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Memorial and Place of Encounter Bonhoeffer-Haus Berlin
www.bonhoeffer-haus-berlin.de

So much strength to resist ! Read Bonhoeffer in critical time (9) May 17, 2020

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ROGATE: “Lord, teach us, to pray!” Praying along with Christ

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TEXT A

“Lord, teach us to pray!” So spoke the disciples to Jesus. In doing so, they were acknowledging that they were not able to pray on their own: they had to learn. »To learn to pray« sounds con-tradictory to us. Either the heart is so overflowing that it begins to pray by itself, we say, or it will never learn to pray. But this is a dangerous error, which is certainly very widespread among Christians today, to imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray. We then confuse wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing – all of which the heart can certainly do on its own – with praying. But in doing so we confuse earth and heaven, human being and God. Praying certain-ly does not mean simply pouring out one’s hart. It means, rather, finding the way to and speak-ing with God, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that one needs Jesus Christ …
If Christ takes us along in the prayer which Christ prays, if we are allowed to pray this prayer with Christ, on whose way to God we too are led and by whom we are taught to pray, then we are freed from the torment of being without prayer … We can pray only in Jesus Christ, with whom we shall also be heard …
God’s speech in Jesus Christ meets us in the Holy Scriptures. If we want to pray with assur-ance and joy, then the word of Holy Scripture must be the firm foundation of our prayer. Here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words that come from God will be the steps on which we find our way to God …
Jesus Christ has brought before God every need, every joy, every thanksgiving, and every hope of humankind. In Jesus’ mouth the human word becomes God’s Word. When we pray along with the prayer of Christ, God’s Word becomes again a human word. Thus all prayers of the Bible are such prayer, which we pray together with Jesus Christ, prayers in which Christ includes us, and through which Christ brings us before the face of God. Otherwise there are no true prayers, for only in and with Jesus Christ can we truly pray …
At the request of the disciples, Jesus gave them the Lord’s Prayer. In it every prayer is con-tained. Whatever enters into the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer is prayed aright; whatever has no place in it, is no prayer at all. Al the prayers are summed up in the Lord’s Prayer … Luther says of the Psalter: “It runs through the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer runs through it, so that is possible to understand one on the basis of the other and to bring them into joyful harmony.” The Lord’s Prayer thus becomes the touchstone for whether we pray in the name of Jesus Christ or in our own name. It makes good sense, that the Psalter is very often bound together with the New Testament. It is the prayer of the church of Jesus Christ. It belongs to the Lord’s Prayer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prayerbook of the Bible. An Introduction to the Psalms, 1940, DBW, Vol. 5.

TEXTS B (from: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, volume 8)

From first awakening until our return to sleep, we must commend and entrust the other person to God wholly and without reserve, and let our worries become prayer for the other person.
Christmas Eve 1943 to Eberhard Bethge. DBW 8, 256.

MORNING PRAYER
God, I call to you early in the morning,
Help me pray and collect my thoughts, I cannot do so alone.
In me it is dark, but with you there is light.
I am lonely, but you do not abandon me.
I am faint-harted, but from you comes my help.
I am restless, but with you is peace.
In me is bitterness, but with you is patience.
I do not understand your ways, but you know [the] right way for me.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prayers for Prisoners: Morning Prayer, November 1943, DBW 8, 194 ff.

I should talk with you sometime about prayer in time of need. This is a difficult matter, yet our misgivings when praying for ourselves are perhaps not good either … I won’t say any more about this, I can only do that in person, but that’s the way it is; it takes a crisis to shake us up and drive us into prayer, and every time I find this shameful, and it is. Perhaps it’s because so far, as such moments, I’ve found it impossible to speak a Christian word to the others. Last night when we were lying on the floor again and one man called out aloud: »O God, O God!« – he’s otherwise a pretty frivolous fellow – I couldn’t bring myself to offer him any sort of Chris-tian encouragement and comfort, but I remember looking at the clock and just saying, it won’t last more than another ten minutes. I did this without thinking, automatically, probably with the feeling that I shouldn’t use it as an opportunity for religious blackmail.
To Eberhard Bethge, January 29/31, 1944, DBW 8, 275 f.

God does not fulfill all our wishes but does keep all his promises. This means God remains Lord of the earth, preserves the church, renews our faith again and again, never gives us more than we can bear to endure, makes us rejoice in his presence and help, hears our prayers and leads us on the best and straightest path to God. But doing all these things unfailingly, God elicits or praise.
To Eberhard Bethge, August 14, 1944, for Eberhard Bethge’s birthday on August 28, DBW 8, 569.

