Barney Wiget's Blog, page 43

Dealing with the Slaughter of the “Holy Innocents”

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Have you ever given any thought to the parents of the babies that Herod murdered in order to do away with Jesus? How would they ever be able to deal with their loss?

The Catholic Church calls the children “Holy Innocents.” If you’re Catholic you’ll know that the Church even has a special day, usually December 28th, to commemorate the death of the boys, all 2 years and under. Herod murdered them in his quest to keep the Jewish Messiah from growing up and taking his throne.

How those parents must have had their hearts torn out when the soldiers stormed into their houses, pulled their babies out into the street and murdered them! How they must have wept and grieved, and their grief turned to anger. Who would they blame? Where would they aim their anger?

First in line would be the soldiers, of course! Then again, they were under orders. They had no excuse, but there was someone up the chain of command to blame––all the way up to Herod himself. He was ultimately to blame. This is a guy who killed his wife, his brother, and his sister’s two husbands, to name only a few.

But there was someone further up the chain––God himself. If he hadn’t sent Jesus then Herod wouldn’t have given the order to his soldiers and their child wouldn’t have been targeted for assassination. It was ultimately God’s fault.

Their boy was, as the Church later called him, a “Holy Innocent.” He certainly couldn’t be blamed for his own death. He was too young to merit a premature slaying. Maybe it was the sin of the parents that got their kids killed. That must’ve gone through their minds. [Jesus addressed this later. (John 9:3)]

I can imagine these parents commiserating with each other. Bethlehem was a small town. It’s almost certain that everyone would know who had had their babies ripped from their arms and slain. How would their conversations have gone over the days, the weeks, and the years about that terrible night? They say that time heals all wounds but I’m not so sure about that, especially a wound like this.

How would they have processed their loss knowing that somewhere in their town was another Baby. He was the original target? Was he dead too? Did they murder him as they had their son? If not, how do his parents feel about causing the deaths of their children?

The whole thing just doesn’t seem fair to me. From our nice comfy homes twenty centuries later we Christians might be tempted to theologize the story and think they must have received comfort from the fact that God had a greater plan and that the Messiah needed to be protected at all costs, even at the cost of their child. But I doubt that, at least in the short run, this would assuage their sadness and anger over losing their boy.

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Let’s switch over to another parent who lost a child, actually ten children, all in one day––a man named Job. When his “friends” showed up with their condolences all they gave him were fortune cookie platitudes, tidy prefab answers for every occasion. Unfortunately, this is a common practice among many Christians. But Job he wasn’t buying it. He screamed back at them: “How long will you torment me and crush me with words?” (Job 19:1)

To them, everything was cause and effect. Live this way and everything works out. Pray this way and you always get what you want. Don’t, and you’ll always be disappointed with the result. It’s classic, “God In A Box” theology.

It’s hard for us to live with mystery, enigma, paradox, and wonder. We like it better when everything is nailed down and has a clear explanation, when it fits a pattern.

Oswald Chambers says, “From cowardice that shrinks from undiscovered truth, from laziness that is content with half truth, from arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of truth, deliver us!”

So many Christians are spiritual experts with pat answers to un-pat questions. Pascal said, “I don’t trust Christians. They know too much about God.”

One of Job’s counselors even said that his ten children probably died because they were sinful (Job 8:4)! Great counsel! If God killed everyone sinful person he’d have to do away with the entire planet! A lot of people don’t so much believe in God, they only believe what they believe about God. Their faith fits a tidy formula. But faith has no formulas. God is not karma or a pawn of formulas. He’s a Person, someone you can talk to and sometimes he will even talk back.

Don Miller says, “Formulas seem much better than God because formulas offer control; and God, well, He is like a person, and people, as we all know, are complicated… Why are we cloaking this relational dynamic in formulas? Are we jealous of the Mormons? Much as we want to believe we can fix our lives in about as many steps as it takes to make a peanut-butter sandwich, I don’t believe we can.”

“Give God ‘elbow room’;” says Chambers again, “let Him come into His universe as He pleases. If we confine God in His working to certain ways, we place ourselves on an equality with Him.”

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So at the end of both of these stories, God shows up. To Job he speaks from a whirlwind and does something much better than that in Jesus. In neither case does he come with tidy answers to their questions. He just shows up.

