Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born 113 years ago -- February 4, 1906 -- in Poland. His brief life (he was executed April 9, 1945 in Germany) has had a dramatic impact on my own life.
It was Dietrich, after all, who took a promising, budding theologian and made a Christian. As a young student, I discovered Dietrich's Cost of Discipleship almost by accident. I had a tradition of reading a book a day from the college library. My goal had been to read my way through the 220s (back when universities still used the Dewey System!), and Cost of Discipleship had been misplaced on the shelf. I grabbed it, checked it out, and read it voraciously in one sitting.
And God grabbed me.
Since that time, Dietrich has been one of my most consistent conversation friends. If there's a question I have about this or that thing in the world, I apply Dietrich's logic. Doubtless classmates at school grew tired of that logic. "What does confessing 'Jesus is Lord' do here?"
But that's been the question that burns in my heart and mind ever since. What difference does our confession that "Jesus is Lord" make in our lives?
This way of thinking, of course, left Bonhoeffer lonely. When a theologian writes (in Discipleship), "Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads to death" (Jeder Ruf Christi fährt in den Tod), we know that the door to life has become so narrow that only one can pass through at a time. Perhaps Bonhoeffer had already read the bleak observation of the 19th-century German underground theologian, G.J. Hamann: "In a world of fugitives / One who moves in the opposite direction / Will appear to run away." I can concur wholeheartedly than being a theologian of discipleship to Jesus will inevitably lead one against the crowd. The crowd, in my experience, is often headed in the opposite direction to Jesus' walk.
While others perceived Dietrich's self-assurance as arrogance (read the accounts of his student life and of his time in New York), I think it's been Dietrich's self-contempt and even depression in his own soul that has more resonated with what I think the task of the theologian to be. These periods often followed times when he had been particularly effective in preaching, teaching or leading others. However, as Dietrich's friend Bethge recalls, after his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, he no longer experienced these times, as he was gripped by a sense of duty. In spite of enforced inaction, he had finally achieved the concrete discipleship that he longed for.
That's because Dietrich had discovered finally that to be a theologian is to be convinced of "worldliness of Christianity" (Letters and Papers from Prison). What he meant by that phrase has been unclear to most -- and led all sorts of folks to claim Dietrich as their own. For me, underlying Dietrich's claim about "worldly Christianity" has been his conviction that the God who became human in Jesus Christ abolished the distinction between religion and the world.
Mark this clear: Religion is dispensable. God is not. As Dietrich wrote in his doctoral dissertation (Communio Sanctorum): "Not religion, but revelation, not a religious community, but the church: that is what the reality of Jesus Christ means".
Bonhoeffer witnessed the utter failure of that church in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. As a "religious institution" the church had utterly failed the Jews. That led Dietrich out of the church and into the world -- following Jesus.
Not much has changed in the world since. Witness American politics as recently on display as last night's State of the Union address. Only those who are willing to live fully in the world have a claim to follow Jesus. The God of religion whom we seek to call into the world on our behalf, has already entered the world in the form of a suffering God. "The God who lets us 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" (Letters and Papers again). The "worldliness" of Christianity is not our invention, but our calling. The ambiguity of this situation, he asserted, is precisely what the incarnation created for us. It is ambiguity that creates prophets and preachers.
Dietrich, after all, was one of the first to recognize and point out the disastrous consequences of Hitler's campaign against the Jews. In June 1933, when the church struggle erupted over the National Bishop (Ludwig Müller) and the opposing General Superintendents were suspended, Bonhoeffer urged an interdict upon all pastoral services (baptisms, weddings, funerals, etc.) as a way of confronting the German Christians with their unholy alliance with Hitler. But he couldn't arouse sympathy for this drastic action. In fact, Barth advised against this radical proposal, suggesting that "we should let the facts speak for themselves".
Flash forward to 2016. How often did I hear the same thing from American Christians who said I was being too reactionary? I believe now as I did then: Central Americans have become American "Jews". Our obligations to care for them should be evident in our refusal to participate in the expectations that America places on us as Christians. It was in April 1933 in Dietrich's article on "the Church and the Jewish Question" that he suggested that the only way to act responsibly would be by "throwing a spoke in the wheel" of the national government. After that, he was labeled an "enemy of the state" and his pacifism found him at odds with the German fervor for blood.
What did I learn from Dietrich? Prophets often die by their own words; theologians seldom do.
The problem of Christian ethics, Dietrich often said, is the same as the problem of Christian dogmatics -- the realization of the reality of revelation in and among God's creatures in the form of concreteness, immediacy, and obedience. In a world where good and evil are mixed, and where ambiguity conceals the divine commandment, the Christian's ethical responsibility is to follow and obey Christ, not merely to adhere to abstract ethical principles. There is no place for "self justification" by virtue of reliance on predetermined principles for action. "Principles are only tools in God's hands, soon to be thrown away as unserviceable" (Ethics).
