Abstract
How Christians live in this world has long been contentious, and not just in terms of particular ethical questions. There is on the one hand the, at times justifiable, Marxist critique of ‘pie in the sky when we die’: Christians can so emphasize the consolations of eternal life that worldly life here and now is undervalued. On the other hand, when various Christian communities down the ages have tried to live daily life according to their faith, they have often been labelled separatists, not engaging with the rest of the world. It is precisely this question of how Christians are to live, to be, in this world that Barry Harvey’s Taking Hold of the Real addresses. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thought is the foundation on which he seeks to outline Christianity’s ‘profound worldliness’, and that in ways which speak to life in the early twenty-first century.
Harvey’s stated purpose is ‘to think faithfully and truthfully about this time after Christendom, with [Bonhoeffer] as primary interlocutor’. He does so not simply as an interpreter of Bonhoeffer, but ‘to understand his descriptions, analyses, and insights in order to bring them to bear on the world given to us to attest to the works of God in the world’ (p. 5).
Harvey begins this project by looking at Bonhoeffer’s notion of Christianity as being profoundly ‘this-worldly’: the Christian participates in Christ’s life and sacrifice, and this is borne out in how she is to live here and now. Yet, ‘what profound worldliness looks like at a given time and place must take the distinctiveness of that time and place into account’ (p. 56).
Therefore, Harvey wants to look in more detail at Bonhoeffer’s notion that the world had come of age. Harvey gives an excellent account of what Bonhoeffer meant by this phrase, both in the prison letters and writings. That the world has come of age Harvey treats as a fact, full of irony and inconsistencies, but still a fact that must be acknowledged. He wishes neither to condemn nor affirm the world come of age, but wants contemporary Christians to understand it, as Bonhoeffer says, ‘better than it understands itself’, so as to enable us to bear better witness to God in Christ. And this, he says, requires us to attend more closely to the interpretation of our times.
To do this, Harvey directs the reader’s attention to Bonhoeffer’s discussion of ‘technological organisations’ which are used (instead of ‘religion’) to protect people from the dangers of nature and even to try to control fate. Concomitant with the world’s declaration of its maturity is its relegation of ‘religion’ to the private sphere. Harvey draws here on contemporary works of social commentary to suggest that the modern nation-state has claimed for itself the right to determine what belongs in ‘public’ and what does not. For Harvey, it is imperative that the Church refuse to submit to playing the role and occupying the space that has been determined for it in this fashion. Instead, it should become a ‘political reality’, with ‘distinctive habits, rites, and institutions, and above all its distinctive uses of material goods’ (p. 122). Such a ‘performance of worldliness’, he says, enables Christians to recognise that every regime is contingent, and thereby to avoid both a servile attitude and facile protest.
The following chapters are where Harvey more obviously begins his work of ‘correction, clarification and development’ (p. 139) of Bonhoeffer’s thought, though he wants to build on the foundations Bonhoeffer laid. These chapters deal with religion, culture and race, which Harvey calls ‘crucial terms in the working lexicon that organizes the world in which virtually every woman, man, and child must live and work’ (p. 126).
Regarding religion, Harvey is able to use Bonhoeffer’s talk of religionless Christianity, which he links not only to Karl Barth’s use of the term ‘religion’ but also (relatedly) to the notion of a ‘religious a priori’, the claim that humans are inherently ‘religious’. Against this claim, Harvey works with William Cavanaugh, John Milbank and others to try to show that ‘religion’ as it is currently understood (private or inward engagement with a deity or notion of transcendence) dates only to the fifteenth century, when sacred and secular began to be carved up. In this sense, Harvey claims, ‘religion’ is ‘part and parcel of the technological regime of the modern state’ (pp. 141–42), and was used to compare and classify people(s) in the colonial era, with ongoing effects today (p. 143). Harvey says the function of ‘religion’ ‘is to help provide social capital, a stock of relations and shared values, without which no temporal social order could endure for long’. To do this, the nation-states have often ‘borrowed from the church’s vocabulary of sanctification and sacrifice’ (p. 152) to legitimate aspects of society.
When Harvey turns in the following chapter to consider the role of culture, it too gains scare quotes, as ‘a historically conditioned and transitory form of human expression that was first imagined at the dawn of the modern era in Europe to deal with a host of developments: the diversity of human life, revolution, and class struggle’ (p. 155). At this point Harvey’s post-colonialist critique takes centre stage, as Harvey considers how ‘culture’ is bound up with European discussion of non-European difference: Christian vs pagan; reason vs superstition; advanced vs primitive (p. 165). In these ways Europeans described the differences they noted between themselves and the people(s) they encountered in the ‘New World’. The legacy today is ‘multi-culturalism’, and, whether it is the ‘boutique’ sort which enjoys the flavours of ethnic restaurants and the colours of printed fabrics, or the more serious sort which values difference for its own sake, multi-culturalism has become the ‘culture’ of liberal capitalism (p. 176).
Harvey’s post-colonial critique continues in his treatment of race. Here he sees faulty supersessionist theology as being complicit in the subjugation of whole groups of peoples. Recovery from these evils cannot mean, he says, returning to an earlier state of affairs, and the way forward is likely to be difficult and take a long time (pp. 205–206). The faulty theology must be addressed theologically: baptism needs to be taken seriously as the beginning of ‘the process of unselfing’ (p. 206); and Christians in the West will need to (re-)learn their identity as Gentiles, people who are not entitled, but people who were once far off and have been brought into the covenant by Christ (p. 207).
