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Thread ID: 18375 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-05-24
2005-05-24 14:15 | User Profile
"THE CHILD, THE FOOL, THE SUFFERER" Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Reflection On His Life and Ministry
Keynote Address -- Church Day 95 - Remembering Dietrich Bonhoeffer New Britain, Connecticut, April 29, 1995
By Michael F. Moeller, formerly of The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, PA. Professor Moeller was tragically killed in an auto accident in Africa in 1997
[QUOTE]
The Resister (The Sufferer) Christmas, 1942. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes a long essay addressed to Hans von Dohnanyi, Hans Oster, and Eberhard Bethge entitled "After Ten Years--Report at the Beginning of the Year 1943." A copy of this document was hidden under the shingles of the roof of the house of his parents. In this moving retrospect Bonhoeffer reflects on what it means to have lived in Nazi Germany in the decade just ended. He speaks at one point of suffering:
" It is endlessly easier to suffer in obedience to a human order than in the freedom of one's own responsible action. It is endlessly easier to suffer publicly in honor than hidden and in disguise. It is endlessly easier to suffer with the body than with the spirit. Christ suffered in freedom, solitude, hidden, and in disguise, with body and spirit and since then, many Christians with him" size=2[/size]
The travail of the lonely resister is present in this text. Having to decide against his own people, against his own church, against commonly held beliefs leads Bonhoeffer to enlarge on the meaning of suffering. It becomes clear that the decision to join the political resistance and the plot against Hitler involved an intense inward struggle. The decision did not emerge from a triumphalist motive, as if he knew better than everyone else. It was the realization that the truth requires suffering that made Bonhoeffer ready to take the fateful step, although inside Germany after the war political resistance during the Nazi period was often viewed as nothing short of betrayal. [size=2](17) For Bonhoeffer to join the resistance was not only a political but also a theological decision.[/size]
" I believe that God can and wants to create good out of everything, even evil. For that he needs people who use everything for the best. I believe that God provides us with as much strength to resist in every calamity as we need. But he does not give it in advance, so that we trust him alone. In such a trust all anxiety about the future must be overcome." size=2[/size]
With such trust in God Bonhoeffer participated in the plot against Hitler. The pacifist entered upon an act of violence. We see that Bonhoeffer seldom got stuck in ideologies when they stood in the way of responsible action. What did he do?
Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, who since 1939 had become a sonderfuehrer (special officer) on the staff of Admiral W. W. Canaris of the abwehr (military intelligence), Bonhoeffer became acquainted with voices in the German army that were critical of the Nazis and their policies. Eventually he was recruited by the abwehr as an agent and given the assignment by the resistance to establish contacts with the Western Allies and explore reactions to a possible coup d'etat in Germany. His extensive travels took him to Switzerland, England, and Italy. There he endeavored to use ecumenical contacts that had been made in pre-War years to rally support for the resistance, unfortunately without much success. The War had begun in 1939, and Germany had overrun France and the Benelux countries. Bethge writes: "Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy at the lowest ebb of its fortunes." size=2[/size]
"The whole period is overshadowed by a dilemma from which clear-sighted people had constantly been trying to escape: anyone who tried to encompass Hitler's overthrow after the tremendous success in France was thereby conjuring up a new stab-in-the- back legend. . . . On the other hand, there was a danger that the fact of waiting till tables had been turned would make the participants in the conspiracy a liquidation commando of the victorious powers."
Only in the third stage of the plan was Bonhoeffer informed of the decision to attempt to assassinate Hitler. He decided to go on, knowing that his participation might make it impossible to work as a pastor again in Germany if the plot succeeded and the War ended. The first coup attempt in March of 1943 failed. Two weeks later Bonhoeffer was put under arrest.
Many of the letters that Bonhoeffer wrote from prison find him reflecting on suffering as a concomitant of the Christian life. On July 18, 1944, he writes:
"It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he [or she] is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world. That is repentance. It is not in the first place worrying about one's own needs, problems, sins, fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up in the way of Christ, into the Messianic event. . . . The religious act is always something partial, faith is always something whole, an act involving the whole life. Jesus does not call human beings to a new religion, but to life." size=2[/size]
From this perspective we can understand his reflections on what he referred to as a "nonreligious interpretation of Scripture." One must understand it not so much as a bow to the spirit of a secularized world. The opposite is true. Religion fits the modern world very well. Bonhoeffer would not have been surprised a bit at the rise of interest in religion in the second half of our century. His thoughts on religion, rather, caution against using religion as a new means of self-fulfillment or self-adulation. That is the idea behind his concept of the church as well. If the Christian is a person "for others" and the church the community "for others," then those who belong to the church are not engaged in some kind of exercise in self-sacrifice, but instead are learning with greater clarity what it means to be oneself in Christ. That is what Bonhoeffer calls worldliness.
" It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman . . . a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings but those of God in this world, watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith." size=2[/size]
The experience of suffering throws us back on the suffering God. Not one's suffering can create faith: that often leads to despair and depression. Faith is the realization that God suffers in this world. It is the realization that grace dos not come cheap but at great cost--the cost of discipleship.
In the course of the Bonhoeffer convocation at the Lutheran Seminary at Philadelphia in April, 1995, Bishop Wolfgang Huber of the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg pointed to "reciprocity" in the relationship between God and human beings as an important motive in Bonhoeffer's theology. I find this reciprocity already in a poem which Bonhoeffer wrote on July 8, 1944, in prison.
1 Humans go to God in their dire needs, begging for rescue, asking for bread and joy, for deliverance from sickness, guilt, and death. All of them do it, all of them, Christians and heathen.
2 Humans go to God in his dire needs, * find him poor, mocked, without shelter and bread, see him entangled by sin, weakness, and death, Christians stand by God in his suffering.*
3 God goes to all people in their dire needs, fills the body and soul with his bread, dies for Christians and heathen the death on the cross, and forgives them. size=2[/size]
[/QUOTE][url="http://www.luther95.org/NELCA/internos/moeller.htm"]http://www.luther95.org/NELCA/internos/moeller.htm[/url]
2005-05-24 15:05 | User Profile
Sickening.
The (apostate) Lutheran Church in Germany is shooting itself in the foot by taking political stands.
2005-05-24 18:19 | User Profile
[QUOTE=friedrich braun]Sickening....[/QUOTE] [color=navy]Yes, it certainly is![/color]
[QUOTE=friedrich braun]
The .... Church ... is shooting itself in the foot ...[/QUOTE] [color=navy]The church is not shooting itself ... It is shooting the white race![/color]