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It is a challenge to safeguard space where we can be exposed and unhindered to Bible engagement and prayer. But input determines output and it will shape our thoughts and then our speech.
Have you ever thought about what you might say if you had dementia? What would people hear coming from your mouth?
Maybe you never have, but I have, and yes, I pray that it never happens. But if it does, it is likely that I won’t even know what I’m saying. But does that mean that I shouldn’t care?
The Bible says: “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of”. Or in other words: “What comes out of a person’s mouth shows what he is made of in his innermost being”. This makes it pretty clear what I will be talking about in such an extreme case because this is what I talk about now.
Those things that I allow to dwell in my heart, which I speak about now in unguarded moments; the things that excite me, and also what make me pause and reflect, what I lament and at best pray about. All of these things come from my heart.
What I wish
I want a lot of good, beautiful and positive things to come out of my mouth. But perhaps what is most important is understanding what do people hear now when I talk? And what do they hear from you? Positive and pleasant things? Superficialities? Gossip? Ranting?
Do people recognize what we claim to be, that we want to be people of hope and peace, people of the Book?
How does what is supposed to come out get in?
These days I am reading the book by Jürgen Werth “Lieber Dietrich … Dein Jürgen – Über Leben am Abgrund – ein Briefwechsel mit Bonhoeffer” (Dear Dietrich … Yours, Jürgen – About life on the edge – an exchange of letters with Bonhoeffer). Jürgen Werth, a former European Evangelical Alliance board member, answers the letters which Bonhoeffer wrote while imprisoned.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes from Tegel prison on Easter Sunday 1943, how he was still repeating the Bible verses he had learned by heart during the day before going to sleep and reading hymns and Psalms at 6 o’clock in the morning.
He was perceived by his guards and fellow prisoners as an extraordinary person. Obviously, the input influenced the output.
Bible engagement
There was a time when Bible reading time for an average person was in a very different ratio to the input of news and other sorts of communication. The other day I talked with a Dutch man in his early fifties. He said that when he was a child the Bible was read at every mealtime in his family. When I asked how it was handled in his own family now, he answered: “after one meal a day, and actually we have just switched to a Bible reading plan”.
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.
by Richard Penaskovic
In a letter on July 21, 1944, to his longtime friend, Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while in prison, recalled a conversation he had some years ago with a young French pastor. They discussed what they both wanted out of life.
The pastor opined that he aspired to eventually become a saint. Bonhoeffer disagreed, stating that he would like to have faith by attempting to live a holy life. It’s possible that both men were on target with their desires, though we’ll never know that will be the case. (See “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” edited by Robert Cole, Maryknoll, New York Orbis Books, 1998).
Who exactly was Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Dietrich, born in 1906, one of seven siblings, came from a prominent aristocratic family in Breslau, Germany, that moved to Berlin. Dietrich studied theology at Tübingen University and then at Berlin University where he received the doctoral degree in theology with a dissertation on “The Communion of Saints.” He was an outstanding student who played the piano brilliantly and was an excellent tennis player, to boot.
In 1928, Bonhoeffer took a position as a curate in a Lutheran church in Barcelona where he enjoyed taking care of the spiritual needs of blue-collar workers. They loved the talks he gave because they were thoughtful and punctured with biblical verses. For example, he once stated that Christ had been left out of a person’s life, if that person only gave to Christ a tiny part of his/her spiritual life. Bonhoeffer told his audience that one needs to give one’s life entirely to Christ, if they wanted to really understand their spiritual life.
In 1930, Bonhoeffer decided to go to Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan as a Sloan Fellow where he gained the respect of outstanding theological faculty like Paul Lehmann, with whom he developed a close friendship. After the year was up, Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin University as a lecturer in theology, while working on his second doctorate.
Two days after Hitler rose to power as German Chancellor in 1933, Bonhoeffer railed against Hitler and the Nazi party on the radio, when suddenly he was cut off in the middle of his remarks. That same year, inspired by Pastor Martin Niemoeller, Bonhoeffer again spoke out against Nazi rule. Many members of the Lutheran Church, including bishops and pastors supported Hitler and some even wore brown Nazi shirts, to the dismay of Bonhoeffer and Pastor Niemoeller who helped organize the “Confessing Church” that opposed the Nazis.
Bonhoeffer had to leave Berlin in 1938, and in 1941, the Nazi government forbade him to write. He then became part of an anti-resistance movement, along with six military officers who tried to overthrow the Nazi government by force. In April 1943, Bonhoeffer became a prisoner at the Tegel Prison and then at Flossenbürg, a small village in the Oberpfalz region of Bavaria.
Flossenbürg had a barracks that held 1,000 prisoners, but was built to hold 250 prisoners. Both Jews and special enemies of the state were housed in Flossenbürg. Special enemies like Bonhoeffer received “special treatment’ such as interrogation, torture and execution. Bonhoeffer was hanged in this prison — witnessed by Dr. H. Fischer who said that Bonhoeffer knelt on the floor and prayed before he was hanged.
What made Bonhoeffer a special person?
In the midst of Nazi resistance, this Christian martyr offered three models for the season of waiting…
On November 21, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter from Tegel Prison. “A prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent,” he said. “One waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”
The comparison between Advent and a prison cell may seem strange. It evokes powerlessness, perhaps even hopelessness. However, it is this particular type of waiting that Bonhoeffer believes best prepares us for Christ’s coming.
Although a Nazi prison gave him this metaphor, the sermons he wrote during his time of active ministry also present a similar vision of Advent waiting. In these sermons, Bonhoeffer sees the season before Christmas as a sharpened liturgical expression of the tension that informs our entire lives as Christians. Celebrating it prepares us to live as people who have made a radical break with the present world of sin and death and are also preparing for the redeemed future that God has already, in one sense, accomplished. Through Advent, we learn how to live in these two concurrent realities: We have already been delivered, and yet our deliverance is still to come.
Bonhoeffer’s Christmas and Advent sermons highlight three figures who exemplify life amid this tension and, by their example, might guide us through this season. Learning how to wait from these figures will not be warm and cozy but deep, dangerous, and shot through with sorrow and pain.
The first figure is Moses. This is not the triumphant Moses leading the people of Israel through a miraculously parted Red Sea or the lawgiver Moses carrying the stone tablets down the mountainside. Rather, the Advent Moses is the one found in Deuteronomy 32:48–52. Moses knows that God’s promise will be fulfilled, but he also knows that the promise will not be fulfilled in his lifetime. Instead, he will die on Mount Nebo, gazing across the river into the land. This Moses seems at first like the very antithesis of Advent, since he is the one for whom the promise is never fulfilled.
However, Bonhoeffer finds in Moses’ experience an expression of our own Advent waiting. Just like Moses, we know that the promise has been fulfilled—Jesus has come—but not yet completely. Through Moses’ punishment—his death before entering the Promised Land—we are also reminded that Advent is the season for death, judgment, and repentance. In a reversal of the world’s order, we pass from death into birth and new life. This awareness of our own death and judgment is crucial for us to understand that we only enter the Promised Land due to God’s victory, not our own. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “God is with us and we are no longer homeless. A piece of the eternal home is grafted onto to us.”
The second figure is Joseph
The Cost of His Discipleship
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45)
On July 20, 1944, the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler failed. The very next day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to Eberhard Bethge, his former student and future biographer. Bonhoeffer had been in prison since April 5, 1943. In the wake of the failure of the Valkyrie plot, Hitler led a crackdown on the resistance movement. Hundreds were immediately arrested; many in the movement already held in prison were moved to higher security prisons. Many were put on expedited paths to their execution. Bonhoeffer was one of them.
But on July 21, 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote about a conversation he had in America in 1930. He was in the United States to learn of theological developments. He was to spend the year at the patently theological liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He found it wanting. “No theology here,” he reported back to Germany. But he did find dear friends, and he found adventure on a road trip from New York to Mexico City.
Somewhere along the way, as they camped in pup tents and sat around a fire, they asked each other what they wanted to do with their lives. One of them, a Frenchman named Lasserre, said he wanted to be a saint. Bonhoeffer picks up the story from there in his letter to Bethge the day after the failed plot:
At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. . . . I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous or an unrighteous man, a sick man or a healthy man. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.
As we reflect on that list in that last sentence, there’s only one word we really like, “successes.” We tend to avoid the other things mentioned by Bonhoeffer, but those things are part of life, of “this-worldliness.” Bonhoeffer then adds that by living life in this way, “We throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of the God-man in the world — watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith.”
Bonhoeffer learned this in a very short time in a very short life. He died in his thirty-ninth year. While most people are only beginning to make their mark and offer their mature thought as they turn forty, Bonhoeffer never made it to that milestone.
Young Professor in Berlin
He was born into an academic family. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a renowned psychiatrist at the University of Berlin. One of his brothers, a chemist, would go on to discover the spin isomers of hydrogen. The family home had a large library, a conservatory, and walls lined with very impressive looking oil portraits of his predecessors. Dietrich excelled as a student. He took his first doctorate as he turned twenty-one and a second doctorate three years later. He served in the academy, initially. But he loved the church.
As a young professor at the University of Berlin, he noticed an appeal for a teacher of a confirmation class at a Lutheran church in Berlin, on the other side of the tracks from where the Bonhoeffer family home stood. These were rough kids, who had already chewed through a few prospective teachers. The pastor was hoping to get an idealistic seminary student who didn’t have the better sense to not do this. Instead, the pastor and this band of prepubescent ruffians got a theology professor in wire-rimmed glasses and tailored suits.
Within minutes, Bonhoeffer had won them over. When the day came for their confirmation — a day the pastor was almost sure would never come — Bonhoeffer took them all to his tailor and got them all suits. He was the kind of professor who would just as soon pull out a “football” and hit the soccer pitch with his students as he lectured to them. During the time he spent in America, he got an armload of 78s of blues and negro spirituals. After the soccer games, he would spin records with his students and talk theology. For Bonhoeffer, education was discipleship.
Life Together
When the German Lutheran Church endorsed the Nazi party and became the Reich Kirche, Bonhoeffer quickly became a leader among the Confessing Church, despite his very young age. He lost his license to teach at the University of Berlin, and his books were placed on the banned book list. He was appointed the director of one of the five seminaries for the Confessing Church. At this seminary in Finkenwalde, he taught his students the Bible and theology, and he also taught them how to pray. Bonhoeffer saw these three things — biblical studies, theology, and prayer — as the essential elements of the pastoral office.
Eberhard Bethge, one of his students at Finkenwalde, exemplifies what he was taught by Bonhoeffer. Bethge wrote, “Because I am a preacher of the word, I cannot expound Scripture unless I let it speak to me every day. I will misuse the word in my office if I do not keep meditating on it in prayer.”
The Gestapo found out about the seminary at Finkenwalde and shut it down. Bonheffer spent the next year in his parents’ home. He wrote Life Together, memorializing what he practiced and what he had learned at Finkenwaldeab, and he visited his students and kept them on task with their studies and ministry.
Letters from Prison
The next years of Bonhoeffer’s life, 1940–1943, are debated. He joined the Abwehr at the urging of his brother-in-law. But it does not appear that he is actually much of a spy at all. He used his position to travel freely around the country — a way to keep up with his students and keep up with the churches they were pastoring. Then comes the contested episode of his life as he became part of a group seeking to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s role was not one of providing strategy — that was supplied by the other highly placed military and intelligence agency officials.
Bonhoeffer appears to be the pastor in the room, the one who gives the blessing on the undertaking they were about to embark on. Bonhoeffer wrestled with it, wondering if what they were doing was right and not at all presuming it was right and righteous. It was war, and these Germans were convinced that Hitler was an enemy to the German state and the German people, as well as to the other nations plunged into war. Whatever Bonhoeffer’s contribution was to this group, he did not make it presumptively or rashly.
The plots, like the Valkyrie plot, all failed. On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and sent to Tegel Prison. For the next two years, he would live in a 6’ x 9’ prison cell. He spoke of missing listening to birds. He missed seeing colors. Early in his time at Tegel, he despaired for his life. It was also in Tegel that Bonhoeffer wrote about living a “this-worldly” life. It was at Tegel that he spoke of learning to have faith in life’s failures, difficulties, and perplexities. At Tegel, he wrote poetry. He wrote a novel. He wrote sermons for weddings and baptisms — they were smuggled out and read by others at these occasions. Bonhoeffer’s time at Tegel yielded his classic text Letters and Papers from Prison.
In one of those letters, on June 27, 1944, he wrote, “This world must not be prematurely written off.” He was in a Nazi prison cell while Hitler was unleashing madness upon the world, and Bonhoeffer wrote about being a Christian in the world, in the time and place in which God had put him.
Cost of Discipleship
In 1936, Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge. It would be later published in English as The Cost of Discipleship. In it he declares, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
In Christ, we are dead. The old self and the old way is dead. And, in Christ, we are alive. After the Valkyrie plot, Bonhoeffer could write simply, “Jesus is alive. I have hope.”
For the rest of the article…
MARCH 27, 2017
Bonhoeffer, a film of a one-man play, was screened Saturday in the sanctuary at Bolton Hill’s Memorial Episcopal Church, in Baltimore, MD.
The film starred the late actor Peter Krummeck, who also produced the play. He was born in London in 1947, and emigrated to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1969. He died there in 2013. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was one of the patrons of Krummeck’s Cape Town-based African Community Theatre Service.
Bonhoeffer, the play, originally debuted in Washington, D.C. in the early 2000s. It also was performed in Canada, South Africa and at Baltimore’s Theater Project. It was televised in Canada.
Backstory on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45). He was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and author, who opposed the Nazi regime. He was active in the resistance movement and in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler, the German dictator. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April, 1943, and jailed at Tegel prison. He was subsequently hanged by the Nazis — at Flossenburg — just weeks before WWII ended.
The program was hosted by The Rev. Grey Maggiano of Memorial Episcopal. After the presentation of the film, John Kiess, professor of the Theology Department at Loyola College, The Rev. Dr. C. Anthony Hunt of United Methodist Church, Senior Pastor, and Judith Krummeck of classical radio station WBJC, participated in a panel discussion.
They each shared their views on Bonhoeffer. A spirited Q&A from the audience followed.
In her remarks, Krummeck, a sister of Peter Krummeck, talked about the background of her brother’s work, especially in the area of the role of theater, and the church, too, in “promoting social justice and reconciliation.” She has been the popular “evening drive time host” for WBJC, since 1998. Krummeck is a native of South Africa. She is also an actress, educator and author. Her latest book, Beyond the Baobab, is a collection of essays about her immigrant experience.
I must add that I thought Peter Krummeck’s portrayal of Bonhoeffer in the 45-minute edited film version of the play was simply riveting. He captured the essence of the doomed, but courageous cleric.
New Film Follows Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Final Chapter
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Gary Blount, psychiatrist-turned-producer, has created a remarkable new film about the last days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a Nazi concentration camp, told through the eyes of a British broadcast team.
Question: You have just produced a film about influential theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer after years of studying his work. What has kept you so interested in Bonhoeffer?
Answer: Since first hearing the story more than 50 years ago, I’ve never hit a roadblock or detour. (That is, once I got used to my Christian hero being a chain smoker.)
As with all of my heroes, I’ve constantly tried in one way or another to relate to Bonhoeffer, and I suppose this has gotten a bit easier as I’ve become acquainted with a few members of his family in Germany and England.
From the beginning, I’ve loved his hard-core faith and courage, but I confess I’ve also been increasingly wowed by his good taste: Bechstein piano, Audi (okay DKW), and pet Saint Bernard. And it was easy to relate to his need to move back in with his parents and his willingness to accept an adult allowance. Dare I mention his eagerness to marry a girl half his age who was possibly smarter than he was and a lot better looking?
You work as a psychiatrist in Minnesota. Do you have a particular interest in theology? Does your expertise in psychiatry give you particular insights into Bonhoeffer and his still-discussed ideas?
It seems to me there is a kinship between theology and psychiatry. Many people seem convinced that neither one requires a degree or even specialized study.
Seriously, I love theological insights and, in fact, really look forward to hearing them occasionally from the pulpit.
You know, Bonhoeffer said some harsh things about mental health treatment, but some of his actions in prison reveal a more open stance. For instance, recently I read that when he would learn from a fellow inmate in Tegel that a family member might benefit from a psychiatric consultation either to address a condition or simply mitigate what otherwise might seem to be a hopeless forensic situation, Bonhoeffer would find a way to refer the person to his father, the recently retired psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer. I would put that in the practical theology column.
I recall a legendary professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota who would tell his residents and students: “With this new patient, I don’t care who does the physical exam; I’ll do the history.” That’s what I want to continue doing — focus on the dynamic story.
What is your film Come Before Winter about?
Our story is about the final chapter in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and what must have been the aching for deliverance by the Allies, who were rapidly closing in. We felt our time frame might extract something of the essence of his life and the perspective which he seemed to seek — “the view from below.” This view now includes more uncertainty, wartime cruelty, and vengeance.
Bonhoeffer had long been an outspoken foe of Hitler, and we chose to tell the story with the help of a couple of other anti-Nazis: seriously broken vessels Sefton Delmer and Otto John. The latter has been called “the living link” between Bonhoeffer’s last days and the storyteller in England.
O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray and gather my thoughts to you, I cannot do it alone.
In me it is dark, but with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not desert me;
My courage fails me, but with you there is help;
I am restless, but with you there is peace;
in me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways, but you know the way for me.
Father in Heaven praise and thanks be to you for the night
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A prayer written in Tegel prison, Berlin
From the beginning, then, I was associated with Bonhoeffer’s training of ministers for the Confessing church. A close friendship resulted, and I accompanied him wherever he lived and worked. In 1940 I followed him him to Berlin, where I often stayed at his parents’ house, and in 1943 I married Renate Schleicher, the daughter of Bonhoeffer’s sister Ursula, who lived next door. Finally, he and I conducted an illegal correspondence that began after Bonhoeffer had survived the first dangerous series of interrogations in Tegel military prison. Eventually, this correspondence led to worldwide discussion. I also saw him several times in Tegel prison, until our contact was finally broken off as a result of my own arrest in October 1944. The Gestapo explored my relation with the Schleicher family, but neglected to investigate my ties to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Thus, I survived!
~ Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Preface to the First English Edition), xv.
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