Theological Journal – February 14 What Dietrich Bonhoeffer Would Say to the North American Church (7)
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 ...