Marginal Christianity

From one of Bonhoeffer’s underground seminary students: “Twice [Bonhoeffer] quoted to them the words: ‘One man asks: What is to come? The other: What is right? And that,’ ” said Bonhoeffer, “ ‘is the difference between the free man and the slave.’ ” What do you think Bonhoeffer means? What does it mean for you?

Were you there when they suffocated George? We all were. Some of us were the officers involved in subduing and mercilessly taking his life. Some of us were other cops on the scene who did nothing to stop this atrocity. Yet others of us were among the onlookers, fretting and repulsed or uncomprehending what they were seeing or silently approving or at least accepting the necessity of this (ab)use of state authority. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once made this famous comment about the church’s response to social and political evil: “In the first place it can ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e., it can throw the state back on its responsibilities. Secondly, it can aid the victims of state action. The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a s...

Stupidity a lá Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a keen observer of human beings and their history. His profound and acute observations about his German contemporaries who fell prey to Hitler and the Nazi phenomenon are striking in their own right. They appear downright prescient as America faces what can only be judged a cognate phenomenon under the Presidency of Donald Trump. Bonhoeffer describes what he calls “Stupidity” in an essay “On Stupidity” in his  Letters and Papers from Prison . The essay describes this kind of person, probes the nature of their “stupidity,” and observes appropriate responses to them (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison: DBW 8 (Kindle Location 1475-1504). Augsburg Fortress. Kindle Edition). Description of “Stupid” People These people are not malicious or evil. They cannot be made or convinced to forswear their stupidity. Their prejudgments are immovable overruling or dismissing contrary evidence. Stupid people ...

Monday Bonhoeffer scholar Jeff Pugh offered five reasons to turn to Bonhoeffer in this crisis-ridden time in a webinar. Drawing from Bonhoeffer’s reflection in Letters and Papers “After Ten Years” Pugh derives the following benefits Bonhoeffer brings to a such a time: 1.        A needed vision of what we should be standing in this historical moment The view “from below,” the perspective of the suffering is where God is found, where God’s people must stand if they are to see and hear clearly what God is doing where he is present. This entails vigorous, uncompromising truth-telling : suffering happens, we need to repent of white supremacy, how the view from top looks, that is, how is power marshalled and deployed against people, a stripping away illusions. 2.        failing to see others in their suffering leads to contempt for others ; but God does not hold us in contempt, however deserving of it we may be,...

Those Who Pray the Psalms In this section Bonhoeffer connects Jesus to the Psalms through David, who is credited with most of the psalms in the Psalter (73). He is a type of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer works out this typological connection this way: -David’s life prefigures Christ’s (Acts 2:30ff). -“David was a witness to Christ in his kingly office, in his life, and in his words.” (Heb. 2:12; 10:5; Heb.3:7) “The same words that David spoke, therefore, the future Messiah spoke in him. Christ prayed along with the prayers of David or, more accurately, it is none other than Christ who prayed them in Christ’s own forerunner, David.” (3464-3472) -David’s prayers, then, are not simply personal, but also those of the Christ who indwelt him. “David, remains himself; but Christ dwells in him and with him.” (3476) -though David did not write every psalm in the psalter, yet the psalter as a whole is connected to him. Since Christ indwells David, the whole psalter becomes his words b...

We’ll be using Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Prayerbook of the Bible (Kindle edition) on the Psalms in this Monday spot replacing Moltmann Mondays for a while. Bonhoeffer has a distinctive take on the Psalms and their role in Christian prayer so I hope you will find the material here provocative and helpful. We often hear that prayer is simply talking to God. Whatever is on our hearts, we should just let him know. Bonhoeffer disagrees. “Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one’s heart. It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that one needs Jesus Christ.” (3405-3407) On our own, we have no true prayer. However, “If Christ takes us along in the prayer which Christ prays, if we are allowed to pray this prayer with Christ, on whose way to God we too are led and by whom we are taught to pray, then we are freed from the torment of being without prayer . . . that is what Jesus Chris...

From Letters and Papers from Prison (Kindle edition) “The Christian is not a homo religiosus but simply a human being, in the same way that Jesus was a human being—in contrast, perhaps, to John the Baptist. I do not mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the bustling, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness that shows discipline and includes the ever-present knowledge of death and resurrection.” 6211-6219 Bonhoeffer is famous (or infamous) for his calls for a secular or non-religious Christianity. He makes it clear in this passage that he is not recommending that the church simply join in and go with the flow of wherever the prevailing cultural winds take us (though he has been [mis]interpreted to mean that). He characterizes that way of living as: -“enlightened” -“bustling” -“comfortable” -“lascivious” Or what we might call a middle-class or above way of life give to business, busy-ness, consumerism, and pleasure....

From Letters and Papers from Prison (Kindle edition) “What is so liberating about Good Friday and Easter is the fact that our thoughts are pulled far beyond our personal circumstances to the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and indeed everything that happens, and this gives us great hope.” (Kindle location 511) While it is possible to individualize Good Friday (“Were you there when they crucified my Lord”) and Easter, and has often been done in Western Christianity, Bonhoeffer sees biblically what is truly at stake at the cross and in the resurrection. Unless we see the cosmic scope of what happened there we miss the full significance and glory of Easter weekend. It all gets reduced down to my sins and my forgiveness, which is good news nut not Good News. Unless we see the whole cosmos gone wrong loaded on Jesus’ shoulders on the cross and raised with him as new creation we miss what Bonhoeffer here calls the “great hope” which is rightfully ours.  

