Discipleship and Secularity

In the previous post I quoted from a paper that John Howard Yoder presented to the Bonhoeffer Society at the 1987 American Academy of Religion conference. There are two points that I want to highlight about this quote, which pertain to the key differences and perhaps points of convergence between the theology of Yoder and Bonhoeffer: discipleship and secularity.

In his paper Yoder explores the concept of “discipleship” in Anabaptism and in Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yoder concludes that the concept of discipleship carried a variety of different meanings within the Anabaptist heritage. The term, discipleship, took on something of an identity marker for Anabaptists especially after Harold Bender listed it among the key “principles” of the Anabaptist vision. This is not to say that discipleship was not important to Anabaptists before Bender, only that the term itself took on a more self-identifying function after Bender. Yoder, I think, rightly asks if Bonhoeffer had some role in bringing this out for Bender, as a core “principle” of Anabaptist faith.

Now, Yoder concludes that “Bonhoeffer neither began nor ended with a vision of discipleship cognate with that of the Anabaptists.” He makes this assertion on the grounds that what motivated Bonhoeffer’s Christology was “more dogmatic than exegetical or historical.” According to Yoder, Bonhoeffer “was not driven either to concreteness about the pre-passion Jesus nor to any abiding challenge to the axioms of Constantinian political ethics.” And this is Yoder’s central challenge to Bonhoeffer’s conception of discipleship. Bonhoeffer, according to Yoder, paid more attention to the dogmatic significance of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, while tending to sideline the concrete historical life of Jesus of Nazareth. For Yoder, if discipleship in some sense means a following after, then we must be given some clue as to what kind of person we are following. In Yoder’s interpretation, Bonhoeffer focuses heavily on the importance of obedience in his conception of discipleship. In Yoder’s words, “At the core, the issue put to a person by the ‘call to discipleship’ is a concern not first of all with how he will behave if he follows Jesus, but with the renunciation of self-determination and of one’s own reasoning.” The demand to renounce self-determination and one’s own devices is certainly a key feature of Bonhoeffer’s work, especially in Discipleship. Yet, Yoder points out that such demands could be made by any lord, or any moral teacher. Such a demand is not “intrinsically linked with how that particular master himself behaved, or with whether what he asks of me is the same as his own behavior.” Yoder does note that in Bonhoeffer’s discussion of discipleship he does speak of the importance of the cross. The disciple will suffer as Jesus suffered, by rejection. Yet, even here, Yoder does not think Bonhoeffer is concrete enough, as the discussion remains too much on the level of “existential self-understanding” and not enough on the behavior and concrete decision-making that leads the disciple to rejection and the cross. Other key questions remain for Yoder: will the disciple that follows Jesus by going to the cross be “a monk or a politician? An emigrant or a conspirator? Or does the meaning of bearing the cross exist on a level unrelated to such concrete decisions?” Even at the point when Bonhoeffer brings the Beatitudes into the discussion, it is still not concrete enough. The discussion of the Beatitudes focus more on disposition and tend to be stated by way of negations: the disciple is called to renounce power, honor, and violence, but there are no concrete examples in the affirmative about the way the disciple should then live.

In all of this, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of discipleship runs parallel to the “mystical” and “moralistic” strand of Anabaptism which manifests itself by the logic of renunciation and obedience without question. According to Yoder, however, the most “original” and “socially realistic” strand of Anabaptism is the position that the church must be ready to “give up her control over society.” In Yoder’s words, “This realism perceived that the model of Christian social participation is not simply the cross of Christ in some symbolic or emotional sense, but also the attitude toward political office which helped to bring him, the Jesus of the gospels, to the cross.”

Yoder’s concern is that Bonhoeffer’s Christology leaps “from the crib to the cross.” What is perhaps most interesting in all of this is that Yoder finds Bonhoeffer’s suggestions about a “religionless Christianity” in his prison letters to point in exactly the right direction. An awareness of the secularity of Christ, the immanence of God’s action in Christ, opens up Christological reflection to attend to the constitutive life history of Jesus. Yoder points out that Bonhoeffer’s leap “from the crib to the cross” is “precisely to leave out of one’s christology the substance of (“secular”) social living in occupied, rebellion-torn Palestine.” Thus, the much disputed meaning of Bonhoeffer’s letters about “the world-come-of-age,” “secularity,” and “religionless Christianity” is perhaps the most interesting point of contact between Bonhoeffer and Yoder.