He points out Job’s failure to acknowledge his ignorance about the complexity of the world he has created. Interestingly enough he doesn’t explain anything to Job or defend himself. He doesn’t reveal any secret plan. He just reveals himself.

On my part, I’ll take one encounter with God over a thousand explanations! In that case, I might not end up with tidy answers to all my problems, but I’ll have God. Faith doesn’t mean we have God all figured out, it means we can live with him without having him figured out.

It’s legit to desire answers and even ask him for them, but it’s not that we deserve them, or have the right to demand them. Faith can rightly hope for the best and yet be prepared for the best to be other than what we’d hoped!

In the case of the massacre of the “Holy Innocents” God didn’t speak in words, instead he sent The Word to make his dwelling among us. I don’t think he gave them an explanation, but he did provide a revelation of his Son. God didn’t send His Son into the world to explain stuff to us, but to save us.

“Jesus is called the Word because a word is the expression of a hidden thought,” says E. Stanley Jones. “Unless I put my thought into words you cannot understand it … So the Hidden Thought––God––becomes the Revealed Word––Christ.”

Would knowing this have relieved all their grief and pain? I doubt it. Yet, one would hope that someday those parents would have a personal encounter with the One whom their child died to save. If so, while it wouldn’t have made everything okay, it would invite them into a kingdom wherein they would someday be with their child again (2 Samuel 12:23).

Knowing him is the only way I know how to live with loss without losing hope. I’ll take whatever explanations he chooses to provide, but in the meantime, I’m content with encounters with him.

More On the POTUS’ Wall

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“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”

“I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight.”

I can’t stand it when Bible-believing people (so called) do mental jujitsu with the Scriptures to back up their pre-conceived ideas. Okay, though I’m not aware of it, I’ve most likely done it myself. But I hate it especially when people twist God’s words into a shape that approximates their political party platform, as though Jesus registers Republican or Democratic. This wall thing that the POTUS has been talking about since his campaign is one of those issues. “They’re all a bunch of criminals and rapists!” he says. And it makes me crazy!

When I wrote about this a year and a half ago I was calmer and more hopeful for a return to sanity than I am now. It’s like we’re walking around in circles with moral amnesia and can’t recall the difference between truth and “alternative facts.” What gets to me most is the stubborn insistence on shallow thinking among Christians over these things. I’ve learned to expect this kind of eccentric thinking of people with no moral shore on which to moor, but I can’t understand it coming from those who have a faith in Jesus, or at least claim they do.

The president bragged that he would proudly shut down the federal government and take the credit for it if he didn’t get his wall. Now that he has actually done it he blames the democrats! If anything he said or did stunned me anymore, I’d be stunned.

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. … I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”  

– – – One week later – – –

“The Democrats now own the shutdown!”

Before you stop reading here and shoot me your ready-made-for-pasting argument that says: “So you just want open borders and let anyone who wants into our country to enter?” No. I didn’t say that. Furthermore, I don’t know anyone who actually does believe that. That’s a caricature made up for making people who disagree with them sound stupid and uninformed. The actual solution, i.e., the precise details of immigration reform, is not in my pay grade. What I can say with confidence is that you can’t make a clean case from the Bible that since there were walls in the Old Testament, ergo God loves walls.

I think I did a fair job of making the point  last time  that the Jews built their wall not to keep refugees out, but to deter invading armies. But let me add a few things to my previous argument.

The Jerusalem wall only served as a deterrent to invaders so long as the Jews lived obediently to God. Once they jumped the rails of submission to him, those walls of stone were no more effective than if they were made of papier-mâché. God warned them repeatedly that they would be safe behind their walls as long as they lived righteously. If not he would use whatever and whoever he wanted to tear those walls down and hold them to account.

“If you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you: … They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down.” (Deuteronomy 28:15, 52)

I’m not saying that you can, but if you insist on making such a ludicrous claim that a straight line can be drawn between ancient Israel and modern America’s need for walls, let me say this…

When the Jews had been disobedient for generations their wall was decimated by the Babylonians, and later by the Romans. God used them as his personal wrecking crew to judge his rebellious people. If you have looked around lately, you might notice that America is not morally superior than those Jews. I suppose then that the only thing we would accomplish building our own wall would be to wall in our sin.

