An Overwhelming Christian, Pro-Life Novel

Last updated on: August 13, 2022 at 11:56 am By Gene Veith

You have got to read Edna Hong’s novel Bright Valley of Love, a true story about a community of profoundly disabled children, the Christians who cared for them, and a pastor who battled the Nazi euthanasia program to save their lives.

Although the book deals frankly with suffering and sadness, reading it is an overwhelmingly joyful experience. This is because the author accomplishes something very difficult to do in literature, conveying the joy that comes from the love of Christ as it spills over into love of neighbor.

It tells the story of the Bethel Community, a Christian ministry in Germany devoted to the care of the physically and mentally impaired, led by Pastor Friedrich (“Fritz”) von Bodelschwingh. It does so through the point of view of one patient, Gunther, who can neither walk nor use his hands nor feed himself, a child abandoned by his parents and a cold-hearted grandmother who considered him “no good for anything.”

Then he came to Bethel. Most remarkable is the way the author shows Gunther gradually responding to the love shown him by the Deaconesses and his fellow patients, some of whom are in a worse condition than he is. Since he couldn’t speak, the staff first assumed that Gunther is also mentally impaired, but he isn’t. No one had ever talked to him in a way that would help him learn to talk. But he learns to speak, then to read, and when he goes to school his horizons keep expanding.

The pattern of regular worship “centers” him, for the first time in his life, and he learns more and more about Jesus, especially from Pastor Fritz, who has to be one of the most fully realized pastors in literature. Gunther finds that he has a talent for remembering hymns, which play an important part in the narrative and in addressing the spiritual issues that unfold. (I am told the audio version of the book, in which the hymns are sung, is especially effective.) Eventually, Gunther and his friends go through confirmation class, after which they enter a “calling” in the community, leading to thoughtful and perceptive reflections on vocation, on how they can serve God and their neighbors despite their conditions.

Meanwhile, what happens in the outside world impinges on the Bethel community. The economy collapses, inflation soars, Bethel takes in the unemployed and homeless, and soon the Nazis come into power. Whereupon they launch their euthanasia program, attempting to breed the master race and to eliminate the unfit and “useless.” They send a green questionnaire to hospitals and treatment centers to identify candidates for extermination. Bethel refuses to co-operate. As the news of what is happening goes through the community, Pastor Fritz stands up to the Nazis and does what he can to protect his flock.

Though the novel itself only hints at this, Pastor Fritz would go on to become a leader in the Confessing Church movement, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and Hermann Sasse, among others. The Bethel Confession, which opposed the Nazified “German Christian” movement that had taken over the established church, emerged out of this Bethel.

The story is gripping, immersive, and exciting. And very moving. I warn you: I don’t care how cynical you are–it will bring tears to your eyes. Good tears.

Edna Hong, who died in 2007, was a National Book Award winning translator. She learned about Bethel, which is still operating, from a POW–a Lutheran pastor–her husband met after the war. She came to know Gunther, who by this time was 62, first hand. She first published the book in 1979. Unaccountably, it fell out of print and into obscurity. But Concordia Theological Seminary Press has done a great service in bringing it back.

The book deserves wide readership, now more than ever.

Today Christianity is widely misunderstood, twisted, and repudiated. This book shows the Gospel of Christ and its impact on people’s lives in a powerfully winning way.

Today the church is discredited. The Bethel Community shows what the church can be at its best.

Today churches are being encouraged to engage in works of mercy. This book shows what that looks like and the price it can cost.

Today, the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision has sparked a backlash against the pro-life cause. This book makes the case for the value of all human life, no matter how unwanted, and it does so not just with argumentation but with an imaginative appeal that pierces the heart. (In the Epilogue, the author explicitly connects the struggle against euthanasia to the struggle against abortion.)

Today, we Lutherans still face the stigma of Hitler’s Germany, how so many so-called Lutherans fell into line with Nazism and its atrocities. We need to distance ourselves from that legacy by aligning ourselves with the confessing Lutherans, making a clear distinction from the culture-conforming, theologically liberal “German Christian” movement, with its project of purging Christianity of its “Jewish”–i.e., Biblical–elements, to the point of removing the Old Testament from the Bible. (See my book on this subject.)

Also, in purely literary terms and as an exemplar of Christian artistry, Edna Hong knew how to write. Here is the opening of the novel:

In the world of his mother’s womb, the fluid of life that trickled into him through his umbilical cord was weak and starved. The world into which he was born one day in the year 1914 nourished him no better. Perhaps even worse. For it was the worst of times, and his mother was not the best of mothers. And his father went off to World War I, which the whole world lost, although some countries thought that they had won it. For the baby boy Gunther, who was born in Germany–the country that lost the war most hurtfully–the sum of all these things was a lifetime as a cripple.