CONTEXT (see also the Editor‘s Introduction to the English Edition of Geffrey B. Kelly)

In the introduction to the „Prayerbook of the Bible“, Dietrich Bonhoeffer unfolds his christocen-tric understanding of prayer that leads to Christ and comes from him. In Luther’s footsteps, he understands the Psalms from the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer from the Psalms. Christus is recognized and confessed as the one word of God in the human word (see: Theo-logical Declaration of the Barmen Confession Synod of May 31, 1934, Thesis 1).

The exclusivity of the confession to Christ is experienced by Jews in Christian-Jewish dialogue and people who belong to another or no religion, as an appropriation or even as an exclusion. In his letter to Eberhard Bethge of April 30, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks: „How can Christ be-come Lord of the religionless as well?“

It is not about excluding the “others” (this is also shown by the poem “Christians and Heathens” with the conclusion: “and forgives them both”), but rather about including them by unlocking the doors that separate us. Bonhoeffer’s question is an echo of the Pauline message of overcom-ing the fence between the Jewish people and the other peoples „in Christ Jesus“ (Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:11 ff.). The crucified one is “the peace” as the risen one. „Jesus Christ has brought all hardship, all joy, all thanks and all hope of people before God.“ The „Lord“ being of Christ is to be understood as a dialectical-dynamic conversion („Metanoia“): If we allow “to be pulled into walking the path that Jesus walks, … into the – messianic – suffering of God in Jesus Christ” (letter of July 18, 1944 to Eberhard Bethge), he will liberate us from the smallness of our “own needs, questions, sins, fears” and take us in the greatness of his prayer so that “God’s will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”.
When Christ the “Bread of Life” (John 6:35) prays with us, the request for “our daily bread” be-comes the request for the preservation of the life of others, wherever.

Memorial and Place of Encounter Bonhoeffer-Haus Berlin
www.bonhoeffer-haus-berlin.de

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CANTATE: O sing to the Lord a New Song!

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TEXT A

O sing to the Lord a new song. The emphasis is on the word new. What is this new song, if it is not a song that makes someone a new person, when a person leaves darkness and worry and fear behind and breaks forth into new hope, new faith, new confidence? The new song is the one that awakens God’s presence anew in us- even if it is a very old song, of the God who, as Job says, “gives songs in the night.” The song of praise in the night of our lives, of our suffer-ings and our fear, in the night of our death – this is the new song …
O sing to the Lord a new song – and yet all our songs are only a reflection of the song of songs, which sings of eternity before the throne of Jesus Christ …Why should not we, here and now, look forward to that new song that will embrace us when we finally close our eyes, the purest, sweetest, hardest, and most violent of all songs … Lord, we hasten to join in your new song. Jesu juva – help us, Jesus. Amen.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sermon on Psalm 98:1, London, Cantate Sunday, April 29, 1934, DBW 13, 353 ff..

TEXT B

As part of a series of events organized by the ‚Confessing Church‘ on the occasion of the Olympiad in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes »The inner life of the German Evangelical Church« as a story of the Evangelical hymn. In doing so, he contrasts Luther’s songs („they are without exception songs of the word“) with the songs of Paul Gerhardt:
His personal life was … characterized by great suffering. Bu in this way he became the great preacher of consolation and joy of his era. His hymns no longer testify to the great struggles of faith of early Christendom Luther sang about temptation and struggle; Paul Gerhardt sings, “Be satisfied and remain quiet”; Luther: The righteous one fights by our side”; Paul Gerhardt: “Keeper of my life, truly, it in in vain.” Luther sang: “Grant peace, we pray, in mercy Lord”; Paul Gerhardt: ”Command us your ways.” Luther sang about Christian celebrations with words of Scripture; Paul Gerhardt sang about Christian experience: “Why should I be troubled?” Paul Gerhardt died with one of these stanzas on his lips.

Bonhoeffer then turns his eyes to the song in Pietism with Zinzendorf and Gellert: The pietist seeks a devout life, the enlightener a reasonable life.
Regarding the revival song with Philipp Spitta and Julie Hausmann („So take my hands“), he notes:
It is an awakened religious life. But it all takes place alongside the church. It is pious poetry but not the preached word. The question is how this nineteenth-century faith will fare when genu-inely serious tribulations come upon the church. The tribulations came, and the response was the Church Struggle.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Presentation on the History of the Protestant Hymn (Student Notes), The Inner Life of the German Evangelical Church, DBW 14, 710 ff.

