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Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

April 9, 2022

On Becoming Religion-Less

It was the April 30, 1944 letter from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge that launched what we know of specific reference and writing on “religion-less Christianity.” Just a couple of excerpts of that letter here:

“What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words – whether with theological or with pious words – is past, as is the age of inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether. We are approaching a completely religionless age: people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.”

“……and if we eventually must judge even the Western form of Christianity to be only a preliminary stage of a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well? Is there such a thing as a religionless Christian? If religion is only the garb in which Christianity is clothed – and this garb has looked very different in different ages – what then is religionless Christianity?”

Today is Dietrich’s death day and I am drawn to my continued work on opening up and exploring what Dietrich, because of his tragic execution never himself was able to develop fully, this life of a person of faith who is a religion-less Christian. Back in 2018 I mashed and smashed out a raw book on the topic (Religion-Less Christianity and Renewing the Church: On Following Jesus in God, for God and without God) and self-published it. I say “mashed and smashed” and “raw” because I did it in the last 30 days of my sabbatical and it’s an editor’s nightmare, but at least I got some fundamental stuff of my thinking down on paper. Since then I retired from work as a congregational pastor and have toyed with but not committed to writing more, tightening up the initial work and expanding and developing it all in some way, that way of which I am not sure. I have a bunch of reading that has to be done – I need to see who has recently published on this aspect of Dietrich’s work, this religion-less Christianity.

All that being said, as you are reading this now you know I started writing my blog under the title of “Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian.” But I did this not because the weekly notes from my daily journal do any focused explication of just what “the religion-less Christian” looks like but because my notes, I believe, come from what I understand the bi-fold nature of a religion-less Christianity to be: 1) God is not a supernatural being or a theological hypothesis to explain the unexplainable things in life 2) God is not the “deus ex machina” called upon to achieve what we cannot achieve in our goals and aspirations; is not a supernatural being called upon to intervene in human affairs to correct what has gone wrong. 

Dietrich saw and understood God to be the center of all life, not on the margins as someone to be called into the center of our life. And he saw God, as Luther described God, only in suffering and death – meaning we suffer, we live with and put up with, the pain of a God who does what God wills, not what we will – and we die – not meant physically in this specific reference – to Self, and that not because we can do so or want to do so but because God kills our Self in order to give us, to resurrect us, to full and real life. But then Dietrich too took us to the place of seeing and living life fully only by taking on, then, all of life from the perspective and life-situation of those who are suffering physically, economically, emotionally, politically and socially….and those marginalized from life by exploitation by others. Dietrich called us to see life, and there find life, “from below.”

I have become religion-less. I have been done in by God and I am working to see and live life “from below.” I have no pretensions about how I am doing. I am suspicious of my motivations. I leverage daily confession in order to see clearly and be humbled, then freed, then to start again. I am religion-less, with a focus on healing and renewing the world’s rot, not for my sake or for God’s sake but rather because I am put there by what I see and hear from God. 

It is my hope that as I write weekly from my journal daily I can develop more deeply and widely just what this religion-less Christianity is and can be. I do know this: the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer affects me greatly and I am learning and growing continually. 

On this anniversary of Dietrich’s death I wonder aloud with you what he penned in that April 30, 1944 missal: Just who is Jesus Christ actually for us today?