Militant Liturgies: Practicing Christianity with Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Weil

Traditional philosophy of religion has tended to focus on the doxastic dimension of religious life, which although a vitally important area of research, has often come at the cost of philosophical engagements with religious practice. Focusing particularly on Christian traditions, this essay offers a sustained reflection on one particular model of embodied Christian practice as presented in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. After a discussion of different notions of practice and perfection, the paper turns to Kierkegaard’s conception of the two churches: the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant. Then, in light of Kierkegaard’s defense of the latter and critique of the former, it is shown that Kierkegaard’s specific account gets appropriated and expanded in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s account of “costly grace” and “religionless Christianity,” and Simone Weil’s conception of “afflicted love.” Ultimately, it is suggested that these three thinkers jointly present a notion of “militant liturgies” that offers critical and constructive resources for contemporary philosophy of religion.

Eine komplexe Friedenstheologie und Friedensethik

Peace has to be thought of in a more complex way, which is mainly stimulated by women from civil society. Many questions can no longer be addressed in a thematically and politically isolated or delimited way; chains of action and challenges are too interwoven. So far, too little attention has been paid to the preferential option for the poor, the approach of religionless Christianity and a feminist-liberation-theological-pacifist approach. Topics that are more marginal, such as a peace-ethical approach to money and the relationship between peace and health, are also addressed. Finally, the difficult question of how far one may still cooperate with the state when one is on the trail of peace is explored.

The Sky Is Not the Limit

In this chapter, we engage with the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We seek to build on Bonhoeffer’s comment that ‘God’s “beyond” is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life.’ The chapter addresses the early faultlines in Bonhoeffer’s thought, especially the themes of Mündigkeit, Sicut Deus, penultimacy, ‘natural life’ and creaturehood, evidenced in his Ethics as well as Creation and Fall. The affirmation of this-worldliness and religionless Christianity finds a more profound rendition in the doctrine of creation and creaturehood. The invitation to the religious other is a ‘call to creaturehood’ and to live etsi deus non daretur.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1906–45)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twentieth-century Lutheran theologian who associated Christian belief and political action in an exemplary fashion. His part in the struggle of the Confessing Church and of the German resistance against the National-Socialist dictatorship cost him his life. Christocentric and ecclesiocentric, he stressed personal and collective piety and revived the idea of the imitation of Christ; the concepts of obedience and of the suffering God are central to his view. His Ethik (1949) was widely influential; in it, he argued that Christians should not retreat from the world, but have a duty to act within it. His answer to the secularization of the modern world was a ‘religionless Christianity’, a communocentric, pietistic, personal discipline.

Bonhoeffer’s “Religionless Christianity” and the Evangelical Rejection of “Religion”:A Comparison

The following article compares Bonhoeffer’s writings on “religionless Christianity” with the opinion, common among evangelicals, that Christianity is not about “religion,” based on a study of members of the Vineyard Church in T.M. Lurhmann’s When God Talks Back. While there are important similarities between Bonhoeffer and the evangelical rejection of religion, the article argues that the two theologies part ways on a number of points, most importantly concerning the theology of suffering.

Różewicz and Bonhoeffer. On the Margin of the Poem Learning to Walk by Tadeusz Różewicz

The departure point of the analysis presented in this article is a poem written by Tadeusz Różewicz learning to walk (nauka chodzenia). The protagonist of the poem is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who created the theory of “religionless Christianity”. According to Bonhoeffer, a modern Christian has to immerse himself/herself in the “godless” world so that – in tandem with the Saviour – he/she can be experience the final abandonment. The author of this article tries to prove that the theology of Bonhoeffer had a great impact on Różewicz, making him reconsider his viewpoint on faith. Due to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the poet also found a solution for a basic contradiction that was explicated in the famous poem entitled Bez (Without): “life without god is possible / life without god is impossible”.