Marginal Christianity

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,...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflection “After Ten Years,” written for Hans von Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer’s close friend and confidant, and Major General Hans Oster, a German military officer involved in the resistance against the Nazi regime, reports on what happens to human decency, courage, and wisdom when a political culture disintegrates. Of even more importance, for Bonhoeffer, Bethge, and the church, the ten years he reflects on are years in which the whole edifice of Christendom, the church-state symbiosis regnant in the West for more than a thousand years, came crashing down around their feet. Bonhoeffer’s reflections, then also attest to a failed church culture that assimilated so fully with the large culture that Bonhoeffer indicted it in these damning words: “Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world” ...