Not to Be a Bystander…
An Essay on What It Could Mean to Be a Protestant in Europe
What does it mean to be a Protestant Christian in highly secularised Europe after two years of the Covid pandemic? This is tricky question, and I must confess that I feel a little uneasy about it. Protestants and Catholics, who had alike for many centuries preached a gospel of love for the other and of the importance of building community, decided – just like any other group – to surrender to social distancing. If, aside from all the misery, the Covid crisis brought one positive thing to Christian churches in Europe, it was the challenge to rethink their role and address the questions and needs of believers and the mass of humanity in a twenty-first-century world. On the whole, I am not convinced that this challenge was grasped. Rather, that European Christendom clung to its age-old stereotypes: Catholics remained obsessed with their need to ‘distribute the eucharist’ and Protestants with their desire to ‘deliver the Word of God’, all via the medium of internet streaming on YouTube or Facebook or wherever. Was this the ideal response to an unforeseen and unprecedented global and personal crisis? Was this the response that believers needed? In large part, the very neediest members of our communities – the elderly, the lonely, and the socio-economically disadvantaged – remained alone and terrified. I do not pretend to suggest that I am ready to offer a better solution, even with the benefit of hindsight, just to note, with all due humility, like many others who were not in a position to make or influence difficult decisions about the future of their parish, I escaped, disappointed, into the small circle of my family.
Last Easter, however, I had a unique opportunity, a reminder, to refresh and reinterpret the experience of what it means to be a Protestant Christian and how, indeed, the Reformation enriched the socio-political, cultural-philosophical, and religious development of Europe. This experience was mediated by two events I attended on a trip to Dresden.
The first reminder was a performance of J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the Church of the Holy Cross. I thought about the origins of the word ‘passion’, which resonates better in the Romance languages, where it refers in part to patience, than it does in English, where it conjures up a sense of urgency and fervour. Listening to a three-hour oratorio is not something many twenty-first-century Europeans are in the habit of doing. We do not have the same levels of patience that people had even a few shorts decades ago and prefer to make do with a quick ‘Best of Bach’ (or whoever) concert; we simply do not have the resolve to sit through three hours of something unfamiliar.
While officials in Ukraine report ever greater numbers of civilian deaths and the deaths of military personnel, Western countries appear to be slacking off in their support for the Ukrainian people. Europeans are suffering from compassion fatigue. Although disturbed by the suffering of others, they are tired, bored, and over-used to seeing dead Ukrainian bodies on their TVs; they have lost patience with the war. But this should not be. Christians should not become tired or bored with the suffering of others. They have, after all, much experience of recollecting, re-representing and re-interpreting the Passion of Christ, regarding which the Protestant tradition especially lays great emphasis on individual believers and their responsibility before God.
The second reminder came the next day in the nearby Church of Our Lady. The liturgy there was modest yet powerful and the sermon addressed a timeless question: ‘How do we understand the Passion and death/sacrifice for the other and how do we apply it to our own context?’ This may seem a straightforward question, but it is, in fact, one of the more complex ones. How do we understand and apply stories that are retold every year (the Passion, the Incarnation) without becoming tired or bored?
With the start of the war in Ukraine, the question of dying for the other has become only too relevant in Europe. After arriving in Dresden, I read the news that the federal state of Saxony hosts forty thousand Ukrainian refugees, a number which at the time corresponded to the total number of refugees in the whole of Austria where I live. Recalling the war in Ukraine was thus quite a natural thing. In her homily, the priest spoke of the resentment she had encountered, during a service, from one of the refugees: ‘All this Passion or sacrifice for the other is nonsense. I do not want anyone else to die for me or instead of me! It is all false and it will never stop!’ The priest’s answer to the accusation from this deeply frustrated Ukrainian woman was unexpected: ‘You are right. It will never stop. But perhaps the lesson we should learn is not that death for the other will prevent other deaths but that it should wake us up from our lethargy, that we should never become bored or tired concerning the deaths of others, and that we should never remain bystanders. Perhaps the lesson is that Christ died not for us good Christians who understand and would never crucify him again, but for us weak people who would stand aside watching others die and not actually do anything.’
The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka has become known for his concept of the ‘solidarity of the shaken’, a concept set in the context of the extreme experience of encountering the death/self-sacrifice of another who performs their act as a protest against a totalitarian regime – in Patočka’s times, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Patočka was well aware that the majority is and will always remain silent. Ultimately, it matters not if the silence is out of fear or indifference. The result is the same. In essence, what this silence, or the ‘power of the powerless’ as Václav Havel wrote in his essay of the same name, means is that those silent bystanders keep totalitarian regimes going. The same bystanders, who first cried ‘Hosanna’ and then ‘crucify’, allowed Christ to be crucified, watched him die and then went home as if nothing had happened. These were not necessarily bad people, just those who did not let Christ’s death speak to them. The solidarity of the shaken, on the other hand, speaks about those who ‘understand’ the meaning of the protest behind the death for the other, about those who do not remain bystanders, about those who do not get tired or bored, and about those who understand the importance of creating a community of resistance which says, ‘Not in our name’. So, it was a Good Friday liturgy and sermon from the Church of Our Lady in Dresden, a highly ‘Patočkian’ sermon it must be said (even though Patočka did not consider himself a Christian), which taught me, or reminded me, what it means to be a Protestant in Europe. For me, at least, more than anything else, it means not to be a bystander.
