That's too (Christo)logical

Thus Bonhoeffer states his case for obedience to Jesus on grounds different from those at the basis of a system of moral principles. He grounds obedience on the basis of Jesus Christ alone.—Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, page 154

Why?

So, Abraham took his cue from God and said, “Well, now, let’s talk a little about Sodom.” As he does this, he is playing the role that a prophet, or a man or woman of God, or the elect people are supposed to play. That is a role of intercession, because election is not for privilege. Election, being chosen by God, is so a world can know the truth of the Gospel.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 145

<idle musing>
Indeed. But, as usual, we pervert it and make it all about us...
</idle musing>

The real enemy

[T]he test of whether you are a believer is not in what you do with the third through the tenth commandments; but it is what you let the God of the first two commandments do with the good, the goods, in your life. The greatest enemies to God in our lives are the gifts and the goods He has given us. There is where the competition is.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 136

<idle musing>
Indeed! Too much prosperity and you forget God. You don't need him—you've got the future covered. Right? Wrong! He holds the future. And all our goods and goodies won't secure it. But we forget that when we have too much, don't we?
</idle musing>

Yes or no?

Jesus’s command forces the hearer to decision, to a stark “yes” or “no” response to his call. But if we refuse to be led through this break with given worldly ties, then we have already refused our allegiance. We have failed both to believe and obey. Christ’s call has not formed us as it could have, and thus we fail to see reality as it is in truth.—Bonhoeffer as quoted in Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, page 149

Walk on

The most astounding about all of this is that Abraham is an example of justification by faith. What is justification? Justification by faith is a legal concept for most of us, is it not? How can you make someone understand “justification by faith” if you do not have a law code, if you do not have a court, and if you do not have a judge? Yet Abraham is the supreme example of being justified by faith. He believed God and it was accounted unto him for righteousness. Clearly that is not according to some legal system of accounting. So what is the righteousness that God is seeking and which accrued to Abraham? The essence of it is a personal relationship with the living God. Notice Genesis 17:1. God says that if Abraham is to be all he is meant to be as a human being (“perfect” in the language of the King James Version), he has only to “walk” before God. That is not surprising when we remember that in Genesis the most characteristic way of describing what we mean by the term salvation is to say that a person “walked with God.”— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 123

It's not the act

Christ’s call to do something specific, then, should not mean that the only thing required is behavior modification. Rather, true obedience has commitment to the person of Jesus Christ as its ground and goal. Obedience without commitment to Jesus Christ is not obedience at all but self-chosen moral idealism. Without Jesus Christ, then, “obedience” is disobedience no matter what concrete behavioral form it may take.—Bonhoeffer as quoted in Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, page 147

It's grounded in YHWH

If you look at the book of Leviticus, chapter 18, to see how sexual behavior is addressed in Israelite society, you will find at both the beginning and the end of the chapter the simple expression, “I am the Lord [Yahweh] your God.” What is the point of this? It is providing one simple explanation for the commandments regarding sexual behavior: because I am Yahweh. Why don’t you do this or that? One simple answer is given: “I am Yahweh.” The basis for moral differentiation and for ethical discrimination lies ultimately and solely in the very nature of the God of Israel.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 113

<idle musing>
You don't hear that in the current debates, do you? It's almost as if nobody—on either side—really wants to approach it from the nature of who God is. And if it is grounded in who God is, then what are the ramifications? I don't know for sure, but I suspect it might send all of us back to God on our knees...

I've been reading the book of Romans lately in multiple different translations. It's been a fun exercise in seeing things through varied lenses, but all of them agree on something: the culmination of the catalog of sins in Romans 1 isn't homosexuality—sure it's on the road there, but the final destination is a list of what most would call "common sins"—gossip, pride, breaking promises, lack of kindness, disobeying parents—the list goes on. The sad thing is that some of the ones yelling the loudest against homosexuality are doing so in the most unkind and unloving way.

Make no mistake about it, homosexuality is sin! But so are the other things listed! They all need to be repented off. And by repent, I mean turned away from. In other words, Stop it!. All by the grace of God through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. There is no other way. But, by the power of the Holy Spirit, it is possible—and God commands it!.

