The definitive biography of Bonhoeffer remains that of Eberhard Bethge, published by Augsburg in 2000 as a revised edition. My own hardback copy goes back to the early 1970's, when I first read it as a young pastor. I've never lost the admiration bordering on awe that was evoked by encountering a life so genuinely moral and so theologically shaped around the form of Christ. One way or another, year on year, I've continued to wrestle with the challenge of this man who died in his fortieth year, and whose life so powerfully demonstrated the cruciform shape of Christian existence.
The theological existentialism of the 1970's created an atmosphere of unrest, of impatience with classic expressions of theology, ministry and church. And in the flux and theological turmoil of the time, I sensed in Bonhoeffer both a determination to be faithful to Jesus Christ and a capacity for radical departures from the assumptions and structures of dogmatic formulation and ecclesial pattern. According to Bonhoeffer, an authentic Christian existence, expressed in faithful discipleship, demanded a constant reorientation of life around the person of Jesus Christ, while standing beneath the cross. A life so lived is the most persuasive statement the church can ever make about the reality of her Lord, the nature of the Gospel, and the cost and consequence of following Jesus in the contemporary world. And I was fully persuaded. Ever since, the life and thought of Bonhoeffer have been trusted navigation points for my own traveling in theology and discipleship.
The announcement of a major new biography by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen is therefore an important event. For myself, the significance of a new biography isn't so much that it will provide new information, but that it will exegete the text of a life formed after Christ, and do so with critical reverence for that text. Biography as theology means that a Christian life is itself primary theological data, the living testimony of those who have lived and died by the truth they discerned in Christ. Biography is therefore a key theological resource, primary material for research, albeit mediated through the secondary reflection of the biographer. Schlingensiepen's father was Principal of one of the confessing Church seminaries, and he himself is a German pastor and friend of Bethge. The book is due early December: if the publishers can make that date it will be my Advent companion this year, drawing me into the interplay of light and darkness that is the reality of human life, lived by faith, oriented by hope and sustained by the love that moves the stars and sun.
I wasn't able to blog yesterday, November 15. On that date in 1931 Bonhoeffer was ordained, and so began one of the most remarkable ministries to grace the Church.
Here's Bonhoeffer on the proper balance between pastoral care and the unique freedom of each person in Christ. An entire renovation of authority centred attitudes to Christian leadership is required by Bonhoeffer's central contention:
As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone. However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died and rose again, as those for whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for other Christians, before I could begin to act, I must allow them the freedom to be Christ's. They should encounter me only as the persons they already are in Christ.
Life Together, pages 43-44. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 5, Fortress 1966
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