Confessing Evangelical

John H June 27th, 2010

In my previous post on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together, we saw how Bonhoeffer places the praying of the psalms at the heart of our prayer together as Christians. In this post I’ll look in more detail at his observations on the psalms.

“The Psalter occupies a unique place in the Holy Scriptures”, Bonhoeffer writes, by being both God’s Word and the prayer of human beings. However, when we come to pray the psalms for ourselves, we will quickly find passages that we feel unable to make our own: “the psalms of innocence, the bitter, the imprecatory psalms, and also in part the psalms of the Passion”.

The answer is not to skip the “difficult” psalms, but to recognise that “this difficulty indicates the point at which we get our first glimpse of the secret of the Psalter”: namely, that “here Someone else is praying, not we”:

that the One who is here protesting his innocence, who is invoking God’s judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. It is he who is praying here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter.

So when we sing or pray the psalms, we are united with the prayer of Christ himself. The Church, as the Body of Christ on earth, “continues to pray his prayer to the end of time”:

Even if a verse or a psalm is not one’s own prayer, it is nevertheless the prayer of another member of the fellowship; so it is quite certainly the prayer of the true Man Jesus Christ and his Body on the earth.

And as such, the Psalter teaches us how to pray:

In the Psalter we learn to pray on the basis of Christ’s prayer. The Psalter is the great school of prayer.

It teaches us “what prayer means”, namely “praying according to the Word of God, on the basis of promises”. It teaches us “what we should pray”, namely “the whole prayer of Christ, the prayer of him who was true Man and who alone possesses the full range of experiences expressed in this prayer”. And it teaches us to pray “as a fellowship”, acknowledging that our own individual prayer “is only a minute fragment of the whole prayer of the Church”.

(Incidentally, I wonder if that last point is a way to understand texts such as Mark 11:24: “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”. Should this perhaps be seen as a promise to the church as a whole rather than to us as individuals? Perhaps some roving exegete could comment on this: for example, is the “you” in that verse plural?)

The psalms encompass the full breadth of prayer, just as the Lord’s Prayer does:

Oetinger, in his exposition of the Psalms, brought out a profound truth when he arranged the whole Psalter according to the Lord’s Prayer. What he had discerned was that the whole sweep of the Book of Psalms was concerned with nothing more nor less than the brief petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

Only the prayer of Jesus Christ “has the promise of fulfilment and frees us from the vain repetitions of the heathen”:

The more deeply we grow into the psalms and the more often we pray them as our own, the more simple and rich will our prayer become.

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John H June 26th, 2010

In the second chapter of Life Together (see previous post), Dietrich Bonhoeffer looks at “the day with others”. Most of the chapter is concerned with praying with our fellow Christians: as Bonhoeffer writes, “common life under the Word begins with common worship at the beginning of the day”.

The nature of this common worship will vary depending on the type of fellowship (e.g. families with children, fellowships of ministers), but the basic ingredients should always be the same: “the word of Scripture, the hymns of the Church, and the prayer of fellowship”:

1. Scripture (1): the psalms

Bonhoeffer urges the singing and praying of psalms as part of our life together. In the psalms the church joins its prayers to those of Christ himself, whose prayer the Psalter is. (More of this in my next post.)

2. Scripture (2): reading the Scriptures

Bonhoeffer advises that the reading of Scriptures in the fellowship should consist of extended, consecutive readings rather than isolated texts. It is as a whole that the Scriptures are “God’s revealing Word”:

Only in the infiniteness of its inner relationships, in the connection of Old and New Testaments, of promise and fulfilment, sacrifice and law, law and gospel, cross and resurrection, faith and obedience, having and hoping, will the full witness of Jesus Christ the Lord be perceived.

Hence Bonhoeffer recommends that a family fellowship “should surely be able to read and listen to a chapter of the Old Testament and at least half a chapter of the New Testament every morning and evening”.

3. Singing the new song

The psalms and the scripture readings should be followed by “the singing together of a hymn, this being the voice of the Church, praising, thanking and praying”. Why do Christians sing together?

The reason is quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because they can unite in the Word.

Music is “completely the servant of the Word”, which leads Bonhoeffer to argue that “the singing of the congregation … is essentially singing in unison”. “Destroyers of unison singing” must be “rigorously eliminated”: whether that’s those calling attention to their musical abilities by improvising harmonies, or those “who because of some mood will not join in the singing and thus disturb the fellowship”.

