BONHOEFFER: A PERSON FOR OUR TIMES (post 5)

Bonhoeffer's unique spiritual formation that shaped him to resist the Nazis

This is the 5^th and last post on ‘Fitch’s Provocations’ addressing Bonhoeffer’s theology for our times (although I might do a recap/summary post after this one).

In previous posts I examined the role of Jesus (Christology), the role of creation and the role of the church (ecclesiology) in Bonhoeffer’s theology of culture engagement (those posts are found HERE, HERE and HERE). I examined the way Bonhoeffer’s Christian witness/character was formed by his theology of “who Jesus is,” “creation” and God’s purpose for the church. Bonhoeffer is perhaps the ultimate exemplar for seeing how these beliefs, and the practices that come from them, can shape a life for witness in the midst of Nazi ideology. The challenge of these posts is to examine our own theology and how it shapes our witness for God’s justice in the current culture’s regimes of political ideologies.

I’m drawing almost entirely from Mark Thiessen Nation’s (heretofore referred to as MTN) book Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis (pages numbers in parentheses) which traces Bonhoeffer’s theology alongside the events of his life.

Today’s post examines Bonhoeffer’s personal piety, his spiritual formation and how it shaped his steady yet relentless witness and courage in the face of Nazis. It is one of the most impressive things about Bonhoeffer’s life. And yet it was neither an evangelical-ish personal piety as perhaps Metaxas painted it to be (in his biography of Bonhoeffer), nor a more progressive “Universal Christ” type spiritual formation (he really was a Barthian in the midst of German liberalism, even in his prayer life). His piety centered him in the God revealed in a the enfleshed Jesus, God incarnate, the Jesus who suffered and died, the risen Christ who reigns, and an eschatology confident in this Jesus as Lord who shall bring all things to His purposes. Bonhoeffer’s piety dwelled deep in the presence of the living Christ not only personally, but present and at work in a community, inter-relationally in all things, to save the world from Nazi’s.

Let’s explore this a little bit.

Jesus Centered

In the second chapter of ‘Discipleship’, entitled the “Call to Discipleship,” Bonhoeffer says “Jesus calls to discipleship, not as a teacher and a role model, but as the Christ, the Son of God.” He says discipleship is “nothing other than being bound to Jesus Christ alone. This means completely breaking through anything pre-programmed, idealistic, or legalistic. No other content is possible because Jesus is the only content.” (MTN p. 97). It’s a stunning statement of Bonhoeffer’s refusal to allow Jesus to become merely a moral principal to be followed, an exemplar of God consciousness to be inspired by, a legalistic program to commit oneself to, or even a role model to be emulated. For Bonhoeffer, Jesus is God, the 2nd person of the Trinity. His life on earth reveals who God is, how God works, God’s love and God’s power. It is living in relation to Jesus, under the Lordship of this Jesus, in communion with this Jesus, that grounds Bonhoeffer to see Nazism for what it is, have the strength to resist it, and do so with courage, relentlessness and grace.

Many people reacting to the individualized, over-personalized, and exclusivized Jesus of evangelical fundamentalism, opt for a Christ who is a universal principle of divine love, a universal presence in all of creation. This presence is not limited to a single religion or individual but is a force that can be found in all things. It’s an understandable reaction.

But Bonhoeffer had seen how a universal Christ moral experience had worked in the German protestant church of his time. This Jesus of German Protestantism, extracted from his particularity, his Jewishness, was absorbed into a Deutsche Volk morality. As Barth had seen when his liberal protestant teachers signed on to a “Manifesto” supporting Germany’s role in World War One, so Bonhoeffer had seen with the liberal protestant church of Germany being absorbed into the Nazi German Volk ideology of his time. They had lost the Jesus of Nazareth in exchange for a Christ principle indistinguishable from the culture.

And so Bonhoeffer, following Barth, would have none of it. He worshiped the Jesus of Nazareth who died and rose, studied the Sermon on the Mount of this Jesus, prayed to this Jesus, trusted this Jesus, followed this Jesus, and this Jesus firmly grounded Bonhoeffer in a resistance to the fear-mongering, dehumanizing violence of Hitler’s Germany.

Bonhoeffer lived a spiritual formation where one is absorbed into Christ, His Lordship, His purposes for the world. In Bonhoeffer’s ‘Ethics,’ in a section titled ‘Ethics as Formation,’ he describes this formation as going beyond (in MTN’s words) “embracing some teachings or principles derived from Jesus.” Bonhoeffer says, “formation occurs only by being drawn into the form of Christ.” This is not a matter of “striving … ‘to become like Jesus.’ Rather formation into Christ happens “as the form of Jesus Christ himself so works on us that it molds us, conforming our forms to Christ’s own (Gal 4:9). Christ remains the only one who forms.” (MTN 124)

It is striking how Bonhoeffer’s piety equally resists an evangelical cognitive spiritual formation focused on applying Jesus to our lives, as well as a contemplative spiritual formation that melds Jesus into a universal consciousness of goodness and creation. These two pathways may overlap with Bonhoeffer’s formation, but his path begins and ends centered in Jesus in all his particularity.

Today, as we look around at the various versions of Christian faith in America that are following a political dictator as if he were the chosen one, we see a Jesus extracted from his Jewishness, his particularity, and aligned with a nationalist dictator. Bonhoeffer will have none of it. Instead Bonhoeffer’s life challenges us to ground our lives and our churches in Jesus of Nazareth, in the truth, love, and the power of God revealed and unleashed in Jesus to undermine evil, in the one who sits at the right hand ruling over all things in His strange and mysterious ways. In this Jesus alone shall we resist the powers of rogue empires who wish to claim Jesus is on their side.

