Author: admin

Here is an example of Bonhoeffer at his very best in creating a pastoral christology that dethrones the ego and makes space for the other, in whom we meet Christ.

Because Christ stands between me and an other, I must not long for unmediated community with that person. 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 person they already are for Christ. This is the meaning of the claim that we can encounter others only through the mediation of Christ. Self centred love constructs its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognises the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ. It is the image Jesus Christ has formed and wants to form in all people. 

(Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works, Fortress, 1996, 43-4)

The context within which Bonhoeffer wrote these lines makes them naive, idealistic, and the route to spiritual despair. Or so it seems. Except, Bonhoeffer had a profound grasp of the spiritual nature of the conflicts in which the Church was involved. He understood that Christians struggled not against flesh and blood, nor land and blood, but against spiritual wickedness, principalities and powers, in the high places. He self-consciously and with theological and ethical deliberation opposed ideological coercion with a way of seeing the other person that had roots in the eternal purposes of God in Christ. Christians love because He first loved us. The contrast between self love which dominates the other, and Christ love which allows the other to freely be what Christ calls them to be, could not be more absolute, final and non-negotiable; it is founded on the incarnation, atonement and resurrection events of God's saving purpose.

Therefore in the immediate context of the Seminary, such words, ideas and convictions as those expressed in this passage, were a call to the seminarians to live out a love that is respectful of the other as one for whom Christ died; more generally in a Germany wracked with pressures of social coercion, ideological bullying and physical intimidation ranging from ostracism to concentration camps, Bonhoeffer was constructing a theological anthropopology, rooted in a Christology that preserved the worth of every human individual. That explicit Christological claim, Bonhoeffer opposed to all other claims, including and especially, the claims of National Socialism and Hitler as its demi-god. Life Together is a powerful, and pastoral theological rebuttal of all human claims on the human soul, and on the soul of his German compatriots.

Often enough Bonhoeffer's late theology is called revolutionary. The theological anthropology, incarnational Christology and divine ownership of the redeemed, which give Life Together its radical Christian demand are themselves entirely subversive of all forms of earthly  claims to dominance. This is no wee book of monastic spirituality, which is sometimes the way it is read and praised today. It is a book about developing tough virtues, and Christlike love, and a faithful Christ enabled kenosis, nurtured in prayer and the Word, that is able to defy the seductions and oppressions of political and military power. It may be that Bonhoeffer's relevance for today lies as much in those demands for Christlike behaviour and dispositions towards the other, as in the more obvious and overt challenges of the later letters to Bethge. 

How many of you remember the first time you heard the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer? I'm not sure. While I was in College studying current theology in 1974, we were introduced to recent trends which included 'religionless Christianity'. Around the same time I went to a public library sale of discarded books and picked up Mary Bosanquet's The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The coinciding of reading around radical late 1960's theology and this well written biography posed intriguing questions which still interest me. How could a man of such obvious piety be a primary source for 'religionless Christianity'? What to make of this German pastor who preached the Word, and grounded his convictions in a theology was that was radically Christocentric? Admiration but also puzzlement at his decision to return to Germany rather than stay in the safety of the United States – but also sadness mixed with gratitude that he did return, and how that decision, and many others over the next ten or so years, defined for the modern world a form of Christian witness as resistance. My own search for the connection points between Bonhoeffer's theology and writing, and the situation of the Church now – a search which can be much more substantially traced in the continuing flow of published writing on Bonhoeffer and his reception decade by decade since the publishing of his Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer has become a decisive presence in modern theology, and there is a vibrant Bonhoeffer publishing industry, including the completion of the English Translation of Bonhoeffer's Works.

My first reading of Bonhoeffer's Life Together coincided with the reading of two other books which in some ways are at the other side of the theological dining room. Jean Vanier's Community and Growth remains a watershed in Christian understanding of kenotic community based on welcome, servant presence and profound love for the other, expressed in care, accompaniment and recognition that every person is both gifted and disabled; we are both wounded and sources of healing; we are forgiven forgivers. W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense was a theological eye-opener. His exposition of Divine Love as precarious, vulnerable and by its nature unable to guarantee the Divine Lover's response, reconfigured my theological assumptions at the time. While wanting to qualify some of Vanstone's conclusions, the connection he made between Divine Love and kenosis has become an essential perspective in my own theology.

So when I read Bonhoeffer's Life Together, I had already encountered two very different expositions of what Cjristian community would look like, and how it might reflect the image and ministry of Jesus Christ, and do so as the Body of Christ. Bonhoeffer's theology, his doctrine of God in Christ and the relations between Christ and Church, was altogether more radical, stern, alert to the transcendent otherness and reality of God, more biblically grounded in text and dogma. But no less pastorally aware of the disciplines and faithfulness that gives Christian love its kenotic character, expressed in humility, service, prayerful openness to the other, and gratitude to God for the gift of each person.

I mention all this because I am awaiting delivery of the volume of Bonhoeffer's Works covering the Finkenwalde period when Life Together was written, and The Cost of Discipleship was gestating in the mind of someone whose witness and actions would grow out of profound personal appropriation of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully recognise the importance of Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, and especially the late letters to Bethge. But putting Life Together into the overall contrxt of Finkenwalde, National Socialist Germany, and the life of Bonhoeffer himself will be a fascinating process. And perhaps for me will bring me full circle with Bonhoeffer whose luminous presence has been like a winking light on the shore of the Clyde – I know, a stretched metaphor, but one used by someone who loves the Rothesay ferry!