Theological Journal – September 8 Footprints, Buttprints, and Bonhoeffer

 “Footprints in the Sand” speaks of God carrying us when our strength gives out in following him.

“Buttprints in the Sand” parodies this reliance on God carrying us and calls on us to walk and do what God wants lest he tire of our faux dependence on him and drop us on our backsides.

Bonhoeffer would, I think, call both “religious” responses that people in our time can no longer sense a need for or experience. He would say we must follow God “nonreligiously,” that is,

“The return to that (Footprints or Buttprints way of life )is only a counsel of despair, a sacrifice made only at the cost of intellectual integrity. It’s a dream, to the tune of “Oh, if only I knew the road back, the long road to childhood’s land!” There is no such way—at least not by willfully throwing away one’s inner integrity, but only in the sense of Matt. 18:3, that is, through repentance, through ultimate honesty! And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world—“etsi deus non daretur” (“as if God did not exist”) And this is precisely what we do recognize—before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. Thus our coming of age leads us to a truer recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage their lives without God. The same God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34!). The same God who makes us to live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God, and with God, we live without God. God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us. (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works) (pp. 464-465). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition)

Or, to put it another way, Christian faith in a nonreligious world is best seen as one set of footprints in the sand where the believer (or better, the church) carries God, the crucified God, making him known to the world in the only way the true and living God is with us to help us, as the one killed in his weakness and powerlessness on the cross.

So, I suggest we have neither a single set of divine prints in the sand, nor buttprints where God has tired of carrying us and dropped us so we will walk, but a single set of footprints of a individual or a church carrying the crucified One to and through his world.