4. Saying our prayers together

Having “heard God’s Word” and “been permitted to join in the hymn of the Church”, now “we are to pray to God as a fellowship”. This “must really be our word, our prayer for this day, for our work, for our fellowship, for the particular needs and sins that oppress us in common, for the persons who are committed to our care”.

Bonhoeffer’s advice is that this prayer should be “said always by the same person”, but in their own words rather than using set forms:

The use of formal prayers can, under certain circumstances, be a help even for a small family group. But often a ritual becomes only an evasion of real prayer. The wealth of churchly forms and thought may easily lead us away from our own prayer; the prayers then become beautiful and profound, but not genuine.

The “situation in public worship is different from that of daily family worship”; within the family or small community, “the poorest mumbling utterance can be better than the best-formulated prayer.”

Conclusions

I found this chapter challenging. It made me acutely conscious of how weak/non-existent our own collective family devotional life is, and also of how weak my own personal prayers have become. Use of the daily office has been a great help in the first three stages described by Bonhoeffer – praying the psalms, reading the Scriptures, singing the hymn of the church – but has led me to underplay the fourth aspect, that of praying in my own words. Not completely, by any means, but enough for this chapter to make me rethink how I go about my personal prayers.

Similarly, I hope Bonhoeffer’s challenge will also inspire me to new attempts to foster more shared devotional time with E as a couple and with the boys as a family – though my work patterns (among other things) make this difficult to implement to the extent described by Bonhoeffer.

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John H June 25th, 2010

I’ve recently been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together, in which Bonhoeffer reflects on the nature of Christian community based in particular on his experiences running the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde between 1935 and 1937.

The starting point for Bonhoeffer’s reflections is Psalm 133:1: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” As he observes:

It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. … It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s Word and sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the Gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible fellowship is a blessing. (pp.7,8)

Christian community means “community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ”. This means that, first of all, it is a community that is formed by “the Word of God in Jesus Christ”. And what Bonhoeffer has in mind here is not the written Word of Scripture, but the Word that is spoken by one Christian to another:

God has willed that we should seek him and find his living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore a Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. … The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. (pp.11f.)

Because Christian community has been established by Christ purely on the basis of faith in his Word, it is a mistake to look for “some extraordinary social experience” or “some wishful idea of religious fellowship”:

By sheer grace God will not permit us to live even for a brief moment in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. (p.15)

Hence true Christian community is realistic:

Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. (p.15)

By contrast, anyone “who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter”. Similarly, the survival of a Christian community depends on “whether it achieves sober wisdom” regarding this distinction “between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community”:

In other words, life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy, catholic, Christian church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and and struggles and promise of the whole Church. [...]

There is a particular risk when we start exercising a right of selection over who enters our community, or separating ourselves from other Christians, other than where this is “necessitated quite objectively” (e.g. by “common work” or “local conditions”):

When the way of intellectual or spiritual selection is taken the human element always insinuates itself and robs the fellowship of its spiritual power and effectiveness for the Church, drives it into sectarianism. The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door. We must, therefore, be very careful at this point. (p.24)

That’s not to say that Christian community should be a dour, hairshirted experience without joy. As Bonhoeffer points out:

There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. … We are bound together by faith, not by experience. (pp.25f.)

“How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity”: and Bonhoeffer concludes that:

…now we can rightly interpret the words “in unity” and say, “for brethren to dwell together through Christ“. For Jesus Christ alone is our unity. “He is our peace”. Through him alone do we have access to one another, joy in one another, and fellowship with one another. (p.26)

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John H May 23rd, 2010

Not only do our Lutheran Confessions proclaim the Spirit-breathed theology of Scripture, not only do they reveal the Spirit-filled life and testimony of their authors, but they emphasize throughout in a remarkable manner the saving and comforting work of the Spirit in the life of every believer and throughout the church.

Robert Preus, Getting Into the Theology of Concord

For the last of this trio of Pentecost posts (see previous posts 1 | 2), some links to posts I’ve done in the past on the work of the Holy Spirit, in particular as that work is understood by the Lutheran tradition.

