Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who was one of the leaders of the Confessing Church in Germany in its opposition to Hitler and Nazism. Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazis, imprisoned, tortured, and executed on April 9, 1945, just weeks before the Allies liberated the prison in which he was incarcerated.
As a Christian martyr Bonhoeffer illuminates the cost and path of faithful discipleship. As a theologian writing during this trying and terrible time in human history, Bonhoeffer offered poignant insights into the nature of the Christian faith and the calling of the church. He did not write from the armchair of a comfortable university office. He hammered out his theology in the trenches of war, the Holocaust, prison, torture chambers, and the looming prospect of death.
Bonhoeffer anticipated many of the questions and issues currently facing the church. He especially saw a real danger in Christianity degenerating into a “redemption from cares, distress, fears, and longings, from sin and death, in a better world beyond the grave.” He called the church to follow Jesus as it embraced “this-worldliness.” The God who came in Christ, immersed the divine self into human existence, labored, sweated, agonized over life and death, associated with outcasts and marginals, and died an ignoble death on a public hill. It was this God who served as Bonhoeffer’s reference point.
Bonhoeffer defined “this-worldliness” as “living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That I think is faith; that is metanoia (the Greek New Testament word for conversion/repentance); and that is how one becomes a man (or woman) and a Christian.”
As individual Christians, as congregations, and as the universal Body of Christ, we are currently facing crises (or opportunities) whereby we must redefine our faith. Some people will resist this challenge and continue old patterns which are an affirmation of the status quo. Others will retreat into a false, irresponsible spirituality as they become “other-worldly.” And some will simply give up on living any faith in God which requires costly discipleship. I believe Bonhoeffer was correct in modeling his life and his concept of the church by the example of Jesus. We must allow God to send us back into this world in a radically new way as we immerse ourselves in the joys and sorrow, the liberation and suffering of this creation. And in doing so we must throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, trusting this One Jesus called Abba with our lives, our deaths, and our world. Too much is at stake for Christians to “play” church in a world of hunger, oppression, hatred, violence, and greed. We must become the Body of Christ and follow Jesus’ example of offering ourselves for the sake of a world to which God is stubbornly committed and deeply loves.
