A Kairos Moment

The present reminds me of the Nixon administration and the years leading to the end of the war in Vietnam and the president's resignation. I am sure I am not alone in having this sense of deja vu (and those of you who follow the New York Times Magazine are reminded weekly of this connection to our past in Megan Kelso's "Watergate Sue"). It is all depressingly familiar. This morning I was reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in connection with a new book I am writing, and was forcefully reminded of how irrelevant the institutional church is in today's crisis. Our religious leaders have very little to say to us as the war drags on, as people are losing their homes and their lives, as so many suffer from the lack of compassion in our government: no, make that our own lack of compassion. The rich get richer and we just don't care very much as long as we get our share.

Last week I went to an Episcopal Church here in Portland and was shocked to read and hear in the written Prayers of the People a petition that for "patience with those who incite war." What? Is that all we have to say? It is oh so familiar. The congregation was large, wealthy, prominent. Being patient is easy when you have both money and power.

Bonhoeffer was far from patient. As we know, he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and that led to his arrest and execution. Whether he was right to participate in such a plot is another question. He came to that point as part of his work against the regime that was killing Jews; Bonhoeffer himself returned to Germany from the United States to be part of the opposition when he could have stayed safely away, writing perhaps from Union Theological Seminary. He did not. He helped to found the confessing church that was in opposition to the established church, the one that collaborated with the Nazis.

The church today--almost in every incarnation--is a collaborator with the present government, part of the wealth and war machine that keeps the United States and its people in chains. We go along because as Christians we are no longer powerful enough to speak out, nor confident enough to risk our tax exemption, nor brave enough to risk outraging the those who profit from the current situation (or are so beaten down by it that they no longer know how to resist).

Near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison about what he called religionless Christianity. I have long been intrigued by what he has to say here (the letter was written in April 1944 when I was one-month old). Bonhoeffer writes:

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religion.'"

He goes on to talk about how Christianity itself was historically conditioned and "a transient form of human self-expression." The time he describes, the mid-1940s near the end of the war, was not unlike our own, nor unlike the late 60s and early 70s. These were and are critical times for Christians. We are in our passivity confirming what Bonhoeffer was saying: "the western form of Christianity was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion."

What we have not discovered is the answer to Bonhoeffer's next question: "If religion is only a garment of Christianity--and even this garment has looked very different at different times--then what is a religionless Christianity?"

The question is, in fact, how do we transform ourselves from a passive people bound in the obsolete form of religion to a vibrant spiritual presence in a suffering world? It is clear to me right now that we don't know how to do it. All we can do is repeat the same old tired phrases and meaningless prayers.

Ironically, the state of religionless Christianity right now is most visible in the Christian religion itself. It is a religion without meaning. But the end of religion is a good thing, when the religion in question is no longer representative of the divine ground of being nor a passageway into that place of wholeness once promised by the church. You can't get there from here.

But this is also a Kairos moment if there ever was one. It is a time in which we can take action and change our way of living and being. During Lent I suggested that we give up church for Lent; I suspect nobody followed my lead. And I am certainly not going to suggest that people walk out of church. I know they won't. But I do wonder what we are doing in church. Why are we there? Who cares?

We went to a church yesterday not in the Episcopal tradition. The pastor spoke about the need to pay attention to what matters, to be organized in such a way that the mundane details of getting along do not mask what we really need to be doing. As an aside, he suggested that the present government administration might take some time off to reflect on what it's doing. It was a gentle antidote to "patience with those who incite war." I also wondered as I heard him whether the same might apply to the church today.

Time to ask ourselves: What are we doing? How will our actions be judged by the future? Where is our Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison calling us to discipleship? As we religionless Christians go willingly to execution, who will come after us?

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting we revive religion. I am suggesting we give it up altogether and start over, that we accept religionless faith as a fact and figure out what a new Christianity looks like.