Bonhoeffer Meets Buddha: A Reflection on the National State of Formation Conference

*This piece is reproduced from the State of Formation website, sponsored by the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue.  http://www.stateofformation.org

Across the room, I saw a woman draped in traditional Buddhist Kasaya, or “chougu” if you are Tibetan. While I was here to explore interfaith dialogue, I admit on one level I had no idea what to expect. And seeing this very Eastern expression of religion, my stomach twisted, my teeth ground – I was uncomfortable. On the one hand, in the past several years, I had made great intellectual strides towards interfaith dialogue among representatives from the Abrahamic religions, in which a shared tradition of sacred texts made certain intellectual realities possible. And while our traditional heritages shared an ensemble of characters, each who had their different entrances and exits, my own view of this world stage was still hindered by a narrower view from the back that continued to blur its true dimensions.

As this smiling Buddhist and I shook hands for the first time and made our introductions, for we had been seated next to one another for a few hours already, my filter had broadened, and the horizon before me was threatening to expand once more.

Early in my life, I learned that mission statements are only as good as your intention to own them.  Loyola Blakefield, where I attended high school, was an all-boys Roman Catholic Jesuit institution whose motto was “men for others.” Growing up in an economically privileged upbringing where the price of a Roman Catholic education at an all-boys private school was expensive back then – today, I could not even consider sending my own children to this school due to associated costs – the only “others” available in my insular worldview were the others who looked like me, whose fathers were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and our mothers, many of whom did not need to work. These were our mothers and fathers who were always available for their sons’ soccer and baseball games. Early on, I learned that being “men for others” had a lot to do with economic advantage.

It wasn’t until I came to a deepening of my own faith and its radical rebirth in my mid-‘20s, that “the other” would confront my own worldview in an entirely different manner. After receiving my undergraduate degree at Towson University, I decided to attend The Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University. The school itself was a product of Vatican II cooperation between Episcopalians and Catholics. By this time, I had left my own Roman Catholic upbringing, and was uncomfortably comfortable “church-jumping” (a pejorative phrase for someone who knows he has no accountability and takes full advantage of his liberty) from one non-denominational church to the next. I attended the Institute, therefore, because, in all honesty, the program was affordable, accredited, and there were no viable programs in the immediate area that offered the quality of education I could get here.

Yet at the Institute, it was first time I was truly presented with something more than doctrine. Here, I sat in the classroom and encountered other human bodies, many from traditional mainline denominations but also those from other backgrounds, each of whom confessed to experiencing similar fears, failures, and spiritual concerns, as they questioned themselves and their own traditions. This had the effect of turning me inward, and while one might think that such a turn is counterintuitive to interfaith dialogue, it was a step that allowed for self-critical examination of my own prejudices, and allowed me to open up to the person occupying the seat next to me, whose love and adoration for Christ was becoming harder and harder to impeach as some form of inauthentic expression the more they explained their own faith journey to me.

In my final year of study, I wanted to do a thesis for my final culminating experience. The discipline I chose was Christian Ethics and the theologian whose lens I chose to look through was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran who enjoys rock star status among Protestant Christians, but who also has a broader appeal as well. It was in reading Bonhoeffer, in reading reflections about him, in carefully looking at the importance of his own struggles with social justice as a Christian imperative, that my conservative bent towards the primacy of personal piety, already in a state of flux, started to complete a much needed retreat.

One of the most important expressions of Bonhoeffer’s deep and abiding sense of Christology was not Exclusivism, but Inclusivism. This Inclusivism was a call to enter into the experience of the “Other,” a theme that occupies his own writings from his early work on Sanctorum Communio to his unfinished work known as Ethics. Bonhoeffer’s concept of the Other was not only an integral part of loving one’s enemies who are actively seeking your harm, but also those who for whatever reason have caused you little concern. For Bonhoeffer, the question of Otherness was then tied both to the Reich Church, but also to the Jews  in Germany in the 1930s through 1940s who were being persecuted. It was a Germany in which one’s neighbor might be one’s enemy but unlike our society, could not be avoided.

It reminded me of Jesus’ own time, one which was riveted by its own culture wars, a world in which the Other, be that individual Jew, Samaritan, or Roman could not help but be engaged. The Otherness, however, of interfaith dialogue was something that I had been disengaging, especially because the community where I dwelt could remain geographically isolated in its Protestant, white, upper-middle class character and unaffected by the real demands of the gospel, except to pick a pet homeless project in someone else’s community for a couple hours a week.  Otherness, I found had not been grasped, neither by me nor by those with whom I chose to worship.

