Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

How could the “church of Luther,” that great teacher of the gospel, have ever come to such a place? The answer is that the true gospel, summed up by Bonhoeffer as costly grace, had been lost. On the one hand, the church had become marked by formalism. That meant going to church and hearing that God just loves and forgives everyone, so it doesn’t really matter much how you live. Bonhoeffer called this cheap grace. On the other hand, there was legalism, or salvation by law and good works. Legalism meant that God loves you because you have pulled yourself together and are trying to live a good, disciplined life.

Timothy Keller wrote this

The concept of cheap grace that Dietrich would later make so famous might have had its origins in his mother; perhaps not the term, but the idea behind it, that faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.

Before Luther’s Bible, there was no unified German language.

However, it might be better for a layperson to be completely silent and to leave everything to the artists, because the current art historians really are the worst guides.

Bonnie free quot

he saw a vivid illustration of the church’s transcendence of race and national identity.

What is the church? It was the question he would attack in his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, and in his post-doctoral work, Act and Being.

Here in Rome it was all part of some continuum. For him, it was difficult to be closed to a church that somehow partook of the splendor of classical antiquity, that seemed to see the best in it and even to redeem some of it. The Lutheran and Protestant traditions were less connected to the great classical past and could therefore veer toward the heresies of Gnostic dualism, of denial of the body and of the goodness of this world.

It is hard to overestimate23 the importance of the Catholic church’s value for European culture and for the whole world. It Christianized and civilized barbaric peoples and for a long time was the only guardian of science and art.

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Barth was Swiss by birth and was almost certainly the most important theologian of the century; many would say of the last five centuries.

For refusing to swear his allegiance to Hitler, Barth would be kicked out of Germany in 1934, and he would become the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, in which the Confessing Church trumpeted its rejection of the Nazis’ attempts to bring their philosophy into the German church.

In his essay for Seeberg’s seminar, Bonhoeffer expressed the Barthian idea that in order to know anything at all about God, one had to rely on revelation from God. In other words, God could speak into this world, but man could not reach out of this world to examine God.

Man could not earn his way up to heaven, but God could reach down and graciously lift man toward him.

Sanctorum Communio: A Dogmatic Inquiry into the Sociology of the Church.

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

His words presaged what he would write to his fiancée from his prison cell years later: “Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth.

But in a letter to Rössler, Bonhoeffer pushed the idea further: I have long thought24 that sermons had a center that, if you hit it, would move anyone or confront them with a decision. I no longer believe that. First of all, a sermon can never grasp the center, but can only itself be grasped by it, by Christ. And then Christ becomes flesh as much in the word of the pietists as in that of the clerics or of the religious socialists, and these empirical connections actually pose difficulties for preaching that are absolute, not merely relative.

Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ has not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me.

Bonhoeffer

the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ.

He differentiated between Christianity as a religion like all the others—which attempt but fail to make an ethical way for man to climb to heaven of his own accord—and following Christ, who demands everything, including our very lives.

Lasserre got Bonhoeffer thinking along lines that would lead him to become involved in the ecumenical movement: “Do we believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, or do we believe in the eternal mission of France? One can’t be a Christian and a nationalist at the same time.”

In 1933, when they came to power, the Nazis burned copies of Remarque’s book and spread the canard that Remarque was a Jew whose real surname was Kramer—Remark spelled backward.

The Cost of Discipleship.*

I still believe that the spiritual songs of the southern negroes represent some of the greatest artistic achievements in America.

Bonhoeffer

But what exactly did Bonhoeffer see, and whence this urgency to communicate what he saw? He seemed to want to warn everyone to wake up and stop playing church.

Jesus did not only communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived.

The good leader serves others and leads others to maturity.

Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.

It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions of a state; at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil.

Grace may not be proclaimed to anyone who does not recognize or distinguish or desire it.

Bonhoeffer

The preaching of grace can only be protected by the preaching of repentance.

Bonhoeffer

If human beings have passed on to loved ones and to many the blessing they have themselves received, then they have surely fulfilled the most important thing in life; then they have surely themselves become persons happy in God and have made others happy in God.

Bonhoeffer

He saw it as an act of faith in God to step out in freedom and not to cringe from future possibilities.

To live in fear and guilt was to be “religious” in the pejorative sense that Bonhoeffer so often talked and preached about.

this: “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

Bonhoeffer

Stifter once said32, “Pain is a holy angel, who shows treasures to men which otherwise remain forever hidden; through him men have become greater than through all joys of the world.”