Flame away! But here I stand, I can do no other!
</idle musing>

True freedom

But from all that can be gathered about Bonhoeffer’s soteriology, it is clear that the self that needs to be broken—and broken into—is the guilty self, the self fallen way from God and others, hopelessly entangled in its own falsely construed world. Only because this bondage is so pernicious—it is, after all, a bondage where one is enslaved by oneself—does Bonhoeffer feel it necessary to emphasize the intrusive and disrupting influence of God’s call in Christ in words that are often quite forceful. Thus it should never be forgotten that the purpose of defeat of the selfish self is its liberation, its salvation, and its being made free for God and for others in community rather htan its destruction or corruption.—Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, page 142

<idle musing>
And if ever there was a message that is unpalatable to the world, death to self is. It doesn't matter that death to self is actually liberation. It just won't sell. It won't fill the pews. It won't meet the budget. It isn't popular. Never was. And never will be. But that doesn't mean it isn't true! And it also doesn't mean it shouldn't be preached...
</idle musing>

Sovereignty

If God was alone before the act of Creation, then the concept of sovereignty is not the ultimate concept of God, the ultimate word to be said about Him. In the beginning when there was nothing but Yahweh alone, there was nothing for Him to be sovereign over! So, there must be something about Him that is greater than His sovereignty. His sovereignty is an expression of who He is in relation to everything that he created.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 100

The eclipse of the sun god

Last weekend was the summer solstice, the time of year when the sun is declared king and the temperatures are soaring. Well, supposedly that's the way it works. Except it doesn't always work that way—especially in Grand Marais!

There is always a festival celebrating the summer solstice. Part of that is a pageant put on by the local players; this year it featured a celebration of the north woods—complete with kids on stilts looking like trees and a TALL sun god on very tall stilts and a larger than life Bacchus with green face. Over all it was a cute and well done performance.

Except that the temperature was about 40°F for the performance and the whole weekend was foggy. The sun didn't shine at all. The temperature didn't get above about 60° and most of the time is was in the low 50s° to mid-40s°. The fog would roll in and the temperatures would crash. The fog would subside a bit, and the temperature would recover a bit. So much for the power of the sun god!

I found it highly ironic and not a little amusing. Maybe if there had been more or better sacrifices? Or maybe the sun god's priests didn't perform the liturgy correctly. Or...maybe the sun god isn't sovereign over the weather! Maybe only the Christian God is sovereign. Something to think about, isn't it?

So that's the problem!

Because God is active in Jesus Christ, Christ’s call is both an act of grace and an act of salvation without failing to be a call to obedience at the same time…At the center of Bonhoeffer’s soteriology is his insistence that the unredeemed human subject is trapped inside itself…Only as the sinful human subject is encountered by God’s own self can the human person be liberated from his or her own self-imposed entrapment, isolation, and the resulting alienation from others. Neither human action nor human reflection is capable of delivering humanity from its self-enclosed isolationism. Only by being actively confronted by the living God can the human self be freed from its distorted selfhood to be free for God and for others in community. Self-reflection is not the solution to the problem; it only compounds the problem.—Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, pages 140-141

<idle musing>
Indeed! And in our self-worshiping society, with it's constant attention to self, we are compounding the problem every moment...and the solution seems ridiculous. Death to self? Are you crazy? Deny your self? Yougottabekiddingme!
</idle musing>

Revelation (not the book)

He [God] is the Creator who makes all things, but He transcends His own creation. He is not involved in the flux and flow of the universe. There is an infinite qualitative distinction between Him and what He has created, an infinite ontological distinction between them. He is one order of being and the creation is another. There is a discontinuity between them.

That is the reason revelation is so crucial; there is a gulf between us and Him that we cannot cross. If we are ever to know Him, He must come down to us. That chasm is uncrossable apart from revelation. He must reveal Himself, and that is what we are getting in the Scripture.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 95

Morality and legalism

The model of Christ as a moral teacher cannot do justice to the disciple’s dependence upon God’s gracious and active call in Jesus because it has employed an objectified and objectifying model of God and of Christ. This model has reduced Christ to an object of reflection and his teachings to lifeless moral values, principles, or absolutes. This model, in not doing justice to Christ as the divine subject incarnate, reduces obedience to legalism and Christian freedom to self-grounded moral striving.—Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, page 140

About that primordial surd

Now, where does that magical power come from? It does not come from the realm of the gods, because the gods draw on it as well. It comes from that primordial realm behind the gods.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, pages 82-83

<idle musing>
To get the full understanding of what he's driving at, you need to remember the previous excerpt. Basically, the gods are subject to a power greater than themselves and must manipulate that power via magic—just as humans try to do. So gods are just bigger versions of humanity, subject to circumstances outside themselves but with a bit more power and a longer (unending) life...that's what makes the biblical God so different and unique—he condemns magic because he doesn't need to control anything—he already does! And you can't control him via magic because he is creator of all...