The significance of Bonhoeffer dissolved the dogmatic boundaries of transcendence as a category of epistemology and became for me what Bonhoeffer had demanded in his own form: a relational ethic in Christ. Christology then for Bonhoeffer was not an expression of knowledge “How does Christ operate in the world,” but rather “Who is Christ for me?” The form of Christ therefore is not what he looks like as a subject of knowledge, but how he forms himself in the people who are the Church.
This revelation, and it was a revelation, meant that where doctrine, Dogmatics, and epistemology had been my reigning hermeneutical pressure points, if I were to understand myself as a Christian, I was fully obligated to take in the charge and, at times, the challenge of the Other. And because this had to be done in love, there was no turning that person, be that individual Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, into an object of ethical abstraction. He or she had to be embraced in his or her own life, work, and worship. The significance of this charge in Bonhoeffer’s day was so great, that when he wrote a popular work on the Church and the “Jewish Question” in the early 1930s, in which he speaks about ministering to those who are themselves a community within his community, a later editor seemed uncomfortable and decided to insert some passages by Luther on a Christian’s proper orientation to the Jew for the purpose of bringing them to Christ. Yet Bonhoeffer himself does not go this route.

Among some of the takeaways from my time at the State of Formation conference was an ancillary event in which we heard a panel speak about their contributions to a new book of essays entitled My Neighbor’s Faith. In hearing Dr. John MaKransky, professor of Buddhist and Comparative Theology at Boston University, speak on the “Religious Other,” Bonhoeffer immediately resurfaced. I stopped him after the lecture to discuss my observations. Dr. Makransky was intrigued to discover that this concept of Otherness and the idea of “freedom from the world as freedom for the world” is as much a concept in Bonhoeffer’s writings as it was for him in his early explorations of Hinduism through his own Buddhist context. To quote a line from Dr. Makransky’s own contribution to the book, “I had a strong desire to understand how freedom from the world could become such a powerful force of enlightened activity in and for the world.”

Makransky asked me where he could find this in Bonhoeffer and I pointed him in the direction, but in doing so I too was compelled to go search out the Bhagavad Gita, which had framed part of his own story. There were other things said by Makransky through his own experience that brought to life Bonhoeffer’s own theology as a personal charge, and I am all too glad to pursue those down this road.
I ended up spending some of the most important moments of the conference in dialogue with my Buddhist friend Bhikshuni Lozang Trinlae. She was charismatic, passionate, and readily accessible. As an ex-Roman Catholic who grew up in a farming community in Connecticut she had a lot to add about her own experience of Christianity.  I was able to bounce back my own questions. It was in breaking bread, in going down to the local sports bar and restaurant and conversing on important questions of nonviolence and her own tradition of scriptural discourse that helped reinforce the human face I had found in Bhikshuni.

Some of my conservative Christian friends, who continue to remain cut off from this conversation, who attempt to convince me that their love, to use Makransky’s phrase for the “Religious Other,” is no empty shell but genuine and true must understand that where love will flourish, it always has a mind to seek out the expression of humanity in the Other. It is very hard to love a community of people who exist to you only on the front pages of newspapers by way of streams of negative images or as hypothetical communities to which abstract commands are directed.  Living by accident in communities of religious diversity is not the same thing as living intentionally. While you may not be out rightly hostile to them, you obliterate the Other person each time to fail to enter into their humanity, seeing them as the Other. Christians have a phrase: Christ died for that person. How wonderful would it be if we understood this as more than a mode of proselytization and like Bonhoeffer, as an affirmation of our shared humanity?

In closing, my own tradition continues to speak to me very powerfully. But I’m learning that my tradition is incomplete without these other voices. I’m learning that so much of the work that non-denominational and Baptist churches have done to avoid stagnant sermons on doctrine and dogma to create a “non-threatening” worship experience that draws in people who are traditionally frightened by past images of a heavy-handed Church is no different than the kind of work that is being asked of those who are interested in interfaith dialogue. We are onto something here. And as one who comes to the table through Christianity, I would only add that perhaps what makes you most uncomfortable is precisely where you need to be if you are going to have any chance of grasping the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ at a deeper level.

Christians Who are Uncomfortable with Homosexuality and How to Deal with it Theologically.

I want to make a frank confession.

Homosexuality, while something I have gradually come to understand intellectually and theologically, is still something I struggle with existentially.  It is a struggle that manifests when I struggle not to express discomfort when I receive my coffee from an effeminate man with long painted fingernails at the drive-thru window of the fast-food restaurant on some mornings. It is a discomfort that rises when I see “flamboyant” homosexuals parading down the street in a Gay Pride parade as opposed to the more scrupulous homosexual who tries not to make identity his window of access to the world. In the past, it has been a discomfort when I deflected a sexual advance after a girl friend of mine told me another man was attracted to me. I would like to wax intellectual here and say that what bugs me at times about the whole politicized homosexual movement is the celebration of difference as a form of direct antagonism against the status quo that stirs up these feelings, but it is something far deeper.  I have come to realize that it may be a part of who I am.

