Veteran of the Psychic Wars: Bonhoeffer versus Secular Methodism

Without making this essay too personal, I am someone who has had existentialist tendencies since a young boy. Death scared me and I was aware of life's fleetingness. When I was 10, I cried when my family bought a new dog because I knew one day I would have to bury it. Thus, as I got older, I was attracted to existentialist philosophy. Not that I read deeply in it, but I sympathized with it. Like many Christians, I liked the idea of Kierkegaard (reading a few of his aphorisms) without really reading his work. When I became a Christian, like many Evangelicals I was consumed with the question of conversion. As a good Christian, I wanted to see salvation brought to all. But as a good Evangelical, I believed that this process needed to shake people into reality. I was not particularly interested in the "Four Spiritual Laws" conversion strategy that was normative. I didn't want to go around trying to convince people they were sinners on the way to eternal judgement (especially as I had a brief universalist phase early in my walk). Not only did I not like this approach because it was confrontational, I also thought it didn't really work. The category of "sin" does not really register and many people of my generation generally shrug at it. "Where will you go if you die?" did not seem to have any punch behind it.

However, there's an existentialist version of this approach. The problem is not so much sin and salvation, but the self-awareness about life itself. Death and taxes, as the expression goes, are the only guaranteed things. Thus, people wandered through life like a daze, unaware of their imminent fate. In his Pensees, Pascal noted life was like a gaggle of prisoners sitting in a dark hallway, waiting for their turn to get butchered in the Coliseum. Life meant impending death and people needed to be awoke to this nightmare. I gave an existentialist spin on Ecclesiastes: life is empty and meaningless. Of course, my suspicion about this approach began when, having pitched this to a friend, his response was a smirk. Life was empty, but hey, you can scrape some pleasure together while we're sliding into the pit. I was mortified, but I was also in a despondent mood myself. Years later, the lesson of that encounter started to take. The point of Ecclesisastes is not despair, but weariness. It's a love of life, not haughty contempt, that gets the Preacher to shake his head. Wisdom indeed is better than a dissolute life of pleasure, but the wise tragically has the same fate as the fool. If there's hope, it's from God's hand, hence the conclusion.

It's from this vantage that Bonhoeffer really nails the problem with this approach. The following was from a letter he wrote while imprisoned:

"Thus we live, to some extent, buy these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered without 'God'? We have of course the secularized off-shoots of Christian theology, the existentialist philosophers and the psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented, happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate, and merely unwilling to realize that it is in severe straits it knows nothing at all about, from which only they can rescue it. Wherever there is health, strength, security, simplicity, they spy luscious fruit to gnaw at or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They make it their object first of all to drive men to inward despair, and then it is all theirs. That is secularized methodism. And whom does it touch? A small number of intellectuals, of degenerates, of people who regard themselves as the most important thing in the world and hence like looking after themselves. The ordinary man who spends his everyday life at work, and with his family, and of course with all kinds of hobbies and other interests too, is not affected. He has neither time nor inclination for thinking about his intellectual despair and regarding his modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble or a disaster" Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison

Bonhoeffer is rightly ruthless. Psychotherapy is this existentialism applied in a secular theology. It is, as he says, "secular methodism", this kind of evangelistic approach to conversion. Don't get Bonhoeffer wrong. He opposes the worldliness of the contented bourgeois, the "busy, the comfortable or the lascivious". His point, rather, is about the idea that grace only comes to the one who is patently shocked into life. Bonhoeffer is a relatively faithful Lutheran and he has contempt for this kind of fanaticism. In another letter, he defines repentance in these terms:

"This is metanoia. It is not in the first instance bothering about one's own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up in the way of Christ, into the Messianic event, and thus fulfilling Isaiah 53. Therefore, 'believe in the Gospel', or in the words of St. John the Baptist, 'Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.' [...] This being caught up into the Messianic suffering of God in Jesus Christ takes a variety of forms in the New Testament. It appears in the call to discipleship, in Jesus' table fellowship with sinners, in the conversions in the narrower sense of the word (e.g. Zacchaeus), in the act of the woman who was a sinner (Luke 7), an act which she performed without any specific confession of sin, in the healing of the sick (Matthew 8.16, see above), in Jesus' acceptance of the children. The shepherds, like the wise men from the east, stand at the crib, not as converted sinners, but because they were drawn to the crib by the star just as they were. The centurion of Capernaum (who does not make any confession of sin) is held up by Jesus as a model of faith (cf. Jairus). Jesus loves the rich young man. The eunuch (Acts 8), Cornelius (Acts 10) are anything but 'existences over the abyss'. Nathanael is an Israelite without guile (John 1.47). Finally, Joseph of Arimathaea and the woman at the tomb. All that is common between them is their participation in the suffering of God in Christ. That is their faith. There is nothing of religious asceticism here. The religious act is always something partial, faith is always something whole, an act involving the whole life. Jesus does not call men to a new religion, but to life."

