Chad Lakies

Confession is a central practice in the life of the church. In this paper, I engage two thinkers on the nature and power of confession: Michel Foucault and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Foucault considers confession to be a means of control and domination, a technology which ultimately dehumanizes, depoliticizes, and perhaps even erases the self. Bonhoeffer considers confession to be truly liberating. However, the liberation he describes is a form of self-transcendence wherein a new creation emerges—a new self embodied by an “other-in-me.” Foucault offers an important critical perspective on the power of confession in our time but does not fully account for its enduring role in human life. I turn to Bonhoeffer whose work innovatively answers Foucault's objections. Even more, Bonhoeffer accounts for the critical role confession plays in human life. His construal ought to help us better understand why we want to confess and are seemingly compelled to do so.

... Challenging the Cultural Imaginary: Pieper on How Life might Live. Chad Lakies. Article first published online: 25 MAR 2010. ... Register now >. Get PDF (139K). More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Chad Lakies. ...

The church in the North Atlantic world functions in many ways out of the memory of its former role within Christendom. Having moved into a post-Christian era, the methodologies and imagination fostered by the church’s habits developed within Christendom inhibit rather than advance the vocation of the church, which is to herald the Gospel to the world. This paper describes our new situation along with some of its challenges, and while admitting the church is often unprepared in terms of training for and knowledge of the new landscape in which the church finds itself, nevertheless, there is some wisdom from the past that can help the church faithfully advance the mission of God in which it is called to participate.

In our modern, so-called “secular age” religion in the North Atlantic world continues to flourish unabated, yet its shape and character seem undoubtedly to be changing. This essay will articulate what our secular age is like in order to help the pastor, professional church worker, or missionary gain a better grasp of our contemporary religious milieu. It won’t be comprehensive, but it will be broad enough to give the reflective practitioner some resources to help map and navigate our present moment, especially in terms of anticipating mission efforts, thinking about faith formation in the lives of the youngest to the oldest, and of course, trying to give a helpful description about how we came to be the kinds of religious people we are in the North Atlantic.

In this article, I try to give background to some of the sociological data that describes the relationship between millennials and the church. Since the modern American religious context has for some time been described as therapeutic, I explore this to help explain recent work which characterizes millennials as embodying and desiring this form of religion. The result is that the problem lies not so much with millennials but the church itself. From there, I try briefly to suggest how the church became merely therapeutic and what the church might do to recover faithfulness.

In this paper I offer a possible approach to accomplishing Benedict's goal proposed in his Regensburg address.1 I take his goal to be twofold. First, we must expand our concept of reason beyond the privileged position of scientific empiricism and philosophical reasoning, both of which form what I have called the Secular Magisterium, put in place as the dominant intellectual force by the Enlightenment. Second, the motivation for expanding our concept of reason is for the purpose of greater dialogue across cultures, across religions and across academic disciplines. Since I take Benedict's goal to be twofold, my paper will address these issues in two parts, the second building from the first.In the first section, I will revisit the counter-Enlightenment thinking of some well known, yet significantly marginalized voices, with the goal of hearing them again and reviving their critique to inform our own. By the end of this section, I will offer what I take to be a counter-Enlightenment approach to knowing our world by means of an expanded concept of reason. In the second section, I will address what I take to be some of the more intellectual challenges to the possibilities for conversation across cultures, religions, and disciplines. It is my goal to show how an embodied version of the counter-Enlightenment approach I offer in the first section can allow for genuine conversation that not only provides opportunities to better know our conversation partners, but also offers the possibility of honest persuasion in which the other sees reality differently and considers this way better.

This paper will present two themes—resistance and community in Bonhoeffer’s experiment within theological education—in light of his broader theological project, and conclude with a few remarks on what possible applications his innovations might have for such formative practices that exist today. Bonhoeffer’s focus on a community living together, with its implicit power to shape a life with permanent marks, provides a prescient sociological reflection on theological education today. Bonhoeffer’s innovation at his illegal seminary provides us with an imagination for how contemporary theological education might work to shape those being prepared for the ministry. Thus, some brief reflections will be considered in this regard, especially aimed at how the residential seminary experience with its possibilities for communal life offers formative structures for those federated in their theological education that might enable them to resist various external cultural forces as they move on to serve parishes and other ministries.

The very idea of forgiveness needs to be reframed from a sense of an “economy of exchange,” one in which forgiveness is merely owed upon the payment of some sort of debt (i.e., after someone apologizes or asks for forgiveness). Recent conversations in continental philosophy and Christian theology have offered helpful new understandings of the nature of forgiveness. The discussion of the “gift” and forgiveness in Jacques Derrida’s work and those influenced by him reveals a certain calling into possibility something which seems impossible—true forgiveness. Coupled with insights from the Christian theological tradition, the “gift” of forgiveness through grace becomes powerfully transformative for both personal and communal identity.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer fruitfully elaborates the extent of this transformation for individuals and communities. Bonhoeffer, arguably an “ad-hoc phenomenologist,” describes the identity of Christians and the church as “being-for-one-another” in a manner that is distinct from other communities and possible only through exterior intervention. Yet such intervention enables a new way of being, both toward/for each other and the world. The ethical consequences of the work of these two remarkably different men (an atheist and a pastor/martyr) begs for a reconsideration not just of the church’s ethical life as a community in the world, especially in terms of treatment of marginalized populations. It also calls non-religious communities to give attention to a source (the church’s practices) for considering forgiveness in their treatment of others, especially in an age which is witnessing critical attacks on the ideal of Enlightenment toleration.