If God were to  judge America our wall won’t hold back his judgment. In my opinion, if he does judge us as a nation, it won’t just be for our sexual confusion or our abortion rate as some preach. Included on his list of things for which we deserve to be judged will be our treatment of people outside our borders: widows, orphans, strangers, and the poor.

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Bonhoeffer on Trump: A Postmortem Interview (Part 4 of 4)

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Barney: Welcome back, everyone, to the final segment of our conversation with the venerable theologian, pastor, and martyr: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For context, I recommend that our readers go back and peruse the first three interviews.

And thank you, Mr. Bonhoeffer, for making this postmortem appearance to share your wisdom with us about living in a post-truth era under a totalitarian leader.

Bonhoeffer: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Barney: I’d like to begin this last segment with by a professor of philosophy at Yale University who spent a decade studying fascism. Let’s watch this and then extrapolate what we can regarding our own contemporary circumstances.

So, Mr. B, what stood out to you in that short presentation?

Bonhoeffer: Well, I agree with his distilled down list of earmarks of fascist leaders. Men like Hitler and Mussolini conjure up a narrative of a mythic past, sow division between citizens, and attack the truth wherein conspiracy theories abound. I saw these in my country and I think the professor makes a pretty good case for identifying these tendencies in your president and his rhetoric. We didn’t see the signs in our day until it was too late, so I think you should keep a close eye on him and a keen ear to what he says.

Barney: My take is that while Mr. Trump may not exhibit every fascist tendency to a great degree, in some ways he does display each of those particular characteristics.

Let’s recap the ground we’ve covered in our three previous conversations. You said that during the 1930s and 40s your countrymen reacted in four different ways to Adolf Hitler’s fascism. Some were perpetrators, others were collaborators, or bystanders, or resisters to the regime. We’ve spoken briefly about the first three, now let’s consider what resistors look like in a fascist context.

Bonhoeffer: Let me get something out of the way first, since your readers are likely aware that I associated with those who conspired to overthrow and later to attempt to assassinate the Führer. I’m certainly not advocating any such extreme measure in your case. Millions were being slaughtered in the camps and in the war, and many of us felt there might not exist a more peaceful way to bring an end to the holocaust. There were two failed attempts at his life, in neither case was I personally involved.

But, by way of resistance, which did eventually land me in prison and get me hung, I did speak publicly condemning Hitler’s atrocities, acted as a courier for an intelligence organization, and worked in the effort to get Jews out of Germany and into Switzerland. During my imprisonment, with the help of prison guards, I wrote and smuggled out a number of subversive letters to the Christian community challenging them to wake up and resist in one way or another.

We founded what we called “The Confessing Church” as a biblical alternative to the German compromising Church and published a document called the “Barmen Declaration,” which pushed against the idolatry of Hitlerism in the German Church and called for the centrality of Christ and his gospel. In it we declared, “We repudiate the false teaching that there are areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ but to other lords…”

In April 1933 I preached to a group of pastors on “The Church and the Jewish Question” urging them to boldly challenge the government, come to the aid of victims, and “jam the spokes of the wheel” of the state to keep it from succeeding.

Barney: How did they respond to that?

Bonhoeffer: Many of them left in a huff!

Barney: That’s tragic!

Bonhoeffer: They were just looking out for their own interests and had a failure of nerve. I wrote at the time, “Will the Church ever learn that majority decision in matters of conscience kills the spirit?”

Barney: That sounds a lot like what we’re experiencing today with our president. Just because the majority of the Church, 81% of white evangelicals in our case, think a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s right and should automatically become the standard for our consciences.

You also wrote that the Church was “guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.” Were you calling the Church out to become resistors?

Bonhoeffer: Absolutely! If they had listened to us and to the Spirit I’m convinced that the holocaust could have been checked if not averted altogether.

I heard that after my death, when a shipload of Jews came to your country, your state department turned them away. I also read that now you reject truckloads of persecuted and hungry refugees, many of which are women and children. Is that true?

Barney: Regrettably, yes. It’s a national disgrace. And it is encouraged from the top.

Bonhoeffer: When the Nazis gained power in Germany with Christian support I wrote:

“If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

Barney: That hits home! I wonder how it would have turned out had there been a passenger in the car that drove into the crowd at Charlottesville, someone with a conscience that could’ve grabbed the wheel away from the driver before he killed Heather Heyer.

Bonhoeffer: I’ve heard that your Western Church is largely complicit in the culture careening out of control through classism, racism, consumerism, and nationalism. Is that true?

Barney: Wait! I thought I was asking the questions! OK, yes, it is quite true. All those “isms” could accurately describe a large percentage of the Church in America. The American Dream is now pretty much what Christian people aspire to achieve for themselves. Instead of dreaming the dreams of God, they dream about success and prosperity.

Bonhoeffer: So, resistance involves more than speaking truth to power. Resistors have to live a radical lifestyle, like I wrote about in The Cost of Discipleship based on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Barney: I couldn’t agree more!

You mentioned “speaking truth to power.” It’s my conviction that those with access to power must speak truth to it, but those who don’t have such access can speak truth about power in order to help those who aren’t yet “woke.” I also feel that we who have a vote must vote for the common good, as opposed for just our own personal socio-economic benefit. It seems also resisting involves being active in our communities, finding ways to serve rather than subjugate the marginalized, confronting white nationalistic voices, and speaking for the voiceless.

I also think that prayer can be resistance, like the prayer I pray almost daily for the president: “Lord, save him. If he won’t be saved, silence him. If he won’t be silenced, send him!”

Bonhoeffer: That sounds a lot like the thousands of prayers we prayed during Hitler’s horrific reign.

I would also point out that the spirit of the resistor is as important as the resistance itself. Our struggle must never be vitriolic or hate-filled. Anger, yes. Hate, no. We must resist with civility and Christian decorum. As Paul said, “Let your speech be always with grace… Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth…”

Barney: That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t have something called the “Internet” or social media! These modalities have all but sapped every vestige of civility and decorum in our culture.

Bonhoeffer: I don’t know what those things are, but it sounds like an excuse for sin to me. Nothing and no one can make you do anything against the will of God. We “can do all things through Christ who strengthens us,” including display self-control in our relationships and communication.

Barney: OK, you got me! And with that we’ll have to bring our conversation to a close. I can’t thank you enough, Mr. B, for coming back from the grave and imparting to us your wise counsel. While our circumstances aren’t as grave as yours––at least not yet––I fear that the Church has by-and-large lost its way in the malaise. We have way too many perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders in American Christendom and not nearly sufficient numbers of resisters to our increasingly-fascist administration.

Bonhoeffer: You’re welcome. If you’ll allow me, in conclusion, I’ll share three passages that come to mind:

Ephesians 5:14 “Wake up, O sleeper…!”
Ecclesiastes 3:7 “There’s a time to be silent and a time to speak…” and
Acts 18:9 “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent.”

Barney: And with that we bid you God’s blessing along with the wisdom to steward it for his glory!

Bonhoeffer on Trump: A Postmortem Interview (Part 3 of 4)

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Barney: Welcome back to the show, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Author, pastor, activist, and martyr.

Bonhoeffer: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Barney: We left our discussion last week comparing your historical context with our hysterical one––hysterical, not in the sense of humorous, but as in bizarre, even manic. Everyday we 21st Century Americans wake up to some new whacky thing our president has said or done before we’ve even had our first cup of coffee.

I’ll say it again, that while we can’t make a totally congruent comparison between your time and ours, I believe there are some similar elements. That’s why we’re consulting you. You’ve had first hand experience with what an untethered totalitarian leader can do a nation. Your Hitler and our Donald Trump may not have the same DNA, but from where I sit, they have at least the same blood type.

Bonhoeffer: You and many of your own contemporaries have noted that Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. This is true. But then, even Hitler wasn’t Hitler until he was.

Barney: Well said. Moving forward, in our last conversation you listed four different responses to the fascism of your time. Could you refresh our memories about those?

Bonhoeffer: We had perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, and resisters with the regime. The perpetrators were Hitler, his goons, and those who worked with them in the commission of their crimes against humanity. Next, we had collaborators, who may not have personally worked in the death camps or served in the SS, but they supported the regime’s values. They came from all segments of our society, but it was the Christian community that backed the Führer and his hyper-nationalistic ideology that broke my heart most. Then there were the bystanders, who came from a number of different ideologies, but it was the apathetic Church that bears the greatest culpability. “Unto whom much is given much shall be required.” Resisters were people like myself and what we called the “Confessing Church” that stood up to the Nazis and their Third Reich.

Barney: Since this is where we left off last week, let’s unpack the idea of the bystanders a little. You say that the Church by and large had their head in the sand regarding what was happening all around them. What did that look like? How did they arrive at that place of apathetic inaction?

Bonhoeffer: In many ways our churches were just chapels for the dominant culture. Their denial of the danger that was all around them was epic.

Barney: Not to interrupt, but one of our theologians, Walter Brueggemann said of another time and place in history: “The target was the narcotized population of the elite who lived off economic surplus and who never noticed the sufferings that their policies and practices imposed on the vulnerable who sustained them by their labor.” Does that sound familiar?

Bonhoeffer: Yes it does. It reminds me of the famous quote by fourteenth century Saint Catherine of Siena, “Preach the truth as if you had a million voices. It is silence that kills the world.” The Church in my day seemed unwilling in most cases to break the silence of conformity to the ideology and atrocities of the Third Reich. Instead of standing up to the powers they preferred to sing songs and hug each other until their problems evaporated into thin air! I wrote at the time: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

I also wrote, “One act of obedience is worth a hundred sermons.” But many German Christians were content to listen to more and more sermons without ever lifting up their eyes and doing something.

Barney: Tragically, it wasn’t until 50 years later when Pope John Paul II finally issued a formal apology for the failure of the Catholic Church to speak up and take action against the Nazis.

I’m reminded of something Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Bonhoeffer: Because we couldn’t get much traction in the state Church, we founded what we called, “The Confessing Church” to oppose the government’s efforts to unify all churches under their own evil banner.

Barney: Mr. B, I think the Church in our day creates a false split between spiritual and social, and makes Jesus’ message into sweet, spiritualized syrup. Any gospel without feet isn’t the gospel! You called it “Cheap Grace” as I recall.

Bonhoeffer: Yes, I wrote that cheap grace “is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” If the grace that Christians claim for themselves doesn’t change their ideals and their lifestyles it’s cheap and flimsy.

Barney: Another of our great pastor-theologians Tim Keller said, “If your politics don’t change when you start to follow Jesus, you might not actually be following Jesus.” Do you agree with that?

Bonhoeffer: Of course. Shockingly, I had dozens of debates with pastors who couldn’t see past the end of their noses. This is why I wrote: “Against folly we have no defense. …reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.”

Barney: As I see it, the bulk of American Christians fit in this bystander category of yours. They don’t have time or energy to get involved with “political” issues. Some conveniently claim that God sovereignly uses whom he chooses to be leaders of nations. God is in charge, so why worry your head about it? Others’ favorite passage is Romans 13 about obeying the government at all costs. Don’t get in trouble with God by pushing back on what the government says. Some people are just too busy going to Bible studies and prayer meetings; focusing on how to supersize their incomes and making their middle-class lives as comfortable as possible.

Bonhoeffer: I wrote about Christians “fleeing from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness: and shutting their mouths and eyes to the injustice around them. . . Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep themselves pure from the contamination arising from responsible action.”

By the way, one of the worst arguments the Church uses to remain in those “sanctuaries” is something you alluded to, the God-always-gets-his-man-in-office argument. I doubt that if in hindsight your contemporaries took even the slightest glance at the history’s Hitlers, Mussolinis, or Stalins they would scrap such an unreasonable, to say nothing of unbiblical, idea.

Barney: It’s the head-in-the-sand Christians in our time that concern me most, Mr. B. They languish in spiritual obesity while the ideals of Jesus and many of the original principles upon which our country was founded are being shredded in Washington. From pulpits and on social media many even go so far as to support our president’s inhumane policies with their spiritual verbiage and cherry-picked verses from Scripture. Walter Brueggemann said, “Don’t tell Jesus that religion plays no part in the public arena or that faith is just a private matter between you and your Creator. He’ll think you weren’t listening.”

Why don’t we wind down this episode with the well-known poem by your colleague, German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Thanks again, Mr. Bonhoeffer for your wisdom and sacrifice for God’s dearly beloved Church. We’ll pick up our conversation next week and talk about your final point about how we ought to live as “resistors” in times of cultural, social, political, and spiritual turmoil. Until then.

Share Christ, NOT Christianity

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Jesus didn’t come here to start a new religion called “Christianity,” so our testimony is about him and not our religion. Christianity is a construct; the way we organize, categorize, and theologize. But at the end of the day it’s Jesus who saves, and our witness of him so much more compelling than any construct.

