Brian: “Please, please, please listen, I’ve got one or two things to say.”
Crowd: “Tell us, tell us, both of them.”
“Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals.”
“Yes, we’re all individuals.”
“You’re all different.”
“Yes, we are all different.”
“I’m not!”
“Shh”
“You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves.”
“Yes, we’ve got to work it out for ourselves.” “Exactly.”
“Tell us more.”
“No, that’s the point. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do.”[1]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a clergyman in Nazi Germany. He was executed by the Nazis in April 1945 for his “crimes” against the Third Reich. In his ‘Letters and Papers From Prison’ he wrote “We cannot be honest unless we recognise that we have to live in the world even as if there were no God…Before God and with God we live without God.” [2]
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I think what Paul is getting at here is the tendency for human beings to delegate the ordering of their moral and spiritual lives to a set of rules enforced by a cosmic law giver with a big stick who will punish disobedience and reward compliance. He goes on to argue that Christians no longer need such a disciplinarian, because, by faith/trust in Christ, we find it within ourselves to work out how we should live our lives.
Bonhoeffer takes it one stage further and says that in world come of age, secular humanity can and must grow up and take responsibility for the ordering of their own moral and spiritual lives, which is exactly what Brian was saying in his speech from “Life of Brian”.
“You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves.”
It seems to me that the Church has done its best to avoid the implications of this teaching. It has told people what to do and punished them when they’ve got it wrong. Far from helping people to work it out for themselves it has always been in danger of infantilising them, keeping them as spiritual babes and moral infants, doing what a cosmic “Law-Giver” tells them. It could have been so different, and still can be. The Church is, after all, a community and communities, be they churches, schools, families or social network sites provide the contexts in which we are formed as moral and thinking individuals. Life together forces us to think about how our actions affect the lives of others. But community demands more, it ask us to take the risk of making relationships built on trust. Of course it’s not perfect, but that imperfection enables us to learn lessons we won’t discover if we surrender to a set of rules, boxes to be ticked without a thought. As large brained animals we are capable of so much more. We are all individuals. We can hurt and be hurt, bless and be blessed.
Life together forces us to face and reflect on the consequences of our actions. Our actions can harm or heal, break or to build. It’s our choice and together we can learn how to make the right choice.
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ReplyDeleteSorry for the above. Posted and tried to correct a spelling mistake.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this post. I can see that communities can be an important source of moral guidance, but I have to say that Christian communities can have a tendency to fossilise certain views. I have been very disappointed at the reaction of the Church of England regarding gay ministers and gay marriage in recent years. I have thought they could have done much to counter the attitude of the Catholic Church.
However, I do have to admit that Church communities (which might not even be that religious) can sometimes have an important role. As Daniel Dennett says, it may be harmful to remove religion until we have something to replace it.
I do hope this does not mean I lose my status as a militant atheist!