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(Preached April 14 at First Reformed of Wynantskill NY, and May 14 at Trinity Presbyterian in Scotia NY. The texts were Micah 6:1-8 and the core of the Sermon on the Mount, by the Jesus Seminar.)
On Easter Sunday I was a little sad because April 9 was also the anniversary
of the execution by the Nazis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1945,
only a few days before the end of WWII.
He was imprisoned and hanged for participating in a plot to kill Hitler.
Nearly 5,000 people were executed for the plot.
You may have seen one or more of several TV specials and full length films about him
in recent years, such as the film, Valkyrie.
He may have died, but he is risen!
There has been a kind of resurrection of Bonhoeffer that he never could have imagined.
Now there is an international Bonhoeffer society
with national divisions in dozens of countries, of many scholars
who do little more than study and write about him,
He is one of the most extensively studied and written-about figures in modern Christian history.
So, I and many other ministers are Bonhoeffer nerds.
Why so much interest in a single Lutheran clergyman in Germany,
who was swept up and killed among more than 6 million others?
To start with, he wrote some remarkable books, mostly short,
and not scholarly but aimed at church members like yourselves.
The first one to be published in the US came out four years after his death.
You may have read The Cost of Discipleship in a church study group.
It was written before the World War, and is about the Sermon on the Mount
and how following Jesus' teachings faithfully,
we witness to him and belong to him,
and come into a deeper, more personal relationship with God.
This book is best known because here Bonhoeffer wrote of "Cheap grace,"
expecting God's presence and help, but without the teachings of Jesus,
without the cross, without discipleship.
Many people in the churches didn't know about this book until another,
more sensational and controversial book came out in 1963:
Honest to God, by British bishop, James A.T. Robinson.
I am sure that many mainstream pastors preached from these writings,
at that time, and from the writings of Bultmann and Tillich,
who also were discussed in Honest to God.
If you are old enough you probably heard one or more of such sermons, but not so much anymore.
Honest to God introduced Britain and the U.S. to Bonhoeffer's writings
in Letters and Papers from Prison, his thoughts from 1942-1945.
Here is my $1.45 copy from 1967, and this monster from 2010 which sells for as much as $50
with additional material and commentary, Vol 8 of 10 books in the DB Works.
This is the book that concerns me today.
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Who was this person? And why is he important to us, today?
He was from an upper class family in Berlin.
His father was a psychiatrist, his mother a teacher.
His Grandparents and uncles were professors of theology and church history,
but Dietrich's family was not religious, or church going,
and yet he became a serious, pious teacher and preacher
who believed that we must follow the words of Jesus
which were to him the Word of God.
Bonhoeffer almost always spoke of Jesus as "Christ," whereas
I always speak of the historical Jesus as "Jesus"
and talk about him post resurrection as "the Christ."
He spent a year at Union Seminary and in Harlem in New York City,
which affected him profoundly, but returned to Germany
to work against the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.
What he wrote in prison sounds current today,
and has provided the sparks for all the radical theology of the 1960's and of today.
I will give only of a few of his ideas that impact all of us today.
Some of his thoughts and mine may be shocking to you.
(I am trying not to give a lecture, but what I think of as a teaching sermon!)
Bonhoeffer wrote in prison: [043044]
"What is bothering me incessantly is the question [of] what Christianity really is,
or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.
The time when people could be told everything by means of words,
whether theological or pious, is over....
We are moving toward a completely religionless time;
people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.
Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it,
and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religious.'"
Bonhoeffer was first of all despairing of how the Christian churches of Germany could accept Hitler
and control of the churches by the Nazis and the murder of millions of Jews and others.
This was so serious that he came to realize that the churches and their doctrines
were at fault and needed to change.
He began to think about how Christian beliefs about God were outdated and mistaken.
He said:
"The foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our 'Christianity....'
What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world?
How do we speak of God--without religion, i.e., without the culture and philosophy of the times.
How do we speak... in a "secular" way about God?"
Bonhoeffer saw a great problem for us:
"It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world....
What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world...."
[All these] doctrines of revelation: virgin birth, Trinity, – [aren't] biblical....
[But] The mysteries of the Christian faith must be protected."
So Bonhoeffer planned a book on "Taking stock of Christianity"
and "The Real Meaning of the Christian Faith."
First, was this problem of God. [060844]
"[People] have learned to deal with themselves in all questions of importance
without recourse to the "working hypothesis" called 'God.'