We’re immersed in a friendship that we want everyone to experience. “We proclaim to you,” wrote the disciple whom Jesus loved, “the eternal life… that has appeared to us… what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”

In many ways we have handcuffed Jesus to traditions, doctrines, and dogma. Certainly, there is a place for those, but they’re not Jesus and can’t save anyone. Our goal is not to download into people all the right ideas and make “Christians” out of them. We want them to follow Jesus and fall as hopelessly in love with him as we are (or more hopelessly).

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

Our Part / God’s Part

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Salvation is work cut out only for the divine. It’s a miracle. Just as the supernatural surrounds every salvation, miracles brimmed over in Rahab’s rescue. For instance, walls crumbling at the behest of shouts and trumpets? Not bad in the miracle department I’d say. Was it their perfectly articulated shouts or the trumpeters’ unique tone that did the trick? I think not. No more than our perfectly articulated testimonies and sanctimonious tone that saves a soul.

One thing for sure is that we aren’t in the business of creating life or changing hearts. We can’t know which seed will take root and which will bounce off a stony heart. We can’t control the process or manipulate someone into salvation. We might be able to get them to say a prayer and convince them to cut down on their sinning, but to get them to come savingly to Jesus is out of our league.

It’s not our job to predict or control the mystery of the seed, but to sow it and trust the Spirit to make it grow.

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

Bonhoeffer on Trump: A Postmortem Interview (Part 2 of 4)

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Barney: Welcome back everyone to our postmortem conversation with evangelical icon, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And welcome to you, Mr. Bonhoeffer. We very much appreciate you, your legacy, and your devotion to the truth and your sacrifice for the Church of Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer: It’s entirely my pleasure.

Barney: Last time we were discussing the four categories of people in Germany in the 1930s and 40s in relation to Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror. You said there were perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, and resisters. We looked at the perpetrators last week. Who were the “collaborators” of your time, and I’m especially concerned about those who professed faith in Christ?

Bonhoeffer: Our pews were filled with collaborators. Most Protestants pledged their loyalty to the Führer and his extreme nationalism. They took communion with Nazi officers, SS guards, and concentration camp doctors, and were to my mind, ultimately complicit in their atrocities. They were drunk with the power that proximity with Hitler afforded and saw no conflict between their milquetoast Christianity and his poisonous demagoguery.

“German Christianity,” a state-sponsored religion was grounded in four heretical precepts:

Adolf Hitler is the completion of the Protestant Reformation;
Baptized Jews must be immediately dismissed from the Church;
The Old Testament should be dropped from the Christian Bible; and
Neither Jesus of Nazareth nor the first generation of Christians were Jews.

Barney: No way!

Bonhoeffer: Yes, and one of our very own German pastors, Hermann Gruner, actually preached: “The time is fulfilled for the German people of Hitler. It is because of Hitler that Christ, God the helper and redeemer, has become effective among us. … Hitler is the way of the Spirit and the will of God for the German people to enter the Church of Christ.”

Barney: That sounds horrifically familiar to those who prophesy today about Mr. Trump’s anointing by the Spirit as a David-like king that will root out evil and bring revival to America! I guess there’s nothing new under the sun!

Do you think people who take photo ops in the Oval Office are just ambitious “Evangelical Courtiers”? They flatter the president for their own prestige and go back to their pulpits and preach their nation-first sermons. They take their “seat at the table” and with their mouths full of the president’s food have nothing to say, but “Thank you, Mr. President! Thank you!” Are these the collaborators of our time?

Bonhoeffer: I wrote, “Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power.” I also said, “We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing—for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’—for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?”

In biblical terms, they’ve been shown “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” but, unlike Jesus in his encounter with the Tempter, they have gladly embraced them.

Barney: Right-Wing Evangelical leaders like Gary Bauer compared Mr. Trump to George Washington. Paula White expressed gratitude for his practice of “calling our nation to God” and for “always putting God first.” Robert Jeffress described him as a “gift to the country” raised up by God to bring “healing” to a divided America! And when Jeffress defended the president’s remarks after Charlottesville he did some nifty verbal jujitsu and changed the subject from the defensive to the offensive. He warned viewers that this was nothing but a plot of the “axis of evil” (Democrats, the media, and the “GOP establishment”) to take Trump down. I call that collaboration!

Bonhoeffer: So do I.