At the heart of this understanding is the following statement from Article V of the Augsburg Confession, which I’ve previously described as the engine-room of Lutheran spirituality, providing the crucial link between justification by faith (Article IV) and the life of faith (Article VI):

So that we may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments was instituted. For through the Word and the sacraments as through instruments the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God in those who hear the Gospel…

Both sides of this statement need to be kept together: first, the Word and sacraments cannot be separated from the work of the Holy Spirit, as if they had some inherent power distinct from the Spirit’s work; second, the principal way in which the Holy Spirit works in us is through the Word and sacraments, rather than through “direct” means separate from those instruments.

Sometimes Lutherans speak so highly of Word and sacrament that we forget to speak of the Spirit whose instruments they are. Sometimes Christians from other traditions (especially from the charismatic tradition) see the Word and sacraments as almost in opposition (or at least stark contrast) to the life-giving work of the Spirit. Article V is a corrective to both groups.

In 2008 I wrote a couple of further posts on the Holy Spirit in the Lutheran confessions:

• Part 1, looking at who the Holy Spirit is and what he does (drawing in particular from the Small Catechism).
• Part 2, looking at how the Holy Spirit carries out his work of calling, enlightening, sanctifying and keeping us, forgiving our sins and raising us on the last day (drawing on Article V of the Augsburg Confession and expanding on the brief comments made above).

The last word, though, goes to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Augsburg Confession places the work of the Spirit squarely in the communal life of the church. A Spirit who works through Word and sacrament is necessarily a Spirit who creates (and works through) community, rather than individualistically. As Bonhoeffer writes (in The Way to Freedom, quoted in this post):

It will again be found in the fact that it pleased the Holy Spirit to promise himself not to the individual, but to the gathering. It is the visible gathering which receives the Spirit and which is brought to koinonia through the Spirit.

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John H June 11th, 2008

I’m currently reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s little book The Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible. I hope to post some of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on the psalms at some point, but in the meantime the book’s final section (really an appendix or afterword), “The Blessing of Morning Prayer”, stirred my heart and conscience and seemed a good follow-up to yesterday’s post on morning prayer in the Small Catechism:

The Blessing of Morning Prayer

From the unity it has attained the whole day takes its order and discipline. This unity must be sought and found in morning prayer and will prove itself in work. Prayer in the early morning is crucial for the whole day. Wasted time of which we are ashamed, temptations to which we succumb, feebleness and lethargy at work, disorder and indiscipline in our thoughts and in our intercourse with other people – these more often than not have their cause in the neglect of morning prayer.

The ordering and arrangement of our time will be more positive when it is the outcome of prayer. Temptations which the working day brings with it will be conquered if there has been a real encounter with God. Decisions demanded by our work will come more easily and readily when they are made not in the fear of men but simply before the face of God. “And whatsoever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23). Even mechanical tasks will be carried out with greater patience, when they are recognised as tasks laid on us by God. Increased energy for work will be ours when we have asked God to give us today the strength our work requires.

• Discipleship , Prayer
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John H May 30th, 2008

So what is the difference between a person who follows Christ and that same person before they were called? In chapter 5 of The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer emphasises that what Christ effects when he calls us is not a gradual change, but a radical break with the past:

We must face up to the truth that the call of Jesus does set up a barrier between man and his natural life. But this barrier is no surly contempt for life, no legalistic piety, it is the life which is life indeed, the gospel, the person of Jesus Christ. (p.49)

What is lost, rather, is “all immediacy with the things of this world” (p.49, emphasis added). It is not that Jesus blocks us off from all things, but rather that he “wants to be the centre” through which “all things shall come to pass”:

He is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality. … Since his coming man has no immediate relationship of his own any more to anything, neither to God nor to the world; Christ wants to be the mediator. (p.49, italics in original)

So what distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian is not a different set of ideals, but the “fait accompli” of Christ the Mediator who stands between us and all things:

Between father and son, husband and wife, the individual and the nation, stands Christ the Mediator, whether they are able to recognize him or not. (p.50)

This means we can neither repudiate the things of the world nor “return to the world and enjoy our direct relation with it with a good conscience”. Rather, our relationship with these things is now mediated through Christ:

What has not been given to me for Christ’s sake, does not come from God. … Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin. (p.51)

More positively, the mediation of Christ provides a means by which I can reach my neighbour in a new way, overcoming the “unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness” which blocks the way from one person to another:

Christ stands between us, and we can only get in touch with our neighbours through him. That is why intercession is the most promising way to reach our neighbours, and corporate prayer, offered in the name of Christ, the purest form of fellowship. (p.51)

So that is the difference between a person before and after Christ calls them; between a person as a non-Christian and that same person as a Christian. The Christian is neither the same as they were before Christ’s call, nor merely in possession of a new set of ideals or legal obligations. Rather, they now recognise Christ as the mediator between them and all things:

• between us and God;
• between us and other people;
• between us and the rest of creation;
• between us and the fulfilment of the law (see chapter 8 of Discipleship).

