1. Proposed Book of Common Prayer, 1928, Church of England, Collect for the New Year.
2. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 548–550.
3. Donne, “To Mr. Tillman After He Had Taken Orders” The Complete Poems of John Donne, 115.
4. Barth, Evangelical Theology, 172.
5. Ibid., 172.
Chapter 2: Life Together
September 29, 2004
This past week I have had the opportunity to talk with several of you and have become aware yet again, how much we depend on each other for encouragement along the way. I think one can bear a good deal if one senses that one is not alone. For instance, it is somehow encouraging to discover that Hebrew looks weird to other people besides yourself, or that you are not alone in thinking that Augustine’s journey of faith can seem at times utterly bizarre, or that reading Calvin or Barth is not without its frustrations and times of bafflement. The way is long and there are many competing obligations and claims that must be addressed. Life has a way of crashing in, most especially when we have finally got everything planned and settled.
Recently, my wife and I went to see the movie Vanity Fair, starring Reese Witherspoon. In the movie (and even more in Thackeray’s novel), the world is portrayed as a place full of schemes and shrewdness, where those who are wise as serpents regularly triumph over those who are innocent as doves. However, the title comes from a very different book, a book which, not unlike Augustine’s Confessions, has to do with an individual’s journey of faith. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is where “Vanity Fair” makes its first appearance, and there it is not so much about “getting ahead” in a glamorous world as it is about the despair of living in a world where everything is for sale. “Christian” and “Faithful” are beaten in “Vanity Fair” and “Faithful” even dies. The way is hard. Yet the journey, in all of its hardship and struggle, is strangely more satisfying than the endless diversions of “Vanity Fair.”
I don’t mean by this that those who study here are more virtuous than other people or better than those who hustle for mere money. In my opinion, there is nothing “mere” about money at all. But I do think that studying to become a teacher or pastor in the church is a marvelously liberating gift, precisely in the focus and stringent demands it places on one’s life. Thursday nights or Friday nights or all day Saturdays have to be planned around, prepared for, aimed at, all of which describes a course of walking in company together toward a specific destination, living a focused, or rather a “called” life. Such a journey is not characterized by the diversions of “Vanity Fair,” but it gives what “Vanity Fair” cannot offer, and what the modern world often holds in contempt: a called life, that is, a life set toward a particular direction. The gift of being directed in accordance with a particular voice is what the faith calls freedom. “Christian” discovered in the company of “Faithful” that we are not made for endless diversions. Endless diversions are finally soul destroying, imprisoning us in comfortable isolation. There are few greater gifts than finding that one is living, in the company of others, a “called” life.
February 16, 2005
When my wife and I lived in Scotland, the announcements given during worship were called, “Intimations,” a word which carried with it not only the sense of “announcement” or “making known,” but also the sense of speaking to familiar friends of things affecting the whole community. There is a tenderness about “Intimations.” Many of these notes I am writing to you contain “intimations” like that, i.e., the description of and concerns with our common life.
The other night when Dr. Wireman spoke to us, I watched little groups of students form after the evening meal, some to talk about what he said, others to cram for Hebrew, others simply enjoying each other’s company. Viewing all of that made me realize how much I have come to depend on this community—as scattered and fragmented and weary as we are. I am grateful for these “intimations” which, strangely, give me joy and hope.
January 31, 2007
Our life together, such as it is, is one of the most important things about our fledgling seminary. These words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Life Together, apply therefore also to us, I think: “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even where there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith— and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and insignificant, and does not at all live up to our expectations—then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”6 Those words are underlined in my copy of Life Together. Perhaps I need to hear them more than you. Still they are worth remembering and I commend them to your attention.
October 3, 2007
Before Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1939, he wrote a little article summarizing his impression of American Protestantism. The article was entitled, “Protestantism Without Reformation.” In that article Bonhoeffer expressed skepticism concerning what Americans called “freedom of religion,” seeing in the multiple denominations that worship God in their own way, not an example of freedom so much as a flight from the church’s confessional nature and its true unity in Christ. He thought that American Protestants were no longer scandalized by their inability to confess and live together and so they celebrated their disunity by calling it “freedom.” Bonhoeffer was particularly suspicious of a freedom celebrated by largely white congregations that somehow did not implicate them in the life and worship of largely African American churches. In opposition to what he thought was a false notion of freedom, Bonhoeffer spoke of the “freedom of the Word of God,”7 a freedom that cuts against the claims we so often idolize, and draws us instead into a peace we have not made, a life together that comes to us as a gift, a baptism in which we find ourselves placed beside those we have not chosen.
This Saturday I have been asked to preach for Coastal Carolina Presbytery. The presbytery asked me to exhort the assembled saints “to pull together.” All of which has caused me to think how easy it is and how much better we are at pulling apart. In preparing for this sermon, I was struck with how much of scripture has to do with our “pulling apart”: Cain vs. Abel; Jacob vs. Esau; Joseph and his brothers; Saul vs. David. If you want to read a sad story, read 1 Kings 12 and the story of Israel’s split from Judah. “To your tents, O Israel! Look now to your own house, O David.” (1 Kgs 12:16)
In one version or another, that slogan has described the “freedom” which has characterized so much of American Protestantism, and particularly our own denomination (i.e., PCUSA). We are free to . . . split, a freedom that is indistinguishable from divorce or “pursuing my own happiness,” or even worshipping the god I choose and find useful. What is more difficult is to worship the God who has chosen us in Jesus Christ, and has done so quite without our permission. In the divine economy of this God’s choosing, freedom is manifest in “bearing, believing, and hoping all things.” It endures. It is free from that kind of self-absorption that insists on having its own way. It is the freedom Charles Wesley sings about, the gift of being “lost in wonder, love,