“No good for anything,” said his grandmother coldly when the war was all over and his father rescued him from the woman who was not the best of mothers and brought him to her own house in a great gray, dingy city west of the Rhine, north of the Ruhr, and south of the Lippe rivers.

The grandmother had swept and scrubbed floors and rubbed clothes on a washboard practically every day she could remember of her life, and she believed that only people who did something useful like that had any right whatsoever to live in the world. Or people who were rich enough not to have to be useful. (pp. 9-10)

Here is a passage from much later in the story, when Gunther and his epileptic friend Klaus–both of whom know that they would be put on the death list–role play the conversation that they think Pastor Fritz may be having at that very moment with Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s physician and the head of the euthanasia program, who came to Bethel to arrange for the turning over of its patients:

“According to you, Dr. Brandt, there are people who are non-human. Your standard is supposed to separate humans from non-humans, and the non-humans are to die. Would you call that a human standard?”

“Yes, for I do not call the lives these poor creatures live human.”

“Where is the dividing line? When does a human life become non-human?”

“When it cannot respond to another human being in a human way. When it is not able to have human association with anybody.”

“Dr. Brandt!” Gunther’s voice rang with triumph. “That cannot be said of even the weakest in mind and body here in Bethel. I must say that I have never in my life met such a person, and I have spent my whole life here in Bethel. if you were to say that of anyone here in Bethel, I’m afraid I would have to ask you, Dr. Brandt, if you are capable of human association with another human.”

“Bravo, Gunther! Bravo!”. . . .

“Therefore, Dr. Brandt, no rulers on earth can make a standard that decides what is human, what human life is worth preserving, what human life is not worth preserving. God alone can give us that standard. And he has done so, Dr. Brandt. The answer to the question about the worth of human life is Jesus Christ. First of all he became human. And in his life here on earth, whom did Jesus Christ place first in his love and concern? Tell me that, Dr. Brandt!”

“I prefer to remain silent before that question, Pastor von Bodelschwingh.”

“Dr. Brandt, before the answer to that question all of us have to be silent. The poor, the wretched, the helpless, the lonely, the sick, the crippled, the epileptics–that was Christ’s standard here on earth. It is his standard today. It is the standard we live by here in Bethel. We can allow no other standard that God’s here, for here in Bethel God rules!” (pp. 150-151)

See what I mean?

Finally, for further impressions of the book, read these reviews by Cheryl Magness in The Federalist , Anthony Dodgers in Gottesdienst, and Mary Moerbe in Meet, Write, and Salutary.

HT: Paul Grime

Photo: Rev. Friedrich von Bodelschwingh by Unknown author – Scan: Ersttagsbrief 50. Todestag Friedrich von Bodelschwingh (1996), Deutsche Post AG, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76134920

Deconstructing Faith and the Theology of the Cross? (Part 2)

Last updated on: July 28, 2022 at 3:22 pm By Gene Veith

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Yesterday we posted about James Walden’s essay Deconstruction and a Theology of the Cross, which sees a connection between Luther’s distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory with today’s phenomenon of disillusioned Christians “deconstructing” their faith.

As I said, Luther’s theology of the Cross does indeed correct many of the pathologies of contemporary Christianity, such as the prosperity gospel, overemphasis on politics, many church growth tactics, and works righteousness. But this is not what most of those who are practicing “faith deconstruction” seem to be engaged in.

First of all, to think in terms of “deconstruction” carries with it the notion that faith is a “construction.” That gives the game away from the outset. If Christianity is nothing more than a social or personal construction, subject to being reconstructed according to one’s likings, then there is not much point to it.

Christianity purports to be true. It teaches that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, who died and rose again to redeem us from sin, working a salvation that we receive by grace through faith. Christianity purports to be a revealed religion, in which God communicates Himself and the truths we need to know through the human language of His Word.

That is to say, Christianity has to do with what it claims to be objective reality. Postmodernism, on the other hand, denies that we can know much about objective reality. It is “constructivist,” seeing truth itself–or, rather truth claims–not as something that we discover, but as something that we–or the culture, or the group in power–“construct.” Such constructions can be deconstructed, as we expose the power relations or other factors that gave rise to them.

Deconstructing your faith entails looking at how you came to believe in certain things, how your background or people imposing their power on you formed your faith. As a result of this exercise, you might reject your faith altogether or, more positively, make it your own on your own terms.

This is not the theology of the cross. Rather, it is a textbook example of the theology of glory.

