It seems to me that something has passed out of the culture, changing it invisibly and absolutely. Suddenly it seems there are too few uses for words like humor, pleasure, and charm; courage, dignity, and graciousness; learnedness, fair-mindedness, openhandedness; loyalty, respect, and good faith. What bargain did we make? What could have appeared for a moment able to compensate us for the loss of these things? Perhaps I presume in saying they are lost. But if they were not, surely they would demand time and occasion — time because every one is an art or a discipline, and occasion because not one of them exists except as behavior. They are the graces of personal and private life, and they live in the cells of the great cultural reef, which takes its form and integrity from them, and will not survive them, if there is aptness in my metaphor.
Why does society exist, if not to accommodate our lives? Jefferson was a civilized man — clearly it was not his intention to send us on a fool’s errand. Why do we never imagine that the happiness he mentioned might include a long supper with our children, a long talk with a friend, a long evening with a book? Given time, and certain fading habits and expectations, we could have comforts and luxuries for which no one need be deprived. We could nurture our families, sustain our heritages, and, in the pregnant old phrase, enjoy ourselves. The self, that dear and brief acquaintance, we could entertain with a little of the ceremony it deserves.
It will be objected that we are constrained by the stern economics of widget manufacture. Perhaps. If that argument is otherwise persuasive, there is no real evidence that it is true. In either case, we should at least decide when such considerations should be determining. There is a terse, impatient remark in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” And why are we, by world and historical standards, and to the limit of our willingness to give meaning to the word — why are we free? To make hard laws out of doubtful theories, and impose them and obey them at any cost? Nothing good can come of this. Great harm has come of it already.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
THE GERMAN LUTHERAN pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer first put himself at risk in 1933 by resisting the so-called Aryan Clause, which prohibited Jewish Christians from serving as ministers in Protestant churches. In 1945 he was executed for “antiwar activity.” This included involvement in a scheme to help a group of Jews escape to Switzerland in 1941, and a meeting in Sweden in 1942 with the British bishop George Bell at which he tried to secure Allied support for the planned coup against Hitler now known as the Officers’ Plot. In the years between he helped to create and guide the Confessing Church, a movement of Protestant pastors and seminarians who left the official churches rather than accept their accommodation with Nazism.
Bonhoeffer was the son of a large, affectionate, wealthy, and influential family. He distinguished himself early, being accepted as a lecturer in theology at Berlin University in 1928, at the age of twenty-two. From the first, his lectures attracted students who shared his religious and political views. The divisions in the churches would also have the effect of surrounding him with committed and like-minded people, “the brothers” as he called them, who seem to have answered fairly well to the exalted vision of the church in the world which was always at the center of his theology. In some degree they must have inspired it, having accepted discipleship at such cost. Many of them would be arrested and imprisoned, or be drafted and die in combat.
Bonhoeffer’s family were scholars, scientists, artists, and military officers. His own powerful attraction to “the church” — he might be said always to have used the term in a special sense — is apparent in his earliest writing, and also in his decision to be a pastor rather than an academic. He reacted to the introduction of racial doctrine into the polity of the Protestant churches as heresy and led a revolt against it based on the belief that the so-called German Christians had ceased to be the true church. He was active in European ecumenical circles, with the intention of informing the world about the struggle in Germany and of legitimizing and supporting the dissenters.
By “the church” Bonhoeffer means Christ in this world, not as influence or loyalty but as active presence, not as one consideration or motive but as the one source and principle of life of those who constitute the church. This was the resistance position prepared by the formidable work of the Calvinist theologian Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer’s teacher and mentor and another early leader of the opposition to Nazism. Barth wrote the Barmen Declaration, which rejected the influence in the church of race nationalism together with all other “events and powers, forms and truths” on the grounds that “Jesus Christ, as He is attested to in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we have to hear and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”
To make exclusive claim to the authority of Christ is the oldest temptation of Christianity, and full of difficulties no matter how sound the rationale behind it or how manifest its rightness in any particular instance. In his theology — that is, in thought and practice — Bonhoeffer corrects against these difficulties with a very strong bias toward grace. Falseness and error and even extremest viciousness are, for him, utterly within the reach of God’s compassion, which is infinite. In Bonhoeffer’s understanding, the otherness of God is precisely this boundless compassion. The failure of the church and the evil of the world are revealed in their perfect difference from this force of forgiveness, which they cannot weary or diminish or evade. Bonhoeffer’s protest, after all, was against exclusivism in the official church, and the church of his contemplation is utterly broad, indefinite in its boundaries. But the basis of his ethics is that Christ wills that the weak and persecuted should be rescued, and he must be obeyed; that Christ is present in the weak and the persecuted, and he must be honored. Bonhoeffer’s magnanimity and his inclusiveness — which governed his life and cost him his life — are profoundly Christ-centered. Characteristically, he wrote, “An expulsion of the Jews from the West must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”
Bonhoeffer’s life and his thought inform each other deeply. To say this is to be reminded of the strangeness of the fact that this is not ordinarily true. Questions are raised about the consistency of his theology, with the implication that his political activity and his death give his writing a prominence it might not have enjoyed on its own merits. But clearly his experience is the subject of his theology. It is a study of the obedience he himself attempted, together with his students, colleagues, and friends. In 1932 he wrote, “[T]he primary confession of the Christian before the world is the deed that interprets itself.” An obedient act owes nothing to the logic or the expectations of the world as it is, but is affirmed in the fact of revealing the redeemed world. Action is revelation.
As a good Lutheran, Bonhoeffer would object on theological grounds to the suggestion that he earned the grace that seems so manifest in both his life and his writing, but the evidence of discipline, of rigorous reflection, is everywhere, most present in his most personal letters, those written nearest his death. Considering the circumstances of his life, so adversarial and then so besieged, and considering what was taking place in Germany and Europe, it is amazing how little notice he gives to sin or evil, how often he expresses gratitude. The church is described, but not its limits. Grace is described, but not its absence. He will not cease to love the world, or any part of it: “When the totality of history should stand before God, there Christ stands.”