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Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Dallas M. Roark
Bonhoeffer’s experiences with the clandestine seminary beginning in 1935 repeat a familiar refrain in the history of the church: How can the church survive under the fire of illegality?
At Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer ran a Predigerseminar, a preachers’ seminary, covering a term of about six months, concentrating on pastoral duties. The days of training pastors for the Confessing Church were the most satisfying of Bonhoeffer’s life. Gemeinsames Leben (Life Together) is a record of this experiment. Published in 1938, the book enjoyed a popularity beyond its basic theological profundity.
Life Together deals with the practical relations of the church’s life in Christ. Between the two advents of Christ the believer lives in community with other Christians. This is a gift of God; not all can experience it, for they may be scattered, imprisoned, or alone among heathen people.
THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY
Community, for the Christian, centers in Jesus Christ. This means three things: (1) a Christian is related to others because of Jesus Christ; (2) the path to others is only through Jesus Christ; (3) the Christian is elected in Christ from eternity to eternity. The first point of being relates to one s need of others. Christians must have one another to give God’s word reciprocally to each other. The word given to me is more assuring than my own. Yet my word may encourage another who is uncertain of his own heart. Thus the Christian community is to bring the message of salvation to all. The second point means that all relationships with one another and God are through Christ. He is our peace, wrote St. Paul, and the avenues to others wind through him. The third point relates to the Incarnation. We are incorporated into Christ and shall be with him and one another in an eternal fellowship.
As in his early writings, Bonhoeffer is careful to emphasize the difference between the community as an ideal and as a divine reality. The church is not the product of desire, a wish dream, or visionary hopes. If the church were a result of man’s efforts, its failure would cause the founder to accuse the other members, God, and finally himself. However, the church has been created by God in Jesus Christ, and thankfulness is the only attitude open: thankfulness for forgiveness, daily provisions, and fellowship. Thankfulness is the key to greater spiritual resources. Without thankfulness for the daily gifts, the greater gifts of God will not come our way. Especially in the case of pastors, thankfulness is important. A pastor has no right to accuse his congregation before God. Rather, let him make intercession and give thanks for his congregation.
When Bethge was himself arrested at the end of October 1944, he destroyed the last letters arranged for by Bonhoeffer in order to bring neither of them into even greater danger. He – and many Bonhoeffer followers – later regretted that very much, since from the correspondence with his parents, but above all with Eberhard Bethge, and from notes that Bonhoeffer had made in prison, after the war the book Letters and Papers from Prison (Widerstand und Ergebung) appeared, which Eberhard Bethge published (at the request of Fritz Bissinger of Chr. Kaiser Publishing House and in consultation with the Bonhoeffer families)
(Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life, 66-67).
Darryl Dash went through the same DMin track at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The track, The Preacher and The Message, was under the direction of Dr. Haddon Robinson. Darryl recently posted a message by Dr. Robinson on his blog DashHouse.
Saturday Links
by Darryl on November 21, 2009
…An MP3 of Haddon Robinson responding to some who criticize preachers for “dumbing it down” – This short recording reminds me how much I appreciate Haddon.
I had a few days off because I was off hunting. We will get back to Bonhoeffer tomorrow!
Bryan
Other than his fiancee and his parents, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not allowed to write anyone. He was, however, allowed to receive letters. For some, it did not seem advisable to communicate through letters that might draw the attention of the Gestapo, which controlled the postal service. Two guard were stationed there especially for Bonhoeffer.
They smuggled letters out of prison to (Eberhard) Bethge and let others go through to particular addresses.
If this had been discovered, they could have expected severe punishment.
(Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life, 66).
Hate Your Family | Dietrich Bonhoeffer
”If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-27).
For the Christian the only God-given realities are those he receives from Christ. What is not given through the incarnate Son is not given us by God. What has not been given me for Christ’s sake, does not come from God.
When we offer thanks for the gifts of creation we must do it through Jesus Christ, and when we pray for the preservation of this life by the grace of God, we must make our prayer for Christ’s sake. Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin.
The path, too, to the “God-given reality” of my fellow-man or woman with whom I have to love leads through Christ, or it is a blind alley. We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangeness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union.
There is no way from one person to another. However loving or sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open in our behavior, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him.
That is why intercession is the most promising way to reach our neighbors, and corporate prayer, offered in the name of Christ, the purist form of fellowship.
From The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and inmates posing next to SS guard at Tegel…
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young pastor who symbolized the German resistance against Nazism, is counted among those who can support us on our road of faith. In the darkest hours of the twentieth century, he gave his life to the point of martyrdom. In prison he wrote these words we sing in Taizé: “God, let my thoughts be gathered to you. With you there is light, you do not forget me. With you there is help, with you there is patience. I do not understand your ways, but you know the way for me.”
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.
By Brother François of Taizé
Last updated: 19 June 2007
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s determination to be strong in the spiritual disciplines sustained him during the dark days of prison…
From the first days in the prison he continued the steady discipline of his Christian life: meditation, intercession and thanksgiving, the daily “praying” of the Psalms and Bible study.
He wrote in November (He was arrested on April 5) to Bethge that by that time he had already read the Old Testament through two and half times.
From this inexhaustible supply of spiritual strength, life once more began to well up (Mary Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 248-249).
What a wonderful example for us today. Let us build healthy and consistent patterns of growing in the Lord, so that when dark days come our way–and they always do–those same habits will allow us to be strong and to endure.
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