And in each case, Christ is not merely a barrier between us and those things, but also the door to them. We cannot get to any of them without Christ, but the moment we are in Christ we cannot escape our connection with any of them.

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John H May 30th, 2008

In the comments on my post about Bonhoeffer and hyper-Lutheranism, the question came up of how (or even whether) we should expect the moral behaviour of Christians to differ from that of non-Christians.

Now, as was pointed out in that discussion, it is certainly the case that not every non-Christian is “a total immoral swine”. Many non-Christians put many Christians to shame in their concern to live a good life and to help others in a sacrificial way. On the other hand, even if we don’t expect all Christians to behave better than all non-Christians, we should certainly expect individual Christians to behave better than if they were not Christians.

Not “expect” as in “require as a legalistic obligation”, please note, but simply “expect” as in “expect that to be the normal and ‘natural’ consequence of faith in Christ”. If someone has faith in Christ and their behaviour and attitudes show no apparent consequences of that, then that is a problem, not simply material for a weekly law/gospel dynamic when they go to church.

But what is the nature of the difference which faith in Christ should make in our attitudes and behaviour, if it is not one of new (or renewed) “legal” requirements upon us? I hope to look at how Bonhoeffer answers that question in my next post, for which this post is really just an extended introduction.

• Discipleship , Law and Gospel
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John H May 26th, 2008

Josh has a great post about the tendency of some “confessional” Lutherans to “say things that flatly contradict most of what the Lutheran Confessions say about repentance, good works [and] the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian’s life”, let alone the teachings of Jesus or St Paul.

Josh ascribes this tendency (one I’ve occasionally described as “hyper-Lutheranism”) to the results of defining one’s theology as a negation of the teachings of other Christian traditions. However, his post has some strong parallels with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s criticisms of “cheap grace” in the opening chapter of The Cost of Discipleship.

For example, where Josh observes that “it’s sort of trendy these days to say that … the life of a Christian is at best indistinguishable from that of an unbeliever except when he is participating in the liturgy”, Bonhoeffer writes:

The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to escape from the world for an hour or so on Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are forgiven.

And where Josh argues that “‘properly distinguishing Law and Gospel’ … has been in our era largely defined as a negation of everything that Catholics, evangelicals, and Reformed have to say about the Christian life”, Bonhoeffer makes a similar point in even harsher terms:

We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcase of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ … To be “Lutheran” must mean that we leave the following of Christ to legalists, Calvinists and enthusiasts – and all this for the sake of grace. We justified the world, and condemned as heretics those who tried to follow Christ.

• Discipleship , Lutheranism , Sanctification
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John H May 4th, 2008

We’ve come up to Leeds for the weekend to stay with my parents, and this morning I paid a visit to St Luke’s Lutheran Church for their morning service.

St Luke’s is a congregation in the Lutheran Church in Great Britain (the UK’s LWF-affiliated Lutheran synod), and it was interesting to see the similarities and contrasts with the ELCE. It turns out that “the other lot” share the odd Lutheran predilection for sitting down for hymns, and the Lutheran Book of Worship is so similar to Lutheran Worship that it’s almost eerie (though not surprising given that the two books emerged from the same process of liturgical revision). It was a non-communion service, which helped avoid any awkward moments about intercommunion…

It was also good to meet blogging ordinand Doorman-Priest, who was leading the worship, in the flesh. Though I stupidly forgot to ask what his name was when we spoke afterwards: D-P, if you’re reading this, any chance you could email me with the secret of your mild-mannered alter ego?

The main reason for this post though is to share the following quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Pastor Mark’s sermon. The sermon text was John 17:1-11, and the sermon emphasised Jesus’ words about unity as relating to the need for mutual love and community among Christians in the face of the world’s hostility and persecution (rather than (mis)interpreting Jesus’ “that they may be one” in institutional terms). As the pastor put it, we need to “rub elbows” with one another, and he quoted the following passage from Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together:

God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth.

