Apologies for the late newsletter: it’s been that kind of week.
Next Spring, I have two books coming out, which you can pre-order here and here. I’m working through the proofs (the last of the last stages) of the second one, on how isolation is perpetuated through the things we do in church and what to do about it, with a heavy lift from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’m not telling you to buy them, but I’m pretty proud of both of them. I’m happy at this point for someone else to eventually read them other than me.
It’s gratifying to be at this stage, especially since the book began when I was in the early stages of grief about the demise of my former seminary, prior to beginning my good work here in the Abilene Christian University Graduate School of Theology. It’s an Ebenezer of sorts, a waypoint in my own life which gathers up a lot of what I’ve learned both existentially and intellectually. The book itself came as a surprise to me, mostly begun as a matter of writing myself into hope that felt very frail when I began writing it in March 2020.
One of the key things which I’ve learned from Bonhoeffer over the years is that one can have a very robust commitment to the spiritual and theological formation of the church which is inextricable from our embedded lives in the world. Bonhoeffer develops this in a lot of ways, but most clearly in the opening lines of his little classic, Life Together, where he writes:
It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes.
If you want to read this thought in more detail, go find his essay “Christ, Reality, and Good”, in his Ethics, which teases this out in more theoretical detail. Foregrounding his discussions of the community of the church against this insight is sobering in two respects. First, it reminds us that there are no perfect conditions in which to exercise the life of the Christian community: your kids will always be acting terrible, there will never be enough time or energy, and most importantly, many things within society will be pushing against the very impulses to live in a way other than a fragmented one. But secondly, as he reminds us here and elsewhere, the church is a body whose life is a shared one with creation: it is upheld by the same creative word of Christ, which separates light and dark but sustains both in the same cosmos.
It’s part of the package deal, and actually, this is a good thing: the natural lives which Christians share with others (as I’ve written about with respect to empathy) serve as those touchpoints by which the world is renewed in Christ, and by which the church receives the nourishment of the common creation which it needs. The church cannot live in thin air, but caught up in the same maelstrom that threatens to swamp the whole thing. On this, our model is more of Jesus asleep in the storm and less Jonah trying to ride out judgment upon his flight: the connections are good and without them, the institutions of the church turn in on themselves.
This isn’t to say that the institutions and bureaucracies of church life won’t eat the Christian alive even if they are healthy. But my concern here is the church is meant to be sharers of creation, for it is fitting for a body described as the “firstfruits” of creation to be so. It’s important, thus, for churches to be able to name those connections, not only for the sake of listening to how God is nourishing the church in those ways, and not only so that we might be able to the connections for mission which emerge there, but so that the Christian might be able to name the ways in which it and the world both need to be healed. The church’s wounds—its pathologies, its biases, its prejudices and weak thinking—are best seen, I think, in those spaces of exchange where there is dissonance: being able to see them is the first step to being able to pray for their healing.
All of this means that there’s no way out of it. There is no seclusion, Bonhoeffer suggests, and that the way to God is only through the world, suffering rejection, surrendering to the diagnostics of its connections, and looking for the ways in which the good which God works out in the church is ultimately a good which is to be shared with our neighbors. As Wilco put it, our love is all of God’s money. It is a way which calls for continual surrender of our selves, acknowledging that God is coming to us in the face of the neighbor, and so, when we lose our cloaks or lend without expecting it to return, it’s God doing the asking.