Bonhoeffer and the risk of state funding

I have been reading the biography of Deitrich Bonhoeffer recently. It is entitled Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Maryty, Prophet, Spy. It is sobering, to say the least, to read about the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the 1930’s. Over the past few years we have seen in the news numerous comparisons between the recession since 2008 and the Depression of the 1930’s. While the economic difficulties of recent times are by no means comparable to the Great Depression, the outcry of the political left would make you think that it is. In light of that rather indefensible hyberbole from those advocating ever more state spending and ever more state control of the economy, I have to admit some hesitance in bring up the subject. However, in reading Bonhoeffer I have been struck by the similarity of some things that Hitler did to consolidate his control with some of the things going on today.

Due to the economic collapse of the Weimar republic and the general feeling of the German people that they had been victimized by the Versailles treaty to end World War I, the people were all too willing to support Hitler’s moves. The fact that he was first elected democratically and then systematically moved to eliminate the democratic processes that elected him reminded me first of Iran and then of the things now going on Egypt and Libya. I have little hope that those recent overthrows of dictators will result in anything more than a different type of dictator.  So first I was reminded of how easy it is for new attempts at democracy to run amok, especially in situations where there is no heritage of democratic institutions. 

It is the story of how the German church was used by Hitler to his advantage, though, that was especially concerning to me. The German church had been losing its direction for at least a century before Hitler came along. Schliermacher had ushered in what we think of as ‘liberal’ theology, followed by Harnack and many others who had abandoned the deity of Christ, treated most of the Gospels as myth, and considered Jesus little more than a high-minded man who set a good example. They and their German schools of theology had led the way in rendering the German church little more than a psychological  support group. When Hitler began to co-opt the church for his own political purposes, most common folks in German had little understanding of what the gospel actually is  and as a result had no foundation to stand on. Nietsche and his concept of the Ubermensch (superman) had won out. The liberal theologians had removed the soul of the church before Hitler arrived; when he arrived, the church simply caved in and went along.  Today’s church in America has been slowly abandoning the historic reality of the scripture for many years and is getting to the point that it is no longer a voice that can confront the government to hold the government accountable. The scandals of child abuse, adultery,  lust for money in the ‘health/wealth’ preachers, and acceptance of the clearly immoral practices of abortion, homosexuality, easy divorce, etc. has rendered the voice of the church in America  nearly as impotent as it had become in German in the 1930’s.

A chill went down my spine, however, as I read about some specific Hitler moves beginning in 1933. The key was in putting limits on how state money could be used. In April of 1933 the Nazi’s barred Jews from being state attorneys in the patent office; then also in April they banned Jewish doctors from working in institutions funded by state insurance; they limited Jewish students allowed in state funded schools; then they banned Jewish dentists from institutions receiving state health insurance funding.  Since there was a state church in Germany, they soon banned anyone with Jewish ancestry from being ordained into the ministry regardless of if they had been raised Christian. One of Bonhoeffer’s seminary friends found himself in this problem.  Eventually they demanded that candidates for ordination take an oath of loyalty to Hitler before ordination; after all, the state paid the salary of these pastors.

I must admit that the constraints put on how the state money could be used began to remind me of how we now find ourselves in a situation where pharmacists who do not want to administer abortion pills are threatened, where some medical schools demand that all doctors in training take hands-on training in abortions, and where state funded universities demand that groups who oppose things like homosexuality and abortion must allow supporters of those things to join their groups or even run for office in those groups or be banned from the campus.  Many of these things are tied to receipt of state funds.

Bonhoeffer saw where this was leading with the Nazi state, and began opposing them in the 30’s; many of his friends and colleagues, even the eminent Karl Barth, did not.  I fear many of us today have the same sort of naivite about our own slow drift into the omnipotent state.

Defending gay marriage like slavery

Obama's announcement last week that he now favors allowing gay marriage was not particularly surprising to me in light of his political approach to the upcoming fall election, but the defense for it given by some of his supporters did come as something of a surprise.

