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By Gracious Powers: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Prayer for a New Year
The real power of his hymn comes from the fact that Bonhoeffer does not offer a rosy picture of life or any of the tropes so typical of cheap piety that tell us that everything is always right, that things happen for a reason, and that we should try to stay positive.
ometimes on New Year’s Eve, we may be happy that a year is over. Sometimes a year has been so filled with suffering, sorrow, sickness, and death that we just want to be done with it. At the same time, we may also look upon the coming year with trepidation: another year in which we will strive unsuccessfully to get accomplished all we hope to do, another year filled with yet unknown anxieties. What tragedies await us this year? Who will fall ill this year? Who will be taken from us too soon? What events will rend our hearts in two?
Sitting in his basement prison cell in the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, doubtlessly Dietrich Bonhoeffer felt similar sadness, fears, and anxieties for the future. Having spent the entire year of 1944 behind bars in western Berlin’s Tegel Prison for his participation in plots to kill Adolf Hitler, Bonhoeffer was separated from his friends, his family, his fiancée, and his church. There must not have seemed like much for which he could thank God in the past year.
His present circumstances could not be said to give him any joy either. While his earlier accommodations at the military prison at Tegel would have been anything but comfortable, they would have seemed nearly palatial compared to the hell he experienced at Gestapo headquarters. In his cell at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Bonhoeffer would have likely been unable to sleep due to the constant screams of the inmates who were tortured by the black-shirted troops of Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
Moreover, the coming year held nothing good for Bonhoeffer. In February of 1945, the SS moved him to Buchenwald concentration camp, where so many opponents of the Nazis’ regime of terror, including many clergymen, met their end. After two hellish months, the SS again moved Bonhoeffer, this time to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, whose name was synonymous with death, since so many were executed there by the SS. In fact, it was there that Bonhoeffer would join the ranks of those murdered by the darkness of Hitler’s monstrous Third Reich and, more importantly, the ranks of the saints triumphant whose light is the Lamb of God.
With such a past, present, and unknown future, one would not expect much in the way of hope for a good New Year for Bonhoeffer. And yet, in the damp, cold darkness of his cell, bereft of light, friends, and family, Bonhoeffer wrote his last theological work, a poem written to his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer, entitled, “Von Guten Mächten Wunderbar Geborgen,” a text full of hope in the graciousness and power of God. This poem has since been made into a hymn and can be found in the German Lutheran hymnal, the Evangelischen Gesangbuch. It has also been translated into English and adapted as “By Gracious Powers So Wonderfully Sheltered” in Evangelical Lutheran Worship.
In this hymn, Bonhoeffer leaves us a theological legacy that takes seriously the sorrows of life and the reign of death in a world still under the power of sin and the devil. But it’s a hymn that also confesses hope in a God who holds all things in his hands and demonstrates faithfulness to his promise to work all things together for his children’s ultimate good. With all that has happened in his life, Bonhoeffer still holds on to that promise and is even able to praise God amid horrific suffering, deprivation, and fear. Here is a man of God who has been tortured, separated from friends, robbed of judicial process, and condemned to a future that holds almost certain death.
Yet, in the midst of this, Bonhoeffer confesses the promise of God’s graciousness. In spite of all of his suffering and an uncertain but undoubtedly dark future. Bonhoeffer proclaims that he will live out his days without fear, “come what may,” because his life is still wrapped in the power of God’s grace.
Bonhoeffer’s poem makes a powerful New Year’s hymn for Christians today. In a world filled with natural disasters, wars, corrupt governments, and uncivil discourse, we need the message of God’s grace Bonhoeffer proclaims here. Amid lives wrecked by suffering, pain, death, and so many broken promises, we need the all-enveloping love of God in Christ confessed by this preacher who is about to cross over into the arms of his Savior.
