“’Can Christianity make itself real to us, just as we are?’ It is exactly the same urgent need of all those who would lay claim to the name of Christian on any grounds… to justify Christianity in the present age; there is exactly the same presupposition, namely that the Archimedean point, the firm starting point which stands beyond all doubt has already been found (be it in reason, culture, or the idea of the people) and the moveable, questionable, uncertain element is the Christian message.; and there is exactly the same method, namely to go about the interpretation in such a way that the biblical message is passed through the sieve of humanity’s own knowledge – what will not go through is scorned and tossed away. The message is trimmed and cropped until it fits the frame which has been decided… This is just the way people have tamed for themselves a usable Christianity, and it is only a matter of time and honest thought before they lose interest in their creation and get rid of it… Second, however, there also follows the cry, doubtless in part uttered with great passion and subjective earnestness, for the relevance of the Christian message… This is surely not to be taken seriously… it was at best the terror-stricken shout of those who saw the gulf between Christianity and the world opening up beneath them, who, conscious of their complete conformity to the world, recognized that it was all up with Christianity for themselves, but were not strong enough to say a clear “yes” and an equally clear “no”, and cravenly pulled down Christianity with themselves in their fall into the world. The clearest indication of this is the fact that no one here found the courage to ask afresh after the FACT of the Christian message; they sought only it’s RELEVANCE, precisely in order to evade the fact. But where the question of relevance becomes the theme of theology, we can be certain that the cause has already been betrayed and sold out.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Interpretation of the New Testament”)
The conviction issued forth from this passage crackles with the same liveliness and force today as it ever did in it’s own time and context. It is so potent in its prophetic forcefulness that, upon a first reading, one is terribly tempted to immediately conscript Bonhoeffer’s words into service against one’s theological foes; that theological ‘other’ in whom we so easily see the signs of this sin of surgical, neutering contextualization of Gospel truth. For that first moment, we might even sigh in pleasure at the thought of the other, forced to squirm under the harsh and revealing light of Bonhoeffer’s indictment of them. For a moment, these words may feel like vindication.
But only for a moment.
Because if we are honest, as that initial moment passes, we begin to perceive that our own hearts and motives are becoming illuminated, too. We start to realize that the truth of these words cannot be merely conscripted for our own purposes without first doing their powerfully unflattering work upon us, pressing us toward a previously unknown depth of humility. It is inescapable, because what Bonhoeffer puts his finger on here is not merely some boutique theological error, but on the very pulse of human sin itself. Namely, that rebellion of the human heart against the call to surrender to the “Imago Dei” which we have been created to bear, in preference for the illusion of self-definition and human autonomy. Humanity’s sin is - and has always been - that we are not content with being in relationship with God; rather we, all of us, prefer to BE God unto ourselves. What the writer of Genesis tells us of the fall of Adam and Eve, Bonhoeffer here articulates with regards the world of scriptural interpretation in light of Christ and the Christian message; namely that, all too often, we are not content or inclined to allow the message of Christ to mould us. Rather, instead of being satisfied with our calling to be faithful interpreters, we set ourselves up as authors and editors; molding and contextualizing the Gospel of Christ until it seamlessly fits the broken world in which we are already comfortable. We have created a god in our own image
In the “liberal” church today, this tendency toward ‘relevance’ - rather than surrender to the ‘fact’ of Christ - is playing itself out most publically and poignantly in the conversation around human sexuality, the heart of which centers on the question of whether we will interpret our drives and physical/emotional passions in light of scripture, or interpret scripture in light of an understanding of humanity’s various sexual appetites as the immoveable or ‘a priori’ reality. A rather striking example of this – albeit outside the more predictable lines of liberal mainline denominations – was presented in the news just this past week, as Bishop Jim Swilley of Atlanta megachuch, “Church in the Now” was noted to have come before his congregation with an admission regarding his own sexuality. His statement was striking: "There are two things in my life that are an absolute," said Swilley, "… One was the call of God on my life... and the other thing ... was my sexual orientation." “Absolute”. When prioritized to the point of the a priori, the absolute, the ‘Archimedean starting point’, as Bonhoeffer puts it, human sexuality (or anything else, for that matter) becomes that point around which all other truth claims, including our interpretation of the revelation of scripture, must bend around in order to be given a hearing. This is a danger and a blindness.