Barney: I agree with Cal Thomas who wrote, “Religious leaders who seek favor with the king, run the risk of refusing to speak truth to power out of fear that they won’t be invited back.” Rather than merely eating the meal and taking photos, those at the table have an opportunity to point out to the president when his policies are un-Christian.

Bonhoeffer: Remember that Nathan took advantage of his seat at the table to rebuke his king. “You are the man!” he cried, and David repented. When they’re given the opportunity to speak truth to power and don’t use it, they’re complicit with the sins of their leader.

Barney: After witnessing Hitler garnering mindless followers you wrote in one of your books that under the influence of imposing demagogic personalities people are “deprived of their independent judgment, and – more or less unconsciously – give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.” You said that when we’re talking to such folks it’s like “dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him.” I can’t imagine a more poignant description of Mr. Trump’s fan base and his sloganized ideology!

Bonhoeffer: Yes, and don’t get me started on “Make America Great Again!”

Barney: I won’t. In fact, we’re out of time, so regrettably we’ll have to wait till next time to continue our conversation when we’ll tackle the other two reactions that you related to fascism. Until then, Mr. B., thank you so very much for your time.

Bonhoeffer: You’re quite welcome.

Barney: Thanks also to our audience. Ya’ll come back next week for the third of four sessions with author, pastor, activist, and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer on Trump: A Postmortem Interview (Part 1 of 4)

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Barney: Dietrich Bonhoeffer*, it is a distinct pleasure to have you in the studio with us today. You are a hero of mine and of many around the world for your seminal theological work and sacrifice for your generation and for humanity.

Bonhoeffer: My pleasure.

Barney: We’ve asked you here today to seek your advice on how we might think and act during our plight in the Trump presidency. I realize that there is no precisely straight line to be drawn from the Führer of Germany in your time to our contemporary POTUS, yet, many of us believe there are enough similarities to warrant concern.

A lot of folks have invoked your name and legacy in support of one or another socio-political viewpoint, leveraging your reputation to propagandize. It’s an effective method of garnering support and motivating devotees, but my motive is to pick your brain about how the Christian community in America should proceed in these politically perilous times.

You invested your brief life on earth warning the German Church about Adolf Hitler, and though I don’t think the stakes are as high for us as it was in your context, I wonder if we might be able to get ahead of this trend toward totalitarianism by heeding advice from a martyr such as yourself. Many of us love our country and are profoundly disturbed by Mr. Trump’s administration and his unflagging and fawning fan base, many of which claim allegiance to Jesus. What would you say to them?

Bonhoeffer: I’d begin by saying that, for the believer, allegiance belongs only to Jesus Christ. The sort of sycophantic praise of your president that I’ve been watching is, at best, misplaced and uninformed, and at worst, idolatrous. I don’t believe Donald Trump is worthy of even the slightest of accolades for which he trolls incessantly, let alone of the worship-like devotion that some who professes faith in Jesus Christ give to him.

Barney: So, how did your countrymen, as well as many of your fellow Christians relate to Adolf Hitler? What was the German Church’s response to the Führer, especially in the early days of Nazism?

Bonhoeffer: In that time you were a perpetrator, a collaborator, a bystander, or a resister.

Barney: Could you break that down a little for us?

Bonhoeffer: Hitler and his Nazi Party members were perpetrators of the atrocities against the Jews and other “undesirables.” And believe it or not, much of what they did, they perpetrated under a “Christian” banner. They twisted Scripture in such a way as to justify a biblical basis for eliminating anyone that impeded the ascendance of the master race.

Barney: Mr. B, many who occupy offices in this administration identify as “Christian.” I personally believe that many of them also perpetrate a very dangerous trajectory for our country. They may have Bible studies in the White House but in my opinion their policies and personas are antithetical to the way of Jesus and are socially, politically, and spiritually toxic. And while the assault on our democracy is not as severe as Hitler’s Germany, many of us think Mr. Trump and his cabinet do damage to the American psyche, to its moral conscience, and to the democratic process in general, to say nothing of our relationship with other countries.

Bonhoeffer: I saw the footage and heard the chants of supposed “Christian” neo-Nazis at your Charlottesville tragedy–– “Jews will not replace us!” they shouted. I couldn’t help but harken back to how demonstrations such as that in the 1930s were a precursor to the concentration camps and the murder of millions of innocent people. When I saw American marchers displaying swastikas and crying, “Blood and soil!” it turned my stomach.