TEXT C

In his first letter from prison, on April 14th, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes to his parents:
Forgive me for the worries I am causing you, but I believe that this time it is less myself than an adverse fate that is to blame. As an antidote it is good to read and memorize hymns of Paul Gerhardt, as I am currently doing.
In many letters from prison he finds refuge, comfort and clarity with Paul Gerhardt. In the first letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge, which is possible by circumventing censorship, he writes on November 18, 1943:
In the first twelve days here, during which I was kept isolated and treated as a dangerous crim-inal – to this day the cells on either side of mine are occupied almost exclusively by death-row prisoners in chains – Paul Gerhardt proved of value in unimagined ways, as well the Psalms and Revelation.
In his letter to Eberhard Bethge the day after the failed coup of July 20, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoef-fer writes:
I think you must be so often present in spirit with us here that you will be glad for every sign of life, even if our theological thoughts do preoccupy me incessantly, but then there are hours, too, when one is content with the ongoing processes of life and faith without reflecting on them Then the Daily Texts make you happy … And then returning to the beautiful Paul Gerhardt hymns makes one glad to have them in the repertoire. In the last few years I have come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Chris-tian is not a homo religious but simply a human being, in the same way that Jesus was a hu-man being.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, July 21, 1944, DBW 8, 541.

CONTEXT

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s head and heart, the “theological thoughts” and the “ongoing processes of life and faith without reflecting on them” come together in prison. So singing becomes a ’new‘ song, “that makes someone a new person” in the “profound this-worldliness”. And so the way for his own „new“ song paves the way for him.

Paul Gerhardt songs, which are firmly established in the family tradition at festivals and during the church year, become Dietrich’s permanent hold and possession. The appreciation of the controversial orientation towards God’s Word in Luther’s songs is combined with the discovery described by Bonhoeffer in his letter of the 4th of Advent in 1943:
In these past few days I have discovered for myself the hymn »I stand her at your manger«. Up till now I had never really made much of it. Probably one has to be alone a long time and read it meditatively in order to be able to take it in. Every word is extraordinarily replete and radiant It’s just a little monastic- mystical, yet only as much as is warranted, for alongside the “we” there is indeed also an “I and Christ”, and what that means can scarcely be said better than in this hymn.

Bonhoeffer’s consolation poem for Maria and his family: „By Powers of Good“ has become a ’new song‘ for many people. It has the power to awaken hope, faith and trust in us today when we leave “darkness and worry and fear behind“ us, new.

Memorial and Place of Encounter Bonhoeffer-Haus Berlin

www.bonhoeffer-haus-berlin.de

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The huge masquerade of evil

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TEXT A

The huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion. That evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice is absolutely bewil-dering for one coming from the world of ethical concepts that we have received. For the Chris-tians who live by the Bible, it is the very confirmation of the abysmal wickedness of evil.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Who Stands Firm? Prolog in Letters and Papers from Prison, DBW 8, 38.

TEXT B

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice … If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid … Upon closer observation it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other … [The stupid person] is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing, that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolic misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a general internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has proceeded it …The word of the Bible, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, On Stupidity, Prolog in Letters and Papers from Prison, DBW 8, 43 ff.

TEXT C

The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has become guilty of the lives of the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Guilt, Justification, Renewal, Ethics-Manuscript 1940/41, DBW 6, 139.

CONTEXT

In the first and fundamental thesis of the Barmen Declaration of the Synod of the Confessing Church from 29th to 31st May 1934 the false doctrine is rejected, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.

Nevertheless, Dietrich Bonhoeffer seems to be the only one who, as a theologian, took a clos-er, view of the psychological and social structures of the ideology of power. His insights, which anticipate Hannah Arendt’s thoughts from the 1950s, correspond to the sobering experiences in resistance under the conditions of the totalitarian rule of National Socialism. Where every criti-cal instance – as in the biblical tradition the „fear of God“ – is eliminated, a „real inner liberation“ of man only becomes possible „after the external liberation has preceded.“

But the insight that „every strong upsurge of power … infects a large part of humankind with stupidity“ does not in any way release the ‘infected’, including the church, from their guilt. Die-trich Bonhoeffer’s sentences on the silence and failure of the church against the crimes against the fifth commandment belong to the earliest confession of guilt in the Nazi era. The represent-atives of the ‚Confessing Church‘ were not ready to confess the guilt towards the Jews even at the ‚Stuttgart Confession of Guilt‘ in October 1945.

They were faced with the fact that the unconditional surrender in German society was per-ceived by many in the population not as a liberation but as a being oppressed. The silence yawned in the place of the memory. Hannah Arendt wrote in her essay ‚Visit to Germany, The Aftermath of the Nazi Regime”, 1950 about the indifference with which the Germans move through the rubble finds its exact equivalent in the fact that nobody mourns the death. And she reports on the course of stories about the suffering of Germans, which would be set off against the suffering of others, whereby the ’suffering balance‘ is tacitly considered balanced. (in: Zur Zeit. Politische Essays. Hamburg 1999, S. 43–70).

