Psychology & The Cross

  Right. So we are going to leave the 14th century and we are going to go into the middle of the 20th century in Germany and have a little visit with a great Protestant saint. I consider him a saint, certainly a martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

And this is, I think, an important move for us in terms of our discussion because we've been pretty Catholic so far. Irenaeus, Clement, Eckhart, and now we're going to invite the Protestant in the room. And Bonhoeffer is 100 percent a Protestant thinker. And I think it's an important, he's going to offer us an important kind of, , complementarity and even correction perhaps of a certain kind of dangerous optimism, which we might have been generating in ourselves and in our hearers.

Have you heard of the Protestant principle by, I think it's Tillich who, who defined the Protestant principle. I heard about it, but , I can't say. It's pretty, it's pretty easy to remember. Basically the Protestant principle, which is the principle of protest against Christendom and Catholicism in particular, is that one should never absolutize the relative.

That is the, in Tillich's view, that's the whole of Protestantism. Don't absolutize the relative. Insofar as religion. It's always prone to absolutizing the relative, and certainly politics is. The Protestant principle is ever relevant. Absolutizing the relative, that means taking something which is just a means and turning it into the end.

Let's say It's the ma the, the, the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. You know, that is a means towards the propagation of the gospel. It is not the end itself, just as the, you know, the state. It's the state is a means towards an end of all these things are relative. They're all human. They're not divine even if they are taken up into divinity and become medium, media of grace.

They, in themselves, they remain human, fallen, and sinful. They should never be absolutized. So we talked about just to recap a few things, we started with Irenaeus in the second century and we spoke about how Irenaeus took the Chalcedonian formula that Jesus Christ is fully human, fully divine, without mixture or confusion of human and divine nature, and constructed a extremely robust and challenging Christian humanism on the basis of this, affirming that, you know, the glory of God is man fully alive, which means that wherever we see humanity thriving, in some respects, God is glorified.

So God is not glorified at our expense. God doesn't want a crushed and humiliated and self annihilated humanity. He wants a humanity that is his God bearer, his image. And then we went to Clement of Alexandria, who is our cultural Christian hero from the 4th century, 3rd century, I should say who, who argued quite clearly compellingly, I think, that the Christ is not just the logos of God, He is the logos of nature.

He's the logos of everything. And therefore, we ought to be looking for Christ's nature outside of the boundaries of the visible Church. In Greek philosophy, for example, or why not in Buddhist philosophy, or in our time in science, maybe, in ecology, wherever. And then we landed in Belgium and in the Rhineland in the 14th century with Meister Eckart's non dual Christianity.

And Eckhart, in many ways, anticipates Protestantism because this Protestant principle, don't absolutize the relative. You can see it in Eckhart's sermons, particularly in his edict against idol, idolatry. You know, if you think you can get more of God from church than you can in the kitchen, then you're an idolater.

And God is equally distant from every point on creation and therefore equally near. So there's not more of God in the Vatican than there is, let's say, in a Berlin consulting room. So that you could, others have noted that this is the beginning of Protestantism. But with Bonhoeffer, Protestantism has gotten quite old and actually quite sinful as all these things tend to do.

Bonhoeffer was born into an affluent family in Berlin. They were a good, pious Lutheran family, but not particularly dedicated to religion. His father was a doctor, a very famous and important doctor, an important psychiatrist, as it was, and everybody in this large family was expected to be make something great of themselves, which they did, but that generally meant becoming a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman.

And of course, this was all before the Nazis took over. Young Bonhoeffer was, Dieter was very musically inclined, and one of his possible vocations was to be a musician and to be end of his life, short life. He was quite dedicated to music, to playing music and to singing and to hymnody and so on. But he decided instead for the church to become a theologian, a Protestant theologian.

And I think this was somewhat surprising to his family because, you know, a little like some Catholics that I know, it's good to be religious, but not too religious. And so when young Dietrich sort of jumped in and swallowed the gospel hook, it was a bit of a shock. But they supported him in it, and he became a rising star in Protestant theology before the Second World War, which was extremely powerful theology.

He particularly became a close associate of Karl Barth, who we've talked about on the podcast. Karl Barth, I think, has the greatest claim to being our church father. So Bonhoeffer was poised to have a big career as a systematic theologian, and then the Nazis came to power. And he, like others, SLED He went to England, then he went to America.

We won't go into all the details of his fascinating life, but at a certain point, he realized that his call was to be with the Germans at this moment of crisis in their history, particularly with the German Protestant churches, which were capitulating and becoming accomplices in the Nazi atrocity. We talked a little bit about how Hitler, being a clever anti Christ figure that he was, knew that he couldn't get it very far by simply opposing the churches.

