Forgotten what the real point is...80 years ago - Bonhoeffer on the American Church

"The sermon has bee reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events... So what stands in the place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by faith in progress that - who know how- claims the right to call itself "Christian." And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation...One cannot avoid the impression, however, that...they have forgotten what the real point is."*

These alarming words were written by Bonhoeffer in the 1930s. 80 years later and I shudder to think what he'd write now. Now obviously one man's opinion is limited to a single perspective. Bonhoeffer was truly a German theologian and no doubt wherever he went he could see a Church that he did not necessarily stand in full agreement with.

Still his perspective on the social nature of the church gives us reason to pause and take note of where we are as a church in the 21st century. Bonhoeffer was witnessing some of the fiercest clashes of the fundamentalist vs liberalist battle that was taking place in America (in NYC in particular.) Its was a battle much akin to the republican vs democratic squabbles of today. Today's American churches are the churches that grew out of those battles. Even so the more reason to take heed to Bonhoeffer's words.

How do you feel about the church? Should it be concerned with an ethical and social idealism? Should it only exist to teach dogmas and doctrines and leave out its interaction with society? I think its somewhere in the middle - in that glorious tension of following Jesus.

*Excerpts taken from Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas