even into ourselves and potential rewards in the beyond. But there seems no reliable substitute to religion for getting us to widen our concerns to universals and to one another. Such are the ambiguities. [Originally posted: March 16, 2003] Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2008 12:00 AM