Personally I find that refreshing and freeing : )
</idle musing>

Intellectual assent

“An idea about Christ, a doctrinal system, a general religious recognition of grace or forgiveness of sins does not require discipleship.”—Bonhoeffer as quoted in Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, page 139

<idle musing>
And that's how we got into this mess...
</idle musing>

What's that I see behind you?

In the Babylonian story of cosmic origins, the one who reigned had the tablets of destiny around his neck, and they had magical power. Did you notice any reference to magic in the book of Psalms? Did you notice any appeal to witchcraft or sorcery? Yet there is no god in any of the pantheons in the Ancient Near East who was not very skilled in magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and the occult. Why is that? If you are a god, why do you need a magical amulet and the skill to use it?...It is because there is a power behind the gods to which we must turn if we are to gain power. Notice that in magic there is no appeal to a personal god. The realm for magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and the occult is what [Yehezkiel] Kaufmann call the “metadivine,” the real beyond the gods. So he says, behind everything in the pagan understanding of reality there are two worlds, not one. There is the divine world and behind the divine world, there is the metadivine one. And the gods are as dependent on that metadivine world, the world of raw, faceless power, as we humans are. This idea is at the heart of every mythology; if you read Greek mythology, you will find it; if you read Norse mythology, you will find it, and on and on. In every one of them you will find that the nature, the activity, and the fate of every god is determined by a force outside of themselves.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, pages 77-78

<idle musing>
And nothing has changed since then. Even among Christians, you see this. Use a particular verse to bind God to act in a certain way. Pray a certain prayer in a certain way. Do a liturgical act. Get up at a certain time. Read a certain number of Bible verses/chapters a day. The list goes on.

Why? Because we want to be in control! If there is a power behind God that we can get a handle on, we can control our destiny. We don't really believe that God is love, do we? If we did, we wouldn't see a need for all of that stuff...we would be able to "cast our cares upon him" and "take no thought for the morrow" and "in everything give thanks" and...well, you get the idea.
</idle musing>

Who is really important here?

Every Friday morning, several of us get together at 6:00 for an informal time of sharing and praying. The group varies in size from two to a dozen and has been meeting for over 10 years now. We gather at the local coffee shop, Java Moose, for about two hours.

Last Friday, the book Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence came up. In case you aren't aware of the book, it was written in the 1600s in a monastery in Paris. Brother Lawrence was the dishwasher for the monastery for many years; he was illiterate, so the book is a record of conversations between him and the person who wrote the book. It's delightful little book that you can easily read in a sitting—or spend a lifetime pondering its insights.

Steve, one of the guys there, commented that 400 years later, we don't know anything about the monastery's personnel except the dishwasher, the lowliest of the lows on the totem pole. The support staff, as it were, of the mission.

Interesting isn't it? I'm sure the people in charge at the time were convinced they were doing great things for God that were of lasting importance. But all we have is a book by a dishwasher! And it's had a major impact on many (millions, maybe) lives.

Think about that when you think of missions organizations. Maybe the support staff, who are usually considered overhead, are the ones who will be remembered 400 years from now..."But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first." (Matthew 19:30; Mark 10:31, NIV)

It isn't legalism

One of Bonhoeffer’s most important insights in Discipleship is his definition of the nature and effects of Christ’s authority. His understanding of Christ’s authority will allow him to depict God’s subjectivity in the Christ narrative. It will allow him to appropriate Jesus’s commandments and obedience to them as theologically suitable. But Bonhoeffer’s particular model of Jesus’s authority will also enable him to bring together grace and obedience without succumbing to either legalism or antinomianism. Thus his model of Christ’s authority is the positive insight that his deconstruction of “cheap grace” anticipates.—Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, pages 136-127

<idle musing>
I've heard people accuse Bonhoeffer of being a legalist after reading The Cost of Discipleship. I agree with the authors of this book; Bonhoeffer navigates the tricky waters between legalism and antinomianism very skillfully. Would that more people were able to...
</idle musing>

How atheistic are they really?

The reality is that any good atheist today is about sixty-five percent Christian. And if you listen to him, you will find that most of his arguments for his position had their origins in biblical revelation.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 72

<idle musing>
I heard Kinlaw argue in class once or twice that atheism couldn't exist in its current form without a Christian foundation. Interesting thought, isn't it?
</idle musing>

Say that again...

Because this Word is always God’s own, it is transcendent; but because it is God’s Word, it makes itself known. Because God makes God’s self known in God’s Word, human beings can hear that Word and know God through that Word. The Word is revelation of God inasmuch as it is God’s Word; and inasmuch as God’s Word is God’s, it is revelation of God to humanity.— Bonhoeffer as quoted in Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, page 133