Explanation

This New Year I am deciding to write more.  I don't know how often I will write, but I wanted to have a space to do so when I have time. 

It's customary to make the purpose of one's very first blog an explanation of one's title, right? You might think that the title, “in the middle” is a reference to my being a middle child, but thats really not that important. 

“In the middle” is a reference to a concept in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s work; I was very much influenced by Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall and Christ the Center in seminary. It has shaped my goals for ministry more than most books I have read.

I offer two caveats: My blogs will not always be this long or this detailed and this summary of Bonhoeffer’s work is not in any way exhaustive.

For Bonhoeffer, there are two senses of the middle:

First, Bonhoeffer notes that humankind finds itself at a middle point after the fall. We are between creation and consummation. Bonhoeffer says, “Humankind no longer lives in the beginning; instead, it has lost the beginning.  Now it finds itself in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning” (CF 28).  Humankind does not have knowledge of the beginning—creation—or of the end—where we are going.  We are purposeless and directionless in life. But, with the Scriptural story, humankind is able to realize the beginning and locate their place in the middle. Scripture becomes a directive for those of us living in the fallen middle.

More importantly for my purposes, Bonhoeffer also imagines the middle in another way.  Humankind is also at a middle point in a circle without a center as a result of the fall.  Adam and Eve seize the center through the fall, where God stands as the source of life, freedom, and truth. In short, Humanity chose to leave creaturely freedom and the limits created by God in order to become Master—self-sustained and unlimited in boundary. At this middle point, there is no center but ourselves.

Without limit, humanity enters a new state—sicut deus (like God). Bonhoeffer succinctly summarizes, “Sicut deus—humankind like God in knowing out of its own self about good and evil, in having no limit and acting out of its own resources…bound to the depths of its own knowledge of God, of good and evil…the creator-human being who lives on the basis of the divide between good and evil” (CF 113). God no longer mediates our relationships, but humanity seeks to rule over all its relationships in seeking to be like the Creator.

            However, Christ invades the middle and becomes the center of the circle. Christ becomes the center that was lost through the fall. By becoming incarnate, God constitutes a limit to human personhood. In Christ the Center Bonhoeffer notes that, “Christ is at one and the same time, my boundary and my rediscovered center. He is the center, between ‘I’ and ‘I’, and between ‘I’ and God. The boundary can only be known as boundary from beyond the boundary” (60). Importantly, Christ becomes our mediation to God, oneself, one’s neighbor, and creation.  As the new center, Christ reminds us of our creaturely existence, liberates us from self-sustainment, and restores its freedom for God and one another.

It is precisely this last point that has been central to me. The idea of Christ as the mediator and middle has stayed with me during my six short months of pastoral ministry. I keep this quote in the back of my head to guard and shape my interactions and relationships: “Christ is at one and the same time, my boundary and my rediscovered center. He is the center, between ‘I’ and ‘I’, and between ‘I’ and God. The boundary can only be known as boundary from beyond the boundary” (CC 60).