Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Remembrance Sunday and the blessing of the world

Today is Remembrance Day. Earlier this week I had a Bonhoeffer day. I read the editor's introduction to Life Together in the Fortress Edition, and then several favourite passages from Discipleship. Then in the afternoon I watched the DVD Bonhoeffer. Agent of Grace, which is proably as careful and honest a portrayal as I've seen or read. Little by way of hagiography, as Ulrich Tukur portrayed the soul searing tension with which Bonhoeffer lived his last years, exploring the moral  ambiguity of our actions over and against the ethical imperative and inclination of the soul to act in the real world in faithfulness to Christ.

|Later, reading an important fragment included in the volume Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945, I became very aware of why it is that I love Bonhoeffer – I don't just mean I love reading his writings, studying his thought, even tracing his biography and history. I mean something altogether more radically human and authentically theological. In the communion of saints, I feel a deep sense of privilege and bafflement, that this man I could never have known, who died 6 years before I was born, is one to whom in Christ, I am nevertheless bound, by eternal yet human ties of love, into that great interpersonal reality that is the Body of Christ, Sanctorum Communio. And on Remembrance Sunday, I remember the theology and spirituality that animated and fired him with love of life, and forged that integrity which will always choose what makes for life, even if it means dying. In a world where "the song of the ruthless" (Isaiah 25) is still heard, Bonhoeffer speaks again in a voice redolent with promise and trust: