"Christian community is not an ideal we have to realise, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate."
D Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, Works vol. 5, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 38
Logo of United Methodist Church which you can find here.
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.
"The despiser of humanity despises what God has loved,
despises the very form of God become human."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, page 87
"...the church is subjected to all the weaknesses and suffering of the world. The church can, at times, like Christ himself, be without a roof over its head...real worldliness consists in the church's being able to renounce all privileges and all its property but never Christ's Word and the forgiveness of sins. With Christ and the forgiveness of sins to fall back on, the church is free to give up everything else."
"Whoever lives in love is Christ in relation to the neighbour....Christians can and ought to act like Christ; ought to bear the burdens and suffering of the neighbour...It must come to the point that weaknesses, needs and sins of my neighbour afflict me as if they were my own, in the same way as Christ was afflicted by our sins."
Sometimes I don't agree with Bonhoeffer. He is just too uncompromising in tone, an extremist in his style of writing, excessive in the demandingness of his vision of what a Christian is and what the church is. But no matter how strongly I disagree, no matter how cleverly my intellect squirms away from reality, somewhere inside me where it is harder to hide from truth, I know he is right. It's Bonhoeffer who embraces risk and cost and the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and I who want to have it all toned down to a much more manageable Gospel, a more attainable standard, a more respectable and compliant spirituality. There is a diagnostic precision in Bonhoeffer that leaves little room for argument - it isn't that he has misunderstood the Gospel; more likely that I miscalculated the cost, or flirted once again with compromise. I don't know how easy it would have been to be in Bonhoeffer's company - we don't tend to relax in the presence of such unassuming intensity, articulated in words chosen for the truth they tell - and the truth they tell us about ourselves.
If you're looking for a couple of books that take you to the heart of Bonhoeffer's theology, then here's two I've learned a lot from, and which are good theology in their own right:
G. B. Kelly and F. B. Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership. The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)
Sabine Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An Introduction to His Thought, (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007)
There's a huge and growing body of secondary material on Bonhoeffer, much of it stimulated over the past decade with the publishing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works now being translated into English. I have a friend who may well know more history than, as the Scripture says, "all we can ever imagine or think", who scoffs at the purists who say don't read secondary works first, read the primary texts. His advice was much more sympathetic, and I've followed it for many a year. Applied to Bonhoeffer it means: Get a hold of two or three books on Bonhoeffer written by trusted guides and read them, then when you read Bonhoeffer you will have a sense of who he was, what he was saying and why, the central themes of his thought, and an appreciation of him as a human being engaged in the life of his time. My friend is the kind of friend you disagree with only if you can provide securely nailed down footnotes.
In any case I agree with him, and have relied on that simple common sense trustfulness of the scholarship of others, as a way of being introduced to the great minds of Christian thought and philosophy. Bauckham did it for me with Moltmann: Hunsinger and Webster for Barth; several unforgettable conversations with Donald Mackinnon for Von Balthasar; Robert Jenson and Perry Miller for Jonathan Edwards; and for Bonhoeffer, apart from Bethge's huge biography a number of others, but the two above are now amongst the most engaged and engaging guides.
But after a guided tour by a couple of experts, it's time to start hearing the original voice, reading Bonhoeffer and allowing him to speak for himself.
To read Bonhoeffer is like engaging in a theological detox programme. The toxic build-up of lazy assumptions, intellectual evasions, ethical cost-cutting exercises and spiritual suppressants don't easily survive regular dozes of Christocentric reality checks!
To read Bonhoeffer is good for the soul - astringent, purifying, unsettling, demanding, not recommended for the timid who don't want to ask questions, or the comfortably sure who don't want to hear answers that might contradict their certainties.
Here's two extracts, one is Kelly and Nelson's commentary, and one is unadulterated Bonhoeffer:
Hence Bonhoeffer's injunction, "Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe"...Faith and obedience are linked together in a dialectical and indissoluble unity in which the willingness to serve God by obeying the Gospel mandates is the natural and spontaneous note of Christian life governbed by the person and mission of Jesus Christ.
Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship, and a Christianity without discipleship is always a Christianity without Jesus Christ.
Both quotations are on pages 134-5 of The Cost of Moral leadership.
Reading a lot of Bonhoeffer just now. No ulterior motive beyond spending time with one of the most pastorally astringent and spiritually decisive voices in modern theology. I learn more about the reality of Christ and the call to reality in my living for Christ, from Bonhoeffer than from most other writers. In place of our current accommodation to a host of lesser demands, Bonhoeffer reminds us of the greater demand of the Christ who calls us to take up the cross and follow into the freedom that may in the end require that we lose our lives in order to find them.
"We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ's largeheartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes and by showing a real compassion that springs not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. Christians are called to compassion and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters for whose sake Christ suffered."
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament of Freedom, 483-484).
I know of no other writer whose biography so faithfully embodies his theology, whose spirituality is so intensely this worldly but is energised by a grace not of this world, and whose life choices so deliberately echo the ominous but purposeful surrender intimated in that crucial Gospel detail, 'Jesus turned his face steadfastly towards Jerusalem". To have "some share in Christ's largeheartedness", to live our lives "with responsibility and in freedom", to be called to compassion and action - is there a more distilled account of what Christian witness looks like in the political and social arenas of our contemporary existence?
It's one of the enriching paradoxes of Bonhoeffer's thought and writing that he remains, decade after decade a voice as contemporary as today's online newspage. He is the theologian whose life and words combine to challenge our theological flabbiness, rebuke our ethical evasiveness, expose our spiritual self-centredness, and our chasing after the chimera of relevance and manufactured connectedness. Instead of such accommodations to culture, his is the call to an asceticism of the heart, an invitation to utter self expenditure in that reckless giving away that is the cost of discipleship, and the clearest reflection of the largeheartedness of Christ. Largeheartedness - that is a demanding benchmark to place over and against our current church programmes, our missional activism, our thinking and public stances on matters of peace, justice and compassion for the vulnerable. I don't read German - so I'd like to know what the word was that Bonhoeffer used that led a translator to use such a magnificently expansive word for the disposition of Christ towards those who suffer. Largeheartedness.
(The icon depicts the resurrection and Christ the lifegiver - the ultimate demonstration of theological integration - Eastern Orthodoxy doing liberation theology?)
"The starting point of Christian ethics is the body of Christ,
the form of Christ in the form of the Church,the formation of the church according to the form of Christ."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 97-8.
Which is why now and then it matters to have someone say something about 'fellowship' and 'community' that unsettles us, and dissipates the devotional haze that obscures what fellowship and community at their demanding uncomfortable Christlikeness might actually look like, feel like and be like. And one of the people who regularly does that for me is one of my best theological friends, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A theological friend is one who isn't interested in reinforcing my conceptual comfort zones, or ignoring my bad intellectual and theological habits, and whom I trust enough to listen when he tells me I'm talking or thinking nonsense.
So. To the popular notion that fellowship and community are directly tied to intimacy, like-mindedness, mutual knowledge of each other's story, sharing of personal needs and problems, and current place in the world, Bonhoeffer enters a disconcerting disclaimer. Like the good theological friend he is he confirms his trustworthiness as a friend not by agreeing with us but by telling us why we are wrong. In Sanctorum Communio,in a discussion of the Lord's Supper Bonhoeffer compares the experience of those who know each other well with those who break bread as strangers:
It has been deplored that urban congregations celebrating the Lord's Supper are faced with the unfortunate fact that participants do not know one another; this situation allegedly diminishes the weight placed on the Christian Community and takes away from the personal warmth of the ceremony.
But against this we must ask is this very kind of a church-community not itself a compelling sermon about the significance and reality of the community of saints, which surpasses all human community? Isn't the commitment to the church, to Christian love, most unmistakable where it is protected in principle from being confused in any way with any kind of human community based onb mutual affection? Is it not precisely such a community that much better safeguards the serious realism of the sanctorum communio - a community in which the Jew remains a Jew, Greek Greek, worker worker, and capitalist capitalist, and where all are nevertheless the Body of Christ - than one in which these hard facts are quietly glossed over?
Wherever there is a real profession of faith in the community of saints, there strangeness and seeming coldness only serve to kindle the flame of the true fire of Christ; but where the idea of the sanctorum communio is neither understood nor professed , there personal warmth merely conceals the absence of the crucial element but cannot replace it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio. A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 245-6
Renewal is a hopeful word. Like renovation, taking something as it is, keeping what is of value in what it was, building what is now necessary to make it even better. Church renewal is a phrase that likewise opens up more hopeful perspectives. When speaking of the Church I think I'm coming to prefer the word "renewal" to "fresh", or "emergent", probably because it holds two important sine qua nons together. [What is the plural of sine qua non? :))] The Church is what it has been, and its long storied tradition, its history, can neither be ignored nor made normative. But the Church is also a living spiritual reality, the Body of Christ, and growth, change and movement are definitive of life. It's probably fruitless to ask what Bonhoeffer would make of the Church's task in a post-Christendom and post-modern (at least post-Western modernity) culture, in an age of cultural flux, globalised economics, ecological crisis and the irresistible urge of the Church to reinvent itself in order to survive. Which makes the following extract from the Letters and Papers from Prison all the more intriguing as a perspective on the renewal of the Church at one of the darkest moments in 20th century history:
Bonhoeffer isn't giving up on the earlier vocabulary of the Church. He is arguing that they must be born anew out of a Church which provides lived evidence of what it is these older words bear witness to. "Prayer and righteous action amongst humanity" implies reconciliation, love of enemies, cross and resurrection proclaimed through lives which are cruciform and vivified by resurrection hope. The great words of the Gospel are not redundant, they need translation into something much more persuasive than what is now a forgotten discourse - communities embodying the Gospel they preach, prayer and righteous action, empirical demonstrations that the love of God for a sinful world is given credibility by what God makes the Church - forgiving forgivers, reconciled reconcilers, peaceable peacemakers, grace bestowers because grace receivers. And perhaps, out of such retranslation of the Gospel into Gospel-demonstrative Christian community will come the old words to be reminted in new language that again has meaning, credibility and a recovered capacity to communicate the love of God in Christ. And how to do this? Only if through the cross and resurrection of Christ, we have learned ourselves the Gospel we preach, and its great realities have remade and renewed our own humanity in Christ. Renewal has its deepest and most permanent roots in hearts that are made new, in what Paul calls "new creation", and in that changed worldview that looks out on the broken, fragmented world at odds with itself and God, and believes "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself", - "making peace by the blood of His cross". And then to own and surrender to the great apostolic affirmation of the Church "He has given us this ministry of reconciliation". I have no doubt, a ministry of reconciliation, energised by faith in the cross and in the resurrection, is one of the primary imperatives of the Church today.
(The quotation comes from R. H. Fuller's 1963 translation, as anthologised in A Testament to Freedom, ed. G. B. Kelly and E. B. Nelson (San Francisco: harper, 1990, 1995), page 321. The misprint was in the phrase "we too much..." - the correct citation as noted above, was "we too must...."
However in the Fortress Critical Edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works, which is the most recent and reliable English translation, the passage reads rather differently again. Compare the one below with that above, and ponder the fluidity of language, while admiring the skill required to translate an author's words adequate to the author's intended meaning, such that those who later read them apprehend that intention. ( Assuming of course that the author's intended meaning is in any definitive sense accessible to us, and that authorial intention and reader apprehension can coincide.... which I do.)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works, Volume 4. Discipleship. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), page 285.
I think the differences in nuance, style, punctuation and even paragraphs makes a marked difference to the passage. So when we are trying to establish the most reliable text of the New Testament, and working at the best translation of koine Greek into 21st Century English, it's a bit of a challenge eh?
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