Do you have that friend who you can rely on to be a great listener? One that offers deep wisdom and probing questions that lead you to greater understanding of yourself and your place in this world? One where you know that if you make the time to grab coffee with them, you will leave grateful and filled?
I am fortunate to have many of those friends and colleagues, but one I’m most grateful for on this day is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Sure, he’s not alive in the physical sense, but he is still a voice I turn to when I need advice, inspiration, or a loving reminder that my priorities need shifting. He’s the theologian I find myself turning to again and again, not for technical or systematic jargon, but for solidarity with someone who also has struggles and for his deep confidence in God’s presence in those struggles.
I was first introduced to Bonhoeffer in college; I was doing a summer internship at a congregation in St. Paul and living with other interns at Luther Seminary, where we were tasked to read Life Together as we formed our own community. Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together as he taught in the underground seminary, Finkenwalde, for those studying to become pastors living in community while forming the Confessing Church. Besides Bonhoeffer’s insistence on early morning prayer, I found his vision of a community of disciples rooted in honesty and forgiveness a beautiful glimpse of what the Church could and should be. I also found hope and inspiration in the Confessing Church – those who rejected the ways in which the national German Church catered to and supported the Nazi regime. I was hooked.
That summer I also read Discipleship (aka Cost of Discipleship) and marveled at seeing the Sermon on the Mount in a whole new light. I spent the next two years of college immersed in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, his final, unfinished work that he wrote while in prison for being a part of the resistance movement and plot to assassinate Hitler. I wrote my senior distinction project on the theological lines connecting Luther’s theology of the cross to Bonhoeffer’s life and writing (I am nothing, if not a nerd for Lutheran theology...).
Bonhoeffer continued to pop up in my formal theological education, but as I became an ordained pastor, he became my go-to conversation partner and colleague. Unlike some mid-century theologians who I think prided themselves on being intellectually superior and inaccessible to the masses (I won’t name names...), Bonhoeffer continued to show up in my reading with his pastor’s heart and his very real questions, doubts, and struggles, rather than presenting himself with all the answers. Credit is of course due to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge, who saved all of Bonhoeffer’s notes, letters, musings, poetry, and manuscripts, for helping to shape our understanding of Bonhoeffer as a whole person, and not just theological words on a page.
Bonhoeffer always struck me as real: tangible and accessible and knowable to me because of his deep love for God and God’s people. His faith was not neat and tidy; rather he eschewed such theology as “cheap grace,” rooted much more in the messier, unclear, doubt-filled “costly grace.” He lived in the real world, faced real consequences for his discipleship, and knew that the Christian disciple must, necessarily, face hard choices.
In the past few years, I find myself often in conversation with Bonhoeffer about the role of pastors in the public sphere – when am I supposed to speak out? What does it say about my faith if I’m more afraid of losing my job than I am about speaking truth? What is actually the cost I’m willing to pay for proclaiming God’s grace? What does it say about the Church if we find ourselves silent in the face of evil? Where can we create a community that is committed to peace and love of neighbor, if not in a bold and engaged Body of Christ?
Theologian, writer and Bonhoeffer scholar John W de Gruchy says in a conversation with the UK’s Bonhoeffer Project (one of the excellent resources from the International Bonhoeffer Society) that when he engages in these sorts of conversations about today’s context with Bonhoeffer, he often imagines Bonhoeffer saying, “Well I don’t know what I would do. Your context is so different from mine. But let’s talk about it.” When I listened to that interview, I smiled because I find myself having a very similar back-and-forth with Bonhoeffer. Much to my dismay, and much like what happens when I try to pin Jesus down, reading Bonhoeffer never yields black-and-white absolutes, but rather more questions, more wonderings, more invitations to doubt and struggle together.
As we continue in this election season and discern together as a Church about the proper role of Civic Life and Faith, I’m excited to keep conversing and questioning with Bonhoeffer, those who study him more deeply than I, and all who have questions on their hearts about how to best live into our discipleship in this time and place. I don’t think we’ll come up with any concrete answers, but I’ll have a pot of coffee brewing and am excited for the wisdom that will be shared over it.
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If you’ve never read any Bonhoeffer, here’s a taste. This poem, “Who Am I?” was one of the many he wrote while in Tegel prison in Berlin, and captures his wrestling with himself and his discipleship, and his confidence in the steadfastness and grace of God.
Who am I? They often tell me I would step from my cell's confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me I would talk to my warden freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me I would bear the days of misfortune equably, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of, or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation, tossing in expectation of great events, powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint and ready to say farewell to it all.
Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!
Find more resources, and an exciting announcement about a forthcoming study on LAMPa’s website here.