Religionless Christianity?

Imagine yourself enjoying a coffee over a book at Barnes & Noble, and you strike up a conversation with another patron. Eventually, you find yourself talking about religion, and the subject of the historical Jesus comes up. I'm sure you may have heard it before: "Jesus probably never existed," they say. Don't you know that? Aren't you up on your history? Now, as a PhD student in theology, my overwhelming desire is to respond, "well, that view may have been held by a few radical 18th and 19th century historians, but very few historians would hold such a view today." However, I am almost always met with incredulity, as if my very attempt to persuade them otherwise was an attempt at "pushing my religion." And, anyway, what good would it ultimately do to convince them that he merely existed, if nothing could be known about him? 

People today are incredulous toward everything "religious." As Friedrich Schleiermacher once rightly complained, people are ready to seek an expert in every other field for the best information, but in the area of theology, it is the expert that is above all to be avoided. How ironic. If you really want to know what "religion" is all about, better get a secular historian.

For me, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's reflections on the idea of a "religionless Christianity" speak most directly to our situation today. Bonhoeffer asks "how we can reinterpret in a 'worldly' sense – in the sense of the Old Testament and of John 1.14 – the concepts of repentance, faith, justification, rebirth, and sanctification" for people for whom all things "religious" have become hopelessly discredited? In a letter from prison to Eberhard Bethge on 30 April 1944, Bonhoeffer states:

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religious'... The Pauline question of whether [circumcision] is a condition of justification seems to me in present-day terms to be whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from [circumcision] is also freedom from religion..."

Bonhoeffer reflects on his discomfort with speaking of God in the modern period. "Religious people speak of God when human knowledge... has come to an end," and thus whenever a boundary is pushed back by scientific advance, God too is pushed back. This makes God into a mere stop-gap for our limits and problems. As he explains in another letter on 5 May, to be "religious" for him meant metaphysics and individualism, as if God were a concept defined by the removal of our limits (e.g. omnipotence) and as if everything had to do with me and my own inner, private piety before God, and to hell with this world. Bonhoeffer would rather speak of God not on the boundaries but at the center of this world:

"Aren't righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and isn't it true that Rom. 3:24ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous? It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ."

Since God has fully plunged completely into this world and into history in the person of Jesus Christ, and reconciled the world to himself, we as Christians must be worldly in the sense of being for the world. Bonhoeffer knew these were very germinal reflections that were never fully developed—he was executed within a year by the Nazis—but nevertheless they provide some important food for thought when bearing witness to Christ in a world that is incredulous toward all things "religious."

As an example of a "religionless" interpretation of sin, I think of the humorous yet wildly honest blog by Allie Brosh, called "Hyperbole and a Half," especially the last chapter of the book by the same title on identity. There she writes:

"On a fundamental level, I am someone who would throw sand at children. I know this because I have had to resist doing it, and that means that it's what I would naturally be doing if I wasn't resisting it. I would also shove everyone, never share anything, and shout at people who aren't letting me do exactly what I want. I don't do those things, though. Because I don't want to have to know that I did them. It would hamper my ability to feel like a good person. I don't even want to know that I would do them. Thankfully, I have an entire system of lies and tricks in place to prevent me from realizing how shitty I actually am."

When I bought this book for my wife Erin as a humorous birthday present, she read the last chapter, and came to me saying, "hey Gabe, isn't this about sin?" I read it and thought, well no kidding, sounds like it to me! Can something so humorous, impious, and definitely secular or "worldly" such as this be used to begin to illustrate for people the meaning of basic theological concepts, such as sin? Isn't this sort of like what Bonhoeffer means by a "religionless" interpretation of basic theological concepts? Doesn't this help in bearing witness to Christ in a society that is incredulous toward all things "religious"?

What do you think?

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1997. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York: Touchstone. 

Brosh, Allie. 2013. Hyperbole and a Half: unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened. New York: Touchstone.