The Little Friar

On the 5th of September 1930, Dietrich Bonhoeffer left his native Germany for his first visit to the USA.  In his first sermon before his American audience, Bonhoeffer chose to speak on 1 John 4.16, the love of God.  Part of that address included these words -- as true today as in 1930: Under the cross of Christ we know that we all belong to one another, that we all are brethren and sisters in the same need and in the same hope, that we are bound together by the same destiny, human beings with all our suffering and all our joys, with sorrows and with desires, with disappointments and fulfillments -- and most important, human beings with our sin and guilt, with our faith and hope.  Before the cross of Christ and his inconceivable suffering all our external differences disappear, we are no longer rich or poor, wise or simple, good or bad; we are no longer Americans or Germans, we are one large congregation of brethren; we recognize that nobody is good before God, as Paul ...

I want to turn to Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity".  After having spent a good deal of my own academic career with Bonhoeffer, he's become an important theological mentor.  And this phrase, unfortunately, is often misunderstood.  Pardon this rather long post, placed beneath the fold, but it's been ruminating in my head for some time. Upon their publication in 1951-1952 Bonhoeffer's letters have stimulated a great deal of speculation, commentary, and head scratching -- particularly in reference to his notion about "religionless Christianity". Some were disturbed (then and now) by what seemed to be a liberal turn in Bonhoeffer's thinking.  It bothered people like Karl Barth that Bonhoeffer seemed to be saying things that sounded like Tillich and Bultmann . For many, it was hard to reconcile the "liberal" Bonhoeffer of the Letters and Papers from Prison with the "orthodox" Bonhoeffer of The Cost of Discipl...

On January 14, 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned a fascinating letter to his older brother Karl-Friedrich.  At the time of the letter Bonhoeffer was in the middle of the Confessing Church struggle, working against the Nazi takeover of the German churches.  As Nazi influence in the German churches increased Bonhoeffer's efforts grew more extreme, so much so that in his letter to his eldest brother Bonhoeffer is at pains to give an accounting of his actions. That Karl-Friedrich would have viewed Dietrich's actions in the church struggle as fanatical stem partly from the fact that Karl-Friedrich was a scientist and a skeptic.  Karl-Friedrich was a world class physicist who had done work on atomic physics with the likes of Einstein and Planck.  That Karl-Friedrich didn't share Dietrich's religious convictions contributed to the incomprehension between the brothers, one a scientist and the other a theologian. I find this letter to Karl-Friedrich fascinating for a cou...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken 70 years ago, yesterday, on Sunday, the 8th of April, 1945, just as he completed a worship service at Schoenberg prison.  He was hung sometime within the next 24 hours. Bonhoeffer was born in 1906.  As an outstanding student, he became lecturer in theology.  When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer championed the cause of the Confessing Church, the center of Christian resistance of Nazism.  He later organized and led the underground seminary at Finkenwalde for the Confessing Church.  His Life Together (for which I've recently written a study guide) is an account of the Christian community at the seminary that sounds so unlike typical German education, precisely because Bonhoeffer took the faith seriously.  In 1939, his brother-in-law introduced him to a group of educated Germans dedicated to overthrowing Hitler, and in an effort to avoid military service, secured him a place in the Abwehr (the German military intellig...

I've often been struck by the way Jesus' parables are preached in the Church.  Several years ago, I taught a preaching class.  Since it was Year A of the Lectionary (as it has been this year), I had students preaching from Matthew's parables.  It didn't take me long before I noticed they all  had the same, basic homiletical structure:  First, they'd narrate the basic plot (historical context and such).  Then, they'd proceed, with lots of pastoral "sensitivity", to talk about the parable's moral dimension in providing us a "balanced" ethical vision.  Preachers gotta be careful to keep away from any aweful "extreme" applications, after all.   So when Jesus says to sell everything, it’s not about  possessions , it's about the state of your  heart  -- and so on.  I also very vividly remember my response.   A congregation's first response, I told them, upon hearing a sermon on a parable of Jesus, ought to be dread .  These...

O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to save us.  Sometimes I'm reminded that I simply don't belong in our culture.   Everyone in the world wants the same thing:  Peace.  But you can't  get it unless, instead of aiming for peace, you aim for God.  Goodness is  something you can possess only by sharing it; as soon as you try to keep it for yourself, you don't have any.  That's Augustine's City of God  in a nutshell.   Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall  is one of the best places I know to read about sex.   And yet it's such an undervalued work among we Christians.  There, Bonhoeffer pits  humans as  imago dei , created in the image of God, bound to and guided by the Creator, against  sicit deus , humans acting as if they were God.   Sicit deus  ignores humankind's inherent limits, doesn't depend on God and acts out of its own resources.  For Bonhoeffer, sexuality expresse...

More ink is often spilt over Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany, to such an extent that his time in America is overlooked.  That's a tragedy.  After working as a pastor in Barcelona (where he even acquired what may have been an original Picasso!), Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to complete his postdoctoral dissertation,  Act and Being , which presented a kind of Barthian-Kantian-Hegelian approach to theological anthropology, grounded in the empirical reality of the church.  The ensuing American period is especially fascinating:  1930-31 was a hell of a time to be in New York City! The young Bonhoeffer was taking courses with Reinhold Niebuhr and John Baillie, going to hear sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, studying pragmatism and American literature (he "read almost the entire philosophical works of William James, which really captivated me, then Dewey, Perry, Russell, and finally also J. B. Watson and the behaviorist literature"), worshipping in black churches...

