Religionless Imagination
The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer justly gets credit for changing the conversation in post-World War II Protestantism. He began as a neo-orthodox wunderkind, but the Nazi rise to power and its consequences, including his own resistance and imprisonment, led him toward seeing a post-Christian Europe.
While in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote letters speculating on what he termed a “Religionless Christianity:”
What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words — whether with theological or with pious words — is past, as is the age of inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether. We are approaching a completely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” aren’t really practicing that at all; they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”
The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God — without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even “speak” as we used to) in a “secular” way about God? In what…
