The Little Friar

I spent the better part of my academic career studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- his theology in its context, with the hopes of articulating a peace-making theology for the twenty-first century.  I never intended that study to become pastorally relevant in our own historical context.  But it's proven to be. Today I made the claim that modern America looks nearly identical to Weimar Germany. For those who don't understand the comparison, first some background. The Weimar Republic was the short-lived experiment in German democracy between the great wars of the 20th century.  It emerged from Germany's loss in World War I, and was brought to a crashing end by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.  The Weimar period was marked by political, economic, and social instability, and intense cultural creativity as well as decadence.  Weimar was time in which the center didn't hold, and extremism took over the imaginations of many Germans, especially the young. ...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on this day in 1905.  I have spent nearly all of my adult life reading and learning with Dietrich, so I thought it a good exercise -- in the midst of all the hullabaloo in American politics these days -- to share a few of the quotes of things he's said that have shaped how and why I think the way I do about that politics. The first is from a sermon Dietrich preached while working in London as a youth pastor.  It was 1934, two years after Nazism had risen to positions of prestige and power in Germany. What is the meaning of weakness in this world?  We all know that Christianity has been blamed ever since its early days for its message to the weak.   Christianity is a religion of slaves, of people with inferiority complexes; it owes its success only to the masses of miserable people whose weakness and misery Christianity has glorified.  It was the attitude towards the problem of weakness in the world, which made everybody t...

The prophetic witness of Christians in the face of the State is muted, I think, by a serious misreading of Romans 13.  Particularly 13.1:  "Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God".  I want to explore what it means to read Romans 13 in light of the rest of Scripture, in order to help us understand that we don't necessarily have to accept every line that proceeds out of a particular politician's mouth or every policy proposed by any certain politically reigning group. A caveat lector is probably in order here, though:  What you're about to read is the way I read Romans 13, which is informed by the way folks like Bonhoeffer and Barth read Romans 13 and resisted the Nazi German agenda.  It's the foundation of why I resist Donald Trump (and, before him, Obama and lots of other American politicians).  To let the cat out of the bag early:  ...

One of those remaining questions in Bonhoefferian scholarship is what Bonhoeffer meant in his Letters and Papers from Prison , toward the end of his life, when he wrote that Barth was unable to address the concerns of modern people.  Theologians like Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and even Bonhoeffer concerned themselves with the question of how we can proclaim the gospel in an age that cares less and less about God, the church, or theology.  They searched in vain for an answer to this in Barth's works -- or, rather, they were disappointed with the answers they found .  Some years later, Barth had written a letter to Bethge, after the publication of the latter's magisterial biography of Bonhoeffer, asking Bethge what Bethge thought Bonhoeffer had meant in accusing Barth of a "positivism of revelation". The problem Bonhoefferian scholars have in appreciating Barth is that, if we take some of Barth's earliest writings alone, we can be left with the same impressio...

I'm always surprised that Bonhoeffer is popular among American Christians. I'm surprised because his theology, his politics and his activism seem to out-of-place for Christians in the United States.  So many different conservatives praise him. Some people laud him for his non-violent pacifism, and other for his violent attempt at activism.  Some laud him for his commitment to community, and others for his religion-less Christianity.  Some laud him for his non-metaphysical theology, and others for his pastoral care.  Some laud him from the far left, and others from the far right. When this happens -- as it inevitably does -- I just look at them and wonder, "Is there something else going on here?" Lots of folks like to think of Bonhoeffer as a hero.  Personally, I view him as a cautionary tale . The forgotten lesson, it seems, is that far too many of us strive to be like Bonhoeffer, instead of being the Church that wouldn't need him. Instead of ...

