Tag Archives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

New Year, New You

New Year, New You?

As Prospero says in Act IV of The Tempest, “Our revels now are ended.” Now that the commercial world has wrapped up Christmas, we are encouraged by voices in the media to embrace change.  They say in thousands of clever ways: “Never mind the past. It’s no longer relevant. You can push ahead with new promises, new hopes, and new goals. Become the better person you want to be.” But is this claim true to experience? Can we shed the past like a snake sheds old skin? Or does the past disregard our artificial time posts and insidiously sweep us as we are into the New Year?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, image for New Year, New You post

It is as if the commercial culture has expropriated the central Christian message — “You must change your life” — without all the baggage about sin and godlessness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer labeled this secular faith in personal transformation as “cheap grace.”

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

It is cheap because it does not cost us much and does not deal with the implacable truth of our sinful nature. When the word “sin” is excised from our vocabulary, we are left with evidence of a problem, but no tools that can help except in a most superficial and unsatisfactory way. Within a few weeks, we revert to old, familiar patterns of behavior and the promise of a “New You” becomes a sad, repetitive self-deception.

Paul defines the affliction of intractable darker impulses this way: “So I find this law at work. Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in me waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 7: 21-25)

Paul did not underestimate this powerful war within our hearts that can subvert and destroy the good we desire, nor should we underestimate it. When we finally realize that we are in the midst of a life and death struggle, then the door opens to the possibility of God’s grace flooding into our hearts and driving out the impulses that undermine the goodness we deeply desire.

So let the calendar turn another tattered page. Prepared or not, let’s peer together over the precipice toward a new year. The view ahead is more than intimidating. Didn’t we just complete the climb to the top of 2015? But perhaps the summit is not a summit at all, but a mere resting place for the next phase of our uncharted journey together.

Christ Expelling the Money Changers from the Temple by Cecco del Caravaggio (c. 1610) image for New Year, New You

Christ Expelling the Money Changers from the Temple by Cecco del Caravaggio (c. 1610)