The higher the gift of a new beginning of the relationship with the initiative’s ecumenical part-ners. They included George Bell, Bishop of Chichester / UK. With Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he was not only connected to the idea of the cross-border „Universal Christian Brotherhood“, but also to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s confession at her last meeting on May 31, 1942, that Germany’s mili-tary defeat must be linked to an act of repentance: “Christians do not wish to escape repent-ance, or chaos if God will to bring it on us.“ (George K. Bell, Diary Notes. 13.5.-11.6.1942, DBW 16, 300).

Together with Willem Visser’t Hooft, the general secretary of the Ecumenical Council of Churches in formation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a statement on his second trip to Switzerland in Geneva in September 1941 on William Paton’s peace letter „The Church and the New Order in Europe” (July 1941): He wrote: “What matters is whether a state order in Germany is realized that acknowledges its responsibility to the commands of God. That will become evident in the total removal of the Nazi system, including and especially the Gestapo; in the restoration of the sovereignty of equal rights for all; in a press that serves the truth; in the restoration of the free-dom of the church to proclaim the word of God in command and gospel to all the world. The entire question is whether people in England and America will be prepared to negotiate with a government that is formed on this basis even if it initially does not appear to be democratic in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word. Such a government could establish at once. Much would de-pend on whether it could count on the immediate support of the Allies. (DBW 16, 532).

Memorial and Place of Encounter Bonhoeffer-Haus Berlin
www.bonhoeffer-haus-berlin.de

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If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:
everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
Bible for Sunday Jubilate from 2 Corinthians 5:17
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TEXT A

The miracle of Christ’s resurrection has overturned the idolization of death that rules among us … Where death is final, earthly life is all or nothing …
Where, however, it is recognized that the power of death has been broken, where the miracle of the resurrection and new life shines right into the world of death, there one demands no eter-nities from life. One takes from life what it offers, not all or nothing, but good things and bad, important things and unimportant, joy and pain. One doesn’t cling anxiously to life, but neither does one throw it lightly away. One is content with measured time and does not attribute eterni-ty to earthly things. One leaves to death the limited right that it still has. But one expects the new human being and the new world only from beyond death, from the power that has con-quered death.
Within the risen Christ the new humanity is borne, the final, sovereign Yes of God to the new human being … The night is not yet over; but day is already dawning … The form of Jesus Christ alone victoriously encounters the world. From this form proceeds all the formation of a world reconciled with God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics as Formation, 1940, DBW English Version, volume 6, 91 f.

TEXT B

How did you spend Easter? Where you in Rome? How did you manage your homesickness? … For me the first warm days of spring are somehow wrenching, as they probably are for you. When nature comes into its own again but the tensions in our own lives and the historical com-munities in which we live remain unresolved, we feel the split especially strongly. Or it may just be a sense of longing, and perhaps it’s good for us to long for something again. For myself at any rate I must say that for many long years I have been living, not without goals and work to do and hopes that completely absorbed me, but without personal yearnings, and perhaps that makes one old before one’s time. Everything has become too “objective” [sachlich]. Almost everyone nowadays has goals and work to do. It’s all tremendously objectified and thingified. But who today can still afford strong personal feelings, real yearnings, and take the trouble and spend the energy to carry around a sense of longing within him, to explore it and let it bear fruit?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter from April 11, 1944 to Eberhard Bethge, DBW English Version, vol-ume 8, 351.

CONTEXT

These are two very different texts related to the miracle of resurrection and Easter. When placed side by side, they show how head and heart, theological knowledge and sensual experi-ence belong together in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and work. This connection has a special meaning for me – and I think also for many others – in the encounter with him.

Bonhoeffer’s theological knowledge and sensual sensation are both subject to split, longing.

In prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer lives intensely with the church year. Its structure gives it inner support especially until the execution of the plot. One year after his arrest, he wrote to Eber-hard Bethge on April 11, 1944:

“I have long had a particular affection for this season between Easter and Ascension Day. Here, too, there is a great tension. How should people endure tensions here on earth when they know nothing of the tension between heaven and earth?”

How do we endure the split when “the first warm days of spring” are upon us and our inner na-ture longs to join the outer nature, if only the virus, which is also part of nature, would not pre-vent us from doing so? How do we succeed in our praying and doing that we do not turn about ourselves and the prescribed distance of 1.50 m from the other becomes the inscribed felt infi-nite distance? How do we stay connected to each other and perceive the needs of the near and distant others and, together with others, take care not to leave anyone behind?

