Under the heat of the Nazis, in Tegel prison, and surely under the cloud of having participated in a conspiracy to wipe out Hitler, and clearly how he responded in interrogations and concealed the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer wrote a short essay, or a fragment, called “What does it mean to tell the truth?” The essay is found in Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945 (DBW 16, pp. 601-608).

Is it ever right to tell a lie? When? Where? Or, what does it mean to tell the truth?

His concrete example opens up the issues:

A child is asked by a teacher if his father is a drunk. The child, if he or she says Yes (which is true), exposes an embarrassing family reality. If the child says No (which is also true and it means it is wrong for a teacher to invade into that territory), the child does not expose the privacy of the family. Relationship matters, Bonhoeffer says, but the deeper reality also matters.

Joseph Fletcher argued that Bonhoeffer provides an exceptional example of “situation ethics,” but most Bonhoeffer scholars think Fletcher got this one dead wrong. There’s much more at work in Bonhoeffer than situational ethics. [Read more...]

Kris and I will be going to Ireland in about a month and I have already picked the book I will read on the plane: Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
. This year I began both my 4th Yr Seminar classes and the Spring Jesus classes by reading portions of Bonhoeffer’s books: Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible
and Discipleship
. And just this week the scholarly edition of Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol.
arrived. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Life Together was ahead of his time in Bible reading. 

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together we are reminded again of the value of beginning our day as has the Church throughout the ages. Though speaking here of “day together” what he says applies to both groups and individuals, but it would be good for groups — Christian groups — to follow Bonhoeffer’s practice:

Many of us do not have a “life together” — most of us don’t in the sense of Bonhoeffer. This is why the use of the great prayer books of the Church can join us with others, the communion of the saints, as we say the prayers that the Church is saying. As we say them, we can hear the echo wave across the world hour by hour. (If you need an introduction to prayer books, check this out: Praying with the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today
.)

I consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together one of the most important theological works in the 20th Century. There is in this brief encounter with Bonhoeffer’s ideas a swelling gloom of Nazism, a palpable blur of what is to come, and an insight into how the Church is to conduct itself that makes the book a one-of-a-kind and I hope you own it, read it, and read it often.

Bonhoeffer combines profound insight into the psychology of how humans interact along with a constant holding of all things in the light of Scripture. One of his themes is selfish, emotional love vs. genuine spiritual love. The first excites itself out of what it can get while the second is rooted in our relationship to one another in Christ — it takes the relationship as it is to be in Christ and demands no more and expects no less.

Love is measured by its attributes: What do our relationships produce? Do they lead to truth, to freedom, and to fruits? What do you think of his ideas of the dangers of retreats?  

But these are his best words on the subject:

“Emotional love lives by uncontrolled and uncontrollable dark desires; spiritual love lives in the clear light of service ordered by the truth. Self-centered love results in human enslavement, bondage, rigidity; spiritual love creates the freedom of Christians under the Word. Emotional love breeds artificial hothouse flowers; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily under God’s open sky, according to God’s good pleasure in the rain and storm and sunshine” (44).

It is too easy to be tempted to construct church unity on the basis of our personal, missional, or theological unity instead of the spiritual unity that we have only in and through Jesus Christ. After a considerable time of actually living out the challenges of life together, Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together to record a theology of community.

How do these words speak to you today? Do you find the temptation to construct your own unity? What breaks unity for you?

Which brings into immediate concern the failings of our brother or the failings of our sister and how those failings tax our ability to dwell in unity. Bonhoeffer’s words root us in grace, they point out our feeble attempts to construct our own ground rules for unity, and they reveal that genuine unity is something that we receive and something in which we live by faith:

“Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the common life, is not the one who sins still a person with whom I too stand under the word of Christ? Will not another Christian’s sin be an occasion for me ever anew to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Therefore, will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me because it so thoroughly teaches me that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ? The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting” (36-37).

Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together in one month in 1938. It puts into written form the principles and practices that guided his time at Zingst and Finkenwalde, the underground seminaries of pious Lutherans who opposed Hitler’s ever-encroaching power in the Church and Germany.

It is one of the seeds expressing what led to his arrest, imprisonment at Tegel (the picture to the right is from Tegel), constant interrogations and eventually, sadly, to his hanging at Flossenburg, not long before the concentration camp was freed.

Bonhoeffer’s idea of seminary was that it was both the formation of mind and spirit/soul or spiritual life. So, he taught about discipleship and he taught about living in community, which he practiced in a more intense form with some of the students. That more intense form is found in Life Together.

What constitutes our fellowship and our unity?

This is no light question. Many are tempted today to think we are united by mission or by program or by goal or by vision; others think our common ideas or practices unify; yet others think of unity created by the spiritual gifts. Bonhoeffer digs deeper.

[Read more...]

I’ve been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s magisterial, moving Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works). It is, so I think, his best book. No need, however, to debate what is neither provable nor non-falsifiable.

What is worth discussing is his incredible set of statements about the expectations we bring to the church and that we expect of the church and how our expectations, when they encounter the realities, are dashed to the ground.

In our 4th Yr Seminar, we are reading 4 pages per day to begin class from this great book. Those who can read Bonhoeffer’s life (and death) and not grieve what we lost have not come to terms with this great man’s life and thought.

Here are my favorite lines, lines that follow on from his important claim that Christian fellowship is “through” and “in” Jesus Christ:

[Read more...]