From Letters and Papers from Prison (Kindle edition) “Being able to face dying doesn’t yet mean we can face death. It’s possible for a human being to manage dying, but overcoming death means resurrection. It is not through the ars moriendi but through Christ’s resurrection that a new and cleansing wind can blow through our present world . . . If a few people really believed this and were guided by it in their earthly actions, a great deal would change. To live in the light of the resurrection—that is what Easter means.” (Kindle loc.4352) The rest of the week will be devoted to explore some of Bonhoeffer’s observations about Easter and resurrection in his Letters and Papers from Prison . Coming to terms with dying is a noble human venture, no doubt. It certainly beats the denial of death so rampant in our culture. Yet that is merely a capitulation to the powers of the old age that hold the world in their deathly grip. As Bonhoeffer notes it is “overcoming death” that brings...

“The knowledge of Easter does not relax but maximizes the need to follow its antecedents in their narrative order. Then the grave of Jesus becomes a boundary preventing forward movement until one has first looked back, without the light of Easter, at the cross and seen its cataclysmic extinguishing of every light. In fact, there is no boundary, only a no man’s land. With no remarkable tomorrow on the horizon to give that sabbath special identity and form as an interruption between old and new, the interment of Jesus is shapeless and anti-climactic. It is simply the day after terminal rupture . This is the end of a man, a mission and a message; the end of the God of whom the message spoke, from whom the mission came, and to whom the man was Son; and the end of the world for all whose future hung with the coming of the Father’s kingdom.   (Alan E. Lewis, “The Burial of God: Rupture and Resumption as the Story of Salvation,”  Scottish Journal of Theology , Vol. 40, No. 3 (1...

The 75 th Anniversary of the Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer We depart from our pattern of looking at Mark’s account of the events of each day of Holy Week to reflect on the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German pastor and theologian and martyr to the Nazis for his resistance activities against the Reich. He was hanged at the concentration camp at Flossenburg on this day 75 years ago. As we celebrate Maundy Thursday we remember the one who died for us on the Friday of Holy Week. Many will not be able to observe the Lord’s Supper because of COVID-19 tomorrow but we will not forget that on this night Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, displaying the servanthood he would enact even more fully the next day dying on the cross. And he left this example of servanthood for us, his people to enact in our own lives and our own time and place. And one of his most famous quotations reflects deeply on Jesus’ call on our lives. “The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-sufferin...

8.        Eighthly, I believe Bonhoeffer would tell us to pay close attention to the sound of silence (Simon and Garfunkel) . He spoke of the need for the church to maintain what he called the “arcane discipline” in their life amid the world. He writes, “That means an “arcane discipline” must be reestablished, through which the mysteries of the Christian faith are sheltered against profanation” ( DBWE 8 :10562-10564). What in the world is an “arcane discipline”? In the ancient church this was the practice of shielding the worship of the church and the mysteries of faith that sustained and nurtured it from the world which lacked the necessary formation to understand them and would inevitably distort it.  W hat are these mysteries that need such protection? DB probably had in mind things like the trinity, incarnation, Eucharist, things sure to be misunderstood by a world not properly initiated into them. It also included time for the churc...

7.        “It’s the Church, Stupid!”   This is DB’s seventh word to the church in the US. Here we tend to treat the church as an optional extra to Christian living. A good thing if it helps; otherwise, dispensable. DB, on the other hand, came to see that “everything depended on the renewal of the church and the pastoral station” (personal letter, 1936, cited in Nation and Hauerwas, 2018). The “church for others” as he called it in Letters and Papers. We like to “go to the garden” alone to commune with God. As we have seen, we think people are pretty much like billiard balls. Complete and self-sufficient in themselves, they roll around the billiard table bumping into other balls and the rails. But such contacts are external and though they change the ball's direction they do not change what it is. Our relationship with God, on this view is personal, by which we mean private. Inaccessible to others unless we chose to disclose something of it to ...

6.        “Behold, the human being!” (John 19:5): Becoming Human for the first time. DB’s sixth word to the North American church. His understanding of ethics is neither informational (Socratic), or formational (Aristotelian), but conformational (Christological). He does not believe that if we know the good we will do it. Nor that if we do the good enough it will become a habit. For him, not surprisingly, it all depends on Jesus Christ. DB’s Ethics as Conformation “Only the person who combines simplicity with wisdom can endure,” writes Bonhoeffer ( DBWE 6 :2707). Only this person can offer a free act of responsibility casting themselves on the mercy and judgment of God.  But can such simplicity and wisdom be found? Yes, answers Bonhoeffer. “Only because there is one place where God and the reality of the world are reconciled with each other, at which God and humanity have become one, is it possible there and there alone to fix...

5.        Fifthly , DB would point us to the “theology of the cross” and say “You Gotta Look Good on Wood.” Two contrasts clarify what he means here. DB followed the reformer Martin Luther is stressing the “theology of the cross” over against the “theology of glory.” The difference is nicely captured here: “A theology of glory … operates on the assumption that what we need is optimistic encouragement, some flattery, some positive thinking, some support to build our self-esteem. Theologically speaking it operates on the assumption that we are not seriously addicted to sin, and that our improvement is both necessary and possible. We need a little boost in our desire to do good works…. But the hallmark of a theology of glory is that it will always consider grace as something of a supplement to whatever is left of human will and power. “A theology of the cross defines life in terms of giving rather than taking, self-sacrifice rather than self-pro...