My own experience and observations in this arena confirm Bonhoeffer’s convictions regarding what happens when we place our own appetites and self-perceptions in the place of the foundational, the immoveable, such that all other claims to truth must either be conformed to them or disregarded entirely. Namely that, over time, the “Christianity” which is forced to exist within these preconditions steadily declines further and further into a self-referential and suicidal abstraction. Either Christ, his message and his Lordship is the central, the foundational, the immoveable reality, and that to which everything else in us must conform, or else all our grand posturing and grasping at a Christianity of some kind constitutes merely a parody of that which we had been initially seeking. In time, we soon abandon our creation altogether.
In the Evangelical church, with our proudly held high esteem for scripture, the pitfalls are often of a different sort, but no less profound. The troubling reality is that, for most of us, our places of most deeply held rebellion against wholehearted surrender to the Gospel of Christ are also almost always those to which we are most blind. In the American evangelical Church, especially, comfortable lifestyles and relative affluence have become the basic prerequisite assumptions underlying our interpretation and application of scripture. There are many places where Christ, in speaking about money, and in speaking about what it means to follow him, comes across so radically in contrast with the lifestyles which we have simply come to assume that our interpretation quickly and easily becomes a defensive deflection more than a genuine openness to conviction and transformation. Similar ‘a priori’ type assumptions have taken root in things like Patriotism and militarism within the Church; where Jesus has things to say that would challenge us to think more deeply or critically in these areas of our lives - both personally and corporately – our tendency is to avoid and deflect. Contextualization to the point of philosophical abstraction is a powerful strategy for this purpose; where Jesus says things that are simply too hard for us to hear, we find ways to satisfy ourselves that, though this may be what Jesus SAID, it is not really what he MEANT - at least not with regards to us, personally. This stems from the same self-centered ‘absolutizing’ that plagues more liberal denominations; as evangelicals, we just tend to be more subtle in our de-structuring of scriptural mandates. Bonhoeffer presents this word for us, too.
In general, the pursuit of ‘relevance’ by the Church, within the shifting cultural paradigms of our own day, is a complex and perilous aim. On the one hand there is, I believe, a genuine goodness of heart and theological seriousness that drives the Church to seek cultural forms and modes of expression in order to present the Gospel – the message of Christ - to people in a language which they are able to most easily understand. For the same reason that the international work of translating the written Bible into thousands upon thousands of native dialects for the sake of reaching the unreached is such a noble one, I believe that the incarnational nature of the Gospel itself demands proper cultural contextualization. The Gospel is creation-wide, not wed to any one culture or historical manner of thinking, and as such requires a thoughtful, faithful application and communication in a wide variety of environments. At it’s best, this strikes me as the pure heart of any quest for ‘relevance’; not that we are trying to craft a new gospel, made in our image and so relevant to our own experience, but that, in the knowledge that the Gospel of Christ IS infinitely relevant - regardless of time, culture or context - we seek to faithfully express that inherent, eternal relevance to our own time and culture in forms and through methods that they are able to understand.
Herein lies the challenge, and the danger, however. For while the desire to communicate the inherent relevance of Christ may stem from scriptural faithfulness and Godly concern, this quest is all too easily turned inward, becoming self-justifying and self-defining. It is a short road from seeking to reveal the inherent relevance of the Gospel to trimming the Gospel down in order that it becomes safer, popular and more convenient for us to communicate. There is but a short distance between seeking to communicate the true Gospel in our own particular language, and molding the Gospel itself until it fits more comfortably within that language and culture. The only thing that divides faithfulness and deadly error in these places is our willingness to surrender everything - all of ourselves and every aspect of our culture – to the one, true, rightful a priori and unmovable reality: the revealed Word. We must surrender Christ to nothing; surrendering all to Christ. In Him, and in the scriptures that reveal Him, we find the only authoritative window upon human reality as it was intended and the end to which humanity will ultimately be restored. Christ is both our foundation and our horizon, beginning and end, our promise and our hope. It is only in holding Christ as our center that we will be saved from the fatal errors of our own rebellion and the deadly self-centeredness of our own hearts. It is this that Bonhoeffer reminds us of with such eloquence in this passage; a reminder in the light of which we ought to dwell with certain humility and seriousness in order that we might be more fully conformed to that great and glorious image in and for which we have been created.