Barney: Yeah, that was definitely one of our own darkest days.

Bonhoeffer: And when your president implied a moral equivalence between the opposing sides I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was surreal.

Barney: Do you think our president and his loyalists are “perpetrators” of a vision for America that leans more toward fascism than a democratic republic?

Bonhoeffer: Yes I do.

Barney: With that, we’ll conclude our conversation for now. Next week we’ll take it up where we left off and talk about what you are calling “collaborators” of Nazism. Thank you so much, Mr. Bonhoeffer, for talking with us.

Bonhoeffer: Thank you for having me.

*OK, since Mr. B has been dead for over 70 years these conversations would be logistically impossible, yet in my opinion, ideologically plausible.

POTUS versus Science

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More than 300 federal and nonfederal scientists worked on the “National Climate Assessment,” which was reviewed by13 federal agencies. The report estimates that about 92% of climate change can be attributed to the harmful effects of human actions.

Read it for yourself. If it’s too daunting, read just the FAQs. Here are a few excerpts to the point:

“Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.”

“The warming trend observed over the past century can only be explained by the effects that human activities, especially emissions of  greenhouse gases, have had on the climate.”

“The evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans’ physical, social, and economic well-being are rising.”

“Climate change is altering the world around us in ways that become increasingly evident with each passing decade. Natural and human systems that we rely on are being impacted by more intense precipitation events, rising sea level, and a warming ocean and will be impacted by projected increases in the frequency of droughts and heat waves and other extreme weather patterns.”

“The choices made today largely determine what impacts may occur in the future. Carbon dioxide can persist in the atmosphere for a century or more, so emissions released now will still be affecting climate for years to come.”

Now here are some things President Trump has said about climate change, before and after the report came out.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

“It used to not be ‘climate change.’ It used to be ‘global warming.’ That wasn’t working too well, ’cause it was getting too cold all over the place.”

“I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change .”

“It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!“

“Brutal extended cold blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to global warming?”

“Is there climate change? Yeah. Will it go back like this, I mean will it change back? Probably.”

“Well, I think we’ve contributed, we certainly contribute, I mean, there’s certain pollutants that go up and there’s certain things that happen.”

“I want everybody to report whatever they want, but ultimately I’m the one that makes that final decision. I can also give you reports where people very much dispute that (the claim that climate change is human caused).”

“I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”

“What I’m not willing to do is sacrifice the economic well-being of our country for something that nobody really knows.”

Do I know science––or politics for that matter? No. But I do believe 300 congressionally mandated scientists and the 13 agencies over the president, who admitted he hadn’t even read the report before he began debunking it! 

Does it matter? Maybe not to you, but it will for your children and grandchildren, long after anyone remembers that our president chose immediate “economic well-being of the country” over long term stewardship of our planet. It also matters to God, who commissioned us to tend and not trash his garden.

To the president, it’s about money and votes. To us it should be about the truth, about taking our responsibility before God seriously, and about giving coming generations, especially the most vulnerable populations, a better chance at a future.

Not for the sake of “Mother Earth” but for the glory of Father God that we should refuse to exploit the house he gave us.  Since everything he made is “good” we should be eager to be the good stewards of it until he returns to make all things new.

If your parents give you a car for graduation they expect you to take care of it and not use it to hurt others. It wouldn’t bode well if later you handed it off to your little sister rusted, dented, and running on 2 cylinders.

As someone pointed out, this is a “Joseph Moment.”

“We are killing our planet. Let’s face it––there is no Planet B.” French President Emmanuel Macron

Do unto creation as you would have it do for you!

God Takes (His) Time

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They say, “Time heals all wounds,” but I don’t believe it. Some people just get more infected over time. Time doesn’t heal, but God does–– though he often does take his time to do the healing. That might be a mercy so we’re not thrown into shock by his therapeutic ways. His procedures can be painful – like a cross!

Though it’s hurt – a lot – now I’m glad that I’ve given God access to my wounds, willing to let him use his stiff wire brush to clean them out! First he hurt me, now, through the hurt, is helping me.

PS – Only kidding, I didn’t stab my therapist. But he sure gouged me (price wise) at the end of each session!

– Originally published in The Other End of the Dark: A Memoir About Divorce, Cancer, and Things God Does Anyway (the profits of which go to Freedom House).