The real power of his hymn comes from the fact that Bonhoeffer does not offer a rosy picture of life or any of the tropes so typical of cheap piety that tell us that everything is always right, that things happen for a reason, and that we should try to stay positive. Bonhoeffer pulls no punches whatsoever. Life is hard, even impossible. The darkness surrounds us; the silence deepens.
At the same time, though, says Bonhoeffer, God is present with us through good and bad, at morning and evening, through light and dark, and promises to go with us into the future. This is the only thing that can get us through this life. In the midst of suffering, temptation, and fear that would lead us into despair, the light of God shines, because he has entered into our world as the Child of Mary, became one of us, experienced life with all of its hardships, died and was raised to life again for us. As the author of Hebrews tells us, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb 4:15). We have a high priest, and God, in Christ who knows all of our sorrows and took them with him to the cross, dying in our place, giving us his salvation in exchange for our suffering, his life for our death. Because of that, we can face whatever life holds for us because our Savior and God has gone before us and goes with us into the future, “come what may.”
In the third verse of his hymn, Bonhoeffer puts this truth to us in this way:
And when this cup you give is filled to brimming
With bitter suffering, hard to understand,
We take it thankfully and without trembling,
Out of so good and so beloved a Hand.
The reason that we can accept the cup of suffering about which Bonhoeffer writes, and from which he personally drank so deeply, is because the hand that gives it to us bears the marks of the nails of the cross. The reason we can go into the coming year with hope is not because of some trite idea of starting the New Year right. It is because our God, Jesus Christ, goes before us and with us. We have no idea what 2020 will hold for any of us. We don’t know what successes, failures, triumphs, tragedies, sicknesses, or deaths await us. Of one thing, however, we can be absolutely sure: that God, our Savior, holds us all in his nail-pierced hand, and that he is with us.
Mark Stephens
Wed 23 Dec 2020
In 1943 the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was languishing in Tegel prison, charged with sedition against the Third Reich, for which he would eventually be executed. On 17 December, he wrote a moving Christmas letter to his longsuffering parents. Bonhoeffer recalls lovely celebrations from his past and laments the lonely Christmas of his present. But then the letter takes a turn. With surprising resilience, he writes:
I daresay [Christmas] will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to man, that God should come down to the very place which men usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn — these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else. For him the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense.
In his recent book The Godless Gospel, the philosopher Julian Baggini valiantly tries to retrieve Jesus for the secular age. Treading the well-worn footsteps of Leo Tolstoy and Thomas Jefferson before him, Baggini feels compelled to edit the biblical texts. Ditch all the miracles and eliminate the God-talk, he insists; what really matters is Jesus’s teaching — moral parables, rebukes to the rich and powerful, witty aphorisms. This keeps Jesus relevant for a world weary of dogma.
Christmas barely features in Baggini’s retelling of the gospel. To be sure, some details of Jesus’s birth are briefly given, but they lack much significance. Why would they? The birth of Jesus is just prosaic preamble to what really matters: Jesus the adult sage dispensing words of wisdom.
Baggini’s book throws into sharp relief how strange it is that the Christian story celebrates the infant Jesus. The gospel of Luke speaks excitedly about the arrival of a “Saviour”. But what is the sign that a Saviour is here? A baby. Part of the utter weirdness of the Christian story is that the birth of Jesus is not prelude. It’s essential to the story.
In a year like 2020, one could be forgiven for confusion as to what Christmas might mean. The saccharine sentimentality of Yuletide past feels awkward in this strange, strange year. In its place is the deeper gratitude which emerges from an experience of struggle. The simple joy of eating together. The deep relief that loved ones are safe and well. It’s somehow better than the ideal, because it’s joy in the darkness, and the darkness has not won.