And what I realize is that this “issue” that I have spent time trying to intellectualize and overcome seems at times a worthless mental exercise. In this same way though, it reminds me of the often worthless profession of faith I claim as a Christian. It reminds me clearly of how at times I’ll leave church, having been inspired in the peace and communion of Christ, only to enter a car with three screaming children and let off a curse word, meeting their screaming with my own. Or how I promise to volunteer more in charitable activities and no sooner have I said it that I forget this pledge of compassion and move on with my insular life, attending to my own needs, spending my own money on me. Or how I bad mouth someone or gossip and feel convicted even as the words are coming over my lips, but continue because the catharsis that comes with it is too satisfying not to indulge.

There is no other image to me perhaps more striking than the events that immediately follow Christ’s resurrection. Resurrection life, that promise which we believe opens us up so entirely to the Other, seems on an applied level like so many moralities that we fail and which fail us by expecting of us a person who simply cannot follow step-by-step along the same path. And yet if we are to believe the reports of the gospel writers, then at some point, Jesus does things that are completely unexpected. He enters the home of a sinner to share a meal. On another occasion, he allows an unclean person to clean his feet with her hair, as these motifs increase, we are constantly confronted by Jesus doing things that many Jews of his time would find unclean and abominable. And in doing such things, we are led to believe that what was unclean, what was abominable, he makes clean. What makes clean is not the transformation that occurs in the Other, if any, but rather that Jesus comes alongside the Other in humanity and compassion, and by doing so challenges the status quo.

The reality of the gospel cannot simply be summarized as the actions of a holy man doing holy things that we get to emulate every now and then when we pass a poor person on the island of an intersection we decide to give him a 5.00 dollar bill, even while against our better judgment because we can’t account for our act of charity once it leaves our possession. And as Americans, it’s our duty to know where our money goes. The reality of the gospel is the lived experience of the Other. The pre-Passion cross sayings that the gospel writers put on Jesus’ lips in the living world seem like a call to live among the despised, the damned, and the outcasts. It is self-death.

Paul talks about being dead to the law and alive to Christ. What does this look like? The law is the law of sin and separation, not just from God, but to ourselves and others. When I see myself only as a functionary of God’s law, I have failed to relate to what it means to be alive in Christ. There is something profound to be understood that even after the experience of resurrection life, we find that the Apostles continue in their progressive understanding of Christ to live as those whose lives are continually making room for new understandings. Having been in his presence was not enough. Continuing to live in his presence is necessary.  

Two particular issues of post-resurrection importance that required the Apostles to examine their interpretative filter were among these, and they were far from trivial. These included the eating of unclean meats and the problem of circumcision. Paul’s answer to circumcision was one of ecumenicity. Peter’s answer to the eating of meats was one of inclusion. In both, the customs of the outsiders, despicable, abominable, and unclean, were met in the spirit of love and grace. If you are not Jewish, if you do not understand the meaning behind ritual laws of purity, you most likely will not capture how problematic this was. As a lay Christian far removed from this world, my response used to be “get over it.” And then I quickly realized that I may as well have said “get over it” to the post-slavery generations of my time who still strongly identify with slavery, despite myself, who has virtually no bond that could bring me to any such ethnic identification, primarily because I have always existed at the top of the ethnic power structure and have no need to remind myself who I am.  

I mentioned earlier that the existential discomfort I feel for homosexuality is perhaps a part of who I am. This however is not without qualification. What I’ve learned in my Christianity is that who I am and who Christ says I am are not the same person.  Outside of Christ, I am isolated from God, a sinner, and to add to this rather abstract notion and ineffective motif, I am also a liar, jealous, envious, in the past, a brawler, a thief, a fornicator, in essence I have never had a problem understanding what Paul says of me before Christ:  I am guilty of it all. And while my life has been shot through with the resurrection life of Christ, this other law working in me expresses the expectation for the fullness of resurrection life I have yet to experience, even while I continue to grow. While many Christians intellectualize the importance of sanctification as a life-long process, it is often understood as a conformance to something they think they’ve already got a handle on intellectually. For as soon as their transformation is complete, their interpretative window closed, and their Bibles bound cover to cover, and there is no longer a living Word but a codified Word that they knock the cobwebs off each Sunday to re-read the same static passages, and in doing so prove sanctification is not a conformance to the character of Christ but a conformance to ethical duty. Despite talk then of a living confrontation with the living God, it is always a confrontation with the past that fails to find itself as a genuine experience in the present. It is the “dead men’s bones” Jesus inveighs. There is no room for new wine, for the skins are already full. These Christians live the faith of their fathers, but it is not their own. Is the problem deeper? Is there a fear that we will go off track? Is there a presumption that God inspires the men who went before us in a way that is unattainable to us? It is an unspoken presumption, unvoiced, but present and deeply attached to our own restrictive interpretations of ourselves as spiritual persons.