For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, knowing “the tension between heaven and earth” means trusting in the conquest of death by the risen Christ. The split still exists, the longing remains alive: „The night is not yet over; but day is already dawning.“

In the early morning dawn, believers experience the world in two ways: as the place of „the idolization of death“ and at the same time as the place of life into which „the miracle of the res-urrection and new life shines into the world of death.“ JUBILATE!

The expectation of the „new human being“ and the „new world“ is not a unique characteristic of the Christian faith. It also occurs in other religions and ideologies and it can be politically mis-used. In Bonhoeffer’s time this happened from this side, within the world – with all the signs of „idolization of death“ – in the Nazi state. The expectation “only from beyond death, from the power that has conquered death” is not an escape from this world, but resistance against this abuse on this side. This expectation is reminiscent of the first thesis of the theological declara-tion of the Barmen Confession:

“Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in holy scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.
We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”

The „new life“ takes shape in our new focus on life. It resists forces of „idolization of death“, hatred, disenfranchisement, violence, war and its preparation. It „takes … from life what it of-fers“ and thus does justice to reality. It takes responsibility for the own life and the lives of oth-ers.
“The final, sovereign Yes of God to the new human being” encourages us to act in the area of the penultimate, guided by the vision to be part of the “formation of a world reconciled with God.”

Christ, light of the whole world,
takes power from the darkness,
everything is put in the light
what keeps the world captive.

Memorial and Place of Encounter Bonhoeffer-Haus Berlin

www.bonhoeffer-haus-berlin.de

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Ways with us: „through the lush pastures and through the dark valley“ (Psalm 23)

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TEXT

God’s ways are the ways that he has tread before and that we are to walk with him now. God does not allow us to walk a path that he has not walked before and on which he would not precede us. It is the way cleared by God and protected by God on which he calls us. This is truly His way …

With God, one does not just mark time but one walks along a path. Either one moves ahead or one is not with God. God knows the entire way; we only know the next step and the final goal. There is no standing still; every day, every hour, one progresses. The life of whoever has set his foot on this path has become a wandering. He walks through the lush pastures and through the dark valley, but the Lord will always lead him on the right path (Psalm 23) and “he will not let your foot be moved” (Psalm 121:3).

The entire gospel message of salvation can be called simply “the way” (Acts 19:9; 22:4; 24:14) or the “way of God” (Acts 18:25, 26). In this way it becomes clear that the gospel and faith are not a timeless idea but an action of God and of the human being in history.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditation on Psalm 119 (Vers 3), 1939/1940, DBW English Version, volume 15, 504.

CONTEXT

Dietrich Bonhoeffer particularly valued Psalm 119. It is the longest psalm, artistically arranged the letters at the beginning of the verse in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. The Torah as the ‚path of perfection‘ revealed by God contradicts the reality of life with the experiences of injustice, lies, greed, violence, wickedness, need, grief, misery and shame, but also standstill where it should go. In his trust, the praying person hides in the protective castle of the Torah, the unshakable world order. In the praying meditation, the Torah becomes the ‚gospel‘, the good news of the presence of God and the joy of life.

Psalm 23 describes the protective presence of God and joy of life with the metaphor of the good shepherd who accompanies us through the lush pastures and the Death Shadow Gorge and the generous host who sets the table for us in the face of the enemy (I associate it with specific conflicts, fears, threats).

Literatur: Erich Zenger, Stuttgarter Psalter. Mit Einleitungen und Kurzkommentaren, Katholisches Bibelwerk Stuttgart, 2005

We cannot go the usual ways in existential crises. If we only look at our own path, we will not find our way out of need. The different, even contradictory directions, that are offered to us from all sides confuse us. What can we trust?

Museums are already beginning to collect memorabilia from the time of the Corona crisis – for later. Why don’t we – for now – look for the memorabilia of our trust that have guided us through previous crises? In this way, we can check – seen from today – whether and how they helped us. Can they help us also now? Biblical stories, prayers and confessions are such memorabilia. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is convinced that it is not only our way that matters, but God’s way with us. God takes us into the future. This raises our view beyond the next steps and now allows us to pray, act, be responsible and concrete in the implementation of the principles of a fairer and more solidary society.

„God’s ways are the ways that he has tread before and that we are to walk with him now.“

Christ, shepherd of your people,

live with us, share with us

the Father’s word

that speaks to us in our lives.

Memorial and Place of Encounter Bonhoeffer-Haus Berlin

„Praise be to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead“

(1. Peter 1:3)

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What do we know from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s last sermon, on Sunday Quasimodogeniti, April 8, 1945 in Schönberg?

