Living Wittily

Reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer Readers.

There's a literary genre I don't go in for all that much. The Reader. They are usually thick, often heavy, dense with text, and many of them are compilations of lots of bits often uprooted from context. But there's no doubt they have their uses, providing they are edited by someone who knows what they are doing, remembers who the reader is, and who the Reader is for, and knows the field well enough to include not only the important bits, but the interesting bits.

Not long ago I bought the Bonhoeffer Reader, edited by Clifford Green and Edward De Jonge.  Yes it's thick, heavy and dense with text. The selections are organised chronologically but also thematically, from student years to final imprisonment. I have most of the volumes of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, and almost all that is in the reader is taken from those texts.

 

I also have A Testament to Freedom edited by G Kelly and E B Nelson, a volume that has served Bonhoeffer students as a core resource for nearly 25 years - goodness is it that long. I remember buying it and some of the times I've lugged it around to have something substantial to chew on. It too combines chronology with thematic organisation. When there's a large amount of material, and you don't have time to read it all, but you want to encounter the significant, interesting, mind expanding, characteristic thought of someone who interests you, a well edited Reader is a good deal. Sure it isn't the same as reading a thinker's entire corpus, though you'd have to ask why do that anyway. But with Bonhoeffer a substantial, discerning, well arranged reader works, and works well. So much of Bonhoeffer's corpus is occasional, fragmentary intimations of an intense life, lectures, letters, sermons, and only a few book length items. Even several of them are made up of reconstructed fragments.

The Collected Works has thousands of pages of biographically arranged letters, relevant contextual papers, and other written material from the pen of someone whose life and thought was compressed into such a relatively short life. Not many will want to plough through them or go to the expense of buying them. So between them, these two readers give a wide selection, with quite a lot of overlap - the most recent of which is, of course,based on a critically grounded text. So those who are looking for a way to engage seriously with Bonhoeffer, and to do so beyond the core gifts he left the church (Life Together; Psalms: Prayer Book of the Bible; Discipleship; Ethics), are well served by these two hefty volumes, printed 25 years apart. having used both of them a bit now, I still like A Testament to Freedom. Reading Bonhoeffer on a daily basis for a few weeks is like training for a 10k of the mind, and heart. Either of these books would do.

Then there's always A Year With Dierich Bonhoeffer. I have to say I've often smiled at the likely response of Pastor Bonhoeffer to the thought his writing would one day be a daily devotional. But reading Bonhoeffer is an exercise in expansion, deepening and toughening; expansion so that devotional isn't about a theology of my fulfilment, but a theology of the cross; deepening because for Bonhoeffer devotional is a word redolent of sacrifice, cost, consequence and daily dying; toughening because everything Bonhoeffer wrote that has enduring value for the Church is a distillation into words of the experience of confronting, subverting, challenging and having to live under the oppressive controls of National Socialism. The July 24 reading has these words: " The people who love, because they are freed through the truth of God, are the most revolutionary people on earth. They are the ones who upset all values; they are the explosives in human society." Not for Bonhoeffer the chronic niceness that avoids confrontation and calls it peacemaking!

Luther's anti-Jewish theology, German Theologians and the Holocaust.

Looking for background reading for something I'm writing on Bonhoeffer I discovered the recently published Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology, edited by R. Kolb, I. Dingel and L. Batka, (OUP: 2013). Of the 47 essays a number of them are to do with the reception of Luther's theology, and its legacy in different historical periods. Essay 41 is on the reception in the Nineteenth Century; chapter 42 then jumps forward to Marxist reception. There is no chapter on the reception and use of Luther in Germany in the first half of the 20th Century. There is a chapter on 'Luther's Views of Jews and Turks' (chapter 30).

I did a Google search for Holocaust and there is one occurrence of the term in the entire 688 pages - in chapter 30 on the Jews and Turks. I did a further search for Susannah Heschel whose book on The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany is a watershed in scholarship and research into the role of many Christian theologians and of significant sections of the German Lutheran church in the construction of an anti-Semitic mindset. Her name does not occur once.