The leftist parts of the church which have abandoned the idea of Biblical morality applauded him, as expected. What was not expected for me was how portions of the church that had claimed to maintain a Biblical view of morality decided to support his direction on this while at the same time admitting that it was in conflict with their moral compass. Some of those folks were interviewed on local television in Atlanta and said things like 'it's just legal stuff, it does not affect our morality'. Many of these folks were African American.

This point of view that somehow the law is not a matter of morality is one that creates much confusion. While it is true that to some degree not all things in the law are matters of morality, like some driving laws or tax laws, it is also true that most criminal law is inherently moral. Murder, stealing, assault, giving false testimony are all matters of both morality and law along with a great many other things. To think that gay marriage as a legal matter is 'just legal stuff' is to ignore the inherent moral nature of the law.

That alone is not what surprised me, however. What surprised me was hearing that kind of argument from African Americans in light of how very similar that argument is to some of the historic arguments that were offered in favor of legal slavery. Some who favored slavery allowed that African slaves were indeed human and would even admit them to some institutions like churches while still defending the idea that slavery could be moral. The equality of humans in the church and before God was one thing while economics was an entirely separate thing and slaves as legal property was 'just legal stuff'. It was shocking to me that African Americans would defend the legalizing of gay marriage with an argument so much like some of the arguments defending slavery.

Slavery is immoral. The arguments against it are fundamentally moral arguments. That was in fact the heart of the civil rights movement, the moral arguments. Gay marriage proponents seek to frame their arguments as civil rights arguments but have failed to be convincing in that effort because homosexual behavior is not inherent to the human condition in the way race is. Many in the African American churches of the U.S. recognize that and have therefore opposed homosexual marriage, and rightly so. To back away from that moral position now is to put their commitment to politics as a higher priority than their moral commitments. It is ironic that the arguments some have used to support Obama are so much like arguments used to try to keep them in slavery.

A day on the beach

We spent a few days at Hilton Head island recently, and I was reminded of the parable of the man who builds his house on the sand. That man, having built his house on the sand, found that when the storms came his house collapsed as the sand was washed away by the storm. Sand does not make a firm foundation. The day we drove over to Hilton Head from Atlanta was rainy and by the time we arrived it had cooled after the rain. It also was quite windy. The next day we went down to the beach and attempted to plant a beach umbrella in the sand. While the wind wasn't quite as bad as I imagine the raging storms to have been in Jesus' parable, it was still very windy; not quite like sitting in a sand storm but not exactly what you have in mind by the phrase 'a day at the beach' either. The umbrella, having no firm foundation, kept trying to blow away. We were able to keep it in place by sitting right next to it and holding onto it, but that was not exactly convenient. It just wasn't the kind of day at the beach we had imagined.

Now, I am not all that fond of the beach anyway. I'd rather be in the mountains than at the beach, but the beach is ok from time to time, in limited doses. I sunburn easily and don't really like being on the beach outside of the morning or evening for a walk. Being there to get wind-burned in addition to sunburned just adds to my overall negative viewpoint about the beach.

Still it was a reminder of lessons to be learned. As we left and saw the traffic jam headed onto the island I was reminded of how we seem to long for the beach despite the issues of being there. To me Hilton Head, in spite of the many awards for careful development, is too crowded and overbuilt. Since we had been there before the weekend, I was glad to be leaving as the crowd arrived. That crowd, though, wants to be at the beach! Seeing the dolphins swim by, eating the seafood, even spending a little (emphasis on 'little') time on the beach all have their appeal, even to me at times. My roots, though, just are not there. Like the umbrella, when the wind blows, I am ready to leave!

Easter and Pride

As Easter approaches I like to listen to Handel's Messiah, both the Christmas and Easter sections. One of the great things about that work is how the words come directly from Scripture. 'Worthy is the Lamb' stands out in the Easter portion, and the words come directly from Revelation  5:12, 'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.' One of the remarkable things about Christianity is that  Jesus' triumph over sin and death results from His humbling of Himself in self-sacrifice. His resurrection that we celebrate at Easter calls me to humble myself in view of His sacrifice and to confess that my pride is very often the main thing that keeps from experiencing God's presence.

In contemplating this I was reminded of the apostle Paul's words in Philippians 3 in which he recalls how as a Pharisee he had much pride in his own goodness but had come to realize that all of that was
'manure' (Phil. 3:8). He realized that based on Easter, on the death and resurrection of Jesus (Phil. 3:10).

So, after listening to Handel and contemplating this as I did my time on the treadmill, I was drawn to listen to a song by Caedmon's Call that I think captures this attitude of Paul. The song is entitled 'I Boast No More' and goes like this:

       No more my God, I boast no more
       Of all the duties I have done
       I quit the hopes I had before
       To trust the merits of Thy Son

       Now, for the loss I bear His name
       What was my gain I count my loss
       My former pride I call my shame
       And nail my glory to His cross

      Yes, and I must, I will esteem
       All things but loss for Jesus' sake
       Oh may my soul be found in Him
       And of His righteousness partake.

       The best obedience of my hands
        Does not appear before Thy throne
       But faith can answer Thy demands
       By pleading what my Lord has done.

All of this speaks to me of pride and my innate tendency to want to be my own savior. Easter confronts me with the reality of what God has done on my behalf and makes me ashamed of my pride. C. S. Lewis writes about pride as 'the complete anti-God state of mind' and that 'pride is essentially competitive-is competitive by its very nature'. Through pride I compete against God to be my own god, to provide my own salvation, to be the center of my own little universe.  Paul saw that in himself when he looked at the cross, when he comtemplated the events of that first Easter.

When I think about pride I often get upset, even angry, at what I see in the world around me. I don't like what I see on the athletic field, or what I see in politics, or what I see in CEOs. I don't like what I hear coaches teaching about pride or what I hear 'leadership' gurus saying about it. But all of that is outside of me and easy for me to criticize. At Easter I am confronted with my own pride and am challenged to lay it down at the cross in repentance, to seek the grace to say with Paul, 'no more'.

Fasting versus Abstaining

It is Palm Sunday as I write this and we are nearing the end of this year's Lenten season. This week's online version of Christianity Today has an article about fasting, noting that it is currently popular to fast for a cause. This year several groups have advocated fasting to show solidarity with the poor. At other times fasting has been recommended for a variety of reasons, including to use the food money you would have used as an offering for the hungry, or to free up time for prayer by saving the time used for food preparation. The article this week in Christianity Today  promotes the idea of fasting in order to gain more self-control and even to shape the desires of our subconscious. As I grew up my friends and neighbors who were Roman Catholic would not eat meat on Friday, which they referred to as a 'fast'.

These seem to generally be good causes. It is good to help the poor, to gain self-control, and so on. Yet, these various approaches to try to explain fasting illustrate how we as a culture have a difficult time relating to the very idea of fasting and how we continue to be confused about it. Today in our Sunday morning Bible study we were looking into the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6 where Jesus tells His followers not to fast the way the 'hypocrites' do, who would put ashes on their faces and make a show of it, but rather to look happy and keep it secret from those around you. He said very similar things about prayer and about giving to the poor.  The Greek word used there in Matthew which is translated into English as 'fasting' comes from 2 Greek words, 'not' and 'to eat'; it is very much about not eating, not about a general idea of 'giving something up' for a time.  Fasting is clearly focused on not eating. Fasting is a different thing than abstaining.

This is not to say that there is no benefit to abstaining. The Jews were to continually abstain from some things like non-kosher foods; they were to periodically abstain from some things, like sexual intimacy during a woman's monthly cycle; they were on special occasions to abstain from some things, like leaven during Passover. These are not fasts; they are abstinence.