He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”

It’s so important that the gospel, the Word of God, should come to us principally as a living, spoken Word. Reading the Bible is good and beneficial for us, but it is secondary to hearing the Word, hearing the promises of God declared audibly to us. It is that living Word which both requires and creates community, the community of the church, of those who proclaim and hear the gospel together.

Without that constant renewal by the spoken Word, our faith (or “the Christ in our own heart”) inevitably grows weak, because Christ has not willed or promised that we should be able to keep our faith in him strong in the absence of the Word proclaimed among our fellow Christians.

• Cracking Quote, Gromit , Gospel and Sacrament , TIWIARN
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John H March 21st, 2007

I mentioned in my last post the sermon I heard some years ago by Roy Clements, in which he preached on the whole of Matthew 25 one evening at Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge (D.S. Ketelby was also there, and may be able to correct my recollections of the evening!).

This was classic Roy: lucid, expository, persuasive and unforgettable. None of those qualities are lost by anything that might have happened later (we’re not Donatists round here, after all…). There is certainly more to Matthew 25 than he preached that night, but I don’t think his overall framework, his presentation of what Dick Lucas would call the “melodic line” of the chapter, can be bettered. In the following summary, the usual disclaimers apply: any weaknesses are the result of my fading recollections of a sermon I heard a good twelve years ago, and not the fault of Clements himself.

Matthew 25 follows on from Jesus’ discourse in chapter 24, where he has been teaching of “the sign of [his] coming and of the end of the age”. I assume Clements would take the usual conservative evangelical position (which I share) of saying this chapter speaks both of the events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem in the first century AD, and the second coming of Christ at the end of the age (even if the precise division between the two is not always easy to identify).

This then raises the question of what the disciples are to do while waiting for “that day and hour”. This is the question that the three parables in chapter 25 answer, as follows:

• The wise and foolish bridesmaids (vv.1-12)

  This story depicts a basic division: there are those who are ready for Christ’s return, and there are those who are caught unawares and end up being locked out of the “wedding banquet”.

  However, the wise and the foolish bridesmaids all fall asleep in the parable. So taken on its own, this parable could be seen as implying that all you need to be a “wise” bridesmaid is to get yourself ready (lamp-oil to hand) and then you can snooze your way through life with little apparent difference from the “foolish” ones around you. Hence the second parable.

• The parable of the talents (vv.14-30)

  This parable corrects the potential misunderstanding of the preceding story by showing that the life we live while waiting for our master to come and settle accounts with us is not one in which we are to be drowsy and asleep. Rather, we are about our father’s business, doing those good works that flow from the faith that is given to us. I’m pretty sure this is the sermon where I first heard the old line that “we are saved by faith alone, but saving faith is never alone”.

  So we now know we are to be prepared, and we know that this preparedness manifests itself in action rather than drowsy indolence. But another misunderstanding can now arise, as we suppose that generalised busyness – or even worse, the pursuit of financial gain (see those talents double!) – are what Jesus has in mind here. Which brings us to the third and final parable.

• The parable of the sheep and the goats (vv.31-46)

  This parable shows the nature of the works that we are to be about as we wait for the Lord’s return. Not simply “using our talents” or seeking personal gain, but serving Christ as we encounter him in others. (I’m pretty sure Clements took the view that “brothers” here is restricted to Christians; I’m undecided on this.)

  [As a separate point (i.e. we're not in Cambridge any more, Toto), it is worth bringing in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's emphasis that this parable is teaching gospel rather than law. The crucial thing about the works described in vv35 and 36 is that the saints are unconscious of these works. These are not works that we ourselves do under our own steam or by our own conscious decision: they are the works that Christ does in and through us, that will astonish us when they are revealed to us at the end of the age. It's easy for us to miss the point that most of the sheep - us! - will already know this parable. Hence it cannot be referring to a "tick-box" approach of deliberately-chosen, self-motivated good works - feeding the hungry, visiting those in prison, etc. - but rather to unconscious works of which we are currently unaware.]

So there, in very brief outline, is the argument of Roy Clements’ sermon on this chapter. I hope it goes some way towards communicating the “melodic line” of the chapter as described by Clements: we are to be ready; we are to be active; and those activities are to be directed towards serving others. A lot more can be said, and needs to be said, about each of those parables, but that basic framework still strikes me as sound.

• Eschatology , Sermons
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