In Community

Bonhoeffer believed this kind of formation was only possible within the depths of human community. I am sure Bonhoeffer took many a retreat into nature to be alone, think, reflect and pray. But for Bonhoeffer, formation of one’s self was only possible in a community, where doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and worship are taken seriously. This conviction led him to start and lead the Finkenwalde community. For Bonhoeffer, this kind of formation was the only way to train pastors for resistance to Hitler (MTN 111). And the fruits of this community, he said, would be tested when each Christian lives “many hours of being alone in an unchristian environment. These are the times of testing, … (when the question will be answered) has the community served to make individuals free, strong and mature, or has it made them insecure and dependent?” (MTN 113, italics mine).

Bonhoeffer resists a metaphysical god, “a distant, transcendent God” that allows Christians “to ignore the reality of God in our midst.” (144) It is in the concrete encounter with others where the presence of Jesus is encountered. And so we cannot dismiss any relationships. We must seek Jesus in each relationship. It is here where we shall meet this Jesus at work by the Spirit.

In a letter written in April of 1944, MTN records how Bonhoeffer chides the religious people who only speak of the need for God at the end of their strength, in moments of desperation, “at the boundaries” of their lives, moments of personal crisis such as death. Bonhoeffer says “I’d like to speak of God not at the boundaries but in the center… It is in the midst of day to day relationships that we experience God … Jesus’s ‘being-for-others’ is the experience of transcendence.” Bonhoeffer says. Our relationship to God is found “in ‘being there for others,’ through participation in the being of Jesus.” (144)

My own book ‘Faithful Presence’ resonates much with this part of Bonhoeffer. Introspection has its place in the Christian life, but isolated unto itself, it can lead to self-focus, self-doubt, and self-indulgence. And so we can become seekers of inward experience which on its own can collapse in its own subjectivity. But the practices of Jesus that bring us into connection with real persons, reconciling, being with, eating with, praying with, listening and discerning with, anointing healing oil with, proclaiming Jesus Lord in our midst, etc., etc., make spaces for God in Christ to manifest Himself and His work in our lives, and the social realities we participate in. It is this social nature of Christian spiritual formation which leads us to justice, but often gets lost if we don’t follow the way of Bonhoeffer’s piety – being with others.

This is why Bonhoeffer starts with Finkenwalde. This is why he insists the church must be the starting point for how Jesus shall resist and disrupt the evil powers of the world. To quote Bonhoeffer from his Ethics, “The starting point of Christian ethics is the body of Christ … the formation of the church according to the form of Christ. … The church’s concern is not religion, but the form of Christ and its taking form among a band of people.” (MTN 124)

Bonhoeffer for Today

Bonhoeffer’s life of piety challenges every Christian living in the midst of today’s ideological Christianities. As many of us watch today’s evangelical church align (a large part of it at least) with a dictator, collapsing its ethic into a nefarious Nationalism, being absorbed into unspeakably cruel ideologies, we are tempted to walk away from the church disgusted. Go our own way, seek spiritual formation via other ways, react against the judgmental tribalist churches and seek the universal spirit of God that judges no one. Bonhoeffer does the opposite. Bonhoeffer doubles down on the church in the midst of the German Christian wreckage, and plants a community to seek Christ and his justice, and be true church. Bonhoeffer finds strength only in the living Christ, the Nazarene, who lived, died, rose from the dead, and sits at the right hand.

And so it was, after leading a church service at Schonberg prison camp, that one of the prison guards came to Bonhoeffer and said “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready and come with us.” He knew that he was being taken for his execution. As he was leaving, “he asked Payne Best to remember him to (his long time friend, George Bell) bishop of Chichester if he could ever reach his home. (Tell him) ‘this is the end – for me the beginning of life.” (MTN 147)

There is much to learn in the account of Bonhoeffer’s courage in the face of his own death, as he led his other cell mates into knowing the presence of Jesus in and through all things. His very character, in the midst of the hell of a prison camp, speaks to an unshakable trust and knowledge of Jesus as the Lord of all things, in and through all things, even unto death. It is the only way to explain how he lived in the face of death, persecution, loss of material sustenance. It is the same fearlessness Christians need today. In the words of his cell mate at Buchenwalde, “Bonhoeffer was all humility and sweetness, he always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive… He was one of the very few men I have ever met to whom God was real and ever close to him.” (MTN 147)

Many thanks to Mark Thiessen Nation for writing this book. It is one of the best (if not the best) on Bonhoeffer for these times. After reading it, I’m convinced if there’d been a few thousand more Bonhoeffers as pastors and a few thousand more Finkenwaldes (the community Bonhoeffer planted) in Germany in the thirties, Hitler never would have happened.? May we learn from Bonhoeffer how to live in similar times today. May we plant little Finkenwaldes in our neighborhoods. May we enter the spaces of injustice peacefully, and put a wrench in the machinery of wickedness. May the church rise up anew, as the people of the living Christ, disrupting the powers of evil, and making way for the healing and the cultural transformation of the Lord. Before it is too late.

I’ll have one more post, just a riff on summarizing what I learned in the 5 posts. If you’re interested please subscribe. I try write 2 to 3 times a month when schedule allows.