Nearly nothing.

CONTEXT & TEXT

On February 7, 1945, unlike his superiors Lieutenant-General Canaris and Brigadier Oster, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not transferred from the Gestapo prison in the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin directly to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, but was brought to the Buchenwald concentration camp. So he got on the hostage deportation of the SS, with which he was transported – past Flossenbürg – to Schönberg in Upper Bavaria. There, the almost 100 political and military prisoners („special prisoners“) from 17 countries together with 45 „clan prisoners“ from families of assassins of July 20, 1944 were housed and guarded in schools.

Eberhard Bethge reports in his Bonhoeffer biography from 1967 under the heading “The End” that Bonhoeffer was asked by fellow inmates to hold a morning prayer on „White Sunday“. He only agreed when the atheistic Russian fellow prisoner Kokorin also accepted the request. „He read the Quasimodogeniti texts on Sunday, said prayers and interpreted the watchwords of the day to his comrades: »We are healed through his wounds« (Isaiah 53: 5) and »Praise be to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead« (1. Peter 1:3.). He spoke of the thoughts and decisions that captivity had matured in all.”

We do not know more than the Moravian daily watchwords on Quasimodogenity and this one sentence about Bonhoeffer’s interpretation. What do these two Bible words mean to him for the understanding of the Christian faith, the 4th song of the Suffering Servant with the vicarious representative action and the word about the new life in faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Isaiah 53 plays a role in the relationship between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge. After more than half a year in the detention prison of the army in Tegel, Bonhoeffer had managed to win the trust of a guard who would could smuggle his letters past the censorship.

From mid-November 1943, Bonhoeffer was able to reconnect to his friend Eberhard Bethge in this way. On December 15, 1943, he wrote:

“For I was so utterly accustomed to sharing everything with you that such a sudden and long interruption represented a profound readjustment and a great deprivation. Now we are at least back in conversation, and I am reading your good, warmhearted letter, so familiar to me in its language, over and over again. Ever since your sermon on Isa 53, I have been very fond or your language.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 16, 486, Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006).

Bethge had given a trial sermon to Isaiah 53 in the 1st Finkenwalder course. Bonhoeffer had also submitted a sermon outline on this and stated:

“Here the Old Testament at its limits. Glimmers of the New Testament visible … About the vicarious representative action of a nameless one … Faith see that he is the one who is struck down for us, our punishment, in the place where we ought to suffer. Stands where I and humanity ought to stand … Who is the Unnamed? Answer is given. Answer is there: in the New Covenant, in Christ as the Crucified, as the anticipated messiah. For whom Israel waits.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 14, 359 ff., Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2013).

Is Christ’s vicarious representative suffering one of the „thoughts and decisions that captivity“ had „matured“ in? And is this thought suitable to also make sense of the experiences in detention? Possibly also with non-religious people?

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge of July 21, 1944, immediately after the coup of July 20 failed, Bonhoeffer writes about his knowledge

“… that one only learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life. If one has completely renounced making something of oneself … then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God, and this is what I call this-worldliness: living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities – then one takes seriously no longer one’s own sufferings but rather the suffering of God in the world. Then one stays awake with Christ in Gethsemane. And I think this is faith; this is Metanoia. And this is how one becomes a human being, a Christian … I am grateful that I have been allowed this insight, and I know that it is only on the path that I have finally taken that I was able to learn this. So I am thinking gratefully and with peace of mind about past as well as present things.”  (DBW, vol. 8, 218)

For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, „learning to believe“ does not mean – as in the focus of traditional dogmatics – a new birth and sanctification, but throwing oneself in the open arms of God and the other becoming a Christian  – this ethical idea has „matured“ in his imprisonment.

Under the impression of the threat of the inconspicuous virus, the fearful look at the other, which could become a potential threat for me, captures our thoughts and decisions. Liberation presupposes that we ask: What does the other person need in these critical times? And how can I – responsibly – meet him in a creative way? How does our life depend? What is coming to an end with this crisis and what can start again for me and for the others?

We can learn so much strength to resist / resilience from Bonhoeffer’s thoughts and decisions in prison – even if his and our threat situation are as far apart as death and life. Our life is only limited, his life is threatened with death.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer is picked up after the prayer in Schönberg to be taken to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, his last words are a message to his ecumenical friend Bishop George Bell: “Tell him that this is the end for me, but also the beginning . “ (DBW 16, 468).

Christ, true man and God,

who comes into our life

make us willing to your love

then God’s time is all the time.

Reflection on Easter: Resurrection

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to Christ and his work of expiation.

