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Religionless Christianity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
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You would be surprised and perhaps disturbed if you knew how my ideas on theology are taking shape . . . The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and indeed what is Christ, for us today? ... We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all; men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more . . . Our whole nineteen-hundred-years old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the ‘religious premise’ of man . . . But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori premise simply does not exist, but was a historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i.c. if we reach the stage of being radically without religion . . . what does that mean for Christianity . . . ? How can Christ become the Lord even of those without religion; If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity—and even that garment has had very different aspects at different periods—then what is religionless Christianity?
In this passage, written from prison twenty years ago (30 April, 1944), Dietrich Bonhoeffcr raised an issue to which wide currency has now been given by the Bishop of Woolwich in the chapter of Honest to God entitled Worldly Holiness. Not that the question is confined to that chapter alone. Indeed I believe it to be the central issue of the Bishop’s whole book, more central in some way than the question of what image of God we are to have. For, if I am not mistaken, we have here the central anxiety which made Dr Robinson write his book.
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- Copyright © 1964 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
1
This article is substantially the text of a lecture given at Cambridge in March as one of the Dominican Lectures which discussed various aspects of the Bishop of Woolwich's book, Honest to God.
References
2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 91. The page references given here are to the Fontana paper‐back edition; in Honest to God the page references to Bonhoeffer's Letters are to the earlier S.C.M. edition.
3 The Honest to God Debate, J. A. T. Robinson and D. L. Edwards, p. 241–278, and in particular p. 268 ff. I shall refer to this book as ‘H.G.D.’ and to Honest to God as ‘H.G.’
4 H.G., p. 9 (my italics).
5 H.G., p. 141 (my italics).
6 H.G.D., p. 275 (my italics).
7 H.G., p. 84–85.
8 Summa Theol. 2–2. Q. 81.a.l.
9 Letters, p. 91, cf. H.G., p. 38.
10 Letters, p. 107.
11 Letters, p. 108.
12 Letters, p. 123 (my italics), cf. p. 108, H.G., p. 37.
13 The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, p. 2.
14 H.G.D., p. 275.
15 H.G.D., p. 270.
16 Letters, p. 106.
17 H.G., p. 35, Letters, p. 94.
18 H.G., p. 37, Letters, p. 103.
19 Letters, p. 106, H.G., p. 36; cf. letters, p. 121.
20 Letters, p. 121, H.G., p. 38–39.
21 H.G.D., p. 271 (my italics); cf. H.G., p. 38.
21 I suspect that what Bonhoeffer was struggling with was not a traditional concept, but a pietist attitude which tends to escape human responsibility by the short‐cut of ‘taking it to the Lord in prayer’, cf. Canon Raven's remarks in Praying for Daylight, ed. by J. C. Neil‐Smith, pp. 55, 57.
23 H.G.D., p. 229.
24 H.G.D., p. 271–272.
25 cf. H.G., p. 17.
26 Letters, p. 124.
27 Jn. 17.14 ff.
28 H.G., p. 23.
29 Letters, p. 123.
30 ibid.
31 Letters, p. 91 (my italics).
32 Letters, p. 93 cf. p. 104.
33 Letters, p. 107.
34 Letters, p. 95.
35 For a really balanced treatment of sin and guilt, see Rahner, K., Theological Investigations, vol. II, p. 265ff.Google Scholar
36 Letters, p. 94–95.
37 Letters, pp. 91, 92.
38 Letters, pp. 91–92, 95, 109.
39 op. cit., p. 2, and p. 82.
40 St Augustine, 83 Quaestiones, q. 30.
41 H.G., p. 85.
42 H.G., p. 85–86.
43 H.G., p. 86.
44 H.G., pp. 46, 47 and passim.
45 Letters, p. 108–109.
46 Letters, p. 107. Compare Tillich's Systematic Theology, vol. I, p. 55, ‘It is not an exaggeration to say that today man experiences his present situation in terms of disruption, conflict, self‐destruction, meaninglessness, and despair in all realms of life’.
47 H.G., p. 22, p. 47.
48 H.G., p. 52 ff.
49 In this connection, see H. McCabe, The New Creation, p. 200 ff.
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