Flannery O'Connor famously said she liked Barth because he threw the furniture around, an image of the theologian as interior designer weary of the dull, worn out sofas of the theologically comfortable. Marilynne Robinson shares O'Connor's delight in scholar theologians who do theology for the health of the church, even if that offends the settled ideas and complacent certainties of a church too fond of its own home comforts.
Barth's early contemporary Dietrich Bonhoeffer could do some furniture hurling of his own. His is a theology forged under the pressure presses of Nazism and a National Church selling its soul for power. There is something of a temple-cleansing zeal in Bonhoeffer's theology, a deliberate and orchestrated overturning of the theological tables, as he raises his voice and tells what the Church of God is for. Bonhoeffer's is a disturbingly destabilising voice, declaring why the Church can never allow its house and household to be furnished with the alien trappings of power comfortable with whatever it has to do to achieve its all consuming goal, power.This isn't a gentle exercise of feng-shui, this is a house clearing.
One of the major weaknesses in evangelical thought is the absence of an ecclesiology adequate to its own Gospel. What is a theology of the Church that is built on the Gospel of reconciliation, eternal gestures of redemptive love, God's grace as judgement in mercy, forgiveness of sins? Where is the radical community that claims to be founded on a radical Gospel? The works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are replete with answers to hese questions. From his thesis Sanctum Communio, to Life Together, his survival manual for persecuted pastors, to his exposition of the stringent rigour of the Sermon on the Mount as the paradigm of discipleship, and to letters, sermons and lectures - the recurring insistence, the church is Christ's body, called to be his likeness, and the embodied presence of the redeemer-judge.
Two out of hundreds of examples are enough food for thought for one day:
"The church is subjected to all the weakness and suffering of the world. The church can, at times, like Christ himself, be without a roof over its head....Real worldliness consists in the church's being able to renounce all privileges and all its property but never Christ's Word and the forgiveness of sins. With Christ and the forgiveness of sins to fall back on, the church is free to give up everything else." (True Freedom, p. 87-88)
"Christians should give much more offence, shock the world far more, than they are now doing. Christians should take stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than consider the possible moral right of the strong." (DBW, vol 13, p.411)
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