The Relevance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

(This is Neil.) I have a very long mental list of things that I should post about (not to mention Liam’s comments below, which I need to answer), and near the top is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Last year marked the 100^th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth. While I did post excerpts from an interview and short article, I should have contributed a few more substantive posts for the occasion.

For now, let me post another short but rather comprehensive article written by Brother François of Taizé. He mentions three of Bonhoeffer’s books – Sanctorum Communion, The Cost of Discipleship, and his Letters and Papers from Prison. In his prison writings, Bonhoeffer spoke about the difficulty of speaking about God to people who – at least in some sense – no longer need God. He wrote to his grandson, “The days are coming when it may be impossible to speak openly, but we will pray, we will do what is right, and God’s time will come.”

What could Bonhoeffer have meant by that? In a speech delivered last year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said that Bonhoeffer wished to make two points. First, Christianity must never become a “tribal” language for a pious inner circle that exercises the option of speaking it. Religious language cannot be “the dialect of a minority ‘interest group’; it must be language that permeates all human discourse in one way or another.” Second, Bonhoeffer was aware of the danger of a religious language that “observes and identifies, but leaves unchanged the situation in which it is spoken.” How different that would be from the language of Jesus Christ which, as Bonhoeffer wrote in May, 1944, “transforms what is possible.” We must trust the the words will be given us in time.

It is interesting that Brother François, since he is writing from Taizé, does not mention ecumenism. (Doubtless a matter of limited space.) Bonhoeffer was a participant in ecumenism, but, as Archbishop Williams writes, also issued a challenge to it in 1936 that we should still hear:

Is church union and fellowship in the Word and Sacrament created by the Holy Spirit, or is it the union of all well-disposed, honorable, pious Christians whether their observances be German Christian, that of the church committees or that of the Confessing Church? Is church union founded only on the truth of the Gospel or on a love uncontrolled by the question of truth?

Here, then, is Brother François’ very good introduction to Bonhoeffer:

What is touching about Bonhoeffer is how he resembles the Church fathers, the Christian thinkers of the first centuries. The Church fathers did their work while searching for a unity of life. They were able to reflect intellectually in an extremely profound way, but at the same time they prayed a lot and were fully integrated into the life of the Church of their time. That is found in Bonhoeffer. Intellectually he was almost too talented. But at the same time he was a man who prayed a great deal. He meditated on Scripture every day, until the end of his life. He understood it, as Gregory the Great once said, as a letter from God addressed to him. Although he came from a family where the men – his father, his brothers – were practically agnostics, and although his Church, the German Protestant Church, disappointed him a lot in the Nazi period and he suffered from this, he lived fully as a member of the Church.

I would like to mention three of his writings:

His doctoral thesis, Sanctorum Communio, has something exceptional for the time. A young student, 21 years old, writes a dogmatic reflection on the sociology of the Church, starting from Christ. Reflecting, starting from Christ, on what the Church should be seems incongruous. Much more than an institution, the Church for him is Christ existing in the form of the Church. Christ is not a little bit present through the Church; no, he exists for us today in the form of the Church. This is utterly faithful to Saint Paul. It is this Christ who has taken our fate upon himself, who has taken our place. This way Christ acted remains the fundamental law of the Church: taking the place of those who have been excluded, of those who are outside, as Jesus did during his ministry and already at the time of his baptism. It is striking to see how this book speaks of intercession: it is like the blood that circulates in the Body of Christ. To express this, Bonhoeffer depends on Orthodox theologians. He also speaks of confession, which was practically unheard of in the Protestant Churches. Imagine that: a young man of 21 years affirms that it is possible for a minister of the Church to say to us, “Your sins are forgiven,“ and affirms that this is part of the essence of the Church. How new this was in its context!

The second writing is a book he wrote when he was called to become the director of a seminary for theology students who were considering a ministry in the Confessing Church, men who had to prepare themselves for a very hard life. Almost all of them had to deal with the Gestapo; some were thrown into prison. In German the title is very short: Nachfolge, “following” (in English, The Cost of Discipleship). That tells all about the book. How can we take seriously what Jesus expressed; how can we not set it aside as if the words were for other times? The book says how: following has no content. We would have preferred Jesus to have a program. But no! In following him, everything depends on our relationship with him: he goes ahead and we follow.

Following, for Bonhoeffer, means recognizing that if Jesus truly is what he says about himself, then he has a claim on ­everything in our life. He is the “mediator”. No human relationship can take prevalence over him. Bonhoeffer quotes Christ’s words calling us to leave parents, family, possessions. That frightens us a bit today, and some people criticized that aspect of the book: does not Bonhoeffer present an image of Christ that is too authoritarian? We read in the Gospel, however, how astonished people were at the authority with which Jesus taught and cast out evil spirits. There is an authority in Jesus. Yet he speaks of himself, differently from the Pharisees, as gentle and humble of heart, in other words: someone who was tried himself and who is beneath us. That is how he always presented himself, and true authority is found behind this humility.

The whole book is organized in that way: listen with faith and put it into practice. If we listen with faith, if we realize that Christ is the one speaking, we cannot not put into practice what he says. If faith stopped before being put into practice, then it would no longer be faith. It would set a limit to the Christ that we listened to. Of course, in Bonhoeffer’s writing that can seem a bit too strong, but does not the Church need such listening again and again? A simple listening. A direct, immediate listening, that believes it is possible to live what Christ asks.

The third writing is the famous Letters and Papers from Prison. In a world where he perceives that God is no longer recognized, in a world without God, Bonhoeffer asks the question: how are we going to speak of Him? Will we try to create enclaves of Christian culture, turning to the past with a certain nostalgia? Will we try to foster religious needs in people who apparently no longer have any? Today it can be said that there is a revival of interest in religion, but often it is only to give a religious veneer to life. It would be dishonest on our part to create explicitly a situation in which people would need God. How then can we speak of Christ today? Bonhoeffer answers: by our life. It is impressive to see how he describes the future to his godson: “The days are coming when it may be impossible to speak openly, but we will pray, we will do what is right, and God’s time will come.” ­Bonhoeffer believed that the language we need will be given to us by life. We can all feel today, even with respect to those who are closest to us, a great difficulty in speaking about redemption by Christ, about life after death or, still more, about the Trinity. All that is so far away for people who, in some sense, no longer need God. How can we have the confidence that if we live lives rooted in God, the language will be given to us? It will not be given if we make the Gospel accessible by diminishing it. No, the language will be given if we truly live it.

In his letters, as in the book on discipleship, everything ends in a way that is almost mystical. He would not have wanted us to say that, but when it is a question of being with God without God, one’s thoughts turn to Saint John of the Cross, or to Saint Theresa of Lisieux in that difficult period she went through at the end of her life. That is what Bonhoeffer wanted: to stay with God without God. To dare to remain beside him when he is refused, rejected. That gives a certain gravity to all he wrote. And yet it is good to know that he was optimistic. His vision of the future has something liberating for Christians. He trusted; the word trust appears so often in his letters from prison. In prison, Bonhoeffer would have liked to have written a commentary on Psalm 119, but he only got to the third stanza. In that Psalm there is a verse that sums up Bonhoeffer’s life: You are close, Lord; all that you ordain is truth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived from the assurance that Christ is truly close, in very situation, even the most extreme ones. You are close, Lord; all that you ordain is truth. We can believe that what you ordain is not only true, but worthy of our entire trust.