He had to have them on his side, and so he worked on both the Catholics and the Protestants. And with the Protestants, he had perhaps the most success because he was able to actually appoint Nazi bishops. And a movement began which was called the German Christian Movement, which was a kind of Nazification of Protestantism in Germany.

And it went so far as to declare, for example, that the Old Testament was not part of the Revelation because it was some kind of Jewish aberrations. So all the way into heresy, in order to support Hitler's anti Semitic policies. And Bonhoeffer rebelled. I'm sorry, I don't want to use that word, rebel. He resisted, and he called everyone else to resist.

And two days after Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer was on the radio in Berlin, from Berlin. Saying that the Führer, the new leader was a misführer, a deceiver, and he was leading everyone astray. This figure, Bonhoeffer, we have to think of him, a very bourgeois man, you know, with soft hands and nice clothes, and a lover of music, and a lover of all things cultural and civil.

You know, a very much a Clement of Alexandria kind of figure. But with the courage of a martyr. And Bonhoeffer's courage strikes me as something that we could take with us today. In any case, without going into too many details about his life, he became very active in forming a resistance movement called the Confessing Church, which was dissenting from this Nazi church.

And setting up underground seminaries all around Germany in order to continue to educate people correctly and train people correctly in the true gospel, in true theology. And of course it was a cat and mouse game. With the cat being the Nazis and they more or less caught everybody eventually. Except for Bonhoeffer did something really very interesting at a certain point he became involved with the plot to overthrow Hitler, one of the many plots, and this came from within the military itself.

He was not actively involved in, you know, setting up bombs or anything like that. But he began, he took a position in the German military so that he could pass information from Germany to England through his international church connections in order to prepare the way for a Germany after Nazism. So he was a spy at the end of his life.

And it was this that got him caught. In the last year of the war a diary was discovered by one of these military leaders who were planning on the overthrow of Hitler, and the names were in the diary, and Bonhoeffer was thrown into prison in Berlin. He spent a year in prison in Berlin until, until he was moved to a concentration camp in Bavaria, where he was killed a day later.

Or two before, or I've forgotten the dates, but 1945, very shortly before the war, where he was hung on a piano wire, a piano wire because that would prolong the death agony. Apparently he spent six hours on the, six hours dying. The only reason I mentioned the gruesome details, because it's interesting to think that according to the biblical account, biblical account, Jesus spent six hours dying on the cross.

And for me, that's. It draws attention to how Bonhoeffer was a Christ figure for our times, how he embodied the Christ, and in our own clothing, so to speak, in our own language, in our own age, in our own disenchanted age of total war and rising consumerism and environmental collapse, you can still be a witness.

So I wanted to talk just briefly about his politics and his theology. And I particularly wanted to talk about his theology of religionless Christianity religionless Christianity. This is a theory that he was creating, constructing in the Berlin prison. And after he died, his papers and letters from prison were published.

And we saw that his late thinking on Christianity contained this striking and very controversial concept of religionless Christianity. And I think I wanted to finish there because that has clear resonances with the idea of secular Christianity, although it's not the same thing.

So if we go to the politics, I think I can be brief here. Obviously, he's an extremely political figure. But it seems to me that he gives us the clue to understanding what a Christian politics looks like. And we remember now the Protestant principle, don't absolutize the relative. Politics is the relative par excellence, isn't it?

So one must never absolutize politics. Nazism, Nazism is an absolutization of politics. So too is Stalinism. So too is absolute monarchy in the Middle Ages. And they all fall prey to the same error. of absolutizing the relative, and therefore usurping the position that the sovereignty of God, the only one, the one king of the universe, the one being whose power and whose power and sovereignty is incontestable, is God.

So that means we don't absolutize, we don't absolutize our, our, our our politics, even when it's in the name of justice. So that means We resist evil instead of rebelling, or we reform the state instead of revolting. We've talked about these things. Now, what's wrong with being a rebel? What's wrong with revolution?

Well, the problem with rebellion and revolution is that it falls prey to this temptation to absolutize the relative. That is, it quickly becomes, it moves from becoming A protest against a very familiar form of evil returning in the world to becoming the construction of a kingdom of God on earth through human means.

Bonhoeffer was clear on this. So his activity was resistance. He didn't expect to see Christian politics succeed let's say, the defeat of Nazism and bring about the kingdom of God on earth through human means. That wasn't the point at all. He was in that situation, which, thanks to the grace of God, most of us have never been in, when the state itself has become an instrument of evil.

When laws have become injust, when Satan has taken control of the visible reins of power. And in such a situation, the Christian cannot be passive. And he was a pacifist, generally, in principle. But there are situations in which pacifism is no longer is no longer adequate. But his, his, his politics was one of resistance.

And I think this is something I would like to carry forward, you know, from, I hope people will carry forward from the Section of Christ insofar as we've talked about the political, and left and right and so on. This is not a, this is not endorsing a conservative politics over a progressive politics.

Both conservative politics become, is in danger of absolutizing the relative, so too is progressive politics. So it's, it's a rather, it's a cautionary note. That give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar, and obey legitimate authority where it is to be obeyed, but recognize, really, that there is only one king to the universe, and that is God, and his, his image, which is Christ.

And your primary duty is to bring Christ into the world in your time and space as you can. And insofar as the state doesn't prevent you from doing that, it's probably just fine to leave it as it is. But of course, that was not Nazi Germany. And he paid it with his life. So, on his theology, the most important and controversial claim he makes, is that we have come into a time and our age in which religion has ceased to exist.

Religion is no longer doing what it once did. It is no longer necessary. There is a life in the world now and it's a fully integrated and properly human life in which God is no longer seen to be necessary as an element of human self understanding or as a way of explaining things. So this is the secular age of strong secularism.

It's a, for Bonhoeffer, it represented a centuries long movement towards human autonomy. It starts in the early modern period, it all starts with the Reformation, takes wings in the early modern period, and in the age of revolution, sort of becomes a vanguard. And this has now attained a certain maturity, that was his word, you know, the human being has become mature now, and the world, for many, can now be understood without God.

The world for many good people has now become a world that no longer needs religion, in which science, for example, replaces religion. Bonhoeffer looked at this, this disenchantment of his time, and we have to remember he's writing this thesis in the last days of the Second World War, when much of the old is lying already in ruins, and perhaps Germany itself will cease to exist.

And he's looking at this, his time. And he's saying, you know, this is not simply something evil. We have to recognize. That there is much that, much good that has come from this emancipation of humanity from religion. That there, and there is much that is evil about religion, has been evil throughout history.

And not, the evil that has always accompanied the Christ, and always will. Christ enters the world accompanied by the devil. And he dies on the cross with the devil at his side, and wherever Christ is erupting again in our midst. We won't need to look too far to find the devil. So, but that doesn't mean, of course, that it's very easy to identify it.

So we can't simply say, oh, look, well, there's a, there's a place where there's no religion. Ergo, you know, it's of the, of the, of the devil. Nor can we say, oh, there's religion flourishing must be good. We know of course that this, it just doesn't work this way. And so Bon Offerer was quite clear that there was a, that not all forms of Godlessness are evil.

There's a passage here from his Ethics, his posthumously published Ethics, the book he was working on before he died Bonhoeffer writes, There is the godlessness in religious and Christian clothing, which we call a hopeless godlessness, but there's also a godlessness which is full of promise.

So, there's a godlessness which acts like a Christian, and there's a godlessness which is not interested at all in Christianity, but which is full of promise. Let's think a little bit about this. What does he mean? Well, first of all, he means no one is exempt from disenchantment. The modern project is irreversible.

And many people who deny modernity by affiliating with Visible religion, with institutional religion, are in fact as godless as anyone else in the times, only their godlessness is kind of indisavowed. It's kind of like, you know, disingenuine godlessness. I think what he means here is that, You know, he means, he means the people of his bourgeois culture who capitulated to Nazism, you know, the, the so called God fearing Protestants and Catholics who so quickly became accomplices in the genocide of the Jews.

What happened to their religion, you know, when push came to shove? They're, they're religious for an hour a week, you know, lots of religion going on in the church, not much in their homes or in their hearts or in their political lives. That's one kind of godlessness, which he finds to be Hateful. And there's a hope.

There's a godlessness, which is full of promise, which opposes this hypocritical religion. And mu and there are heroes, secular heroes in, in such godlessness, you know, the defenders of human rights on what, from whatever political stripe. Now this thesis of religious. Religionist Christianity has been interpreted in multiple ways and I don't have the, I don't have necessarily the key to understanding it, but I don't think what he means by this is that, you know, God is dead.

That's certainly not what he means, and I'm not even sure that he's correct when he says that, you know, the world is now in a religion less age. Certainly there are parts of the world that are in a religion that are religion less. You know, I think your part of the world. Yeah. But in particular, I think Europe. You know, a significant majority of the best minds in the Western world are people who have no need of religion. And it's not as though we look at their lives and see that they are living bad lives and they're misinformed about this, that, and the other thing. They're actually good people who, in some cases, heroic people.

And their source of their inspiration is not religion. That's what he's talking about. Somehow or other, in an age in which religion has ceased to function as it has throughout history, there is nonetheless Christianity.

Now, no one is exempted from disenchantment. Here's another passage from The Ethics. By the loss of the unity which is possessed through the form of Jesus Christ, Bonhoeffer writes, the Western world is brought to the brink of the void. The forces unleashed exhaust their fury in mutual destruction.

Everything established is threatened with annihilation. This is not a crisis among other crises. It is a decisive struggle of the last days. That's end quote for Bonhoeffer. A good time to be a secular Christian, we've said that before, when signs of the last days become undeniable around you. One doesn't suddenly wither in fear that everything was a lie.

Well, actually, one rises to the occasion. Christianity thrives in this apocalyptic milieu. This is where it lives. The Christian is one who's always living in the last days, even if the culture is ignorant of it. But especially when the culture itself becomes gripped by apocalyptic fear the Christian does not participate in such fear, but neither does he deny the mood.

He rises, she rises to the occasion of being a witness. So everybody's, everybody's lost in a certain way and spiraling into the void. And the Christian holds the ground given to him by God through the grace of God, maintains the form of Christ amidst all this destruction.

Another passage from Bonhoeffer, there's no part of the world, no matter how lost, no matter how godless, that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God. End quote. So even if Bonhoeffer is wrong, and the world as a whole is not entering into a religion less age, even if there's plenty of religion in the global south, for example, even if Christianity is flourishing in certain parts of the world and expanding as other religions are, Islam, for example, even if he's wrong about this, he's right that a majority of the best and the brightest minds in the West have defected from the predominant form of religious life The West what it is, which is Christianity.

But here's the point, Christianity is not to be identified with the visible Church. Here I'd like to bring back a distinction we made some time ago, I think the distinction originates with St. Augustine, between the invisible Church and the visible Church. The invisible church is the society of the redeemed, whether they're living or dead.

It's the community of saints. It's the people that Christ has redeemed, and perhaps all human beings are there. We don't know. We won't know till the end. Perhaps all shall be saved. In any case, the invisible church is the community of, the community founded by Christ. And we cannot do without it. We cannot be Christians without a church in that cosmic sense.

To be Christian is to be a person of that community, even if you find yourself alone on a hill, sometimes I do, I still am supported by my dead friends, Thomas Merton, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart. But the visible church is something else. That's the institutions. That's the structures. That's the popes and the bishops and the temples and the liturgies.

If we can't get by without the invisible Church, we can, and we sometimes must, get by without the visible Church. That is, we need the invisible ChurchI think I misspoke therebut we do not necessarily need the visible Church. And so this comes back to an originalone of, I think, the original things we said in Secular Christ 1 is that just because the institutions of Christianity are crumbling around us does not mean that Christianity is over or even weaker.

Because these things are not identical. They're connected, sure, but they don't always coincide. That is, the visible church does not always coincide with the community of people redeemed by Christ. Sometimes, it's usurped by the devil, as it was in Germany in the 30s. But I think most importantly, the central mystery of Christianity And the theme of this whole season of Secular Christ, the incarnation of God, has nothing really to do with religion.

Religion is a human activity. It's perhaps the essential human activity, and perhaps Bonhoeffer was wrong on this.

Perhaps there will always be religion wherever there are human beings in some form, shape, or other. But the incarnation is not a human act, it's an act of God. And insofar as God takes up all that is human in Christ, He also takes up religion, he absorbs it into himself, he christens it, and so he renders it adequate.

But we should not mistake it for what it is, we should not absolutize the relative. Religion is not privileged among human activities. It's not more divine, for example, than, let's say, art, or philosophy, or science. And neither is religion any more exempt from sin and error than art, philosophy, and science.

There's no religion in the kingdom of heaven, you know? That part John Lennon got right in his song. So we anticipate an era in which, an age, Let's say the final age of revelation in which religion is no longer necessary. It will have served its purpose. But if religion is not privileged, if it's simply another human activity among others we also have an answer to the important critique often made against Christianity, that the church perpetuates evil.

So people say, you know, Oh, my problem with Christianity is all the abuses, you know, And in our day, we're no doubt thinking of those demonic priests who abuse children. But we could also point to bad popes or Protestants complicit in Nazi atrocity.

Why is this, why is this a surprise? Here it is the visible church, which is infected by sin and evil, which is perhaps even more demonic than most human things. Because as we said, wherever the Christ is invoked, there the Antichrist shall be by his side, trying to trick us. Into thinking that he's the one.

Of course, the, the church perpetuates evil. It always has. Look, look at the, the very beginnings of the Church in the, among the Apostles. Jesus has twelve apostles. One of them delivers him over to death, betrays him. Another one, Peter, denies him three times, and Paul, well, last of the apostles, starts his career as a persecutor of Christianity.