What good is a baby Jesus, wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger? In those earliest chapters of his life, Jesus can’t yet speak. He’s a newborn, not a sage. In medieval portraiture, paintings of the infant Jesus routinely portrayed him as a homunculus, a little man-child. (Have a look at Madonna breastfeeding Child by Barnaba de Modena, in which the child Jesus appears to be suffering from male pattern baldness.) But within the gospel texts, the newborn Jesus is not a precocious philosopher, dispensing hot-takes from the manger. He’s a baby. And yet the arrival of a helpless infant causes pilgrims to travel long distances and many to break out in song. This baby is not simply a life on the verge of significance. The baby is significant — “Jesus, Lord at thy birth.”
This is where Baggini’s reading of Jesus, and Jefferson’s before him, feels manifestly insufficient.
Stanglin: ‘Opened from the outside’
The great German theologian and preacher Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo on April 5, 1943, charged with denouncing Hitler and the Nazis, for repudiating the German Christians and German churches who were supporting Hitler, for running an illegal underground seminary at Finkenwalde, and for preaching, teaching, and writing for the Confessing Church movement.
Bonhoeffer was taken to Berlin and placed in a military cell at Tegel Prison. Seven-and-a-half months later, on Nov. 21, 1943, still in custody, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his dear friend, Eberharde Bethge.
“Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of Advent – one waits and hopes and potters about, but in the end what we do is of little consequence; for the door is shut, and it can only be opened from the outside
If we ever needed a year-long reminder that we are stuck and we have no way to free ourselves, 2020 has been that awful reminder. We are imprisoned in a broken world and we have no control. In the face of a global pandemic, our best science and technology and laws have been slow at best, maybe even disastrous. In the midst of racial unrest and disparity and injustice, our best intentions and politicians have failed. The economic crisis, the ongoing wars, the political instability, the increased division and mistrust – we have no solution. Our very best efforts seem to cause more problems than they solve.
Reflecting on the long-term impact of the Bubonic Plague (1346-1353) sweeping across Europe and ravaging his native Florence, the poet Petrarch wrote: “O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”
In a 2005 History Today essay, “The Black Death: the Greatest Catastrophe Ever,” Olé J. Benedictow estimated that “the Black Death killed 50 million people in the 14th century, or 60 percent of Europe’s entire population.”
Bill Leonard
He cites one chronicler who observed: “All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried … . At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up and thrown into the pit.”
Some 700 years later, a November 2020 story in The Guardian offers a hauntingly parallel report from El Paso, the Texas epicenter of the coronavirus, and confirms more than 800 deaths since March, with 400 more currently being investigated. Recently, city leaders increased the use of mobile morgues from six to 10, acknowledging that hospitals and their medical staffs are “overwhelmed.”
The paper references a near hour-long Facebook posting in which Lawanna Rivers, a visiting nurse, emotionally describes the situation: “The only way that those patients was coming out of that pit was in a body bag,” referring to the COVID unit where she was working. She concluded: “I am not OK from an emotional mental standpoint.”
As 2020 draws to a close, the number of COVID cases stands at 60 million globally, with more than 1.5 million deaths. The United States reports more than 12 million cases, with more than 263,000 COVID-related deaths, the largest numbers for any country worldwide. William Barber, director of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently observed that while the U.S. has only 4% of the world’s population, it claims 20% of COVID-related deaths.
Such overwhelmingly high statistics can numb our collective psyche, unless we’ve had the virus ourselves, or lost friends and family because of it. Yet we are not numb to the reality of lost jobs, closed schools, online worship, unceasing political antagonism, rising hate crimes and daily inconveniences.
While the news of approaching vaccines is promising, we are not strangers to the plaintive words of Jeremiah 8:20, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Coronavirus exhaustion permeates the globe.
That reality came home to me in a recent pastoral prayer offered during Sunday worship by Glenn Pettiford, assistant pastor at First Baptist Church, Highland Avenue, our home congregation for 23 years in Winston-Salem. The service was “virtual,” yet Pettiford’s prayer was anything but. It reached across our collective hearts into the marrow of our bones.