The only fast specifically prescribed in the Torah is for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In the description, in both Leviticus 16 and Leviticus 19, it is clear that the purpose is to 'humble yourselves'. The text does not even use the word 'fast', yet the Jews clearly understood it that way. The focus was on humbling themselves before God. This comes up again when fasts are called for by Ezra, by the prophets, and by David for himself (see Ps. 35:13 and Ezra 8:21).  Repeatedly in the Old Testament fasts are about one main thing: humbling ourselves in repentance. It is not about 'solidarity'; it is not even about self-control. It is about humbling ourselves.

As time went on this got muddled. After the Babylonian captivity, there were fasts to commemorate the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, and other things. By Jesus time, the devout were fasting twice every week. Long before this, in Isaiah's time it was clear that they had begun to miss the point. (See Isaiah 58:3-5). Jesus displeasure with fasting in His day sounds rather like Isaiah.

Abstinence still had its own place, though. Again, repeatedly in the Old Testament we see the reason for abstinence as being related to purity. So they 'purified' their houses from leaven before Passover; they did not eat 'unclean' animals; women would 'purify' themselves after their monthly cycle; and so on. The focus of abstinence was on purity, and the focus of fasting was on humbling ourselves before God.

The article calling for fasting to show 'solidarity with the poor' shows that the muddled thinking continues. I do not object at all to caring for the poor. I also think our culture could stand a great deal more self-control, as learned by abstinence. I just don't think that is the point in fasting. As I contemplate the arrival of Easter next week, I need to focus more on repentance than on 'solidarity'.

Money and forgiving

We have been studying the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew for several weeks in our Sunday morning Bible study at church, and that great sermon has a lot to say about both our personal piety and morality, and also about social justice. I have also been reading Timothy Keller's book Generous Justice, in part because of our study of Matthew. In the midst of this, we had our annual missions conference.

As part of the missions conference we had a missionary from Calcutta as guest teacher in our class one Sunday morning and he talked about the ministry there that tries to help young women who have been sold into prostitution. Some of them are sold by their parents when they are around 10 years old. Some get into debt and are without income and try to get some money to get out of debt, but the moneylenders can charge 10% per month (120% per annum) interest. The whole situation is so desperate as to be almost unbelievable, and yet it reminded me that the world they inhabit is not so different from the world Jesus' lived in (and probably closer to mine than I like to think about). These women have no skills, cannot read or write, and have no hope of getting out of debt. Once they are forced into prostitution most never find a way out. Many commit suicide.

As we heard about this we were about to discuss the part of the Lord's prayer that says 'forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors'. Some translations say 'transgressions' instead of 'debts'. It turns out, per F.F. Bruce in The Hard Sayings of Jesus that in Aramaic,  which Jesus normally used in daily life, it is the same word for either 'debts' or 'transgressions'.  But in Matthew 18, F. F. Bruce points out, Jesus also talks about forgiving one who 'sins' against you (Matt 18:21ff) by giving an example about money.
So it struck me that for these poor women in India who are forced into prostitution, what they needed to escape from prostitution in many cases was to have money debts forgiven.  If they heard Jesus talking about 'forgive us our debts', what would they hear?

If  someone was owed money by one of these poor women, and decided that if she could not repay at 120% annual interest then she should  be sold into prostitution,  would the Lord forgive a person like that? Until hearing from that missionary I would not have even  thought about the Lord's prayer that way. I would have automatically assumed that the Lord's prayer was only talking about 'transgressions' or 'sins' of personal moral failure, not about things like forgiving a money debt. But in some cases, like these women, forgiveness of a money debt is vital to moving out of a life of moral sin as well.

So, it struck me that our attitude about money affects not only our giving, but also affects our forgiving. If we will not forgive a money debt to keep someone out of prostitution, will we forgive a moral debt? I doubt it. In any case,  listening to the missionary gave me a new viewpoint on what it means to 'forgive our debts'.