There's plenty of evil in the Church right from the get go. But here's the point. And I think this is a central point to the New Testament. Why is the New Testament comfortable with describing its heroes as persecutors of the good and cowards and betrayers of the Christ? They're comfortable with it because what they're trying to say is that nothing depends on the merits of the Church.

Nothing depends on us , becoming, you know, heroically virtuous in some pagan sense and achieving divinity like the pinnacle of a mountain that we have been climbing throughout human evolution. No, we don't rise up to meet God. God descends to meet us in the incarnation.

So I think that is probably the last point I would like to make is that every age is in the age of the church, because the church Along with every other human institution has been absorbed into God, has been rendered divine in the incarnation. And so whatever is going on, wherever we are, if we have eyes to see and faith to believe, we will see Christ's nature breaking through ordinary and all too familiar forms of sin.

We will see goodness being achieved in spite of the clear evidence that we ourselves are capable of nothing but Evil.

And, and where, where does that leave yeah, where does that leave the question of faith? I think it puts it directly in the center, doesn't it? Mm hmm. , that's what makes you a member of the invisible church, is your personal conviction, your personal decision, which is a decision that nothing can reverse, that you will respond to the Christ and be the medium of the Christ in your time, right?

Mm hmm. Come what may, that nothing can discourage you from it. And if you want to connect it to the without why of Meister Eckhart, you don't do this because you're hoping for a spot in heaven. You do this because it's a thing worth doing in itself. In fact, the saint is already in heaven. He doesn't need, she doesn't need to wait for death.

Well, you might know that Jung was very fond of this invisible church, this term, . It's something he returned to also in his writings. Tell me a bit about that. What does he say about it? I think he mentions at least a few times that that's the way to think of church today.

That is not a physical, it's not a physical place. It's, it's a sort of a union but it's an invisible union between humans he wouldn't say maybe through the Christ event, but he would say God works in us, but, and the church works in us, but it's not, it's not, it's not the visible church.

It's in contrast actually to the invisible church. He's very fond of the term. The only thing I would say is he's a little harsh on the visible church because sometimes the visible church in the. Invisible church do coincide, you know, it's not like it's impossible.

And invisible Christianity, if that's what we're talking about, invisible Christianity, perhaps it's a better term than religionless Christianity. If invisible Christianity is the essence of the thing, well, you know, we've got to become visible as well. We have to get us, we have to associate with others.

We have to form new forms of political, social life, and that's called visible Christianity. So it's not as though we disregard all that. We have to be careful because Too much critique of visible church leads to individualism, and we don't want that. Exactly. The Christian is never alone. That would be another season maybe but this this question of the of the of the church And you know how that would how that would look or how that could be formed

But I mean, I know very little of bonhoeffer, but I do remember one thing when I read him And that is that he also refers to Kierkegaard when he, and he speaks about, I think it's from when he's in the person, he says, he's been thinking about, , the religious stage and the ethical stage and the and the aesthetic stage.

And he says at the end of life, you know, we have to go back to the aesthetic phase that is not just about , ascending to some Religiosity, but it's going back to skeptics and start to enjoy play and, and the world in a different way. I was thinking about that now when you said this about the importance of the visible. And that is, , there is something essential also in Yeah. In, in, in in beauty or in in, yeah. In, in, in the visible world. And that we should not downplay that as a part of, , creation and, and as a part of yeah, the human experience.

I think that's so important. I'm not sure that Kierkegaard is, Kierkegaard is going to be, would be my guide on that. I would follow Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose whole career was dedicated to reawakening theological aesthetics and recognizing that the beautiful and the artistic and even the mythic are full of theophany.

They're full of Revelation and the Christ form is to be found there as well. But generally speaking, what you're saying is, is that we should, we need, and this really has been the season, the theme of the season, is that we need to affirm what's best in our culture. And we need to become participants of it.

We need to create culture. We need to, we need to be, we need to be productive, productive powers of, of culture. For me, we should not hierarchicalize these things. We shouldn't put religion above art, for example. You know, that's what that's what Hegel did. But these things are not hierarchically related.

They're all relative, which means they're all adequate. They can all be rendered adequate to God, and they can all be totally false and sin ridden. But that's our domain. That's, that's our human thing. That's where we are most ourselves. We're creating culture, creating society. Creating just forms of politics, creating an ecological civilization.

We are doing that human thing which God Himself has recognized as adequate to Him, to His revelation. So I would be very wary of any anti humanist Christianity. Not that secular humanism is correct, but Christianity is never anti human.