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From a recent “World” magazine
November 29, 2013 By Ellen Painter Dollar
So, this arrived on my doorstep about two weeks ago.
I agreed to read and write on The Bonhoeffer Reader for the Patheos Book Clubbecause I’ve always wanted to know more about Bonhoeffer and his theology. But I didn’t know the book would be so big. (The photo doesn’t quite convey its heft. It’s really, really big.) I knew I wouldn’t be able to read the whole book in the short time I had before the Patheos deadline for book club entries, and I was right. I made it through Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall, plus a few other short lectures. To be completely honest, I didn’t understand all of it. I struggle with straight-up theology, and gravitate more readily to story and poetry.
But I was captivated by Bonhoeffer’s description, in Creation and Fall, of the “anxiety-causing middle” in which people live. We did not witness the beginning of creation and we do not know its end, so we are dwelling in a middle place of uncertainty concerning where we come from and where we are going. Sounds a lot like daily life, doesn’t it? When Bonhoeffer writes that “….you do not wish to live without the beginning, without the end, because being in the middle causes you anxiety,” I also thought of my recent Christian Century article about the need for stories that leave intact the messy, tension-filled reality of life rather than transforming our stories into shiny, clean-edged morality tales. When we make a story into a morality tale, we impose a clear narrative arc with a defined ending where it becomes clear who or what was right or wrong, good or bad, compassionate or villainous. This temptation comes from the same fundamental anxiety that Bonhoeffer speaks of in our relationship with God as creator—an anxiety about dwelling in the middle, without knowing the beginning and end.
In contemplating creation, Bonhoeffer also says that God’s word (the biblical creation account), as “the word of a book, the word of a pious human being, is wholly a word that comes from the middle and not from the beginning. In the beginning God created….This word, spoken and heard as a human word, is the form of a servant in which from the beginning God encounters us and in which God alone wills to be found.” While the Bible obviously stands apart from and above the many words that we produce today, the idea of word as a servant through which God speaks to us and through which we encounter God also resonated with me as a writer. So often, the act of writing, of choosing words to describe inward or outward experiences, leads to revelation and sheds light into the shadows.
Finally, it strikes me that Bonhoeffer’s life itself testifies that God can use our anxiety-riddled middle places to point toward the God who is beginning and end.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1961 ed., 196.
By Joel Willitts
In the new volume of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Works, Vol. 14: Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935-37, there are some very interesting (to me) observations made by Jürgen Henkys in the “Editor’s Afterward to the German Edition”.
In particular, I note five particularly interesting observations Henkys’s makes about what emerges from the present collection.
(1) Finkenwalde was a protest and a prophetic discipleship against and in relationship to the dramatic take over of the German Church by the Nazis and the response of the Confessing Church. The Preachers Seminary was founded in response to the Confessing synods of Barmen and Dahlem in 1934. As the Seminary opened with its second of five sessions it was declared illegal by the state in a statement called the Fifth Implementation Decree published on 12/2/1935. The seminary opened its doors in April 1935 and was closed in September 1937 by the Gestapo.
(2) The Bible was the primary resource for Bonhoeffer in the Finkenwalde years. Particularly as everything was being reconsidered by the Confessing Church in response to the challenge of the Third Reich.
It is no accident that the Bible stands at the beginning and the end of this enumeration . . . Everything that had to be justified anew here—with respect to pastoral care, ecclesiastical politics, ecumenical and dogmatic issues—could not be addressed adequately at the level of traditional academic theological deduction (975).
(3) But the Bible is read anew in light of the present experience. There is an important hermeneutical approach Bonhoeffer takes as evidenced in his lectures and sermons. He sees that there is a need for something in addition to historical-critical exegesis. The Church Struggle becomes a hermeneutical lens for reading the Bible aright.
His writing, teaching, proclamation, and admonitions were all guided now by a new manner of reading the Bible, a manner with which not even he had much familiarity yet; the Bible was now to be read with an eye on the decisions—both imminent and past—that affected the church’s concrete present (975).