It would be very unfair to make a critical judgement of this volume solely on such slight evidence as a Google search. But it's the omission of a chapter that spooked me, that jump of a hundred years missing out mid 20th century central Europe. I came away perturbed at such a lacuna in an authoritative academic Oxford Handbook on the subject of Luther's theology and its reception. There is only an introductory glance in chapter 30 referring to the Holocaust, and that is the one reference found by Google. The catastrophic impact of Luther's anti-Semitic writings and the direct role of a significant number of 1930s German theologians, academic and clerical, in giving such lethal prejudice the oxygen of scholarly credibility, is surely significant enough to have required an essay in its own right?

The same trawl on Amazon led to Before Auschwitz. What Christian Theologians Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism, by Peter Hinlicky. Susannah Heschel's name comes up with 21 hits. The relation between a number of German Christian theologians and the fate of the Jewish people in Europe from 1930 to 1945 is fully explored in this book.

Back to Bonhoeffer. I've been exploring the context of his writing in the 1930's and the increasingly dangerous call to follow Jesus through the minefield of National Socialist anti Semitic policies, and the crossfire between Church politics oscillating between collaboration and compromise, with significant numbers of Christians driven by conscience to stand firm in confession of Christ over and against sworn allegiance to Fuhrer or Fatherland. Bonhoeffer of course was a Lutheran, as was Martin Niemoller and Helmut Thielicke, so while Luther's anti Jewish writings were exploited in the interests of National Socialists by a number of leading academic theologians, there was no inevitable or essential connection between Luther's anti-Jewish writing, Lutheran theology and ideological anti-Semitism as political goal seeking religious justification. Many, many German Christians were not so easily taken in by such religious opportunism collaborating with political cynicism, with vast lethal consequence.

It is this complexity of motive and manoeuvre, the difficulties in establishing blame or innocence, culpability or naivete, and even culpable naivete, that gives rise to the moral perplexity and theological embarrassment evoked for subsequent generations of Christians, by Luther's anti-Jewish writings, and their reception culminating in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. These issues remain far too important, and that period of political and ecclesial history an episode of too recent tragic memory, for it to be subsumed into minor references and a page or two here and there, in what is a recognised academic reference work published by a highly respected University publisher, on the reception, legacy and content of the theology of Martin Luther.

I was so perturbed by this that I wrote a personal email to Professor Robert Kolb, one of the editors, and had a courteous and thoughtful reply, seeking to address my concerns from the standpoint of the editorial team and its decisions. I can see the Editors' point, that the issues of hard editorial choices meant that other important perspectives were also omitted; and that German reception of Luther in 1930's Germany competes with other important areas of interest for inclusion in full essay treatment; but editorial choices are inevitably powerful interpretive tools in the survey of a subject field, defining the relative importance of what is in and what is not.

I am glad too that my concerns are at least alluded to in several other essays in the collection, with pointers to further resources. But I remain perturbed - because the Holocaust is a permanent defining watershed in Jewish-Christian relations, requiring a disposition of Christian openness, repentance, self-critique and continuing reflection. Added to this, the active collaboration of prominent German Christian theologians using Luther's writings, baleful tendentious biblical eisegesis, and a theological overlay of public respectability, to give comfort, distorted credence and ideological validity to the anti-Semitic policies of National Socialism, was of critical importance in creating a zeitgeist in which the Holocaust was thinkable and made possible of implementation.

Such vast tragic evil makes an essay on Luther's theology, early 20th Century Germany, and the road to the Holocaust and beyond, self-choosing in the list of essential contents in a volume on Luther's Theology. The absence of such a treatment remains for me, a matter of deep regret, in an otherwise richly resourced compendium of current scholarly perspective on Luther's theology.

Scotland in Stitches, Bonhoeffer for Today, and a Glorious Toe Poke.

