The cross plunged into the earth of a God loved world

A year ago I spent an enjoyable day or two romping through Wesley for Armchair Theologians, by W J Abraham. The Armchair Theologians series published by Westminster John Knox Press provides accessible introductions to significant figures in the history of Christian theology. So far such people as John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Aquinas, Karl Barth are already published. So is Bonhoeffer for Armchair Theologians, by Stephen Baynes and Lori Hale, which I'm now reading. One of the features of these books is the illustrations which range from the funny, to the didactic to the occasionally trite. But in this volume there are one or two that are deeply moving, and several others that carry a powerful ethical payload.

The text itself is accessible but not patronising, and some of the the theological chapters have surprising depth in a book intended for those looking for a starting point in their encounter with Bonhoeffer. The quotations from Bonhoeffer, placed in carefully explained context, and Bonhoeffer's own words remain some of the most powerful statements we have of Christian discipleship in a world the Church cannot and should not escape:

"There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God's reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world... It is a denial of God's revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be 'Christian' without being 'worldly', or [to] wish to be worldly without seeing and recognizing the world in Christ."

All of which raises for me, as so often in my reading of Bonhoeffer, troubling questions about approaches to mission that tend to see Christ as present in the church, absent from the world, and therefore the Church's mission to take Christ to a needy world. Actually, Christ is already there and the Church needs to catch up with Him, and discover ways of incarnating, embodying and offering the love of the living God in Christ through practices that are themselves Christlike - such as peacemaking, brokering reconciliations, expressing imaginative gestures of redemptive love, acts of mercy and compassion as contradictions of other ways of doing business. Bonhoeffer is not only right, he is so right - God so loved the world, and the Cross was plunged into the same earth out of which humanity is made. And the Church is never more faithful to Christ, than when it finds those places in our world, and in its local communities, where in the name of the crucified Lord, it too is lifted up in loving surrender, arms outstretched to embrace the world and announce God's love - and on a cross plunged into the earth of a God-loved world.

Comments

[Tony]

How does this secondary source fit with your previous post, I wonder :)

[Jim Gordon]

Quite Tony. Except the most theologically significant and durable part of what I wrote was Bonhoeffer's paragraph, which was of course a primary source ;).