“The Most Revolutionary People on Earth…”

When I remember, which is most days, I read the selection from A Year With Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I have to say, I've often smiled at the likely response of Pastor Bonhoeffer to the thought his writing would one day be a daily devotional.

Reading Bonhoeffer is an exercise in expansion, deepening and toughening;

1) expansion so that devotional isn't about a theology of my spiritual demands, but a theology of the cross;

2) deepening because for Bonhoeffer devotional is a word redolent of sacrifice, cost, consequence and daily dying; 

3) toughening because everything Bonhoeffer wrote that has enduring value for the Church is a distillation into words of the experience of confronting, subverting, challenging and having to live under the oppressive controls of National Socialism.

The July 24 reading has these words: " The people who love, because they are freed through the truth of God, are the most revolutionary people on earth. They are the ones who upset all values; they are the explosives in human society."