The cross was the end, the death of the Son of God, curse and judgement on all flesh. If the cross had been the last word about Jesus, then the world would be lost in death and damnation without hope; then the world would have triumphed over God.

But God … raised Christ from the dead … The resurrection is the day of the begetting of the Son of God (Acts 13:33; Rom. 1:4). The Son receives back his eternal divine glory; the Father has the Son again.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to us. Christ died for our sins; he was raised for our righteousness (Rom. 4:25) … If Christ had remained dead, this death sentence would still stand: “We would still be in our sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). Because, however, Christ is risen from the dead our sentence has been lifted, and we are risen with Christ (1 Cor. 15). This is the case because we are in Jesus Christ by virtue of his assumption of our human nature in the incarnation; what happens to him happens also to us, for we are assumed into him …

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to the creature. What takes place here is not the destruction of life in the body but its new creation. The body of Jesus comes forth from the tomb, and the tomb is empty. We are unable to grasp how it is possible and thinkable that the mortal and corruptible body is now present as the immortal, incorruptible, transfigured body … It is not a Christ-idea that lives on, but the bodily Christ. This is God’s Yes to the new creature in the midst of the old. In the resurrection we acknowledge that God has not given up on the earth but has personally won it back. God has given it a new future, a new promise. The vey earth God created bore the Son of God and his cross, and on this earth the Risen One appeared to his own, and to this earth Christ will come again on the last day. Those who affirm the resurrection of Christ in faith can no longer flee the world, nor can they still be enslaved by the world, for within the old creation they have perceived the new creation of God …  

TEXT: Hectograph, enclosed with the March 1940 monthly newsletter from the Pomeranian Council of Brethren of the Confessing Church to its pastors.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 16, 472 ff., Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006

TEXT & CONTEXT

Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the resurrection as a relationship event of God in three dimensions: in his Yes to Christ, to Us and to the Creature. “For the world”, he writes at the end of his Reflection on Easter, “there remains an insoluble riddle.” „The world sees the ’signs‘, but it does not believe the miracle.“ “For faith, however, this riddle is a sign of the reality that it already knows, an imprint of God acting in history … Faith receives the certainty of the resurrection solely from the present witness of Christ. It finds its confirmation in the historical imprints of the miracle, as scripture reports them. „

 To perceive “within the old creation … the new creation of God” – what does that mean in the historical context of this text?

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote it a few days before the Gestapo closed the Vicariate on March 18, 1940. Germany had started the war with the attack on Poland on September 1, 1939. In his letter to the Finkenwalder brethren of September 20, Bonhoeffer reports of the first war death of a Finkenwalder brother on September 3 as a soldier in Poland and writes: “Death has come again in the midst of us and we have to decide whether we like it or not, to think about it … If quarrel and death exercise their wild rule around us, then we are called to witness not only through words and thoughts, but also through the deed God’s love and peace.”

Half a year later, in the first manuscript of his ethics, Bonhoeffer unfolds his understanding of the double reality, which shapes the belief in the resurrection: “In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other. The reality of God is disclosed as it places me completely into the reality of the world. But I find the reality of the world always already born, accepted, and reconciled in the reality of God. That is the mystery of the revelation of God in the human being Jesus Christ. The Christian ethic asks then, how this reality of God and of the world, that is given in Christ becomes real in our world.” (Ethics, DBW, Volume 6, 55).

To perceive “within the old creation … the new creation of God” – what does that mean in our context of the corona crisis? Empathy and faith – facing the world – belong together. It all starts with empathy with those who are physically, mentally and in their very existence threatened by this crisis. At the same time, we need to look at signs of the new creation, because the strength of our resistance depends on our recognition and distinction: What can I leave behind – albeit in pain – and what do I want to live and stand for in future? What am I willing to do in our society and across national borders so that not only is solidarity practiced, but other people’s misery is raised as a criterion for law and justice? Believing in the threefold Yes of God, we already know that this new reality is “carried, accepted, reconciled” in Jesus Christ.

Christ, life from death,

overcome our world.

God reconciles what we separated.

So our guilt comes to an end.

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain

1. People go to God when they’re in need,   

plead for help, pray for blessing and bread,

for rescue from their sickness, guilt, and death.

So do they all, all of them, Christians and heathens.

2. People go to God when God’s in need,    

find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread,

see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain.

3. God goes to all people in their need,

fills body and soul with God’s own bread,

goes for Christians and heathens to Calvary’s death

and forgives them both..

TEXT:   Poem “Christians and Heathens”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, Letters and Papers from Prison, Prologue, 46, Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2009.