Christian Singleness

It is clear that the concept of marriage in American culture is confused and broken from a Christian perspective. The acceptance of homosexual marriage, the high frequency of births out of wedlock, and the high divorce rate all speak to that brokenness, but those are merely the symptoms that show the underlying disease of having no concept of what marriage is. As Pope John Paul II pointed out in his theology of the body, marriage carries the image of God to reflect the communion of the Trinity in the communion of male/female together, and to reflect God's creativity in our procreation. The male and female bodies themselves bear witness to this purpose and the body itself has a 'spousal' meaning in its very design. As the pope put it, 'the definitive creation of man consists in the creation of the unity of two beings' as male and female. As a result, according to Genesis 1-3 and re-iterated by Jesus in Matthew 5 and 19, marriage can only be between male and female and 'man' (Hebrew 'adam) is in some sense incomplete when either male or female is alone. Timothy Keller and his wife Kathy raise this point as well in their book The Meaning of Marriage in which they ask how can long term singleness be a good condition if males and females are in some ways incomplete alone?

In their book, the Kellers point out some ways in which our current culture of singleness is broken. Many have lived through their parents' divorce and so have a certain fear of a failed marriage for themselves; many see marriage as primarily a way to gain personal gratification (sexual or emotional) instead of lifelong love, care, and devotion and they see other ways to that gratification outside of marriage now; many have an overly idealized concept of finding the perfect 'soul mate' and will never 'settle' for anyone who doesn't live up to their impossible, imagined ideal; others are insistent that they should never have to change (or grow) and must be 'accepted as they are' and can't bear the thought of having to accomodate some else's disagreements with their habits.  All of these are based on the idea that marriage exists to make them happy rather than to live out God's image and be shaped into closer conformity to that image (sanctification). It seems to me that any single person who remains single for any of these reasons is in fact incomplete and is failing to live out God's image.

The Kellers also point out that, perhaps for the first time, our culture no longer has a culturally supported pathway for singles to meet and marry.  We have no arranged marriages; we have no formal courtship culture; the 'dating' culture of my youth (which had many problems of its own) has died away. There basically is no established cultural pathway to support the finding of a marriage partner now.

Is it possible for choosing singleness to be in conformance with God's image and Word? Yes, but only under certain circumstances. The pope points out in his theology of the body that Jesus speaks to this in Matthew 19 in saying that 'there are eunuchs by nature, eunuchs by the will of man, and eunuchs for the kingdom of God'. That is, some are single for the purpose of total devotion to God's work, as Jesus himself was. Paul says some similar things in I Corinthians. But this is legitimate only under certain circumstances and for a small minority, says the pope, which include that it is voluntary, fully and joyfully embraced, is done as a gift of self to God just as in marriage both give themselves as a gift, is for the kingdom (not for personal autonomy), and bears spiritual fruit from the single vocation (rather than children).  Most singles today, including Christian singles, would not meet these criteria. In particular, a great many would prefer to be married but find themselves in a single culture that seems to have no cultural pathway to marriage and lots of fears and overly-idealized criteria for marriage. They are not 'eunuchs for the kingdom'; they are just stuck. These have not chosen singleness but are just stuck with it. For those who are stuck, certainly they can still be God's servants and continue to seek Him. Their unchosen singleness is not dishonorable or a prevention of obeying God. They will need to break out of cultural norms to find suitable ways to get to know potential spouses since our culture has abandoned making it a priority to have established pathways toward marriage. But the fact that they desire marriage is evidence that it really is something of an incompleteness.

So, it seems to me that our culture is broken in regard to both marriage and singleness. Many single Christians who are avoiding marriage as a result of fears, unrealistic idealism, or idolatrous individualism seem to me to be out of God's will. Marriage will always be an act that requires faith; now it also requires more initiative and creativity than in the past since our culture is not very supportive.