In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become
an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt.
But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions;
it is becoming evident that everything gets along without 'God' – and, in fact, just as well as before.
As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally,
'God' is being pushed more and more out of life,
losing more and more ground. We have 'come of age.'"
So, what people now believe is in a 'God of the gaps,' a God who is absent
except when we need him to step in and help us.
But this God doesn't step in; this God really does not exist.
I think that people saw this after 9-11,
that the Providential God who takes care of us isn't around anymore.
Bohoeffer said: [071644]
"We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world as if there were no God.
And this is just what we do recognize--before God! God himself compels us to recognize it.
So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.
God would have us know that we must live as people who manage our lives without him.
The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34)....
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 on to the cross.
He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way,
the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.
Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering."
Bonhoeffer saw that Much of our Christian faith has been a flight
from the world to God, an escape for our individual salvation.
Bonhoeffer asked: 050544
"Does the question about saving one's soul appear in the Old Testament at all?"
The entire Hebrew scriptures are about the need
for personal responsibility to others and for justice in society.
Sin in Hebrew scriptures is failure to be just; and Jesus was a good Jew.
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For Bonhoeffer, the proof that God was in Jesus is that [081044]
"Jesus is there only for others." Jesus is "the man for others."
"His 'being there for others' is the experience of transcendence
[of going beyond the normal; of God's reality and presence].
It is only this 'being there for others,' maintained till death,
that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.
Faith is participation in this being [for others] of Jesus....
Our relation to God is not a "religious" relationship to the highest,
most powerful, and best Being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence –
but our relation to God is a new life in "existence for others,"
through participation in the being of Jesus [for others].
The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable,
but the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation..."
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So where does that leave us today?
Bonhoeffer wrote about his time something that sounds like our own: [072144]
"Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation,
as though that were an end in itself,
is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world.
Our... being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and work for justice."
Prayer for Bonhoeffer was mostly a private affair,
in which we seek to align ourselves with God and Christ.
Prayer is not to make us feel better, but to lead us to action in the world.
Bonhoeffer had harsh prescriptions for our churches:
"The church must come out of its stagnation. [080344]
We must move out again into the open air of intellectual discussion with the world,
and risk saying controversial things, if we are to get down to the serious problems of life.
The church is the church only when it exists for others.
To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need.
Furthermore: [There is] the question of revising the creeds including the Apostles’ Creed; [and]
reform of the training for the ministry and the pattern of clerical life."
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So if we want to think today about the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ,
we need to think of resurrection as a symbol for the possibilities
of our transformation into new life.
Bonhoeffer called the new life, the new creation in a resurrected life, faith!
So, to believe is to live the new life, and to allow Jesus to lead us into the world, not away from it.
This is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pious upper class Lutheran and pacifist,
came to participate in a plot to kill a murderous tyrant.
He saw it as something that had to be done in order to be faithful to God in Christ.
Whether he was right or not is still debated:
We cannot know if killing Hitler would have brought the positive outcome
the resisters hoped for or expected.
Sometimes when we act to change things for the better, they become worse.
We call that "unintended consequences."
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To summarize:
* The point of being Christian is to be a disciple, and that is hard.
* We live in a religionless time because we have come of age in our knowledge of the world.
* God is being pushed out of life; and we rely on a god of the gaps.
* We see faith as escape from the world, but Jesus was the man for others, for the world.
* Faith is our participation in this being for others.
* Faith requires Prayer and righteous action - work for justice - in the world.
* Discipleship is responsible action in faith.
* The church must exist for others; we need to revise our creeds and our worship.
I see Bonhoeffer travelling in a great circle in his thought about Jesus.
Bonhoeffer began with deep faith in the Incarnation, belief that God was in Jesus, the Christ.
As he focused more and more on the crucifixion, he realized that
God exists only in the suffering of Christ and in the lives and deaths of all who suffer.
And if God is in human suffering, as he was in Jesus' suffering, then God is incarnate in all of us.
So, if we wish to know God, we must be alive to the suffering around us and in the world.
We must therefore treat everyone as Christ, as God,
even if Christ and God are not clearly visible in them.
But at the same time, we must do justice and promote justice
and resist the evil that causes suffering.
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Bonhoeffer is back! He too is risen.
Bonhoeffer challenges us to reform our expression and practice of Christianity
into something more true and honest for today.
What will we do about that, and when?
