As Bishop Richard reminded us in St Paul’s on the morning of Maundy Thursday, it was on Low Sunday exactly sixty years ago that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hastily tried under the cover of night and hanged at dawn on the eighth day after the Resurrection. Today Bonhoeffer’s statue stands among the martyrs of the 20th century who contemplate our world from a vantage point above the principal entrance to Westminster Abbey. Bishop Richard will be joining the Bishop of Berlin in marking the sixtieth anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death, so it seems appropriate to discover something about what makes this bespectacled German Lutheran pastor so important for modern Christianity.
Born on February 4th 1906, Bonhoeffer was brought up in a religious world where, in typical Lutheran fashion, politics and faith were kept in separate compartments giving rise to an attitude of quiescent obedience to the state. He studied in Tubingen, Berlin and Rome; he worked in Barcelona and New York and in 1931 began the life of an academic teacher, active in the ecumenical movement and a friend of Bishop Bell of Chichester. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Bonhoeffer became an active supporter of the minority Confessing Church which began the Protestant resistance to all attempts to make the churches instruments of the Nazi State. From ’33 to ’35 he was pastor to two churches in London before returning to lead an illegal Lutheran seminary on the Baltic coast. In ’39 he went to New York but decided within days of arriving that his place was with his church in Germany. He joined the German resistance movement and having previously espoused a near pacifist ethic was drawn into a group plotting an attempt on Hitler’s life. He was arrested in April ’43 for complicity in helping Jews to escape but his involvement in the failed assassination of July ’44 was eventually exposed and he was hanged at Flossenberg barely a month before the end of the war.
His best-known but most fragmentary writings were produced in prison and strongly influenced John Robinson’s famous book Honest to God. Bonhoeffer’s other books focused on ways of understanding Christ, the Church and Christian ethics in the contemporary world. He spent his life wrestling with the problem of communicating the real, deep meaning and relevance of faith to a world where faith had become meaningless or reduced to a private religion of individualistic piety.
Faith has to begin with a sense of mystery; without it there can be no spirituality; and ‘mystery is something uncanny because we are not at home in it, because it tells of a manner of being at home different from ours. To live without mystery means that one knows nothing of the mystery of one’s own life, or other people’s lives ‘ The incarnation, death and resurrection of the Christ for others is not a solution to this mystery but our way into it. And in our engagement with the mystery we are drawn into the church which is ‘Christ existing as community.’ Only in community do we properly engage with each other and therefore with God. For Bonhoeffer, reflection on God, which doesn’t tell us something about our humanity is not proper theology; and similarly theology which does not take seriously into account the contemporary state of humanity cannot speak meaningfully about God. And the role of theology is not to explain or provide lists of things to believe but to safeguard the mystery of Christ, the God-Man who ‘faces’ us and is ‘for us’ and requires of us a decision for him or against him.
Bonhoeffer famously described the modern generation as the world ‘come of age.’ He was trying to describe the sense in which society seemed to be able to do without God. And he was convinced that the ‘godlessness’ of this age was not something to condemn, or seek to take back to a past state of believing. It can be a liberating realization to see that contemporary lack of belief in God is somehow to be fitted into the providence of God. The autonomy of society says something about the being of God. What it said for Bonhoeffer is summed up in his famous letter from prison where he writes:
‘The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God .. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, he is with us and helps us. only the suffering God can help.’
Such a view of God in Christ means that the church cannot seek to dominate nor allow itself to retreat to the religious margins. The only way forward is through repentance and ultimate honesty. (cf Mat. 18:3) Such a view led Bonhoeffer to become involved in the plot against Hitler because, ‘real innocence shows itself precisely in a man’s entering into the fellowship of guilt for the sake of other men.’ If the plot had succeeded, Bonhoeffer was determined that the first act of the churches in a society liberated from Nazism would be to read a confession of its guilt for having acquiesced and kept silent under the old regime. Bonhoeffer had always felt that God’s will is only revealed where he seems to be most concealed. And in his experience of prison that concealment seemed profound. At this time, he writes a moving poem entitled ‘Who am I?’ in which he contrasts how he appears to others (a man of faith and conviction) and how he seems to himself (uncertain and afraid) ‘ as though something in me is always running away from victory already achieved.’
The fact that some of these views may seem familiar shows how far Bonhoeffer’s ideas have influenced contemporary preaching. And yet they also remain profoundly difficult and challenging, to be pursued only amongst those who believe with Bonhoeffer that the church is only the church where it exists for others, and where the secret discipline of prayer and righteous action always underpins the attempt to talk about God.
With my love and prayers,
Father Stephen
The Vicar Writes