Like a voice in the postmodern wilderness he cried out: “Lord, some of us have lost our minds. Some of us don’t believe we need to wear a mask. Some of us don’t believe we need to social distance. Some people have more faith in their handguns than they do in their own health practices. … Lord, I’m not mad at my brothers and sisters, I’m just tired of this mess. (Some people are) complaining about children not being able to go back to school, but at the same time being more concerned about going to a football game or a bar than making it safe for the young ones. Save us all, if you will, I ask in Jesus’ name. Please Lord, your children are dying. Lord, we’re not giving up; we can’t give up, you’ve been so good to us. We can’t give up. We’ve got to keep going.”
In those moments, the pastor’s prayer became for me an imprecatory psalm, a lamentation bursting with passion and compassion, demanding, “How long, O Lord, how long,” while imploring, “O Lord, do not turn your face from us!”
For me, it seemed another Bonhoeffer moment, a challenge poured out in real time and reflecting two crucial elements of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought: a stark choice between cheap and costly grace amid a determined “will for the future.”
In his classic 1937 work, The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer denounced cheap grace as “grace without price; grace without cost!” This mistaken spirituality incorrectly insists that “the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.” It means “grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares.” (A cheapjack is “a peddler of inferior goods.”)
Costly grace, by contrast, “is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a (person) must knock.”
“Such grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.” In German, the title of this seminal volume is simply Nachfolge, “following.”
Costly grace and the moral catastrophes of his times put Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the test, resulting in his execution at the hands of the Nazis in 1945, a grace from which he never retreated, and by which he kept going, ever with an eye to the future.
DECEMBER 11, 2020 | CHRISTOPHER ASH
Our newsfeeds are full of encouraging results in trials of potential vaccines for COVID-19. I need to start this countercultural article by saying I really hope we get an effective vaccine. I hope we get it soon. I hope it can be rolled out, not only in my own country, but all over the world.
The upsides are clear and rich. Most obviously, it will save lives. Life is a good thing; saving lives is a desirable aim. It may also offer some relief for the many enduring mental-health problems due to lockdowns and COVID restrictions, a way of escape for those suffering the hidden miseries of domestic abuse, the chance of restored education for millions of schoolchildren and college students, and a better prospect of jobs for so many whose work hopes have been blighted. How we long for these miseries to be alleviated. I feel especially for the young people who are paying—and probably will continue to pay—so much of the cost of all this suffering.
It will be such a joy to again be able to meet freely with brothers and sisters in Christ, to sing God’s praises together, and to do all the “one another” things the New Testament encourages. Such a joy. A secular society cannot begin to understand the depth of the grief that our current restrictions cause to our souls. If a vaccine enables all this to restart: hallelujah!
And then there is the ability to see precious family, to spend time with friends, to restart hospitality in our homes. So of course we all long for a successful vaccine, and soon.
As I’ve meditated about this, it seems that the Bible warns of three dangers that might accompany a successful vaccine—and therefore three spiritual warnings. These, I suspect, are not so obvious. They’re certainly not in our newsfeeds.
1. We may not let God’s kindness lead us to repentance.
A pandemic is, I take it, yet another warning from God that there is a judgment to come, that we live in a world by which the pure, holy, and righteous God is rightly angered. That doesn’t mean getting a horrible disease is always personal punishment for a particular sin; Jesus firmly corrected those who thought it was (e.g., John 9:1–3). But it is a warning to all of us that, unless we repent, we too will perish (Luke 13:1–4). The terrible refrain in the book of Revelation (e.g., Rev. 16:9, 11) of people suffering anticipations of final judgment but not repenting ought to warn us to repent. That God does not immediately punish all our sins is a kindness that ought to lead us to repentance (Rom. 2:4). A pandemic is, to use C. S. Lewis’s memorable phrase, a “severe mercy,” because it warns us of worse to come and therefore of the urgent need to turn to God.