Let’s go to the source. Consider what Luther says on the subject in the theses of the Heidelberg Disputation, in which he develops these distinctions:

18. It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ.

19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have happened.

20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

21. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the things what it is.

22. That wisdom that sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened.

Thus, attempts to understand God by means of the intellect, reason, experience, and our own perceptions will be futile. And this is what the faith deconstruction movement calls for.

For a person to know God through the theology of the cross, on the other hand, one must “despair of his own ability”; that is, to be utterly broken by the Law, convinced of his failure to be righteous and realizing to his horror that he cannot save himself. In this state of weakness and suffering, he can hear the Gospel of Christ crucified for sinners as good news.

I do not want to denigrate Christians who struggle with questionings and doubts. Those may indeed be part of becoming a theologian of the cross. But this is not what deconstructing the faith, properly speaking, entails. The posture of making oneself a critic of one’s own faith–saying that “I only believed that because of my parents,” though the vocation of parents is precisely to bring up their children in the faith; or that “my pastors were all right wing hypocrites,” making oneself morally superior–and otherwise judging Christianity according to our own perceptions can only make us “puffed up, blinded, and hardened.”

And I am not criticizing James Walden’s essay. I appreciate how he describes the theology of the cross. (See my long quote in yesterday’s post.) Notice what he says:

Through the weak and foolish word of the cross, quietly powerful through the indwelling Spirit among the community of God’s people, Christ himself deconstructs our deep-seated theologies of glory. . . .

This is the deconstructive work of the cross. It is far more radical than any “deconstruction” we could undertake ourselves, whether by our own individual efforts, by some ecclesial tradition, or by any alleged internal mechanism of history or language. It is the secret work of God, in which the church reformed is ever being reformed.

We don’t deconstruct the faith. The faith deconstructs us.

Photo via Pexels, CC0

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Deconstructing Faith and the Theology of the Cross? (part 1)

Last updated on: July 28, 2022 at 1:27 pm By Gene Veith

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Many Christians today–especially evangelicals–say that they are in the process of “deconstructing” their faith. Disillusioned with the way their fellow evangelicals support Donald Trump, are complicit in social injustice, are caught in sex scandals, or commit other faults that they become aware of, these Christians are scrutinizing their personal faith–questioning what they have been taught and examining how they came to believe it. After such “deconstruction,” some people abandon Christianity altogether, while others “re-construct” it in a different way.

James Walden at Mere Orthodoxy discusses this phenomenon and relates it to Luther’s Theology of the Cross. While Luther is indeed a valuable resource who can help contemporary Christians sort out their problems and confusions, I’m not sure that either “deconstruction” or “Theology of the Cross” accurately describes what disillusioned evangelicals are doing.

In his essay Deconstruction and a Theology of the Cross, Walden first explains what “deconstruction,” a term first used in postmodernist literary criticism, entails. As used by the French thinker Jacques Derrida, it has to do with the contradictions he says are built into literary texts and into language itself. More broadly, it refers to the “constructedness” of all ideas and institutions, reflecting the tenet of postmodernism that truth is not a discovery but a “construction”–either of the mind, the culture, or the will to power, by which one group oppresses other groups.

Luther contrasts the Theology of the Cross with the Theology of Glory. God saved us not by manifesting His Glory, but by emptying Himself in His incarnation and dying on a cross. Similarly, we prefer a theology of glory that will give us all the answers, solve all our problems, and exalt our good works. But we must know Christ in our weakness, failures, and suffering; that is to say, in our crosses that He subsumes in His cross, where we find justification by faith.

(For a fuller treatment of Luther’s Theology of the Cross, go to our series of posts on the subject: Theology of the Cross, Definition (#1); Theology of the Cross: Power and Language (#2); Theology of the Cross and the Gospel (#3); Theology of the Cross: Good Works and Vocation (#4); Theology of the Cross and Suffering (#5); and Theology of the Cross and the Problem of Evil (#6).)

Here is how Walden relates Deconstruction and the Theology of the Cross:

Immensely helpful at this point is Martin Luther’s foundational distinction between the two kinds of theologians – one of glory and one of the cross – from his Heidelberg Disputation (1518). And it’s appropriate to raise this elemental category of Luther here since the etymology of Derrida’s “deconstruction” traces back through Heidegger to the reformer’s use of destructio in reference to the gospel’s “destruction” of worldly wisdom and reason (1 Corinthians 1:19).

This is to say, the destructio of what we might call “theologies of glory.”