This is why Americans resolve to follow Kant's ethics and not Dietrich's. American ethics is nothing if not principled. (God damn those principles! but they're principles all the same.) Because in those principles we Americans have learned to scapegoat and blame the atrocities of our society on anyone but ourselves. Either the church is incarnational or it is not the community of Jesus Christ. Writing from prison, Dietrich's view of the church's future was incarnational and ethical in a truly worldly sense. "The church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give always all its property to those in need ... The church must share in the most secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving" (Letters). Denominations are religious institutions at the edge of the world; the church is an incarnational presence in the midst of the world.
Would that sisters and brothers of The United Methodist Church might remember that later this month.
Dietrich had learned as a student from the early Barth: The act of God reveals the being of God. Practical theology deals with God's self-revelation and activity through the life and ministry of human beings. His second dissertation, Act and Being (1930), attempted to bring Barth's concept of "pure act" into the historical realm through Heidegger. But Bonhoeffer was never a disciple of Barth. True, Barth led him away from idealism into critical realism with regard to divine revelation, but God's life and activity through the human person Jesus Christ became for Bonhoeffer the praxis of revelation and thus the form of practical theology. His Christology was orthodox so far as Christ is the form of God in the world, but practical so far as the Christian is the form of Christ in the world. Because the former was merely a dogmatic assumption, his own theological praxis was concerned with action prior to reflection -- a statement that scandalized his students. And not a few of my own over the years.
Witness the fact that I went to Duke Divinity solely because of Fred Herzog. Fred, after all, had helped me to hear the Word in the world. And there was no going back.
In the end, I've learned from Dietrich that to be a theologian is to be a maverick. John Maverick was a 19th-century Texas rancher and legislator who received a herd of cattle in payment of a bill and turned them loose on the range without a brand. When one of them turned up without a brand, it was assumed to be one of Maverick's. Many have tried to brand Bonhoeffer as their own over the years. Quite probably the most obvious example to American audiences has been that disgusting "biography" of Eric Metaxas. But Dietrich still resists being labelled. Precisely to the extent that he followed Jesus all the way to the wood of a lynching tree.
It's hard for me to say in the final analysis whether Dietrich would agree with me all the time and in every way. But to be honest, I'm not worried about that. I'm more concerned what Jesus says and thinks.
It was Dietrich, after all, who took a promising, budding theologian and made a Christian. As a young student, I discovered Dietrich's Cost of Discipleship almost by accident. I had a tradition of reading a book a day from the college library. My goal had been to read my way through the 220s (back when universities still used the Dewey System!), and Cost of Discipleship had been misplaced on the shelf. I grabbed it, checked it out, and read it voraciously in one sitting.
And God grabbed me.
Since that time, Dietrich has been one of my most consistent conversation friends. If there's a question I have about this or that thing in the world, I apply Dietrich's logic. Doubtless classmates at school grew tired of that logic. "What does confessing 'Jesus is Lord' do here?"
But that's been the question that burns in my heart and mind ever since. What difference does our confession that "Jesus is Lord" make in our lives?
This way of thinking, of course, left Bonhoeffer lonely. When a theologian writes (in Discipleship), "Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads to death" (Jeder Ruf Christi fährt in den Tod), we know that the door to life has become so narrow that only one can pass through at a time. Perhaps Bonhoeffer had already read the bleak observation of the 19th-century German underground theologian, G.J. Hamann: "In a world of fugitives / One who moves in the opposite direction / Will appear to run away." I can concur wholeheartedly than being a theologian of discipleship to Jesus will inevitably lead one against the crowd. The crowd, in my experience, is often headed in the opposite direction to Jesus' walk.
While others perceived Dietrich's self-assurance as arrogance (read the accounts of his student life and of his time in New York), I think it's been Dietrich's self-contempt and even depression in his own soul that has more resonated with what I think the task of the theologian to be. These periods often followed times when he had been particularly effective in preaching, teaching or leading others. However, as Dietrich's friend Bethge recalls, after his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, he no longer experienced these times, as he was gripped by a sense of duty. In spite of enforced inaction, he had finally achieved the concrete discipleship that he longed for.
That's because Dietrich had discovered finally that to be a theologian is to be convinced of "worldliness of Christianity" (Letters and Papers from Prison). What he meant by that phrase has been unclear to most -- and led all sorts of folks to claim Dietrich as their own. For me, underlying Dietrich's claim about "worldly Christianity" has been his conviction that the God who became human in Jesus Christ abolished the distinction between religion and the world.
