Bonhoeffer treasured Cervantes' Don Quixote. He believed the beleaguered idealist was an apt metaphor for the Confessing Church. He reasoned that the church needed "new" weapons, a "new" theology, "new" strategies to confront the rise of National Socialism. The established state church reflected an old falsehood, a church which had burned its witness at the stake as the Nazis had burned books in the Bebel Platz in Berlin. Now, new "weapons of the Spirit" were necessary.
Bonhoeffer found all that newness with Christ the Center, focused in Discipleship, expressed in Ethics and attentive particularly in Spiritual Care through Life Together. He was, in a very new way, the Confessing Church's "renaissance man". To quote Bonhoeffer: "Here is the immortal figure of Don Quixote ... who takes a barber's dish for a helmet and a miserable hack for a charger"; [in Germany we have] "an old world venturing to take up arms against a new one or a world of the past hazarding an attack against the superior forces of the commonplaces and the mean".
What has struck me about Bonhoeffer over the years is his relentless call for the Church to see how much Jesus matters.
There's a good deal of generic spirituality that pervades in America. In lots of ways, American Christianity reminds me of German Christianity. Witness the recent moves in Arizona to couch discrimination on religious grounds. Or witness Alabama's 15 minute legally-sanctioned prayer time in schools. Both remind me so much of German Christianity under Hitler.
So I oppose them. I run off, tilting at yet another windmill. Like Bonhoeffer before me, I am become Don Quixote.
The Church, the Body of Christ in the world, Bonhoeffer insisted in his doctoral dissertation, must reclaim the radical, transforming message of Christ and discover new ways to give witness. Otherwise, we are only lifting an old battered book, a rusty sword, and a tarnished cross: Captive to anemic theology, culturally-captive church, and the pablum of personal I-centered witness.
Like Don Quixote, I've been given Gospel dreams for which I fight.