Yesterday was a day of three halves. In the morning we went ot see the Great Scottish Tapestry for the second time. The first time the Aberdeen Art Gallery was like a cultural sardine tin, with bus loads of stitchers from far and wide, so after trying for ten minutes to see some of the blessed panels, we retreated to Books and Beans (the coffee place in Aberdeen if you want something different, rustic and friendly, surrounded by used books for sale).

Yesterday it was quiet so we were able to move round this amazing exhibition with freedom, time to inspect, admire and enjoy the needlework of women from all over Scotland. Each panel has the names of those who stitched it on the explanation card below - I saw no men's names. Hmmm. Anyway there are over 150 panels each around a square metre, so we looked at the first 70 which took over an hour, and by then we had seen enough for one visit. We'll go back and complete it next week. From prehistoric Scotland to the independence debate, from the first settled migrants to modern immigration movements, from battles to treaties, churches to Toon Cooncils, from agriculture to industry to Enlightenment to heavy industry decline, characters like John Knox and James Watt, local cultures from Gaelic to Doric, lochs and mountains, thistles and heather, castles and tenements - it;s all there, and all of it imaged in cotton, wool and silk. By any standards it is an exhibition that comes from thousands of hours of work, careful organisation, long learned skills and in its complexity and completeness, a superb pictorial history of Scotland.

Late afternoon I went to the inaugural lecture of the Centre for Bonhoeffer Studies at Aberdeen University. Dr Jennifer McBride delivered a superb lecture on 'Who is Bonhoeffer for Today', in which she argued strongly against those who find in Bonhoeffer whatever they go looking for with no regard for the overall context within which Bonhoeffer lived, and spoke and wrote. For example 'religionless Christianity', ripped from context and made into a vehicle for radical, at times radically negative theology, is a phrase that can only be understood within the overall Christological context and cruciform shape of Bonhoeffer's theology.

Mcbride's major work on Bonhoeffer examines Bonhoeffer's insistence that Christian dicipleship and the church as the Body of Christ are authentic insofar as they engage with the world, and do so as expressions of the Lordship of the incarnate and crucified Jesus. One of the genuinely creative points she made was to warn the church against a moral triumphalism by which Christian communities see themselves as the moral and ethical judges of society. The church rather, is the Body of the Christ who took upon himself the sins of the world, and was 'numbered with the transgressors'. Far from being the judge and moral watchdog of society, the church is to be a community of repentance, acknowledging its solidarity with human social and public life in all its ethical co0mplexity and compromise, confessing its implication in the structures of sin, and witnessing to an alternative way of being which expresses repentance as turning away from the practices of domination to the practices of redemptive action, and these based on a discipleship of the crucified, risen Lord, whose life they embody. That at any rate was what I took away, and it provides much to ponder. (Jennifer McBride's book is just released as paperback at £15 - the hardback was £50 - this is a substantial reclaiming of Bonhoeffer for a theology both culturally critical and christologically confessional. I've already got mine ordered).

As I said, it was a day of three halves. The third one was the five-a-side football, my regular Friday night chance to shine with a slowly diminishing brilliance! I scored a long range spectacular toe-poke, after which it would not be true to say the boy done good, my conribution better described in the famous Alan Hansen phrase, 'ordinary and lacklustre'. But it was fun - and overall a day of three good halves.

Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Review, Part One.

It is very difficult to challenge the authority and accuracy of a whole tradition of accepted scholarship. That's partly because the whole weight of scholarly opinion has based itself on "accepted" assumptions, so that cumulatively these assumptions take on the status of certainties. To challenge them seems like a singular lack of humility, questioning the scholarship and intellectual cogency by saying up till now the tradition has been wrong.