Mark this clear: Religion is dispensable. God is not. As Dietrich wrote in his doctoral dissertation (Communio Sanctorum): "Not religion, but revelation, not a religious community, but the church: that is what the reality of Jesus Christ means".
Bonhoeffer witnessed the utter failure of that church in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. As a "religious institution" the church had utterly failed the Jews. That led Dietrich out of the church and into the world -- following Jesus.
Not much has changed in the world since. Witness American politics as recently on display as last night's State of the Union address. Only those who are willing to live fully in the world have a claim to follow Jesus. The God of religion whom we seek to call into the world on our behalf, has already entered the world in the form of a suffering God. "The God who lets us 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" (Letters and Papers again). The "worldliness" of Christianity is not our invention, but our calling. The ambiguity of this situation, he asserted, is precisely what the incarnation created for us. It is ambiguity that creates prophets and preachers.
Dietrich, after all, was one of the first to recognize and point out the disastrous consequences of Hitler's campaign against the Jews. In June 1933, when the church struggle erupted over the National Bishop (Ludwig Müller) and the opposing General Superintendents were suspended, Bonhoeffer urged an interdict upon all pastoral services (baptisms, weddings, funerals, etc.) as a way of confronting the German Christians with their unholy alliance with Hitler. But he couldn't arouse sympathy for this drastic action. In fact, Barth advised against this radical proposal, suggesting that "we should let the facts speak for themselves".
Flash forward to 2016. How often did I hear the same thing from American Christians who said I was being too reactionary? I believe now as I did then: Central Americans have become American "Jews". Our obligations to care for them should be evident in our refusal to participate in the expectations that America places on us as Christians. It was in April 1933 in Dietrich's article on "the Church and the Jewish Question" that he suggested that the only way to act responsibly would be by "throwing a spoke in the wheel" of the national government. After that, he was labeled an "enemy of the state" and his pacifism found him at odds with the German fervor for blood.
What did I learn from Dietrich? Prophets often die by their own words; theologians seldom do.
The problem of Christian ethics, Dietrich often said, is the same as the problem of Christian dogmatics -- the realization of the reality of revelation in and among God's creatures in the form of concreteness, immediacy, and obedience. In a world where good and evil are mixed, and where ambiguity conceals the divine commandment, the Christian's ethical responsibility is to follow and obey Christ, not merely to adhere to abstract ethical principles. There is no place for "self justification" by virtue of reliance on predetermined principles for action. "Principles are only tools in God's hands, soon to be thrown away as unserviceable" (Ethics).
This is why Americans resolve to follow Kant's ethics and not Dietrich's. American ethics is nothing if not principled. (God damn those principles! but they're principles all the same.) Because in those principles we Americans have learned to scapegoat and blame the atrocities of our society on anyone but ourselves. Either the church is incarnational or it is not the community of Jesus Christ. Writing from prison, Dietrich's view of the church's future was incarnational and ethical in a truly worldly sense. "The church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give always all its property to those in need ... The church must share in the most secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving" (Letters). Denominations are religious institutions at the edge of the world; the church is an incarnational presence in the midst of the world.
Would that sisters and brothers of The United Methodist Church might remember that later this month.
Dietrich had learned as a student from the early Barth: The act of God reveals the being of God. Practical theology deals with God's self-revelation and activity through the life and ministry of human beings. His second dissertation, Act and Being (1930), attempted to bring Barth's concept of "pure act" into the historical realm through Heidegger. But Bonhoeffer was never a disciple of Barth. True, Barth led him away from idealism into critical realism with regard to divine revelation, but God's life and activity through the human person Jesus Christ became for Bonhoeffer the praxis of revelation and thus the form of practical theology. His Christology was orthodox so far as Christ is the form of God in the world, but practical so far as the Christian is the form of Christ in the world. Because the former was merely a dogmatic assumption, his own theological praxis was concerned with action prior to reflection -- a statement that scandalized his students. And not a few of my own over the years.
Witness the fact that I went to Duke Divinity solely because of Fred Herzog. Fred, after all, had helped me to hear the Word in the world. And there was no going back.
In the end, I've learned from Dietrich that to be a theologian is to be a maverick. John Maverick was a 19th-century Texas rancher and legislator who received a herd of cattle in payment of a bill and turned them loose on the range without a brand. When one of them turned up without a brand, it was assumed to be one of Maverick's. Many have tried to brand Bonhoeffer as their own over the years. Quite probably the most obvious example to American audiences has been that disgusting "biography" of Eric Metaxas. But Dietrich still resists being labelled. Precisely to the extent that he followed Jesus all the way to the wood of a lynching tree.
It's hard for me to say in the final analysis whether Dietrich would agree with me all the time and in every way. But to be honest, I'm not worried about that. I'm more concerned what Jesus says and thinks.