The discomfort that at times catches my spiritual life off-guard is precisely the impetus I need to understand the universal gift of salvation through the dying and rising Christ. Discomfort indicates that I am still struggling with my former self, the sin that has always been the reflex of my instinctual physical life. I think if Christians are real with themselves, they would not mistakenly translate a discomfort for homosexuality they have felt all their life now as a spiritual discomfort that they justify as emanating from their spiritual life. They would recognize that the “man of sin” remains, and we are at war with surrendering to fear, distance, and simply the discomfort of difference. Christians should see these as opportunities. Those who fear the house of the publican should enter boldly into it, for “perfect love casts out fear.” Those making difficult spiritual transitions are often the ones who are existing in the fullness of relationship with God, eating meat among those who drink milk - they understand that relationships are dynamic. Cornelius learned this. Paul learned this.  Peter also learned this. The afterglow of the resurrection story is not the conclusion but the beginning. Beginnings make new possibilities not codify old ones. And the thing that you are uncomfortable with may very well be the thing that God is calling you to enter into and understand in love.

The Road to Interfaith

Early this week I spent time with students from various seminaries and university across the United States for a 2-day seminar on interfaith dialogue in Boston, MA. The experience was exciting and new territory in the ever-changing shape of my faith. The faith that had been discovered in the context of Fundamentalism has over the past few years slowly eroded to make room for new content, and this was surely one of those moments. This new direction seems appropriate. The Ecumenical Institute of Theology prepared me for inter-denominational dialogue. As a Fundamentalist, I had trouble accepting the sincerity of other Christian traditions. Calvinists had misunderstood free will as a guarantee of the Confessionalism that was necessary to come to Christ. Roman Catholics gave inordinate expression to sacramental grace, works, and the veneration of Mary had robbed them of a genuine experience of the life-giving salvation found only in Christ. As these walls crumbled during my time at the Ecumenical Institute, inter-denominational dialogue was logically extended to interfaith dialogue, and the fruit of that came this weekend as I spent time with Jews and even a Tibetan Buddhist discussing our traditions. In fact, I found the Christians who were attending to have expressions of faith much different than mine, hinging almost on something entirely different. I plan on following this with a much more extended reflection of my time in Boston.

The next stop is an emerging educators conference on interfaith in Connecticut in June.

My Photo History with N.T. Wright

Yesterday, I officially ended my academic career at The Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary & University, which is the only institute of its kind in the Roman Catholic tradition and exists under the oversight of the Sulpician community. Among the graduates was none other than Rev. N.T. Wright, who received an honorary doctorate. I found an older photograph of the two of us back in 2008 when he was invited to deliver the institute's 40th anniversary lecture, and thought I'd simply post the two.

                                                                                2012

     
                                                                             2008

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and North Carolina’s Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

With the defeat of same-sex marriage in North Carolina, I am reminded once again of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sensitive analysis of the cultural, religious, and political ideals that divided his people. During his days of public protest, especially in the early 1930s, laws that sought to discriminate against non-Aryans grew increasingly brazen in their direct assaults on human rights.

The situation we witnessed yesterday cannot help but conjure images of the introduction of one such Aryan paragraph on June 30, 1933. This “law” prevented Aryans from holding civil service jobs if it was discovered they were married to non-Aryans. That marriage was being attacked as a right available only to those of Aryan descent along with other factors created the backdrop for Bonhoeffer’s now famous response “The Church and the Jewish Question.” In this defensive work, Bonhoeffer questions another dimension of these laws barring ministers of non-Aryan/Jewish descent to continue their activities in the Church. In the work, he questions the legitimacy of distinguishing within the Church between Jew or Gentile, claiming that such things are undermined by one’s belief in Christ and place in the community of faith. Likewise, Bonhoeffer also states that it is the Church’s duty to come alongside and support anyone who is being discriminated against and whose rights are being displaced, and not only those who claim “the household of faith.”

This concern for the “Other,” (Andere) an early theme in Bonhoeffer’s writings, eerily anticipates the circumstances that would come to affect the German Jews. Bonhoeffer, who had Jewish family, knew all too well the real-world consequences of discrimination. He deeply regretted, for example, caving into pressure not to preach the eulogy at his brother-in-law’s Jewish father.

Reflecting further, I was also unfortunately reminded that as various non-Aryan laws were passed, one of the outcomes was that Jews were systematically prevented from obtaining benefits through the public healthcare system in Germany.  For those of you following closely, one of the arguments against prohibiting same-sex marriages in North Carolina was a protest of the same quality. By denying homosexual parents marriage status, children in those relationships would not be recognized as legitimate offspring, and could be subject to the exclusion of healthcare benefits.

In effect, what we have in North Carolina is “National Socialism in miniature,” folks. Who knows? Perhaps the next measure will be the reinvention of a new State motto.