In God’s judgment against the pride and arrogance of men, the divine power and wisdom paradoxically appear to them as weakness and foolishness … as something to be despised and rejected. In this way, the theology of the cross confounds – and deconstructs – “theologians of glory.” Such theologians “build their theology in the light of what they expect God to be like—and, surprise, surprise, they make God to look something like themselves,” Carl Trueman writes.

The “theologians of the cross,” however, are those who build their theology in the light of God’s own revelation of himself in Christ hanging on the cross.

This is revolutionary. Here’s the problem though. We are all habitually theologians of glory – even the most doctrinally orthodox among us. We are naturally curved in on ourselves, making and re-making our theology, as applied in word and deed, to our own advantage. We are constantly reverting to theologies of glory in our forms of worship, in our use of power, in inhabiting our socio-economic strata, in our performing righteousness, whether personal piety or public virtue, in our sexuality and familial relationships, in our practice of hospitality, etc., etc. These are all susceptible to being cast in our own image, as Trueman observes, “and all must be recast in the light of the cross.”

Through the weak and foolish word of the cross, quietly powerful through the indwelling Spirit among the community of God’s people, Christ himself deconstructs our deep-seated theologies of glory. By the sign of the cross (Galatians 6:17) — that is, not through our own triumph or heroic performance, but through inward agony and outward mistreatment – our enculturated faith is exposed, reproved, refined and renewed. As we are continually plunged into Christ’s death and raised in his resurrection, we are becoming, slowly but surely, theologians of the cross.

This is the deconstructive work of the cross. It is far more radical than any “deconstruction” we could undertake ourselves, whether by our own individual efforts, by some ecclesial tradition, or by any alleged internal mechanism of history or language. It is the secret work of God, in which the church reformed is ever being reformed. Deconstructed all the way down.

The Theology of the Cross is indeed strong tonic against much that plagues contemporary Christianity: the prosperity gospel (essentially the opposite of the Theology of the Cross); the power of positive thinking; political triumphalism; celebrity preachers; church growth ideology; worship as pop entertainment; legalistic Puritanism; the social gospel of the left or right; and you can probably think of more.

Christians who are reconsidering their embrace of that sort of thing can well find Luther’s Theology of the Cross a way to return to an authentic Christianity and an authentic spirituality grounded in the Gospel of Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 1:23).

But I don’t think that is what many of those trying to “deconstruct their faith” are doing!

I’ll explain in tomorrow’s post.

Image by Felix Merler from Pixabay

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Discuss: Should We Cut Back the Hours We Work?

Last updated on: July 24, 2022 at 3:19 pm By Gene Veith

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This weekend’s discussion relates to vocation. Are we working too much? Some experts are arguing that productivity could be increased if workers were not spending so much time on the job. Or that we don’t need to be as productive as we are, that less work will make for healthier and happier life.

Some companies and some countries are experimenting with a shorter workweek. Sometimes this means keeping the 40-hours-per-week standard, but cramming them into just four ten-hour workdays. That way, every week has a long weekend, the theory being that workers will come back to work better rested and refreshed. Other reformers want to cut back the hours employees work, to, for example, 35 hours. Some are proposing a six hour workday.

Should we go to a four-day workweek? Or a six hour workday?

From a theological perspective, would taking time from our economic vocations give us more time to devote to vocations we are not giving enough time to, such as our family vocations (marriage, parenthood), our citizenship, or our church? Or would we just blow the extra time on our own private leisure activities; that is, on avocations?

And what about the Commandment that requires a day off for the Sabbath but also says “six days shalt thou labor”? Our standard five day workweek is already less than that.

Discuss.

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Praying for Ourselves vs. Praying for Others

Last updated on: July 11, 2022 at 5:48 pm By Gene Veith

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Last week I attended the annual conference of the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education, which had an abundance of good presentations.

I was struck by a sermon by Rev. Michael Frese, one of the pastors of our host congregation, Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He exhorted us to not only pray for ourselves but to pray for others.

He credited Chrysostom for the following observation: When we pray for our own needs, we focus on ourselves. But when we pray for the needs of others, “love rises.”

That is to say, one way we can learn to love our neighbors–which is foundational to vocation, which is all about loving and serving our neighbors–is to pray for them.

I found that very convicting.

Of course we are to pray for our own needs (Luke 11:5-13). But we should also remember to pray for the needs of other people (2 Corinthians 1:11).

One of the many facets of the genius of the Lord’s Prayer is that in it we pray both for ourselves and for others at the same time. That is to say, it employs the first person plural:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.

This is a corporate prayer, in which we individuals pray both for ourselves and for the rest of the group we are praying with–our congregation, our family, the people with whom we recite it in unison, or when we pray it alone whoever we envision–thereby asking God, our common Father, to provide daily bread and other physical needs to both me and to others; to forgive both me and others (including our enemies); to spare both me and others from trials and temptations; to deliver both me and others from evil.

