Category: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

OK. First thank you that nobody gave me a hard time for spelling Dietrich wrong in the title of the previous post!

Second, Jason has asked to be put out of his misery and I gladly oblige. The second version is the correct one. And it comes from Discipleship as Graeme also suggested, though the extract in A Year with Bonhoeffer is taken from A Testament to Freedom, page 321. But I've more to say about the full quotation which I'll do tomorrow.

This morning I came across a puzzling sentence in Through the Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anthology in English of Bonhoeffer's writing I regularly use. The sentence was vintage Bonhoeffer – astringent, christocentric, pastorally focused on the covenant commitments of Christian community. Except for one clause which was so unlike Bonhoeffer's voice I couldn't hear him say it or imagine he wrote it. 

Now it so happens I'm currently reading for the severalth time New Testament Interpretation 1860 -1986, by Stephen Neill and updated by Tom Wright. The chapter on the Cambridge triumvirate of Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort is a remarkable account of scholarship and spirituality at the service of the New Testament. The Westcott and Hort text of the Greek New Testament, prefaced by Lightfoot's outline of the principles of textual criticism was one of the great gifts to the church in the 19th Century. Encouraged by the example of those who meticulously pieced together a more reliable text of the New testament, I decided to go looking for the Bonhoeffer sentence in the book from which it had been taken.

Here's the two versions of the sentence. Where's the error and which was the one Bonhoeffer wrote? I'll give the full and correct quotation tomorrow – it deserves more than a moment's pondering.

The reading from a few days ago:

"With this we have advanced to the point at which we hear the heartbeat of all Christian life together.

A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its memebrs for one another or the community will be destroyed.

I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me.

In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner…

Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day".

Those words written during years of moral and political darkening in Germany and Europe. I took the liberty of putting them in a format that allows slowed down reading.

Guantanamo is to close, thank God. Guantanamo, with its prisoners held behind electrified and razor wire in humiliating, and dehumanising conditions, under the absolute power of their captors; Guantanamo and its military and intelligence personnel who are no less prisoners held behind inner barriers that inevitably dehumanise those who believe their power over others is absolute. Guantanamo is to close.

It is one of the challenges of theology that to make an all inclusive statement like 'reality as a whole held in the hands of God', must therefore include Guantanamo in that reality. It takes with shocking literalness 'He's got the whole world in His hands'; yes Guantanamo too. The military and their prisoners, human beings each caught up in the rage of the wronged.

So when that theologian was himself a prisoner, held, interrogated, tortured then executed by those with totalitarian power over his life, the words quoted above become profound affirmation, radiating a view of God and the world that negates the absolute claims of those forces of darkness that dehumanise. This is theology of hope, taking on the powers of despair, fear and hate, and not being defeated. And going on believing, 'reality as a whole [is] held in the hand of God'. 

Yesterday was January 17. On that day in 1943, while Europe was darkened by war and the German people implicated by nationhood in a regime and ideology of immense evil and ultimate despair, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria van Wedemeyer. Three months later Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned.

The importance of Bonhoeffer and Maria's engagement lies in what it signifies. The love of two people who make public their decision to be joined in marriage makes engagement a symbolic statement of intent. But in its timing, and the fact that it was never broken while Bonhoeffer was alive, it signified something else to the wider world. Like Jeremiah buying a field prior to his land being invaded, Bonhoeffer and Maria's engagement is a sign of hope and hopefulness, of trust and affirmation of the beauty, value and purpose of human life and love. Against the nightmare darkness of their time, engagement was a confession of faith. Bonhoeffer says all this much better himself.

What remarkable human beings Bonhoeffer and Maria were; and that humanity is what gives credibility to their witness, making Bonhoeffer an even more remarkable Christian. And the words in italics – they could be incorporated into a contemporary version of Christian marriage promises! 

Two different ways of expressing an incarnational theology – both centred on Jesus Christ, whose active and redemptive presence in the world is embodied in the Church, the Body of Christ. To live out that redemptive love, in generous gift, courageous witness, persistent hope and attractive joyfulness – that is Christ's call and demand – accompanied and enabled by the promise of his presence, his real presence.

Thanks to all of you who have stopped by here in the past year, to share, read, think, and pray. The consensus of the commentators seems to be that 2009 is going to be harder than 2008. Maybe so. To go into that future as a Church called to reconfigure its structural life in a post Christian culture; requiring to repent of past self-concern and learn again the way of sacrifice; urged to reconsider how to follow after Christ more faithfully, and thus to depend more trustfully on the God who has come to us in Christ – well there's enough to be going on with. But wherever we go, and whenever we gather in Jesus' name and scatter in his service, there we find the Risen Lord, and the love of God, and life whatever it brings, to be lived in the power of the Spirit of Christ.

One of the highlights of my year was the vist to Edinburgh to view Caravaggio's calling of Peter and Andrew. Against a dark background a young Jesus calls older disciples to come after him, into a future to which he points – but which they, and we, can't see. Scary stuff this discipleship.

Today is Remembrance Day. Earlier this week I had a Bonhoeffer day. I read the editor's introduction to Life Together in the Fortress Edition, and then several favourite passages from Discipleship. Then in the afternoon I watched the DVD Bonhoeffer. Agent of Grace, which is proably as careful and honest a portrayal as I've seen or read. Little by way of hagiography, as Ulrich Tukur portrayed the soul searing tension with which Bonhoeffer lived his last years, exploring the moral  ambiguity of our actions over and against the ethical imperative and inclination of the soul to act in the real world in faithfulness to Christ.

|Later, reading an important fragment included in the volume Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945, I became very aware of why it is that I love Bonhoeffer – I don't just mean I love reading his writings, studying his thought, even tracing his biography and history. I mean something altogether more radically human and authentically theological. In the communion of saints, I feel a deep sense of privilege and bafflement, that this man I could never have known, who died 6 years before I was born, is one to whom in Christ, I am nevertheless bound, by eternal yet human ties of love, into that great interpersonal reality that is the Body of Christ, Sanctorum Communio. And on Remembrance Sunday, I remember the theology and spirituality that animated and fired him with love of life, and forged that integrity which will always choose what makes for life, even if it means dying. In a world where "the song of the ruthless" (Isaiah 25) is still heard, Bonhoeffer speaks again in a voice redolent with promise and trust: