Reading a lot of Bonhoeffer just now. No ulterior motive beyond spending time with one of the most pastorally astringent and spiritually decisive voices in modern theology. I learn more about the reality of Christ and the call to reality in my living for Christ, from Bonhoeffer than from most other writers. In place of our current accommodation to a host of lesser demands, Bonhoeffer reminds us of the greater demand of the Christ who calls us to take up the cross and follow into the freedom that may in the end require that we lose our lives in order to find them.
"We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ's largeheartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes and by showing a real compassion that springs not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. Christians are called to compassion and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters for whose sake Christ suffered."
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament of Freedom, 483-484).
I know of no other writer whose biography so faithfully embodies his theology, whose spirituality is so intensely this worldly but is energised by a grace not of this world, and whose life choices so deliberately echo the ominous but purposeful surrender intimated in that crucial Gospel detail, 'Jesus turned his face steadfastly towards Jerusalem". To have "some share in Christ's largeheartedness", to live our lives "with responsibility and in freedom", to be called to compassion and action – is there a more distilled account of what Christian witness looks like in the political and social arenas of our contemporary existence?
It's one of the enriching paradoxes of Bonhoeffer's thought and writing that he remains, decade after decade a voice as contemporary as today's online newspage. He is the theologian whose life and words combine to challenge our theological flabbiness, rebuke our ethical evasiveness, expose our spiritual self-centredness, and our chasing after the chimera of relevance and manufactured connectedness. Instead of such accommodations to culture, his is the call to an asceticism of the heart, an invitation to utter self expenditure in that reckless giving away that is the cost of discipleship, and the clearest reflection of the largeheartedness of Christ. Largeheartedness – that is a demanding benchmark to place over and against our current church programmes, our missional activism, our thinking and public stances on matters of peace, justice and compassion for the vulnerable. I don't read German – so I'd like to know what the word was that Bonhoeffer used that led a translator to use such a magnificently expansive word for the disposition of Christ towards those who suffer. Largeheartedness.
(The icon depicts the resurrection and Christ the lifegiver – the ultimate demonstration of theological integration – Eastern Orthodoxy doing liberation theology?)
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