Abyssenian Baptist Church in Harlem During the year he lived in the United States (1930) Bonhoeffer attended and taught Sunday School at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.  It was there at Abyssinian Baptist where Bonhoeffer encountered the gospel and spiritual songs of African-American tradition.  Before leaving the US Bonhoeffer bought a crate of albums of African-American spirituals. This collection became one of Bonhoeffer's most prized possessions and featured prominently in his pastoral ministry.  Bonhoeffer played this music to poor working-class German children in his confirmation class, to his youth group in London, to his college students in Berlin and to the seminarians at Finkenwalde. To quote Bonhoeffer: The most influential contribution made by the Negro to American Christianity lies in the "Negro Spirituals," in which the distress and delivery of the people of Israel ("Go down, Moses . . ."), the misery and consolation of t...

When God in Jesus Christ claims space in the world -- even space in a stable because 'there was no other place in the inn' -- God embraces the whole reality of the world in this narrow space and reveals its ultimate foundation.  So also the church of Jesus Christ is the place [ Ort ] -- that is, the space [ Raum ] -- in the world where the reign of Jesus Christ over the whole world is to be demonstrated and proclaimed.  This space of the church does not, therefore, exist just for itself, but its existence is already always something that reaches far beyond it.  The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of its territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God.  It is not true that the church intends to or must spread its space out over the space of the world.  It desires no more space than its needs to serve the world with its wi...

From a "Confirmation Sermon" Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached on April 9, 1938: You do not have your faith once and for all.  The faith that you will confess today with all your hearts needs to be regained tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, indeed, every day anew.  We receive from God only as much faith as we need for the present day.  Faith is the daily bread that God gives us. You know the story about manna.  This is what the children of Israel received daily in the desert. But when they wanted to store it for the next day, it was rotten.  This is how it is with all the gifts of God.  This is how it is with faith as well.  Either we receive it daily anew or it rots.  One day is just long enough to preserve the faith.  Every morning it is a new struggle to fight through all unbelief, faintheartedness, lack of clarity and confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, in order to arrive at faith and to wrest it from God.  Every morning in your ...

A quote from Bonhoeffer's Ethics : The miracle of Christ's resurrection has overturned the idolization of death that rules among us.  Where death is final, fear of it combines with defiance.  Where death is final, earthly life is all or nothing.  Defiant striving for earthly eternities goes together with a careless playing with life, anxious affirmation of life with an indifferent contempt for life.  Nothing betrays the idolization of death more clearly than when an era claims to build for eternity, and yet life in that era is worth nothing, when big words are spoken about a new humanity, a new world, a new society that will be created, and all this newness consists only in the annihilation of existing life.  The radicality of this Yes and No to earthly life reveals that only death counts.  To rake in everything or to throw away everything, this is the attitude of one who believes fanatically in death.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Theses on Youth Work in the Church": 1. Since the days of the youth movement, church youth work has often lacked that element of Christian sobriety that alone might enable it to recognize that the spirit of youth is not the Holy Spirit and that the future of he church is not youth itself but rather the Lord Jesus Christ alone. It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God; it is the task of the church not to capture the youth, but to teach and proclaim the word of God. 2. Our question is not: What is youth and what rights does it have, but rather: What is the church-community and what is the place of youth within it? 3. The church-community includes those on earth whom God’s dominion has torn away from the dominion of death and evil, those who hear the word concerning the establishment of God’s dominion among human beings in Jesus Christ and who obediently assemble around this word in faith. The church-co...

One of the most annoying and silly tropes I hear from fellow Christians these days goes like this:   Hate the sin, love the sinner . The idea here is that we can, with surgical precision, make a cut between our affections toward human persons  and how we feel about their behaviors . But such surgical precision is untenable.  And we know this.  It's incredibility hard to not let a person's behaviors affect how we feel about him or her. That's because what this line fails to see: Sinners sin.  What matters isn't the sin.  It's the label.  If all you see is a sinner, you're seeing the wrong thing.  Jesus gets at how silly this mentality is.  Because Jesus envisions -- as I've written here before -- a holiness  that isn't afraid to get dirty .  Jesus embraces sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes.   Which is another way of saying Jesus got soft on sin.  When we love sinners, there's this really real sense that we see the ...