Religion is not a standalone category

Check out Timothy Fitzgerald’s latest post, Religion is not a standalone category, over at The Immanent Frame.

Liberalism’s project of universal redemption

“The violence at the heart of liberal political doctrine makes this clear: the right to self-defense eventually calls for a project of universal redemption. Another way of putting this is to say that some humans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed.”

Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 62-63.

Enchantment to Disenchantment

I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and am finding it quite enjoyable and compelling. Beginning a book this size is always daunting, but to my surprise, Taylor’s work is very accessible. The central question he poses is this: “why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (Taylor 25). Five hundred years ago people rarely if ever doubted the existence of God. Our predecessors lived in an “enchanted” world, a world in which personal forces such as spirits, demons and God existed outside of the human subject and were actually involved in the natural world. In this enchanted world, “atheism comes close to being inconceivable…It just seems so obvious that God is there, acting in the cosmos, founding and sustaining societies, acting as a bulwark against evil” (Taylor 26). Today, of course, we live in a “disenchanted” world, that is, a world in which God is not a given, a presupposition, to all things. What caused this paradigm shift? Taylor argues against the common story “subtraction” story, that is, that with the rise of science God and spirits simply left the picture. Instead, something had to fill the void as it were, what Taylor calls the human spiritual and moral aspiration for “fullness.” Taylor identifies “exclusive humanism” as the rising dominant worldview, which arose with the aid of science. As scientific worldview “disenchanted” our world, exclusive humanism could fill the role for the human aspiration for fullness. The rise of exclusive humanism was conditioned on a shift in understanding of the self. Humans no longer saw themselves as “porous” that is open to possession by outside forces or “vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers.” The new sense of self was a “buffered” self, that is, persons lived in a universe autonomous from outside forces that could possess them. According to Taylor more than disenchantment needed to occur in order for the new self to arise; “it was necessary to have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering” (27).Taylor writes,

Where an exclusive humanism was undoubtedly available was in Epicureanism. And it is no surprise that Lucretius was one of the inspirations for explorations in the direction of naturalism, e.g., with Hume. But Epicureanism just as it was couldn’t really do the trick. It could teach us to achieve ataraxia by overcoming our illusions about the Gods. But this wasn’t what was needed for a humanism which could flourish in the modern context. For this was becoming one in which the power to create moral order in one’s life had a rather different shape. It had to include the active capacity to shape and fashion our world, natural and social; and it had to be actuated by some drive to human beneficence. To put this second requirement in a way which refers back to the religious tradition, modern humanism, in addition to being activist and interventionist, had to produce some substituted for agape (Taylor 27, italics mine).

Thus, according to Taylor, the rise of exclusive humanism, which is the dominant worldview of secularism, did not simply appear after the world was disenchanted. It wasn’t as if science came in and stripped away all myths only to find beneath the surface an obvious humanism. Instead, modern humanism was imagined. Of course, as Taylor notes, this didn’t happen overnight. Much of Taylor’s book is devoted to telling the story of how this shift occurred and I hope to blog some more on it as I continue to read the book.For now, I just thought I’d post on this idea of the paradigm shift from “enchantment” to “disenchantment,” a porous to a buffered self, and the idea that exclusive humanism did not come about negatively, but was imagined and serves as a substitute for agape.

The Secular

Charles Taylor’s new volume A Secular Age is a hot topic these days. His massive work is 896 pages. I have yet to read the book and presumably it will take more than a little while to get through, but I wanted to direct people to a blog that is devoted to discussions of “the secular” with particular reference to Taylor’s book. The blog has many great contributors including such figures as Robert Bellah and Talal Asad. Charles Taylor himself contributes to what is becoming quite a forum for discussion about the nature of religion, secularity, pluralism, and violence. The blog is called The Immanent Frame.