Bonhoeffer goes over a laundry list of heroes in the NT, people Jesus commends/blesses for their faith/faithfulness. In few of these cases is there any explicit psychic self-exploration. Bonhoeffer's point is to emphasize the total definition of persons with Christ, which marks out faith. There is no probe about whether they really believe, or what kind of inner turmoil they feel. Such is not to say that inner turmoil does not exist, but this kind of suffering is ancillary to the act of faith (or faithfulness). It reorients the totality of one's life. In the case of many of these people, they literally turn around and literally follow Christ. It's this that is the essence of Bonhoeffer's "worldly" Christianity. Faith is not simply super-added to an otherwise normal existence, but redefines that livelihood. How? Bonhoeffer struggles to speak about it in his later letters. Nevertheless, he wants to emphasize Christ's transformative glory erupts at the center of life, not its fringe. While the gospel is for the sick, the sickness does not need to be manufactured. We are cut off from life and Christ is the life, and inherently attracts in His presence (made known in the preaching of the Word). The gospel should be preached to the world at its strength, not its fringe. It is not for the edges of life, but its center.

But it's on the "edge" that psychotherapists and existentialists dwell. They feed on human despair and discontent. The centurion did not feel dead and then look for life, he simply saw life and followed. In contrast, the psychotherapists (as professionalized secular methodists) seek to sow doubt in the simple pleasures of men. We're not really happy, our discontent and despair is suppressed (hence our lapses of judgement) and thus it must be excavated. You are not simply sad, but homo vulnus, a creature defined by his wounds who gains a sense of being through overcoming. And life is subsequently retooled to revolve around these wounds: several councilor appointments, medication, the need for "me" time, and other new secular-ascetic practices. 

It's this reason why Bonhoeffer calls it "secular methodism". The success of revivals, like Billy Graham, is the emotive attraction of the carnival, the haunted house, and the roller coaster. You watch a scary movie, get you thrills, and then go back to life. You're broken down and lifted up, and then on you go. Most converts in these crusades rapidly slunk back into the normal dimensions of life, perhaps with some new ideas and new practices. They might read their bible and pray, and perhaps have a stronger opinion about the moral state of the country. But the methodist not only sought to convert but to reinvent a new life. The classis provided an opportunity to go over, again and again, failure striving towards perfection. This approach mapped onto the secular-existential psychotherapy regime, which fed off men's discontent. Rather than seeing the cosmic disequilibrium of a world under judgement, man was turned inwards. Certainly, I'm sure, not a few psychotherapists turn people towards community activism as a way to positively enforce "healing", just as methodism did similarly. However, this becomes a self-help construction project. You're not freed to simply live, a self-awareness that has snapped into self-absorption, but plunge further down. In other words, you don't become aware of yourself in relation to the crucified Christ (self-aware of yourself as witness of the Truth) but collapse God into the state of self. There are divisions about how to understand Luther in relation to this phenomenon. Some critics blame Luther's reinterpretation of faith for this fundamentally anthropomorphic faith. Others see Luther as objectively rooted in the Word to prevent this lapse into self. Bonhoeffer, as a Lutheran, is in the latter camp and thus opposes this secular methodism.

Again, this approach can only speak to the fringe. It only has words for those at the edge of life (the dying and despairing). It cannot speak to those who are not so worried and thus must sow seeds of discord. Christ's word that "only the sick need a doctor" is given a psychological spin. Rather, this declaration should be understood eschatologically: Israel's sin and degradation could only be ignored as if a paraplegic justified that man really only needed one leg. The vocation of the People of God was in the dumpster and this elicited little substantive response from either the scribes/priests or the Pharisees. The latter simply thought they could rally, not seeing Israel's cursed exile still remained over their heads. But none of this required some inward turn. Rather, interiority is a kind of God-of-the-gaps argument. It is what fundamentally marked the liberal project: save the faith by gutting the objectionable parts. Bonhoeffer hates this project (which he sees Bultmann as part of), since the faith comes as a whole. Faith in Christ is faith in the Christ of history, the only place we actually live. Phantoms, whether of reactionary-romantics or from liberals turning inward, will simply leave most people. As Bonhoeffer rightly says, only well-off degenerates will give themselves to this project of interiority.

I think he's right. I confess I was this kind of degenerate. And I am exhausted, a veteran of these insane psychic wars and (to quote Blue Oyster Cult) "we've been eating up our brains; Please don't let these shakes go on". Sometimes good things come from crimes nonetheless (such as a rape producing a baby who grows up to care for his mother and live a righteous life), but it does not justify the crime. May God end these psychic wars and heal all the degenerates. May the Word of God be made manifest, drawing the people to the King on the Cross, where forgiveness flows and man is made perfect in righteousness. In the blood of the cup and the body of bread, life is given and received. From thence may we participate in the Crucified Christ, the lamb slain before the foundation of the world and worthy to open the scrolls of history. Glory!