“Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power. It should give much more offence, more shock to the world, than it is doing. Christianity should take a much more definite stand for the weak than to consider the potential moral right of the strong.”
We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree. We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.[3]
If the contemporary church wants to claim the witness of their deaths, it must wrestle with the fact that both King and Bonhoeffer gave their definitive witness beyond the bounds of the churches of their time, apart from the great majority of Christians in their countries. If they found the body of Christ, it was through solidarity with a company of people representing many faiths and no faith. If they bear witness to God’s new reality breaking in from the cruciform margins, then their deaths also testify to a certain death of the official churches.
Stanley Hauerwas has written that “the church is a social ethic.” Receiving King and Bohoeffer makes that sort of statement difficult because their witness stands for the church’s social failure inasmuch as it represents the body of Christ in strange new forms. The lived social ethic of the official churches in their times was ambivalent at best and lifeless at worst, and the best possibilities for the gospel often seemed to form in alternative memberships. Aftter King and Bonhoeffer, then, what does church mean for Christian social ethics?
We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree. We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.[3]
Secondly, I will watch "The Last Temptation of Christ," which I have seen several times and was reminded of David Bowie playing Pilate by a friend on Facebook ... that is a thought-provoking film, and well-worth some time.
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In a Christian community everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows ‘unemployed’ members to exist within it will perish because of them. It will be well, therefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community, that he may know in hours of doubt that he, too, is not useless and unusable. Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Silence is the simple stillness of the individual under the Word of God. We are silent before hearing the Word because our thoughts are already directed to the Word, as a child is quiet when he enters his father’s room. We are silent after hearing the Word because the Word is still speaking and dwelling within us. We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God….
Silence is nothing else but waiting for God’s Word and coming from God’s Word with a blessing. But everybody knows that this is something that needs to be practiced and learned, in these days when talkativeness prevails. Real silence, real stillness, really holding one’s tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness.
Source: Life Together
An ecclesiology of communion that is Trinitarian offers a model for the Church of living together in unity though not in uniformity. This model may allow for and affirm prophetic voices from the margins so that the church might respond to the cries of a world in need. This thesis attempts to explore and describe an ecclesiology of communion that is influenced by Trinitarian theology. In this awareness of difference and tension, this model of ecclesiology is dynamic and transformational. The hope is that this ecclesiology may describe a more dynamic Church that not only exists in judgment but also exists in action to dismantle systems of oppression.
This thesis begins with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his sense that the Church is constituted socially by Christ. He states “The church is the hidden Christ among us.”[1] In this ecclesiology, Christ is at the center, and communion is known within and between people as they encounter Christ and one another. Further, the “church is only the church when it exists for others.”
The poetic and mystical descriptions of church by Rowan Williams offer a model that the church, along with the creation itself, is gift. As God made the world and as God gave his son to the world, God also gave the church. As such, the church exists in a contingent way, it exists in judgment. As a community of the forgiven, the members of the church are made up of persons, not mere individuals. The persons of the church can be likened to the persons of the Trinity, living in unity and difference, in the mystical Godhead. Finally, in Rowan Williams description, Christ is present in the interaction between people as they encounter and welcome those who are different, that is; the other.
Lastly, to evaluate how communion exists in judgment and action this thesis takes up James Cone’s critiques of ecclesiology. For Cone, “The Christian church is that community of persons who ‘got the hint,’” and thus refused to be content with human pain and suffering. Refusing merely to speak of the church mystically or metaphysically, Cone challenges conventional (white, European) assumptions and claims about church and also challenges even the highly nuanced theology of Rowan Williams. If the church universal and local embraces such a model, it may move from individualism to community, from inward gazing to outward mission, from a focus on the in crowd to focus on all those at the margins.
Living into a model of the dynamic church, the persons of the church would hear the cry of the poor and oppressed and then act to end oppression, to see the injustices of our world, and act to counter them. As we turn to one another in our local churches, in our larger church bodies, and in our worldwide churches, we rely on the work of Christ to bring us to full unity. As we turn to one another with the ordinary, time tested practices of our tradition, we approach one another with humility, with an awareness of our own brokenness, and our own incompleteness. From the interaction between and among the members of the church there emerges a personal and communal transformation into a church that is dynamic, outward looking and responds to a world in need. In the contexts of the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church, we are perhaps at a turning point, an opportunity, or a catastrophe, depending on one’s perspective.
[1] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes – 1928-1936- From the Collected Works, Volume I (Collins, London: 1965)
