Book of Moses Essays #56: Moses Sees the Garden of Eden (Moses 3): The Naming of Animals, Angels, Adam, and Eve (Moses 3:19\u201320, 23; 4:26)<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since I\u2019m already extracting them for my own notes, I\u2019m going to share a few passages\u00a0 here (in my rough translations) that I think some of you might find of interest.\u00a0 They come from\u00a0Christiane Tietz, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologe im Widerstand<\/em> (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2013), a book that I bought during a visit to the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar, a few years back.\u00a0 (I had been delivering a paper at a conference hosted by the University of Erfurt, which is also not too far distant.)\u00a0 As the title suggests, the book is about the heroic Protestant theologian, pastor, and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), who had been imprisoned for a time at Buchenwald because of his role in the famous 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that was carried out by Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators.\u00a0 (Sometimes not quite accurately called Unternehmen\u00a0Walk\u00fcre<\/em> or \u201cOperation Valkyrie,\u201d this was the same plot that implicated Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and led to his arrest and forced suicide.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenb\u00fcrg just twenty-one days before the death of Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a letter written in English to the eminent American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1939, Bonhoeffer reflected on the situation confronting Christians in his homeland:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Christians in Germany will stand before the terrible alternative of either desiring the defeat of their nation, so that Christian civilization can survive or else desiring the victory of their nation, which will destroy our civilization.\u00a0 I know which of these I must choose, but I cannot make this choice . . . in safety.<\/strong>\u00a0 (88, translated into English from Christiane Tietz\u2019s translation of the original English into German; I wonder how close I\u2019ve come to the original)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
A terrible choice, and he paid for his decision with his life.\u00a0 But, now, on to some other passages:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not self-evident for a Christian that he gets to live among Christians.\u201d\u00a0 For, actually, \u201cthe Christian [belongs] not in the isolation of a cloistered life but in the midst of his enemies.\u00a0 That is where he has his assignment, his work.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong> (80, citing Gemeinsames Leben<\/em> [which is, as I recall, typically rendered in English as Life in Community<\/em>]<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I think that Latter-day Saints and, indeed Christians and theists more generally, need to come to grips with the fact that we live in a society that no longer gives even lip-service to traditional religious beliefs or loyalties.\u00a0 When I was a boy, there was still a sort of cultural deference to a broadly Judeo-Christian civil religion.\u00a0 But no longer.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Christian community takes its life from the intercession of its members for each other, or else it dies.\u00a0 No matter how many challenges he presents to me, I cannot any longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray.\u00a0 His appareance, which may have been alien and even unendurable to me, transforms itself in my intercessory prayer into the countenance of the brother for whom Christ died, into the countenance of a brother who has been blessed with grace.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0(82, citing Gemeinsames Leben<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is in confession that the breakthrough to community occurs.\u00a0 Sin wants to be alone with each human individual.\u00a0 It removes him from community.\u00a0 The more solitary a person becomes, the more destructive the hold that sin will have over him, and the more deeply entangled he is in it, the more hopeless is the solitude.\u00a0 Sin wants to remain unrecognized.\u00a0 It avoids the light.\u00a0 In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the complete being of a person.<\/strong>\u00a0 (81, citing Gemeinsames Leben<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the same time, Bonhoeffer emphasizes that \u201cWhoever cannot be alone should beware of community.\u201d and the proposition is also valid, in his view, when turned around:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nEveryone, in and of himself, has profound depths and dangers.\u00a0 Whoever wants to have community without solitude falls into the emptiness of words and feelings.\u00a0 But whoever wants to have solitude without community perishes in the abyss of vanity, infatuation with himself, and despair.<\/strong>\u00a0 (82, citing Gemeinsames Leben<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I like this passage, which comes from Bonhoeffer himself (from Brautbriefe 38, one of the letters that he wrote from prison to his fianc\u00e9e, Maria von Wedemeyer:<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I fear that Christians who only dare to stand with one leg on the earth also stand with only one leg in heaven.<\/strong>\u00a0 (cited on 116)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t like this one, which actually comes not from Bonhoeffer but, rather, from the author of the book, Christiane Tietz, who is a professor of systematic theology at the Universit\u00e4t Mainz, in Germany:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
We can no longer join in certain of Bonhoeffer\u2019s views today.\u00a0 Among those . . . are his conservative political sensibility [Politikverst\u00e4ndnis<\/em>] and his traditional image of the family.<\/strong> (131)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not certain exactly what Dr. Tietz has in mind when she writes of a \u201ctraditionelles Familienbild,\u201d but I\u2019m reasonably confident that she would apply that description to my own views.\u00a0 And I certainly have a \u201cconservative political sensibility.\u201d\u00a0 I realize, of course, that my views are out of vogue.\u00a0 But I\u2019m not sure that they\u2019ve been refuted or that other views have been demonstrated to be superior.\u00a0 Time will tell whether current experiments \u2014 among other things, with issues of gender and sexuality \u2014 are actually sustainable, let alone beneficial for overall human flourishing.\u00a0 But I find myself wondering whether, despite the defeat of Hitler, Nazism, and the Third Reich, \u201cChristian civilization\u201d hasn\u2019t been destroyed nonetheless.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The orientation toward Christ was always accompanied, in Bonhoeffer\u2019s case, by the conviction that Christian community \u2014 that is, the church \u2014 is necessary for a Christian life.\u00a0 One cannot be a Christian on one\u2019s own, but only together with others.\u00a0 This insight has not always been honored in Protestantism over recent decades.\u00a0 In fact, one has often heard, it is the particular mark of being an Evangelical Christian \u2014 as distinct from Catholic Christianity \u2014 that one can be faithful without the church.<\/strong>\u00a0 (132)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Richmond, Virginia<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Newly posted today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: \u00a0 Book of Moses Essays #56: Moses Sees the Garden of Eden (Moses 3): The Naming of Animals, Angels, Adam, and Eve (Moses 3:19\u201320, 23; 4:26) \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Since I\u2019m already extracting them for my own notes, I\u2019m going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13795,2181,870,2427,23249,23252,23246,13798,15075,15078,2253,3406,23243,23240,3676,23237,13810,3685,23234],"class_list":["post-91280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bonhoeffer","tag-christian","tag-christianity","tag-community","tag-deutsch","tag-deutsche","tag-deutschland","tag-dietrich-bonhoeffer","tag-gemeinsames-leben","tag-gemeinschaft","tag-german","tag-germany","tag-life-in-community","tag-national-socialism","tag-nazi","tag-nazionalsozialismus","tag-nazis","tag-nazism","tag-third-reich"],"yoast_head":"\n
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