Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?… Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose…
~Søren Kierkegaard~
Someone in a newsletter last week (Elizabeth Oldfield?) pointed to Alan Jacobs’ post on Dorothy Sayers’ The Man Born to be King and W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Sayers and Auden, Jacob’s writes, “were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously.” (Barbara Reynolds, in her biography of Sayers, said of the broadcast of The Man Born to be King that it “was a great evangelistic undertaking, an unprecedented achievement in religious education and one which has never since been equalled.”)
I need to reread Jacobs’s post, but I wanted immediately to bring Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” and “nonreligious interpretation” into the conversation.
Bonhoeffer wrote, in a now famous passage, to his godson on the day of his baptism:
You are being baptized today as a Christian. All those great and ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be pronounced over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out, without your understanding any of it. But we too are being thrown back all the way to the beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one’s enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us, we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it and express it. This is our own fault. Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.
Similarly, Sayers, in a letter to Dr. James Welch, wrote “My Lord, the people have forgotten so much. The thing has become to them like a tale that is told. They cannot believe it ever happened.…The people are apathetic, because the story has become unreal, and the priests are in despair how to bring its reality home to them.”
The church, Bonhoeffer continued,
is still being melted and remolded, and every attempt to help it develop prematurely into a powerful organization again will only delay its conversion [Umkehr] and purification. It is not for us to predict the day—but the day will come—when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near.
It’s probably very easy both to overstate and to understate what Bonhoeffer had in mind, largely because he wasn’t sure yet himself what he had in mind. (“I’m just working gradually toward the nonreligious interpretation of biblical concepts. I am more able to see what needs to be done than how I can actually do it.”)
But I’m thinking of this again after reading Garrett Green’s essay “Hans Frei and the Hermeneutics of the Second Naïveté,” especially his explication of Frei’s 1976 Greenhoe Lecture at Louisville Seminary. Frei gave the second half of that lecture the title “Interpretation and Devotion: God’s Presence for Us in Jesus Christ,” but he also suggested an alternative title: “Notes on Leaving Things the Way They Are.”
The mistake that so many modern theologians have made is to think that in order to affirm that Jesus Christ is somehow present to us now they must “explain [it] by translating the notion of presence into some explanatory concepts. That is precisely what I think cannot be done, and which I think need not be done. There is, it seems to me, a very ordinary way of talking about the presence of Christ.” The job of Christian theology “is simply to talk about the way Christian language is used by Christians, and to ask if it is being used faithfully” — in other words, whether it is faithful to biblical language and the tradition that flows from the Bible.… This task does not require us “to translate Christian language into a language that will be relevant to our situation.” In fact “the whole metaphor of translation there is misleading.” After all, Frei has demonstrated that at its very heart the Bible “means what it says—so there is no need to translate it; no need to reconceptualize it. There may be a need to redescribe it, but that’s a very different thing.
It’s probably worth remembering that much of Frei’s thought was addressing Liberal Theology. In George Hunsinger’s collection of essays on Frei, the title of Part IV, which opens with Green’s essay, is titled “Postliberal Hermeneutics.” In his Greenhoe Lecture, Frei gave what Green calls one of his best one-liners, in response to death-of-God theology of the 60s: “Well, all right, if Christianity is going to go out (let us assume for a moment that it depends on what we do and not on the grace of God!) it’s had a magnificent history and I’d rather see it go out with an orthodox bang than a liberal whimper.”
Toward the end of the lecture, Frei says this:
I am suggesting there is no need for an explanation. I am suggesting there is no explanation. I am suggesting that there is no problem. I am suggesting that this is precisely the function of Christian language; this is its character, its ordinary use, and, if you will, at the same time its uniqueness: it is both these things …. To try to go to a level underneath them, you see, is precisely what I am saying is wrong, and is precisely where the technical theologians have been wrong. And we need to be released from that verbal and conceptual cramp.
It may sound as though Frei has no place for either Sayers’ or Auden’s (or Bonhoeffer’s) project — to make the story of Christ “real to the listener, even at the cost of some slight shock to the pious,” as Sayers put it in the same letter mentioned above. But, as Jeffrey Stout has also pointed out, the difference Frei has in mind between “translating” and “redescribing” is significant. The point, says Green, was to free the language (and narrative) of theology from the modernizing translators:
Once Frei has liberated Christian language from the prison house of theory, we are able to see it (hear it!) in its proper context—in the everyday life of Christian men and women in the world. The most important legacy of Hans Frei is his call for an end to the academic captivity of Christian theology.
In Jacobs’ post above, he mentions that Sayers’ project with the B.B.C. temporarily fell apart. One of the things that came out of that interruption — though it came after the project had resumed — was something of a writing interlude. The B.B.C. was planning a series of 10-minute talks on the Nicene Creed. Sayers was asked by them to give six talks in the section dealing with the Son of God. Barbara Reynolds points out that this had “the very timely effect of obliging her to scrutinise the theology of the Incarnation before making her presentment the Incarnate in her plays.” (In fact, Reynolds’ chapter on the development of these plays is titled “Incarnation.”)
After the first play had aired, Dr. Welch (“a man of vision, courage, and diplomacy,” said Reynolds) wrote to Sayers:
What [it] has revealed to me quite clearly is that at heart most of us are Arians; we are prepared for Our Lord to be born into the language of the [Authorized Version], or into stained-glass or into paint; what we are not prepared to accept is that He was incarnate. Incarnatus est is a phrase; we bow when we say it; but how many of us are prepared really to believe it? … What has always thrilled me about your plays has been this combination of Christology with a full belief in the Incarnation.
Sayers was certainly concerned with Arianism — she specifically changed the title of her talks on the Nicene Creed from “The Son of God” to “God the Son” for this reason — but her real concern, which endears her to me greatly, was Docetism. In a prior letter to Dr. Welch, written just after she resumed work on the second play, she wrote,
Nobody, not even Jesus, must be allowed to “talk Bible” … [The thing must] be made to appear as real as possible, and above all … Jesus should be presented as a human being and not like a sort of symbolic figure doing nothing but preach in elegant periods, with all the people round Him talking in everyday style. We must avoid, I think, a Docetist Christ, whatever happens — even at the risk of a little loss of formal dignity.
Here’s how Sayers put it in January 1939, in a letter to a critic of her previous B.B.C. play He That Should Come:
forgive me for saying that it is impossible to measure that condescension unless one realises that He was born, not into an allegory, or a devotional tableau, or a Christmas card, with everybody behaving beautifully; but into this confused, coarse, and indifferent world, where people quarrel and swear, and make vulgar jokes and spit on the floor. He was a real person, born in blood and pain like any other child, and dying in blood and pain, like the commonest thief that was ever strung up on the gallows.… We may shrink from the brutal facts of life, but He did not; and that is the measure of His strength and our weakness.
(Doesn’t this just pack that Pauline phrase with so much weight and flexibility: “I became all things to all people.”)
Clearly one of the ways we imitate — praise, honor, reflect — that “vulgar condescension” is with our language and our desire and willingness for The Story to be told and heard, tellable and hearable. As Jacob’s indicates, this is a present task in every age. And as all of the above make clear, it is an orthodox one. So I don’t know about there being, as Bonhoeffer said, some particular day coming when a new language will take hold. The truth of that might hinge on what he meant by, and how right he was about, “the world come of age.” But that’s a thought for another day. Right or not about a day coming, Bonhoeffer closed his letter to his godson with a call to the everyday task, and with a wink to what he called the disciplina arcani:
Until then the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time. May you be one of them, and may it be said of you one day: “The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day” (Prov. 4:18).