the cost of discipleship

A dear friend of mine caused me to return to a book I had begun but had let languish, overcome by events and general busyness, since our vacation in late September: Eric Metaxas' Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. As soon as I picked it back up I was hooked all over again. Metaxas' writing is like butter on warm cornbread, and Bonhoeffer's life is absolutely fascinating.

The tome is daunting, 542 pages exclusive of photos, endnotes, bibliography and author's bio. Yet every time I pick it up I am hard-pressed to put it down. I confess that I have never been much of a biography reader; still, I find that I am blessed I know not how on my journey by studying the lives of others. And Bonhoeffer is strong medicine, indeed.

I bring Metaxas' book up because I have been thinking a lot about truth over the past several weeks, and wondering how we got to such a state as we find ourselves today. As I was reading on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer I was struck by his assessment of the students at Union Theological Seminary,
 and of the mainline Protestant churches in and around New York City when he studied in America in 1930-31. I was astonished to see evidence of the war against truth in his words:

There is no theology here... They talk a blue steak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students... are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level (Metaxas, 101).

The theological atmosphere of the Union Theological Seminary is accelerating the process of the secularization of Christianity in America... [and] there is no sound basis on which one can rebuild after demolition. It is carried away with the general collapse (105).

Metaxas writes of Bonhoeffer's observations:

In an attempt to be more sophisticated than the fundamentalists, whom they hated, [professors and students at Union] had jettisoned serious scholarship altogether. They seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answer the fundamentalists came up with must be wrong. For Bonhoeffer, this was scandalous (103). 

Bonhoeffer found tepid faith in the churches he visited, with one exception:

Things are not much different in the church. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I've been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation [of Christ and His atoning work for sin], and that was delivered by a negro (indeed, in general I'm increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality in Negroes). One big question continually attracting my attention in view of these facts is whether one here really can still speak about Christianity... There's no sense to expect the fruits where the Word really is no longer being preached (106).

All this in 1931. This has been going on much longer than I think we imagined. And perhaps it was not new even then, considering the work that needed to be undertaken in the great councils of the early church. The real truth is that the Enemy can't come up with any new lies. Same girl, different red dress.

Let me encourage you to check out Metaxas' Bonhoeffer from your local library, or even purchase it for yours. You will find a great story of a great theologian, as told by a great writer. And you'll love to compare the cover picture with the author's photo on the flyleaf!

what is truth?

I was reading in Acts chapter 17 today about Paul's visit to Athens, and his apologetic for "the unknown god". As I read I wondered if such an approach would work in today's world here in the West. Paul was meeting a culture that, while spiritual, had never encountered Jesus. We, on the other hand, are dealing with a culture that has been pretty well inoculated against Jesus, in no small part due to the efforts of the erstwhile Christian Church to preach a watered-down gospel, lacking in power because it is lacking in discipleship. That, though, is a conversation best left for another post.

In the meantime, as I was trying to imagine a true Mars Hill experience in our present culture, I glanced over at my bookshelf and there saw a book which my bride had bought me entitled A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions,* a compilation of essays from the Veritas Forum,  edited by Dallas Willard. I took it as a theophany, and opened it.

I love the way a new book feels, before the cover gets all curled and the pages all fanned out. I opened the book for the first time and began to read. The Veritas Forum began in 1992 when "a small group of Christians at Harvard hosted the university for a weekend of lectures and discussions exploring some of life's most important questions. Their hope was to restore within the university a space for asking deep questions, seeking real answers and building community around the search for truth" (p. 11). In the intervening years Veritas Forums have taken place at campuses throughout the US and Canada. Willard has compiled some of the best presentations therefrom.

In the opening essay of the book, Richard John Neuhaus declares:

We Christians have an inescapable obligation to contend that there is truth, and that all truths finally serve the one truth. There is one truth because there is one God and one revelation of God in Jesus Christ... It's not only for the sake of the Christian gospel, it's for the sake of our responsibility in our society. It's a socially disastrous, community destroying thing to deny that there is a truth that binds us together—Christian and Jew and Muslim and believer and nonbeliever and atheist and secular and black and white and Asian (28-29).

 So, perhaps we do have an Areopagus, like Paul, where we can proclaim "the unknown god". But how do we go about doing so? Neuhaus cautions,

But we have to demonstrate that we, as Christians, have understood... how Christians claiming to possess the truth can indeed be destructive of public discourse. Christians who are overwhelmingly confident that they actually possess the truth in the sense of being in control of the truth [emphasis mine] can become the enemies of civil discourse (36).

Or, as William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury is reputed to have said, "It's possible to be right repugnantly." If you want a concrete example of this, think of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, and their anti-homosexual-themed picketing of funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

I agree with Neuhaus that we who follow Jesus have an obligation and responsibility to declare that there is such a thing as truth. And the only way I see to avoid the pitfall becoming the enemies of civil discourse is to carry on those conversations in the context of relationships forged in our community.

I look forward to reading more of this book. I anticipate it will provide more fodder for this blog!

*InterVarsity Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8308-3845-5