A few weeks ago, a Facebook post by a fellow retired ELCA pastor caught my attention. He shared a graphic containing this quotation from German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We are not simply to bind the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice. We are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

The quote comes from an essay Bonhoeffer wrote titled, “The Church and the Jewish Question.” It was written for a clergy group he belonged to in the spring of 1933, so just a few months after the Nazis had come to power. When I read it, I wondered who “we” referred to. After finding the original essay, it was clear that “we” meant the church. Bonhoeffer was outlining how the church should respond to the failings of government. In this case, he was specifically addressing Nazi proposals for adding an “Aryan clause” to church law, prohibiting the baptism of people of Jewish blood or allowing those already baptized from holding church office.

In the sentence right after this quotation, Bonhoeffer explains his spoke-in-the-wheel metaphor saying, “such action would be direct political action.” When the clergy group met, most balked at such an idea. A few months later, the essay was published in a theological journal and there too the general reaction was that this was going too far. Nonetheless, as Nazi authorities became heavier handed in their efforts to control the church, even trying to create a new church of “German Christians”, organized resistance did develop and the state backed off. But that resistance was limited to defending the church’s independence and generally did not address other policies of the Nazi regime.

The church’s role in politics and government has been debated since Christianity began. In the gospels, Jesus’ life ends with his execution by Roman authorities, who he refuses to challenge. When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire, church and government became intimately intertwined. This remained the case for centuries, until the upheavals of the Reformation and the appearance of the first democracies challenged that arrangement. Yet event today, the king of England remains the nominal head of the Church of England.

England is an interesting case because its most famous martyrs were men who resisted state attempts to control the church. Archbishop Thomas Beckett, who previously had been King Henry II’s chancellor, was murdered in 1170 by knights of the king for rejecting his attempts to limit church authority in his realm. Centuries later, in 1535, another chancellor, the pious statesman Thomas Moore, was executed for treason by Henry VIII because he refused to recognize the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Thus, in both cases the conflict was not over theology or morality but church authority and independence.

In more recent times, churches have often been challenged to “do something” in the face of political or social injustice and oppression. After World War II, German churches engaged in serious soul-searching about their acquiescence in the face of the national Nazi catastrophe. Yet what the church could have done differently as an institution was never clear. How, in practice, could the church have shoved “a spoke in the wheel” of the Nazi regime, to use Bonhoeffer’s words?

It’s in this area where the “squishiness” of the idea of church becomes especially apparent. When we say the church should do something, who are we talking about? The pope? The bishops and clergy? For modern Protestants, is it the denominational hierarchy and bureaucrats? Or is it somehow the church membership as a whole? You don’t have to look very closely to realize all of these are significantly hampered in their ability to try and “do something.”

In the above instances, both Beckett and Moore had their opponents within the church itself. At least initially, the majority of German church members, and clergy, were neutral or supportive of the Nazis. So, who did Bonhoeffer think was going to push in this “spoke”? And today, who does the Pope speak for? The church? In a theoretical or theological sense, perhaps. Yet in recent times, laity, clergy and even bishops feel free to disagree with him on many issues. In general, churches have been split over almost every significant issue that has come along: slavery in the US, apartheid in South Africa, property and other rights throughout Latin American, segregation and civil rights again in the US, and so on.

I’ve mentioned before the work of Christian sociologist Ryan Burge. Recently he has been posting about the enormous political divide, not just between denominations but within them, as well. The latter divide is often generational but also between clergy and laity. I remember times when church conventions I attended adopted resolutions on social or political issues. I asked myself, what has this accomplished beside making supporters feel good? Who was the convention speaking for? I can’t remember such resolutions directing church members to take concrete action, like organizing campaigns, marching on the capital, or even writing their representatives. And often this was because it was doubted the majority of members would have supported the resolution.

The idea of “church” has become, if it hasn’t always been, a red hearing. By now it should be obvious that “the church” doesn’t really exist. There are lots of churches, there are Christians, and there are followers of Jesus, and they all overlap, but they are not just different words for the same thing. Furthermore, they are never on the same page with each other. In his letters, Paul has a very spiritual understanding of the church as the “body of Christ.” Yet those same letters testify to the conflicts within the congregations he related to and to conflicts between them and himself. And this is in Christianity’s first decades! It only went downhill from there.

People within the church imagining that it can “do something” about the problems and ills of the world has no justification for this belief either in history or in the Bible. Jesus certainly never talks about it. What he does talk about, however, is people awakening to their calling to both love their neighbor and their enemies. This happens, Jesus says, when people discover that God and “the kingdom” are actually within them and, therefore, within everyone and all things around them. If churches can be said to have a mission, it is to facilitate in whatever ways it can people having that awakening. People experiencing that discovery, that miraculous rebirth, is how the world will come to know itself as the paradise God intended it to be. While more humble than it might like, adopting such role will mean that the church is genuinely living as the body of Christ on earth.

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