In his critique of the practice of confession, Michel Foucault stood vehemently against it because confession represented a means of oppression. As a force of governmentality and control, Foucault considered it crushing, dehumanizing, depoliticizing, and soul-killing. Contrary to Foucault, the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw in the practice of confession an operation of the greatest possible freedom. It was life-giving, transformative, and re-creative for the soul. This paper will contrast these differences in order to appreciate Bonhoeffer’s position. Yet Bonhoeffer’s position and the practice of confession he advocated in his classic work Life Together is, in actu, a rare practice. This is perhaps because Foucault’s critique of just how exposed the soul becomes in confession holds true just to the extent that one is unwilling to engage in confession as Bonhoeffer would suggest. That is, contrary to Bonhoeffer’s sense of the freedom that comes from confession, Foucault argued confession is only a ritual form of death—self-destruction by means of self-renunciation—and thus a form of control and domination under which those who would confess became subjects of another’s power. Bonhoeffer’s sense of freedom would clearly be eclipsed if one were only to see Foucault’s point. Rather, I will suggest pushing through with Bonhoeffer by attempting to concretize in a way the very sense of transformation he understood to be central to the practice of confession. By making an application of Levinas’s work to the experience of transformation, I will suggest that the soul can become the other in me—or, the Other in me—in a manner that brings the kind of freedom and life Bonhoeffer so embodied in his own short life. In other words, the kind of transformation Bonhoeffer described was the same kind St. Paul articulated—“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Thus, when Levinas would say the soul is the “Other” in me, Bonhoeffer’s sense of confession as the opening unto freedom is the moment wherein the soul breathes in Christ. Perhaps Foucault is somewhat correct—there is a death to self—but not to the extent that one is dominated by another; rather as Bonhoeffer suggests, one is liberated by the Other.

The very idea of forgiveness needs to be reframed from a sense of an “economy of exchange,” one in which forgiveness is merely owed upon the payment of some sort of debt. Recent conversations in continental philosophy and Christian theology have offered helpful new understandings of the nature of forgiveness. The discussion of the “gift” in Derrida’s work and those influenced by him reveals a certain calling into possibility something which seems impossible—true forgiveness. Coupled with insights from the Christian theological tradition, the “gift” of forgiveness through grace becomes powerfully transformative for both personal and communal identity. In giving the gift of forgiveness, a space is opened in one’s identity for real and lasting transformation to occur, such that the resultant relations in a given community will be directly influenced in large part, by the expression of further forgiveness, further giving of the gift. The transformation of the one becomes a flow of transformation of others.

Bookending this discussion of forgiveness, this paper will also explore the political relations which form the conditions of possibility for forgiveness. Stated simply, humans live in communities in which there are disagreements, transgressions and conflicts. Even further, these communities are themselves in relation with other communities (the boundaries of many of these are fluid; individuals are members of many different communities). The political nature of these communities is characterized by a sense of contestation. Each community embodies a story of its own, inhabits a worldview of its own—all of which are in conflict with each other. In light of this reality, my paper will re-imagine how forgiveness—viewed through the concept of “gift” and empowered by a Christian theology of transcendence—challenges and changes the political relations of individuals and communities as well as the poetics of the grammar of forgiveness.

Narratives provide the supporting rationality for all of life. Narratives, or what are sometimes referred to as traditions, constitute what has been called the “cultural imaginary”—the very fabric of life in society in which actions and interactions are both driven and understood through a “magma” of images, metaphors, myths, and signs. This paper will explore the phenomenon that truth is carried and constructed in and by stories.

Jacques Derrida has advocated for cities of refuge for writers who were persecuted and silenced in their local contexts of authorship. Might this concept of cities of refuge and the focus on writing and writers be of great importance for a consideration of religion in the secular city? As a refuge from the city but still within the city, the church can bring the marginalized and persecuted voices of private citizens into the public sphere, effectively blurring the line between the realms. These voices write the story of the city as its citizens—not just with words, but with ways of being. Without such voices—voices which have been silenced publicly—the city does not exist, for as Graham Ward has noted, writing and the city are so inextricably linked. The church is the very place which can best write the narrative of the city, from the very beginnings of the city and cities to the narrative of the city as it should be—an image of the eternal city. The church can best narrate the story of the present and local city for, as a place of refuge it is a place which houses the stories of the city in the voices of its people. In so narrating, might not the church offer a transformative politics through the story it tells? This is the story which represents the city as it is and the vision that calls to it, that haunts and has haunted its being since the first city—the story of the eternal city. This paper will argue for such a view of the church in the secular city. The church is a community of refuge which can narrate the city’s present and its future through practicing the citizenship of the eternal city in modern times.

In this paper I argue that one of the prominent features of religion that emerges in the explosion of ways of believing that Charles Taylor calls " the nova effect " is that these new ways of believing have a strongly therapeutic character. To begin, I'll explain each of these two main ideas—the " nova effect " in the context of Taylor's understanding of a secular age. Next, I will address the therapeutic as a characteristic feature of religion in our secular age, engaging with various scholars whose work is fruitful for understanding therapeutic ideology and the culture it has produced. Then I will highlight the work of various sociologists of religion to demonstrate the plausibility of my thesis. Finally, I will conclude with an evaluation of the therapeutic as a characteristic feature of religion in our secular age, noting its weaknesses but also recognizing its present persistence on account of the social imaginary of our time.