In his Letters and Papers from Prison , Bonhoeffer outlined a book he wanted to write.  Of course, that book never materialized, but there are tantalizing clues about what he was thinking.  In  his notes for what would have been Chapter Two, Bonhoeffer sketched out some thoughts about the nature of "authentic transcendence": Our relation to God is not a "religious" relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable -- that is not authentic transcendence -- but our relation to God is a new life in "existence for others," through participation in the being of Jesus.  The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation ... Authentic transcendence is existence for others. Authentic transcendence is the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation. That's a radical redefinition of transcendence , but I think he's absolutely correct. 

It's Mothers' Day weekend.  We typically, as we want to do in our culture, strip this holy-day of its genuine power to transform our lives.  We turn it into flowers and trinkets.  When it's supposed to be a time for peace-making:  Every victim of violence is some mother's child. So I'm tempted to write in that direction.  Instead, I want to offer an extended quote from Bonhoeffer's Life Together .  The quote itself isn't about mothering.  But I know of no better theological advice for mothers (and fathers and children).  So I offer it here.  What does this quote mean in the context of your mothering? " Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them.  As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others, too, can be saved only by Christ himself.  " This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my ...

It's Wednesday of Holy Week.  Tomorrow begins the Great Triduum -- Thursday, Friday, Saturday -- which brings Lent to its culmination.  In that time, there's a lot of talk about "the cross".  Jesus', particularly.  And ours, generally.   If there's one thing I've learnt as a Christian throughout the past forty years, it's this:  We tend to talk a lot about "the cross we've been 'called to bear'".  So what is that cross?  And what is its meaning? One of the ways -- perhaps the commonest way -- some folks talk about the cross we bear is that it has something to do with suffering.  In this view, "bearing the cross" means enduring some form of suffering, that we happen to be enduring -- a sickness, a sorrow or a person.   Thing is, I don't think the "cross" we've been called to bear has anything to do with those.  What do all those have in common?  They're all quite natural -- terrible, maybe, but natur...

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...

As a little boy there was a song I loved to sing.  I learned it from my great-grandmother.  She taught it to me and I sang it, and all my life it has replayed inside my mind. Into my heart, into my heart, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus; Come in today, come in to stay, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus. It was (or so I thought in those days) a song about conversion, about getting saved, being born again.  A kind of children's version of the Sinner's Prayer.  At church (especially Vacation Bible School) they were warning us to make sure we'd invited Jesus into our hearts.  This song only reinforced that message.  It  seemed a pretty grand thing, to have Jesus living in your heart.  And we always felt sorry for the poor non-Christians, those people who went about like walking ghost towns, their interior houses empty and abandoned.  Our most fervent wish was that they too might one day invite Jesus into their hearts.   It's a good thing, I supp...

1.  Some years ago, among the examinations of postulants for ordination, I interviewed a young lady, a seminary graduate (!) who confessed doubts about the resurrection of Jesus.  When I pressed her -- But what'll you preach on Easter Sunday? for starters -- she admitted that "resurrection" is a theological category that doesn't make sense.  It isn't "logical".  And I have to admit, on one level I agree.  Me issuing forth theological musings about the resurrection will have every Christian poet rolling over in their graves.  The mysterious demands open mouthed, gaping astonishment, then doxology, then  theo logic.  Forgive me, great poets, where I trespass here.  2.  The best apologetic for the resurrection is Law & Order  or Perry Mason .  The gospel authors invite gospel witnesses to take a public stand,  elicit their testimonies, cross-examine them, explain away any inconsistencies or contradictions, dismiss the cou...

I heard a sermon recently on a Gospel text about the "rich young ruler" in which the preacher did three things:  (1) He recounted the basic story.  I had my usual response here.  I get nervous each time I hear Jesus' words.  Because each time Jesus speaks, the earth shakes.  Here's a guy out to change things, including me .  Then, (2) proceeding with great warmth and sensitivity, the preacher told a balanced moral story that comforted my fears and warmed me from the inside out.  Until, finally, (3) we were assured Jesus wasn't teaching about possessions  but about the state of our hearts . This kind of preaching always irks me.  It leaves me cold.  My own psychological response to his sermon goes like this:  First, the parable would be told in all its starkness and simplicity, and I would feel my heart pounding in dread and anticipation at the challenge of Jesus' words.  Then, by the end of the sermon, all my fears would be all...

Quite a bit of my time recently has been spent in a variety of contexts counseling. And one of the most important aspects of counseling -- the process of Christian care -- is to stand with another and simply say, "I love you". It's hard to believe in the love of God unless human beings stand before us as signs, representatives, sacraments and ambassadors of God's love.  When we Christians say "I love you" to another, we're not simply expressing the warmth of an emotion.  We're also demonstrating God's mercy, grace and forgiveness.  It's hard to experience the mercy of God.  It's hard to feel forgiven.  And the church doesn't help much with this.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in  Life Together  in the church "we are not allowed to be sinners": For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner.  Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community.  We are not allowed to be sinners.  Many Christians...

Thus far, I've been articulating an understanding of the powers and principalities that hopes to reclaim living humanly as the heart of the NT vision.  What drives my theology is theodicy -- the problem of suffering, the problem of death.  Living Christianly, I've been trying to say, is nothing more than living humanly in the midst of death.  If Americans are dehumanized by the violence of babel and brutalized in the social chaos wrought by the demonic powers and principalities, how can a person live?   How can a person live?   How can a person live in the midst of death, in the face of demonic, dehumanizing forces? The answer, I think, comes in resistance to evil .  Resistance toward death is the only human way to live.  Resistance is what gives us hope.  The biblical response -- again, an answer which also has empirical authority -- is that hope is known only in the midst of coping with death.  It is a person's involvement in that crisis...