Benjamin Thompson's Reviews > Jesus > Religion: Why He Is So Much Better Than Trying Harder, Doing More, and Being Good Enough

Good news; Bethke understands the essence of the gospel, Jesus, the divine Son of God, came and died on our behalf for our sins. After his death he rose again from the grave, conquering shame and death so that whoever believes on and trusts in him through the Holy Spirit have been forgiven and will have eternal life. But beyond this Bethke gets caught up in some not so useful rhetoric. He doesn’t deal with the Biblical tension between the love of God and the wrath of God. For instance, he seems to believe that obeying God out of fear is somehow foreign from the Bible. Likewise, he ignores the responsibility and massive expectations of God on the elect, focusing instead solely on the rest we have in Christ and the completeness of his atonement. Consequently, Bethke’s picture of the gospel becomes very confused, where we are supposed to be good despite already being made perfect, we are supposed to hope for a better tomorrow even though Christ’s work is totally complete and finished and we are supposed to participate in the Church even though we are somehow closer to Christ in our minds and hearts than we are with other Christians.

Bethke, like so many American evangelical Christians before him, eagerly through out the communitarian emphasis of religion along with its legalistic tendencies. What is left is a personal belief system devoid of anything sacred or obligatory.

Finally, Bethke does not understand Bonhoeffer. He cites Bonhoeffer as follows, “Even the famous German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted to reach a place of “religionless Christianity”. In 1944, while he was in prison for trying to sabotage the Nazis, he wrote, “We are approaching an entirely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious' do not in the least act upon it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religion’”. Bethke jumps too soon to consider Bonhoeffer an ally in his war against religious fakery. Bonhoeffer did agree, of course, that religion was fake and unhelpful to the Christian message. However, he thought religion was unhelpful because it conformed to easily to its surrounding culture. After all, the Church in virtually all its denominations merely stood by if not outright cooperated with the Nazi regime as it committed acts of unspeakable evil throughout Europe. But if Evangelicalism is anything, it is a religion in this sense. Modern western Evangelicalism praises to an absurd degree American culture. Evangelicalism has bought wholesale into consumeristic and hyper-individualistic thinking more than any other form of Christianity. If Bonhoeffer saw American Evangelicalism today he would call it the epitome of religion. Evangelicalism, especially in its view of Christianity as a relationship, encourages complacency and calls it contentment, promotes selfishness and calls it God’s love and tells Christians they don’t really have to help the poor, it’d just be nice if they did. Bonhoeffer would call us a bunch of pansies for not taking our faith seriously. Bonhoeffer, however, went even more extreme than this. He argued that Christians should not waste their time in churches, but instead should be in the world with the homeless, sick and mentally ill. He would say stop volunteering to lead Bible Studies or help with children’s choir and go protest an abortion clinic or give your food to the homeless.