To understand contemporary Presbyterianism, one must understand what divides us. Personally, I am not divided. Feel no need to take sides. My sense is that our diversity is the ground upon which we discover God's call to the future. The diversity that I live in everyday is much greater than that which I find in the church.
While reading Eric Metaxas' fine biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I decided to go back and begin to read some of Bonhoeffer's writings that I had missed in the past. I have been a long-time fan of Life Together and a several years ago posted on his essay, After Ten Years. Like many people, I have a deep appreciation for his courage as a pastor confronting the Nazi regime, and of his pastoral writings. However, when I picked up his volume, Ethics, I found theological reflection that resonated as wisdom for our time.
I want to reflect on the essay, The Love of God and The Decay of the World (also called The Love of God and the Disintegration of the World in some versions) as it relates to why we as Presbyterians are so divided. Bonhoeffer begins with these words.
The World of Conflicts
The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge. In launching this attack on the underlying assumptions of all other ethics, Christian ethics stands so completely alone that it becomes questionable whether there is any purpose in speaking of Christian ethics at all. But if one does so notwithstanding, that can only mean that Christian ethics claims to discuss the origin of the whole problem of ethics, and thus professes to be a critique of all ethics simply as ethics.
Already in the possibility of the knowledge of good and evil Christian ethics discerns a falling away from the origin. Man* at his origin knows only one thing: God. It is only in the unity of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with his origin.
In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all; for he can know God only if he knows only God. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil.
I find this a remarkably elegant statement. It is simple, clear and profound. I take it to mean that the ethical process of dividing aspects of life into categories of good and evil is a direct reflection of our loss of unity with God our creator.
We think of discussions of good and evil as the most natural thing. But what Bonhoeffer shows us that is precisely our point of departure from our relationship with God. Yes, he is saying that we are to think differently than discerning what is good and what is evil. And, yes, I suspect you too feel a bit cast out into the storm without a rudder. How are we to live if we do not make choices between good and evil?
Remember, this is the pastor / theologian who participated in a plot to assassinate Adoph Hitler because he judged him as evil. So, there is something else in Bonhoeffer's perspective that we must grasp.
Let me return to Bonhoeffer.
Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God.
In other words, our determination of what is good and what is evil is not God's determination. By offering the judgment of what is good and evil from God's perspective, we become the master of God, or rather, we are creating our own little demi-god who serves at our leisure. The knowledge of good and evil makes us judge, determining who God is and who God is not.
Then, Bonhoeffer makes an important distinction between shame and conscience that I find helpful in understanding his point.
In shame man is reminded of his disunion with God and with other men; conscience is the sign of man's disunion with himself. Conscience is farther from the origin than shame, it presupposes disunion with God and with man and marks only the disunion with himself of the man who is already disunited from the origin.It is the voice of apostate life which desires at least to remain one with itself. It is the call to the unity of man with himself.
In effect, there are two types of disunions or divides. One between ourselves and God, revealed in the emotions and awareness of shame. The second is the division within ourselves between our good and bad conscience, that is reflected in our relationships and society at large. See how the divisive nature of our politics is not about our relationship to God, but rather our need to control what passes for the knowledge of good and evil? Aren't the battles within our church over the past two hundred years really about power and control over who determines the content of the knowledge of good and evil?
I find this very insightful on a psychological level. Rarely, do I hear references to shame any more, often to conscience. As I read, and reread, Bonhoeffer's words, it became quite apparent to me that virtually all the moral, ethical persuasion that exists today is about the conscience.
Morality has become a battlefield of the moral conscience built upon a foundation of either obligation, pragmatism or virtue. In each, there is an appeal to the conscience to act in a particular way. Can't you hear the following?
How in good conscience can you support _____________?
Don' you feel any obligation to ________?
It just makes sense to _________.
A good person will ___________.
What divides us is not God, but ourselves. God has really little do to do with the disunity of the past two hundred years. Presbyterians have been choosing up sides and splitting. Some split by leaving, some split by saying farewell, and for some, by becoming resistant to any and all changes in the life of their churches. We are splitting over very sophisticated statements of conscience, cast in the language of Scripture and theological reflection, yet we are still detached from God, our creator, redeemer and guide.
Let me finish this post with the closing paragraph from the The World of Conflicts section of Bonhoeffer's initial essay in Ethics.
All knowledge is now based on self-knowledge. Instead of the original comprehension of God and of men and of things there is now a taking in vain of God and of men and of things. Everything now is drawn in into the process of disunion. Knowledge now means the establishment of the relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things of oneself and of oneself in all things. And thus, for man who is in disunion with God, all things are in disunion, what is and what should be, life and law, knowledge and action, idea and reality, reason and instinct, duty and inclination, conviction and advantage, necessity and freedom, exertion and genius, universal and concrete, individual and collective; even truth, justice, beauty and love come into opposition with one another, just as do pleasure and displeasure, happiness and sorrow. One could prolong the list still further and the course of human history adds to it constantly. All these disunions are varieties of the disunion of the knowledge of good and evil. 'The point of decision of the specifically ethical experience is always conflict.'(Spranger, Lebesformen). But in conflict the judge is invoked; and the judge is the knowledge of good and evil; he is man.
As a denomination, we have been stuck in a cycle of battles over control of the knowledge of good and evil. We are divided as a denomination because we are divided as individuals. We are divided because we have followed the logic of the knowledge of good and evil to become judges of all that we survey.
Bonhoeffer presents to us, I believe, the heart of our problem as the contemporary church. We feel no shame at our naked impotence and detatchment before God. We feel only the superiority of our righteous consciences exercised against the forces of evil and injustice in the church and the world. Or, if we feel no righteous indignation toward some issue or group, we are easily self-satisfied in the adoption of the traditions that have become how we divided good from evil. Style, taste and our cultural traditions just as easily divide, yet with less belligerence and anger.
Bonhoeffer's essay doesn't end here, nor should we. In my next post, I'll pick up on Bonhoeffer's perspective, and look at What Unites Us.
*Note: Bonhoeffer's non-inclusive language is reflective of a different era. I leave it as the German was translated to preserve its historical context.
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