Suffering: The Badge of Discipleship
Douglas John Hall

When Christ calls a man [a woman] he bids him [her] come and die...Suffering...is the badge of true discipleship. The disciple is not above [the] master. Following Christ means passio passiva, suffering because we have to suffer. That is what Luther reckoned suffering among the marks of the true Church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Suffering has never been a popular theme in Christendom, particularly when it is conceived as applying to the vocation of the Church itself From the fourth century onwards, Christianity had (and chose) to serve as chaplain to empire - one empire after another. The imperial church exchanged the crucified Christ that Paul and his generation preached (I Cor ] :22) for the victorious Christ-victorious in very worldly terms. A winner! No empire wants a crucified human being as its cultic figurehead. After all, empires usually have something to do with the crucifixions! Imperial peoples go in for eagles and the like. It is not accidental that what Constantine "saw" in his famous dream was an inscription assuring his triumph under the sign of the Christ: In hoc signo cinces. "In this sign you will conquer" Governing authorities and I've been "seeing" just that in Christianity ever since. And with a few conspicuous exceptions, Christianity has been glad enough to let them.

But now the Church's honeymoon with Power is over. Kierkegaard saw the great divorce a hundred years in advance of the rest of us. And in our own century no one has understood the meaning of "the end of the Constantinian era" better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

That was, in part, because Bonhoeffer lived in the midst of an empire that was the reductio ad absurdum of "Christendom." With the Nazi "Reich," it became crystal clear what Power wanted from the Christian Religion: legitimation, credibility, approval, the aura of the sacred, and above all, a symbol of inevitable triumph.

Unlike Ludwig Miller, Hider's "Reichsbischof" [Bishop of the Kingdom] and many others amongst his contemporaries, the young Bonhoeffer broke flee of the hold of the State upon the Church. His dissent had only a little to do with his bourgeois upbringing, and even less with his education in the high culture of Germanic tradition. He resisted as a Christian-namely as one of the "exceptional" Christians who remember that what stands at the center of this faith is not a symbol of worldly success but of "suffering and rejection": the cross. Christian discipleship means "adherence to the person of Jesus, and therefore submission to the law of Christ which is the law of the cross."

As is true of the Scriptures themselves, the theme of the suffering of the community of discipleship runs like a leitmotif through all the writings of Bonhoeffer. This oath century theologian and martyr has been a symbol of Christian integrity for three generations now. But we would do well to remember what Jesus said about "building tombs for the prophets and decorating the graves of the righteous" (Matt. 23:29)! We shall neither honor nor understand him rightly until we have grasped and emulated the truth that he embodied in both his writings and his life: namely, that "the 'must' of suffering applies to [Jesus'] disciples no less than to himself" Bonhoeffer did not intend his life to be considered an exception. For Christians the way of the cross is the rule.

Fifty years after Dietrich Bonhoeffer's violent death, as the Christian religion finds itself steadily pushed to the edges of empire all over the world, it is becoming possible for us to recover just that rule. The word "possible" in that sentence must of course be stressed; on The whole, the possibility is not enthusiastically pursued by the remnants of once-powerful Christendom. Church-growth and megahurches are the preferred option in many quarters!

Yet the possibility exists, and here and there significant minorities in all the churches are rediscovering that suffering truly is, as Luther insisted, the one really trustworthy mark of the true church, "the badge of discipleship."

The suffering of the church as it is understood in The gospels and epistles, as in Bonhoeffer's works, stems from two inseparable aspects of its life: its own ongoing initiation into the life of the crucified one, and its consequent solidarity with the suffering of alienated creatures. Both of these sources of Christian suffering need to be stressed, because the usual impression, reinforced by exaggerated lives of the saints and martyrs (including Bonhoeffer), is that Christians suffer because the sinful world cannot abide their purity. This is part of the baggage of ecclesiastical triumphalism that has to be cast off if we are to approximate biblical realism.

Let's be honest: the first reason for the suffering of the church is that it is continuously being caused by the divine Spirit to take on an identity that, humanly and understandably enough, it would rather not assume: "..the Church of Christ.. does not like to have the law of suffering imposed upon it by its Lord." To be "conformed" to Jesus Christ (Rom 8:29) is not the bland sweet thing that religion makes it out to be. Being baptized is in biblical terms a matter of being "buried with him by baptism into death" (Rom 6:4) - so that a new self might emerge which doesn't regard itself as the most important item in the universe but is sufficiently free of self to be concerned for others.

The second reason why Christ's disciples suffer is their participation in the suffering of God's beloved world. Being somewhat freed from their preoccupation with self; they are freed for solidarity with others, especially those who suffer, whether human or extra human. This is not altruism; its a condition of discipleship. We find our lives as we lose them in the love and service of others. That is the "logic of the cross;" the cross is not all "foolishness" a Cor 1:18).

I take it as part of this "logic" that what is happening to the once-proud imperial church of the West has high purpose in it. It is as logical that such a church has to be humbled if it is ever to become obedient as it is that arrogant and powerful individuals, like the biblical Dives, have to be brought low if they are ever to see (even see!) those who have no alternatives besides the bottom of the heap - Lazarus at the gate (Luke 16:19).

To be blunt: only by undergoing the cross will Christendom find salvation. Having throughout history "fought for self-preservation as though it were an end in itself;" the church has now to experience the "decrease" that John the Baptist spoke of - so that Jesus Christ may increase (John 3:30).

All around us and within us today, we experience the "decrease" of Christendom. Can we begin to understand our own "decrease" as the precondition for the "increase" of Jesus Christ? It becomes more obvious daily that unless the churches can find some such profound spiritual rationale for the real humiliations through which they are passing, They will be increasingly moribund places.

Such morbidity is not going to be dispelled by the latest form of the temptation to court worldly favor and so regain the winner-status we Think we deserve: the temptation to climb onto The bandwagon of "The new spirituality." As I write, the most recent edition of Maclean's, Canada's Time, (without a religion section) appears on my desk. Its cover story is entitled (what else?) "The New Spirituality." It features the ecomysticism of the high-booted and fashionably dressed spouse of a prominent Canadian, who is bent upon gathering all the religions of the world together "in Colorado." Though the article makes much of the failure of "materialism," I note that The people pictured and described are surrounded by all of the earmarks of consumer-affluence. "Spirituality" has become the latest consumer item.

Churches bearing The name of the crucified one will only betray that name if they rush in to supply the demand for such "spirituality." And I do not mean that in merely a "religious" way, because The betrayal in question is not only a betrayal of the second person of The Trinity (who can probably take it), it is a betrayal of all the "crucified people" and the groaning creatures with whom that person makes common cause.

Suffering is "The badge of discipleship," not because suffering is good (it isn't) but because there is suffering in God's world, and so in God's heart - the God of suffering love [agape]. The world's suffering is not going to be engaged by people in designer jeans frolicking and posturing in the wilds of Colorado in search of "the meaning of life" (Their own!). It will only be met and transformed, by those who take up the invitation to "come and die."

Douglas John Hall is Professor of Christian Theology at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His most recent book is God and the Nations, The Hein Fry Lectures of the Lutheran Church, ECLA, Fortress Press.