Bonhoeffer allowed the contemporary theological and ecclesiastical conflicts to shape the lecture’s task (984) Bonhoeffer’s hermeneutics pointed him in the direction of exegesis substantively shaped by the church’s own contemporary experience rather than exegesis somehow removed from time. As he reminded his candidates, academic theological departments were not the ones carrying the Church Struggle and were thus unaware of this question regarding the space of the church; those carrying that struggle were instead the pastors and congregations themselves. Bonhoeffer concludes, ‘the theology and question of the church develops from within the church’s own empirical experience and encounters. It receives blows and realizes: the body of the church must take this or that particular path. (985)
In the Bible study (“The Reconstruction of Jerusalem according to Ezra and Nehemiah”), the path to a contemporary statement or position does not emerge from any comprehensive examination of the biblical textual material nor from any enumeration of the results of historical scholarship regarding that material. What moves the exegete instead is the urgent question already on the table, concerning the church dispute and the theological assessment he has already made about this issue. The edifying elements and orientation solicited from the text itself emerge not by way of exegetical derivation and historical considerations. Rather, it is discovered, recognized anew, welcomed as confirming challenge by an exegete who reads Scripture with the assurance of the truth of the struggling church itself, which has already decided in favor of the understanding of its confession required by the contemporary situation (998).
(4) The New Testament was the primary textbook for the training of the seminarians.
The most distinctive feature of Bonhoeffer’s teaching at Finkenwalde is his exegesis of the New Testament in session after session (982).
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1961 ed., 195.
Earthly treasures soon fade, but a treasure in heaven lasts for ever. By this treasure Jesus does not mean the one great treasure of himself, but treasures in the literal sense of the word, treasures accumulated by the disciples for themselves. What a wonderful promise we have here: as we follow Jesus, we win heavenly treasures which are incorruptible; they are waiting for us, and one day we shall enjoy them as our own. Surely these treasures can be none other than the “extraordinary,” the hidden character of the Christian life, none other than the fruits of the passion of Jesus Christ which sustains the lives of his followers.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1961 ed., 195.
This evening at Harvey Oaks Baptist Church was the Annual Thanksgiving Service. Paul Yates of Tiny Hands International. It is a wonderful Christian organization out of Lincoln, NE that not only raises awareness of slavery and sex trafficking but also rescues young girls and boys out of that diabolical trade. Did you know there are 27 million slaves around the world and half of them are children? Are you aware that sex trafficking is alive and well in the United States? By that, I mean children and young people are sex slaves even the heart of the Midwest.
It should break our hearts!
Get involved by going to Tiny Hands International.
by JOE CARTER
9 Things You Should Know About C.S. Lewis
Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Clive Staples Lewis, one of the most well known, widely read, and often quoted Christian author of modern times. Here are nine things you should know about the author and apologist who has been called “The Apostle to the Skeptics.”
1. Lewis is best known for his seven children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia. But he wrote more than 60 books in various genres, including poetry, allegorical novel, popular theology, educational philosophy, science-fiction, children’s fairy tale, retold myth, literary criticism, correspondence, and autobiography.
2. Lewis’s close friend Owen Barfield, to whom he dedicated his book The Allegory of Love, was also his lawyer. Lewis asked Barfield to establish a charitable trust (“The Agape Fund”) with his book earnings. It’s estimated that 90 percent of Lewis’s income went to charity.
3. Lewis had a fondness for nicknames. He and his brother, Warnie, called each other “Smallpigiebotham” (SPB) and “Archpigiebotham” (APB), inspired by their childhood nurse’s threat to smack their “piggybottoms.” Even after Lewis’s death, Warnie still referred to him as “my beloved SPB.”
4. In 1917, Lewis left his studies to volunteer for the British Army. During the First World War, he was commissioned into the Third Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. Lewis arrived at the front line in the Somme Valley in France on his nineteenth birthday and experienced trench warfare. On 15 April 1918, he was wounded and two of his colleagues were killed by a British shell falling short of its target. Lewis suffered from depression and homesickness during his convalescence.
5. Lewis was raised in a church-going family in the Church of Ireland. He became an atheist at 15, though he later described his young self as being paradoxically “very angry with God for not existing.”
6. Lewis’s return to the Christian faith was influenced by the works of George MacDonald, arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton’sThe Everlasting Man.
7. Although Lewis considered himself to an entirely orthodox Anglican, his work has been extremely popular among evangelicals and Catholics. Billy Graham, who Lewis met in 1955, said he “found him to be not only intelligent and witty but also gentle and gracious.” And the late Pope John Paul II said Lewis’ The Four Loves was one of his favorite books.
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