Ive just finished reading Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His call to Peacemaking, a jointly written book by Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G Siegrist and Danile P Umbee. It is an irenic but firm questioning of all previous scholarship based on the assumption that Bonhoeffer was actively complicit in conspiracy and assassination plots. More particularly it examines the widespread implication of such actions on Bonhoeffer's theological ethics and challenges with detailed argument the assumption that Bonhoeffer was ever involved in any explicit assassination plot. Careful study of Bonhoeffer's life, his own spoken and written testimony. the evidence of his writings from Barcelona to his final letters, and examination of the actual evidence for Bonhoeffer's alleged involvement in assassination plots, are all used to build the case that Bonhoeffer was not involved in the various plots for assassination and coup d'etat.  In doing so the authors enage with some of the finest Bonhoeffer scholarship including Bethge, the recent biography by Schlingensiepen, Sabine Dramm (another scholar focusing on Bonhoeffer and the Resistance) and numerous other leading scholars including some of the editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English. The book is a tour de force, but is founded on careful exegesis of text, life and the testimony of Bonhoeffer and his circle of family and friends.

The book argues towards a pivotal challenge to the established taxonomy of Bonhoeffer's life and writings, and his changing views on war, peace and violence. The 1929 Barcelona lecture "Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic" enjoins taking up arms in war to protect one's Volk. This is an uncompromising moral principle, Bonhoeffer argues. Sometime in 1930-31, coinciding with his time in New York at Union Seminary and Harlem, he spoke of a complete transformation, which amounted to a conversion, a turnaround in which the Bible become central in his life as the revelatory Word of God. The Sermon on the Mount was no longer neutralised as radical demand by the Lutheran appeal to the two kingdoms. Several years later when his most famous book, Discipleship, was published Bonhoeffer's definitive position was clear. At the centre of his life, and of every Christian's life is the Word spoken by God in Jesus Christ, a word of peace, reconciliation, struggle and risk. The Barcelona lecture and the book known as The Cost of Discipleship, stand at polar opposites in Bonhoeffer's understanding of Christian obedience to the call of God.

It is the absolute clarity and conviction of his position in Discipleship that creates the difficulty in explaining how the person who wrote this book could possibly then move to a position in which complicity in assassination was even thinkable. Bonhoeffer's commitment to pacifism as expounded in Discipleship is not in itself the absolute, grounding principle. The authors of this book argue powerfully, and persuasively, that pacifism is an inevitable implicate of Bonhoeffer's placing Jesus Christ as revealed in the Gospel and the Gospels, at the centre of Christian existence. Non-violent peacemaking is an essential stance and disposition of those who are followers of the incarnate, crucified and risen Lord of the Church. Therefore pacifism, far from being an isolated moral axiom, is the outer expression of an inner orientation of complete obedience to the revelatory Word of God in Christ, a gift of grace that calls the Christian to take up the cross and follow Christ to Calvary and beyond.

Once this essential point is established, it then becomes necessary to explain how such a life commitment transmutes under constant and all but intolerable moral and spiritual pressures in the toxic ethos of the Third Reich, into an ethic of expediency which justifies involvement in lethal force against Hitler. Mainsteam Bonhoeffer scholarship appeals to the later more mature, nuanced and realistic writings of Bonhoeffer's unfinished volume Ethics, to explain this shift. The authors of Bonhoeffer the Assassin? set out to challenge this position, and suggest there is a continuous line of development in Bonhoeffer's theological ethics that offers an altogether different trajectory. They seek to demonstrate Bonhoeffer's consistency in action and writing,from 1930 onwards, with the cruciform convictions so powerfully argued in Discipleship and in Finkenwalde. Non-violent pacifism was the implicate of an obedient discipleship on which Bonhoeffer did not waver. That is their agument.

In my second post I'll come back to this fascinating book showing how they conclude their case, and exploring what this book might mean for the way we read Bonhoeffer and appropriate his thought for our own context. . The.

Reading Bonhoeffer's Life Together as Subversion of Totalitarian Claims.

