"The day will come …when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite non-religious language, but liberating and redeeming, like Jesus' language, so that people will be alarmed. and yet overcome by its power – the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God's kingdom is drawing near."
"The most important question for the future is how we are going to find a basis for living together with other people, what spiritual realities and rules we honour as the foundations for a meaningful Christian life."
These words were written by Bonhoeffer a year or so before Bonhoeffer was executed. They seem to me to be an important comment on the words of jesus, spoken a year or so before he was executed, "I have come that you might have life, and have life in all its fullness."
This identification with Jesus is spelt out further in another of Bonhoeffer's letters: "Our relationship to God is no 'religious' relationship to some highest, most powerful and best being imaginable – that is no genuine transcendence. Instead, our relationship to God is a new life in 'being there for others,' through participation in the being of Jesus."
"Liberating and redeeming like Jesus' language". If only Jesus' ambassadors could echo the tone and content of Jesus' language, words formed and gifted by grace to set free and make possible a new and renewed beginning. "The whole creation groans awaiting its redemption", and that was as clear to Bonhoeffer in his cell, when his life was forfeit, his family at risk, his nation embroiled in a fight to the death and its military responsible for mass death by blitz, Holocaust and the madness of power. His words were written and his thought shaped by concern for what the church would be, and need to be, in a post-war world.
As Clifford green comments, quoting Bonhoeffer further, "The overall emphasis is on service, not domination, on demonstrating by example what new life in Christ means, of speaking with 'moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment.'" The italics are mine, because these ten words provide a barcode for ecclesial speech, Christian witness, a discipleship that so shapes emotion, will, and thought, that what is articulated in words is recognisably, and startlingly reminiscent of Jesus.
They may be one of the vital clues to what disqualifies the church from the attention of a secular, post-modern culture. Speech that is self-excusing and self-defensive yet critical and judgemental of "the other", the world; on too many occasions words that are carefully chosen as if witness was a synonym for diplomacy; unchristian attitudes of moral superiority, betraying a profound unawareness that is itself sin at its most toxic; and pervasive in the language and apologetics of the church, a fear and anxiety of the world of culture and technology, an ambivalence about human progress and human crisis; and most tragic of all, the gradual disappearance over time of Jesus Christ as the living centre of the church and the dynamic source of Christian life, thought and action.
In a prison cell, facing his own death, looking to a future he would not see, Boinhoeffer wrote letters to his friend containing seeds and seedlings of some of the most crucial ideas required for the Church facing a world where assumptions of religious commitment could no longer hold, and in which the status quo of religious institutions and their influence and power would disappear. In both senses his words were prophetic – speaking into the future, and speaking necessary truth inspired by the Spirit of God.
Amongst the miracles of providence, was the relationship established between Bonhoeffer and Corporal Knobloch, a member of the guard detail in Tegel Interrogation Prison. But for Corporal Knobloch, the letters to Eberhard Bethge would not have survived, may not even have been written. By such coincidences of providence, the gates of Hell shall not prevail…..
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