I’ve been bingeing on the TV show Vikings with its compelling mix of egalitarian but bloodthirsty pagans and pious, corrupt and bloodthirsty Christians. Based loosely on historical characters it is a heady mix of power, ambition, sex, war, adventure, heroism, religion and insanity. I’m in season 5 so no spoiling it for me. One of the more entertaining characters, Floki the boatbuilder is now in Iceland. He left Kattegat with a pioneering group of devout pagans to set up a new community there. It is, he believes, home of the gods.

They set out with dreams of something pure, something free from earthly concerns and devoted to true worship. Here they will be free to believe. It is the sort of dream that has inspired puritans, radicals, and dreamers of all faiths and persuasions. Unsurprisingly, they soon run into difficulties and not just because they’re in Iceland.

The troubles they find are precisely the same ones they thought they had left behind. They argue about who will be king, who will rule, who will have power. Factions quickly form. They struggled because however far we run we cannot escape ourselves.

Back in Norway, the warrior queen Lagertha mocks the warrior bishop Heahmund for believing that you can sin in your thoughts. Deeds, she says, are all that matter. What she misses is that our thoughts are the seeds from which the fruit of our deeds grow as Floki is finding out. The rival factions didn’t just start out of nowhere but were germinated in thoughts of mistrust and suspicion. Those thoughts became ideas, convictions and beliefs. The things that exist only in the mind are no less poisonous and deadly because they exist in thought and not yet deed. Just ask anyone who knows a conspiracy theorist. Or you could ask Jesus, he knew that too.

From Iceland to Dallas to Finkenwalde

Radical communities face a tricky dilemma. Given the choice people default to what is easiest and most comfortable. If that happens a sense of division can creep in as the truly committed carry the freeloaders. One response is to enforce control, to create rules. Legalism to beat licence. Yet as the early church found out both licence and legalism can destroy faith and community but the way to defeat them both is through grace.

Yet the way to discover grace is not to wave away the sin but to face it. The Christian answer to these challenges lies in the practice of confession. But in radical community there are always ways to get this badly wrong. Ole Anthony in his radical vision of the early church in 20th century Dallas tried forced communal confession. It went as well as you might think.

Perhaps the most destructive practice was a scapegoating ritual the Block called “the hot seat.” One person—commonly someone who had pushed back against Anthony, former members say—would sit in the center, and the group would assault them with accusations until they broke down.

“It was brutal,” said Powell Holloway, who sat in the hot seat in 1986. “The whole purpose was to die to self, to get in touch with the fact that you were chief of sinners.”

When people finally psychologically crumpled, they would stop resisting the worst accusations against them and embrace self-loathing and shame. Members would frequently confess to the worst sins they could imagine, including paedophilia, voyeurism, bestiality, incest, and prostitution. While some of the confessions were true, more were made up to demonstrate total submission to the group.

Anthony, as the leader, did not sit in the hot seat, former members say.

Died: Ole Anthony, Terror to Televangelists

Awful.

Choosing humiliation

But if you practice confession, there’s no escaping, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw, the pain. Confession is painful enough and there’s no need to make it worse with abusive and coercive practices.

Confession in the presence of another believer is the most profound kind of humiliation. It hurts, makes one feel small; it deals a terrible blow to one’s pride. To stand there before another Christian as a sinner is an almost unbearable disgrace.

Life Together

Bonhoeffer, who knew a thing or two about community, instead believed the way forward was not to give up confession but to practice it freely. The power was in the grace it conveyed.

By confessing actual sins the old self dies a painful, humiliating death before the eyes of another Christian. Because this humiliation is so difficult, we keep thinking we can avoid confession to one another. Our eyes are so blinded that they no longer see the promise and the glory of such humiliation. It is none other than Jesus Christ who openly suffered the shameful death of a sinner in our place, who was not ashamed to be crucified for us as an evildoer. And it is nothing else but our community with Jesus Christ that leads us to the disgraceful dying that comes in confession so that we may truly share in this cross.

Life Together

When we go of our own free will to a brother or sister and in private confess we hear back the word of grace and forgiveness. We are seen as we know ourselves to be, sinful. But we are sent out as Christ knows us to be, forgiven. Sins confessed leads to transformation. Confession is essential to community.

Floki and his friends tried to run from that which they cannot escape, themselves. They underestimated the destructive nature of sinful thoughts. Bad roots will eventually produce bad fruit. And without means of redemption, forgiveness or transformation the only response is control or division.

The path to change is not to run from the danger but to face it, confess it and see that it has already been judged, condemned and carried by someone else. So arise from the dust and be free.