Here is an example of Bonhoeffer at his very best in creating a pastoral christology that dethrones the ego and makes space for the other, in whom we meet Christ.

Because Christ stands between me and an other, I must not long for unmediated community with that person. As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone. However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died, and rose again, as those for whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life.

Because Christ has long since acted decisively for other Christians, before I could begin to act, I must allow them the freedom to be Christ's. They should encounter me only as the person they already are for Christ. This is the meaning of the claim that we can encounter others only through the mediation of Christ. Self centred love constructs its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognises the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ. It is the image Jesus Christ has formed and wants to form in all people. 

(Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works, Fortress, 1996, 43-4)

The context within which Bonhoeffer wrote these lines makes them naive, idealistic, and the route to spiritual despair. Or so it seems. Except, Bonhoeffer had a profound grasp of the spiritual nature of the conflicts in which the Church was involved. He understood that Christians struggled not against flesh and blood, nor land and blood, but against spiritual wickedness, principalities and powers, in the high places. He self-consciously and with theological and ethical deliberation opposed ideological coercion with a way of seeing the other person that had roots in the eternal purposes of God in Christ. Christians love because He first loved us. The contrast between self love which dominates the other, and Christ love which allows the other to freely be what Christ calls them to be, could not be more absolute, final and non-negotiable; it is founded on the incarnation, atonement and resurrection events of God's saving purpose.

Therefore in the immediate context of the Seminary, such words, ideas and convictions as those expressed in this passage, were a call to the seminarians to live out a love that is respectful of the other as one for whom Christ died; more generally in a Germany wracked with pressures of social coercion, ideological bullying and physical intimidation ranging from ostracism to concentration camps, Bonhoeffer was constructing a theological anthropopology, rooted in a Christology that preserved the worth of every human individual. That explicit Christological claim, Bonhoeffer opposed to all other claims, including and especially, the claims of National Socialism and Hitler as its demi-god. Life Together is a powerful, and pastoral theological rebuttal of all human claims on the human soul, and on the soul of his German compatriots.

Often enough Bonhoeffer's late theology is called revolutionary. The theological anthropology, incarnational Christology and divine ownership of the redeemed, which give Life Together its radical Christian demand are themselves entirely subversive of all forms of earthly  claims to dominance. This is no wee book of monastic spirituality, which is sometimes the way it is read and praised today. It is a book about developing tough virtues, and Christlike love, and a faithful Christ enabled kenosis, nurtured in prayer and the Word, that is able to defy the seductions and oppressions of political and military power. It may be that Bonhoeffer's relevance for today lies as much in those demands for Christlike behaviour and dispositions towards the other, as in the more obvious and overt challenges of the later letters to Bethge. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Faith and Community at Finkenwalde

How many of you remember the first time you heard the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer? I'm not sure. While I was in College studying current theology in 1974, we were introduced to recent trends which included 'religionless Christianity'. Around the same time I went to a public library sale of discarded books and picked up Mary Bosanquet's The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The coinciding of reading around radical late 1960's theology and this well written biography posed intriguing questions which still interest me. How could a man of such obvious piety be a primary source for 'religionless Christianity'? What to make of this German pastor who preached the Word, and grounded his convictions in a theology was that was radically Christocentric? Admiration but also puzzlement at his decision to return to Germany rather than stay in the safety of the United States - but also sadness mixed with gratitude that he did return, and how that decision, and many others over the next ten or so years, defined for the modern world a form of Christian witness as resistance. My own search for the connection points between Bonhoeffer's theology and writing, and the situation of the Church now - a search which can be much more substantially traced in the continuing flow of published writing on Bonhoeffer and his reception decade by decade since the publishing of his Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer has become a decisive presence in modern theology, and there is a vibrant Bonhoeffer publishing industry, including the completion of the English Translation of Bonhoeffer's Works.