Harvey sees in the theological relearning a role for Bonhoeffer’s notion that the Old Testament should be a hermeneutical key for reading the New Testament (p. 208). Harvey offers a careful reading of what Bonhoeffer wrote about interpreting scripture and how he went about that in treating passages from the Hebrew Bible. This forms the backbone for the ‘political’ ecclesiology Harvey develops.
This understanding of how the Church is to live in the world, Harvey calls ‘polyphonic worldliness’, borrowing the musical term from Bonhoeffer’s prison writings. While the musical term denotes a style of composition that has the simultaneous sounding of different melodies, Harvey uses it metaphorically to include the voice(s) of the persons of the Trinity as well as the voices of the followers of Christ, ‘allowing the distinctive rhythms and progressions of profound this-worldliness to be heard anew in every time and place’ (p. 237). This polyphony, for Bonhoeffer, weaves together divine and human loves, joy and sorrow, whereby the love of God is the ‘cantus firmus’, anchoring all the other interwoven melodies. Harvey uses this theme to offer a new imaginary for Christian living in which multiple strands and layers may co-exist without being in competition or overshadowing one another.
Finally, Harvey offers a chapter looking at two pastors: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and André Trocmé, the Huguenot pastor in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who famously led that village to enable some 2,500–5000 people (mostly Jews) to escape Nazi (or Vichy) persecution and probable death. They serve as exemplars of the polyphonic living he wishes to outline. Harvey looks at how their commitment to following Christ provided a different vision of living in the world, from that which was more widely common in their societies. Importantly, he also considers how their heritage (primarily familial in Bonhoeffer’s case, ecclesial in Trocmé’s) formed and prepared them for the kind of response they made to Nazism.
In many ways, this book is a tour de force. Harvey’s breadth of vision (and reading) enables him to engage big issues in ways that command serious attention. His dialogue partners include some of the best theologians (e.g. Rowan Williams, Sarah Coakley, John Milbank) and social commentators of our times (e.g. Charles Taylor, Anthony Giddens, Alasdair MacIntyre). In evaluating such a project, there are three essential questions: how well does he interpret Bonhoeffer; how authentically does he depict the world today; and how cogently does he bring his reading of Bonhoeffer to speak to the world?
First: Harvey’s reading of Bonhoeffer. Harvey draws on excellent commentators on Bonhoeffer, and mostly reads him faithfully. Although here are numerous points where I have quibbles over his interpretation, generally they relate to minor matters, and are more than offset by Harvey’s excellent treatment of a number of themes. These include his handling of ‘participation’ in chapter 1, and more centrally, his understanding of ‘religionless’ Christianity and the ‘world come of age’ throughout.
Secondly, how persuasive is Harvey’s depiction of the world? Harvey’s approach is often historical, asking how the (Western) world has come to define itself as it does. His choice to look at religion, culture and race can feel arbitrary, though each of those sections is pertinent. In particular, at a time when it is still necessary to assert that ‘Black Lives Matter’, Harvey’s focus on race is, sadly, important. However, as with any such attempt at delineating a wide-ranging history or describing the present, I am sure that many commentators will find some elements overstated, underrepresented or even misrepresented. It may not be peculiar to our times, but it is certainly common to them that no one narrative finds universal agreement. Moreover, no matter how truly Harvey may depict his context, the reader in Britain does need to make some adjustments; despite the many similarities and the shared history between Britain and the United States, a number of issues Harvey depicts play out differently here. Additionally, although it is a recent publication (2015), the book already feels dated by the lack of engagement with the nationalist, nativist, isolationist, anti-globalist, anti-establishmentalist (or whatever other -ist) forms of politics which have surprised commentators and much of the electorate in several countries since the book’s writing and publication.
Furthermore, while I have much sympathy with the post-colonial critique which much of Harvey’s depiction displays, I do have some concerns. To say that the ‘world of the church had for centuries been coextensive with that of the colonial powers, working in and through them to achieve its mission’ (p. 188) is undoubtedly right. However, it may also utterly mask not only what those Christians thought they were doing (which, on a charitable assumption, one might suppose was the ‘fresh expression’ of its day), but also what Christians today might helpfully learn from our past. For instance, just as accepting the place society accords to ‘religion’ may be said to be a form of being co-opted by the nation-state, so piggy-backing on current trends (whether colonial expansion in earlier centuries or, say, engagement with the ‘digital world’ in fresh expressions today) makes the church a hostage to fortune: it is hard to see at the time how the gospel might be falsified by association with these new developments. Yet it is impossible to learn such lessons if we only see the colonialists through the lens of ideological critique, rather than—also—looking over their shoulder as they look in a mirror. Only in that gazing with them in the mirror is it possible to recognise the possibility that we today may be risking similar hazards, which could have horrendous consequences for decades or even centuries to come. For these reasons, I did not find his depiction of the world as compelling as I had initially hoped.
Thirdly, how cogently does Harvey bring Bonhoeffer’s insights to bear on the situation of the world (or at least the United States) today? Harvey’s call to the Church to take its place in the polis, in the world, to have ‘political’ existence without being co-opted by the nation-state or having its existence determined or defined by the world, is important. Harvey’s voice adds a distinctive timbre to the music already being sung by Stanley Hauerwas, William Cavanaugh, Samuel Wells, and a number of others. Certainly, for Bonhoeffer to be heard in this way, Harvey did have to develop his thought further. This is an imaginative and powerful work, and in many ways a model of how Bonhoeffer may be a generative resource for constructive theology today.