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"At Abyssinian,
Bonhoeffer sat under the ministry of Powell almost weekly for
over six months. Powell's culturally engaged sermons blended the
artful rhetoric and congregational, noncreedal style of the
black Baptist church with the best of American social
pragmatism. Powell had learned to appreciate John Dewey through
their work together at the NAACP. We have recently learned
through the research of Ralph Garlin Clingan that some of
Bonhoeffer's theological vocabulary was borrowed from the pulpit
work Pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. For example, Powell
complained that the problem of the Euro-American church was
'cheap grace'." Ralph Garlin
Clingan, "Against Cheap Grace in a World Come of Age: A
Study in the Hermeneutics of Adam Clayton Powell, 1865-1953, in
His Intellectual Context." A Drew University Ph.D.
dissertation (UMI Microfilm 9732791, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1997).
First We
Take Manhattan
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Barth was the first theologian
to begin the criticism of religion,-and that remains his really
great merit-but he set in its place the positivist doctrine of
revelation which says in effect, "Take it or leave
it": Virgin Birth, Trinity or anything else, every-thing
which is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole,
which latter has to be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That
is not in accordance with the Bible. There are degrees of
perception and degrees of significance, i.e. a secret discipline
must be re-established whereby the mysteries of the
Christian faith are preserved from profanation. The positivist
doctrine of revelation makes it too easy for itself, setting up,
as in the ultimate analysis it does, a law of faith, and
mutilating what is, by the incarnation of Christ, a gift for us.
The place of religion is taken by the Church-that is, in itself,
as the Bible teaches it should be-but the world is made to
depend upon itself and left to its own devices, and that is all
wrong.
May 5th 1944
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Even though there has been
surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the
so-called ultimate questions—death, guilt—on which only
"God" can furnish an answer, and which are the reason
why God and the Church and the pastor are needed. Thus we live, to
some extent, by 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. June
8th letter
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update 23 June 2008 |