" God makes your marriage indissoluble. 'What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder' (Matthew 19.6).  God joins you together in marriage; it is His act, not yours.  Do not confound your love for one another with God.  God makes your marriage indissoluble, and protects it from every danger that may threaten it from within and without; He wills to be the guarantor of its indissolubility.  It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together; indeed, anyone who knows that may say confidently:  What God has joined together, can no man put asunder.  Free from all anxiety that is always a characteristic of love, you can now say to each other with complete and confident assurance:  We can never lose each other now; by the will of God we belong to each other till death" -- Bonhoeffer, "Wedding Sermon", Letters and Papers from Prison

Lots of folks have described me as an "odd" sort of theologian.  I prefer to think of myself as an eccentric  Christian.  Jesus Christ is, as Bonhoeffer famously and rightly declared in his Christology  lectures in 1933, the center of all human life (" menschliche Existenz"), the center of history, the center of all creation.  Hence, Jesus is the middle or heart of all Christian being.   I think this geographical image -- this "eccentricity" -- is a fertile ground for tilling some ideas I'm thinking today.  The word eccentric comes from the Greek combination of  ek  (out of) and kentron  (center), with  ekkentros  meaning "out of center".  In the late Middle Ages this term -- eccentric -- was mainly an astronomical term describing orbital systems where the earth was not placed at the center.  Thus, Copernicus' theory was "eccentric", the earth was displaced from the center of the solar system.  It's an astr...

" In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without is confronted by death from within, one's own death, the free death of daily dying with Jesus Christ.  Those who live with Christ die daily to their own will.  Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live within us.  Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without.  Christians receive their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ.  Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say, 'It is finished.'"  -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We  live in an age in which we are more globally interconnected than ever before in the history of the world.  Communication and travel take place at incredible speeds.  We can video chat or call acquaintances all over the world.  But in this same moment of history, it's harder and harder to know our next door neighbors.  Intimate relationships with others seem impossible as everyone is pulled in a dozen directions.  Our lives are fragmented into a number of different relationship networks, and our relationships remain shallow.  The outcome?   Loneliness .   Loneliness isn't just a cultural phenomenon.  It isn't new.  Loneliness is as old as sin itself.  Because we can't escape the shame of our sin and because we all fear the ways others can sin against us, it's natural for us to shrink back from relationships.  Even when we do form friendships, sin often destroys them and brings separation.  Witness Facebook and the ...

For some years, I've slowly been getting out of the marriage business. I'm bound by church law -- and by conscience, if I'm completely honest -- to have "due counsel" with both parties of a couple.  And I've found, over those years, that most folks only want that counsel when there's a financial incentive:  My home state (Tennessee) offers a discount on the price of the license if you go through with only a minimum (which is to say modicum ) of counseling.  But the older I get, the more determined I become:  I'd like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage .  The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the Church:  The state authorizes a legal union, and then calls upon the Church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity.  Here, as elsewhere, the Church proves itself to be the state's faithful servant:  "Sure, we'll vali...

" God loves human beings. God loves the world.  Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world.  What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.  God establishes a most intimate unity with this.  God becomes human, a real human being.  While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings.  While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction.  God has no patience with our dividing the world and humanity according to our standards and imposing ourselves as judges over them.  God leads us ad absurdum [into absurdity] by becoming a real human being and a companion of sinners, th...

A couple of years ago, I had a sustained discussion with a "Jesus myther" on Facebook.  The "Jesus Myth Movement", for those unfamiliar, is a modern movement among skeptics and critics that Jesus wasn't a historical figure; instead, he had been created, whole-cloth, from older a syncretic amalgamation of older religious traditions in the ancient world.  According to "Jesus Mythers", Jesus is a myth.  I tried, at the time, setting out all the historical reasons that argument is problematic.   So today I'm not recreating that argument.  Instead, I want to demonstrate what a non-foundationalist, unapologetic preaching of Jesus looks like.  Let me do that by addressing two primary arguments I hear a lot.  First:  " I don't think there is a good reason to believe in Jesus as the Christ because the accounts of him are historically non-convincing for two reasons (a) these are not his accounts but accounts of him from flawed men ..." This com...