By the way, since we are talking pronouns, in addressing Our Father, using the King James-era language, we refer to Him with the second person singular. (Thee, thy, & thine are the singular form of the pronoun; you, your, yours, & ye are plurals, the equivalent of “you all” or “yawl” for us Southerners. Modern English dropped the singular and began using the plural form for both numbers.)

Even when we have important and desperate needs that we pray for, it is helpful to have someone else also pray for those needs. In that way we can “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). This is beneficial to both parties.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

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A Lutheran Thriller

Last updated on: July 14, 2022 at 9:33 am By Gene Veith

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Summer is a time for reading. Light reading, especially. That is to say, fun reading. (See Monday’s post). But if you are like me, even fun reading needs to have at least some substance; otherwise, it fails the requirement of stimulation.

In our post If James Bond Became a Lutheran Pastor, we discussed the Pastor Stephen Grant novels, thrillers about a CIA agent who enters the ministry but still gets called upon to do violent battle against global evildoers. The author, Ray Keating, is an LCMS Lutheran and an economist by trade. In fact, he recently published a lively primer on the subject entitled The Weekly Economist: 52 Quick Reads to Help You Think Like an Economist.

But fans of his Stephen Grant books will be happy to learn that he has started another series of thrillers, The Alliance of Saint Michael novels. These novels, set in the 1930s, are about a shadowy organization that seeks to defend Christianity from the attacks then underway from both Communism and Fascism. The main characters are a Lutheran pastor, a Catholic priest, and an Anglican laywoman, plus a supporting cast of German Lutherans, Russian orthodox, and other operatives taking on Stalin’s apparatchiks and Hitler’s brown shirts.

In the inaugural novel, Cathedral, we learn the backstory of the characters and how they came together, first into an academic think tank, which then added a secret operational arm–named after the archangel known for warring against the devil–to carry out the action required by their mission.

With lots of depression-era local color, from the automat in New York City to the retired Calvin Coolidge, the story in this first book of the series centers on the efforts to save the lost manuscript of a translation of the Bible into Russian. It has been discovered by an orthodox priest, who has hidden it in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which is being looted and demolished by the Soviets. (That part is true.) The Alliance of Saint Michael has to infiltrate the Soviet Union, find the manuscript, and get it out of Russia, in hopes of publishing and distributing it when the time is right.

The translation is described as the work of Johann Ernst Glück (1652-1705), a Lutheran theologian who lived in present-day Latvia and translated the Scriptures into Latvian. I could find no reference to a lost translation into Russian, so I assume that part of Keating’s novel is fictional, but I was glad to learn about Glück. [UPDATE: Thanks to SKJam for this: “Per our friends at Wikipedia: ‘Tsar Peter the Great felt that the Russian people needed a Bible in the vernacular and authorized Pastor Johann Ernst Glück in 1703 to prepare such an edition. Glück died in 1705 and nothing is known of his work.'”]

Not only was his theological and translating work significant, Pastor Glück had a significant impact on history. He took into his home a three-year-0ld peasant girl whose parents both died of the plague. He raised her in his household as a foster child. To make a long story short, she eventually found a position as a servant girl in the household of a Russian officer. Eventually, she caught the eye of Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, who fell in love with her. She became his mistress (I’m not saying she is the best role model), but then the Emperor Peter shocked the world by marrying her. She converted to Orthodoxy (again, not the best role model), whereupon Peter made her Catherine I, the Empress of All Russia. After Peter died, she actually ruled the entire realm, until her death two years later.

Catherine I is not to be confused with Catherine the Great, a Lutheran princess who also converted to orthodoxy and deposed her incompetent and brutish husband Peter III, the grandson of Peter and the first Catherine (a scion of one of their 12 children). But Catherine I had a great influence on her husband, including pushing the reform that she herself embodied, bringing in commoners to the government, as opposed to relying on the aristocracy. She may be, in fact, the greatest example of social mobility in history. She deserves a historical novel of her own. [UPDATE: Thanks to Amaryllis for pointing out that she already has her own series, evidently in the genre of historic romance.]

At any rate, many of you will enjoy Cathedral and the new series that it launches. It isn’t for everybody–there is some obscenity, non-pornographic sexual references, and lots of violence–and some readers dislike thrillers on principle. But Ray Keating is working with an explicitly Christian moral and theological framework, demonstrating the freedom that Lutheran novelists have in their vocation.

Photo: Ray Keating via Amazon.com