My first reading of Bonhoeffer's Life Together coincided with the reading of two other books which in some ways are at the other side of the theological dining room. Jean Vanier's Community and Growth remains a watershed in Christian understanding of kenotic community based on welcome, servant presence and profound love for the other, expressed in care, accompaniment and recognition that every person is both gifted and disabled; we are both wounded and sources of healing; we are forgiven forgivers. W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense was a theological eye-opener. His exposition of Divine Love as precarious, vulnerable and by its nature unable to guarantee the Divine Lover's response, reconfigured my theological assumptions at the time. While wanting to qualify some of Vanstone's conclusions, the connection he made between Divine Love and kenosis has become an essential perspective in my own theology.

So when I read Bonhoeffer's Life Together, I had already encountered two very different expositions of what Cjristian community would look like, and how it might reflect the image and ministry of Jesus Christ, and do so as the Body of Christ. Bonhoeffer's theology, his doctrine of God in Christ and the relations between Christ and Church, was altogether more radical, stern, alert to the transcendent otherness and reality of God, more biblically grounded in text and dogma. But no less pastorally aware of the disciplines and faithfulness that gives Christian love its kenotic character, expressed in humility, service, prayerful openness to the other, and gratitude to God for the gift of each person.

I mention all this because I am awaiting delivery of the volume of Bonhoeffer's Works covering the Finkenwalde period when Life Together was written, and The Cost of Discipleship was gestating in the mind of someone whose witness and actions would grow out of profound personal appropriation of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully recognise the importance of Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, and especially the late letters to Bethge. But putting Life Together into the overall contrxt of Finkenwalde, National Socialist Germany, and the life of Bonhoeffer himself will be a fascinating process. And perhaps for me will bring me full circle with Bonhoeffer whose luminous presence has been like a winking light on the shore of the Clyde - I know, a stretched metaphor, but one used by someone who loves the Rothesay ferry!

And we complain at the cost of theological education - and sometimes at the inconvenience caused by some years of ministry formation.

For students of Bonhoeffer yet another milestone is about to be passed. The English translation of volume 14 of Bonhoeffer's works is due to be released by the end of October. Between 1935 and 1937 Bonhoeffer was engaged in theological education and pastoral formation at the underground seminary in Finkenwalde. The slim book, Life Together, is as near a Rule for that Christian Community as he ever came to write. It is a passionate exposition of the disciplina arcana of a Christian pastoral spirituality resilient enough to resist the Nazification of German culture and the widespread collaborative capitulation of vast swathes of the German Church.

This new volume gathers together for the first time Bible studies, sermons, lectures on pastoral theology and preaching, a huge collection of writing from the rapidly maturing Bonhoeffer who wrote at this time Life Together and Discipleship. At over 1250 pages I did wonder if it might come in two volumes - so I asked the good folk at Fortress - but no, it will be one very thick and heavy book. Cumbersome, but only in the sense that gold bricks are. I'm finishing off the other stuff I'm reading just now so that when this book is unloaded onto my desk there will be room for it, and time to join the seminary classes out of which came some of the most courageous pastors, many of whom would not survive the war.

Jurgen Moltmann quotes Bonhoeffer - "love and remain true to the earth".

Just started this book. In it I find one of my favourite quotations from Bonhoeffer, an essential inclusion in my personal canon of 'Theologians We Dare Not Ignore', quoted by Jurgen Moltmann, one of my most admired theological conversation partners.

Bonhoeffer wrote to his fiance Maria Von Wedemeyer, "God give us faith daily. I don't mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures in the world and which loves and remains true to the earth  in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage is to be a Yes to God's earth, it is to strengthen our courage to do and to accomplish something on earth."

Moltmann points out that these words were written under a death sentence, and while allied bombing was razing German cities to the ground, "and the blood of murdered Jews cried out to high heaven".

So, Moltmann goes on, "The important thing today is to live this faithfulness to the earth in the crises in which the man made catastrophes to the earth are being heralded. The important thing is to prove this faithfulness in the face of the indifference and cynicism with which people knowingly accept the destruction of the earth's organism and foster ecological death."

Driving up the road from St Andrews I turned off as I usually do to come from Stonehaven to Westhill across some of the shire. In 20 minutes I saw the red kites,those aernonautic show-offs, a yellowhammer sitting on the fence beside the gorse wearing its designer yellow against the golden background. And a field with over a hundred sheep and lambs, and nearer Maryculter an ostrich. Yes, an ostrich. Every time I see it, I'm reminded of a sentence in a book review years ago, used to describe someone who sees what no one else wants to see. In that sense Bonhoeffer and Moltmann are essential theologians because they "stand with head erect amongst the ostriches"!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the love of life, and the courage of faith

"If there is one result, one lesson to be learned from history, I would say that it is...the love of life as it really is."

What makes that affirmation remarkable, and full of spiritual adventure, is that Bonhoeffer wrote it while in Tegel prison, and it is put into the voice of a character in one of the fiction pieces he wrote there.

I guess "the love of life as it really is" is what Bonhoeffer means when he says "God is in our life and beyond it", a prevasive presence, a suffusing grace, giver of a transformative vision of the world and our life in it as God loved.

A good thought for a grey, mizzly, drizzly, cold Saturday in mid-September while wondering where on earth summer was, or went.

PS  The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Gardens and is one of the best results so far of the now not so new camera.

Secondly, I noticed the miss print "prevasive" - decided to leave it and let it mean what it sounds loike - that God is there before we are! 

Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison - far reaching fragments of testimony.

Book lovers, and theologians as book lovers, are prone to exaggerate. There's always some new benchmark publication, some indispensable volume, some publishing event of the decade. I do it myself. Lists of favourites, overstated reviews triggered by initial enthusiasm, positive appraisals of books that reflect our personal shopping list of theological essentials, selected books to be rescued in the event of fire - or a flood from an upstairs bath where the cold water tap has fallen to pieces...

But the point of all this is to say I am looking forward to what for me will be one of the very few really significant publishing events of the decade. On August 1, 2010, Volume 8 of the English Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer will be published, and I fully intend to plan several days in August around reading what is one of the most influential theological texts of the 20th Century. Bonhoeffer is one of the primary presences in my theological canon. As a Christian witness he remains definitive, enigmatic, complex, laden with integrity while weighed down also with controversy. And this volume of fragments, given unity mainly by the mind, heart and faith out of which they emerged, contains some of the most exciting and demanding theological statements ever written under real and intentional threat of life itself. 

So a critical edition, with a full Introduction placing the Papers in their historical context, and in their relations to Bonhoeffer's other writings, is one of those greatly to be desired gifts that English speaking Bonhoeffer students with little facility in German, have prayed for and waited in vain. Till now. In these fragments Bonhoeffer explores his own mind and heart, probes at the sensitive core of his own faith, speaks with open heart about his loves and fears, the cost of being brave, the complexity and ambiguity of all attempts to be faithful to Christ in the midst of war, politicised evil, and a world convulsed with violence in the name of state, nation and conflicting visions of the human future.

I wrote some weeks ago about the importance of primary sources in theology, and the relative importance of the secondary. This volume, and others in the series, is primary theology in two senses. It is Bonhoeffer, the distilled essence, and written in hearts blood. And second, it is theology articulated through the specific experience of one whose life focus and vocational certainty centred on Christ as the final and absolute authority. And whatever else Christian witness is, it is when a still young man faces death for his decisions as a Christian and as a man, and did so having written the uncompromising words that told the world, when Christ calls a man to follow him he says come and die.

When I have my copy of this book, I will feel I have in my hands that rarest of gifts to the Christian heart - testimony to Christ, forged in suffering, glimpses elusive yet persuasive, of a soul triumphing by a grace that overpowers power, witnessing to what is true in the face of all that is false, living the costliness at the heart of all redemptive action, and enduring death while affirming the promise of life.

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