Writing of a disaster in Sicily in the 18th century, the Christian poet William Cowper reflected:
God may choose his mark,
May punish, if he please, the less, to warn
The more malignant. If he spared not them,
Tremble and be amazed at thine escape,
Far guiltier England, lest he spare not thee!
In my country, I see little sign of a society moved by COVID-19 to a penitent fear of God. I see little sign of it in the churches. And, worst of all, I find little of this in my own self-righteous, complacent heart. As I write this, I say to myself: Christopher, you need daily to repent of your sins and flee afresh to Christ for mercy. My first reaction, all too often—and I say this to my shame—is to grumble, to criticize governments, to wallow in self-pity. May God have mercy and move me, and move our churches, and move our nations, to a deep and widespread repentance.
2. It may feed our pride so that we neglect to thank God.
How extraordinarily clever are the scientists in the pharmaceutical industry! The skill, ingenuity, hard work, perseverance, and mind-boggling brilliance of those who develop a vaccine is a matter of wonder and amazement. It is an extraordinary thing to watch the whole process as it develops with such speed and—as it seems at the moment—likely success.
‘Suicide Is A Very Real Threat’: Pandemic Depression New, Growing Disorder Linked To COVID-19
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Pandemic depression is a new disorder linked to COVID-19 and it’s growing. Research shows people in major metropolitan areas, like Philadelphia, are being hit harder by mental health challenges.
Students have had their lives turned upside down, mainly with disruptions to schooling. The pandemic is impacting everyone and for many, taking a toll on their mental health.ADVERTISING
It’s not just physical ailments as emergency departments are also being bombarded with the emotional fallout from the pandemic. Over a six-week period this summer in Montgomery County, 400 people went to hospitals because of self-injury or suicidal thoughts.
A new study in Britain shows school lockdowns are having a big impact on children.
“We found quite a substantial increase in ratings of depressive symptoms during lockdown,” said Duncan Astle, a developmental psychologist for the University of Cambridge.
The research tracked about 200 elementary students before and after the lockdown and found a 70% chance that depression increased with isolation.
Chapter 7 of Eberhard Bethage‘s massive bio on Dietrich Bonhoeffer is titled: “Berlin: 1933”. Adolf Hitler came into power at noon on January 30, 1933. Bonhoeffer would lose friends because of his position on Hitler…
“The changes brought an abrupt and discordant end to friendships that had meant something to Bonhoeffer. He did not antagonize his students–some of whom were Party members–before he could explain the issue to them. But he could not and would not maintain ties to those in church offices who had made their peace–albeit with a sigh–with the Nazi Aryan clause (the legislation that banned ‘non-Aryans’ from certain professions). So he wrote his farewell letters to them without regard for their professed reasons good reasons and intentions” (Eberhard Bethage, Dietrich Bonhoeffer A Biography, 258-259).
Of course, Bonhoeffer will lose far more as the years pass.
Chapter 7 of Eberhard Bethage‘s massive bio on Dietrich Bonhoeffer is titled: “Berlin: 1933”. Adolf Hitler came into power at noon on January 30, 1933. This rocked Bonhoeffer’s world:
“This turning point meant that the everyday struggle made unprecedented demands on (Bonhoeffer). It was four years before he was able to finish his next book. Up to now the young lecturer and preacher had not been involved in decisions concerning greater church issues. He had no voice, nor indeed had he desired any. Now, at the age of twenty-seven, he found himself among those whose names had suddenly become prominent. The usual groups were no longer decisive; new people had become involved in the structures of the church. Bonhoeffer’s previously private existence acquired a public dimension. It happened so quickly that he found it uncanny: ‘I often long terribly for a quiet pastorate.’ Among his reasons for the decision to go to London, ‘one of the strongest, I believe, was that I simply did not any longer feel up to the questions and demands which came to me” (Eberhard Bethage, Dietrich Bonhoeffer A Biography, 258).
The ride was just beginning for Dietrich.
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