TEXT and CONTEXT

“To resist” starts with “to stand”. In these days in Passion time my inner ear hears  J.S.Bach’s Choral setting in St. Matthew Passion of Paul Gerhardts words: 

“I shall stand here beside you. But do not despise me!”

It strikes me as remarkable Dietrich Bonhoeffer does not put into words in any of the ten poems he wrote in prison the relationship to Jesus Christ which is the center of his theology. That’s not true! In “Christians and Heathens” we meet God in Jesus Christ.

In his detention cell, where he cannot walk five steps, Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks of people walking as in a procession of the laborious and laden through the centuries     (1st stanza) and of the reversal: of God’s going to people with his bread. What happens in the 2nd stanza?

In his letter of July 18, 1944, he wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge:

The poem “Christians and Heathens” includes a thought that you will recognize here.   “Christians stand by God in god’s own pain” – that distinguishes Christians from heathens. “Could you not stay awake with me one hour?” Jesus asks in Gethsemane. That is the opposite of everything a religious person expects from God. The human being is called upon to share in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world … It is not a religious act that makes someone a Christian, but rather sharing in God’s suffering in the worldly life. That is “Metanoia”, not thinking first of one’s own needs, questions, sins, and fears but allowing oneself to be pulled into walking the path that Jesus walks, into the messianic event, in which Isaiah 53 is now fulfilled! [“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases”]

Between the God to whom people go hoping for his omnipotence (“Allmacht”) and God who, by overcoming death, forgives everyone – Christians and Heathens – we encounter God in his helplessness (“Ohnmacht”), “devoured by sin, weakness, and death”.

The contradiction between omnipotence and powerlessness that goes beyond our minds is cancelled in the empathy of God. It’s the dialectic of empathy to unite helplessness and help: God resists death – the greatest contradiction to life – by taking it upon himself.

The empathy of God makes the walking of the Christian a stand. “Christians stand by God in God’s own pain.” In their empathy, they allow themselves to be drawn into His suffering in others. It is – following Jesus – “this life of participating in God’s powerlessness in the world.”

____________

To Eberhard Bethge, August 21.1944, a birthday letter on August 28, 1944

with reference to the Daily Text for August 28 from 2 Cor. 1:20:

“For in him every one of God’s promises is a Yes.”

A week from today is your birthday. I looked at the Daily Texts again and meditated for a while on them. I think everything depends on the words “in Him”. Everything we may with some good reason expect or beg of God is to be found in Jesus Christ. What we imagine a God could and should do – the God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with all that. We must immerse ourselves again and again, for a long time and quite calmly, in Jesus’ life, his sayings, actions, suffering, and dying in order to recognize what God promises and fulfills. What is certain is that we may always live aware that God is near and present with us and that this life is an utterly new life for us; that there is nothing that is impossible for us anymore because there is nothing that is impossible for God; that no earthly power can touch us without God’s will, and that danger nd urgent need can only drive us closer to God. What is certain is that we have no claim, on anything but may ask for everything; what is certain is that in suffering lies hidden the source of our joy, in dying the source of our life; what is certain is that in all this we stand within a community that carries us. To all this, God has said Yes and Amen in Jesus. This Yes and Amen is the solid ground upon which we stand.

TEXT: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, Letters and Papers from Prison, 514 f., Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2009.

Some Statemens of Faith on God’s Action in History

„I believe

that God can and will let good come out of everything, even the greatest evil.

For that to happen, God needs human beings who let everything work out for the best.

I believe

that in every moment of distress God will give us as much strength to resist as we need.

But it is not given to us in advance, lest we rely on ourselves and not on God alone.

In such faith all fear of the future should be overcome.

I believe

that even our mistakes and shortcomings are not in vain and that it is no more difficult for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.

I believe

that God is no timeless fate but waits for and responds to sincere prayer and responsible actions.“

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, Letters and Papers from Prison, Prologue, p. 46, Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2009.

____________

„Widerstand und Ergebung“ (resistance and submission / acquiescence) – this is the title that Eberhard Bethge gave Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers from prison when it was first published in 1951.

Bethge refers to Bonhoeffer’s letter of February 21, 1944, in which he considers “the line between necessary resistance to ‘fate’ and equally necessary submission”.

In his „Account at the Turn of the year 1942-1943 – After Ten Years“ for himself and his co-conspirators Eberhard Bethge, Hans v. Dohnanyi and Hans Oster, Bonhoeffer speaks of “the strength of resistance”. For him, political resistance and the inner strength of resistance from faith belong together.

Especially in critical times of isolation and quarantine, the restriction of our ‚physical‘ relationships and the worry about losing jobs and future prospects, we can find orientation and encouragement for our mind and soul in Bonhoeffer’s thoughts.