Jesus calls not to a new religion but to life

“I have come that you might have life.”
John 10:1-10

“Jesus Christ is life itself.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
DBWE 6:250

Little did I know when I first read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison [(LPP)] fifty years ago that one day I would become the editor of the latest edition! But for the past five years I have been busy doing precisely that (also a few other things!) here at Volmoed. Now the task is complete and I am delighted that today we can share in celebrating this brand new edition of the book and with it Bonhoeffer’s remarkable legacy. Bonhoeffer made it clear in his letters from prison that he was not interested in becoming a saint, only in becoming a better Christian and human being, a person of faith. But he did become a martyr, and his life and thought have made a huge impact on the lives of many others and the Christian church worldwide. So we thank God for that legacy today.

Bonhoeffer was only 39 years old when he was murdered by the Gestapo on the orders of Adolf Hitler a few weeks before the end of the Second World War. Yet his collected works number 16 volumes, some of them more than seven hundred pages long. Three of his books have become Christian classics. His book Discipleship, an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, has been an inspiration to many, as has Life Together, a book on Christian community. But perhaps the best known of all is his Letters and Papers from Prison, a book he did not intend to write and, of course, never saw published. Comprised of all the surviving letters, papers and poems that he wrote during his imprisonment in Berlin, as well as letters written to him, it was compiled and edited by his close friend Eberhard Bethge after the war. The first German edition appeared in 1951 as a slender paperback of less than 200 pages, and it was translated into English two years later. I first read it in 1960, and recall how it challenged my thinking and my life at the time, and has done ever since then. In 1971 Bethge edited a new, revised and enlarged edition which became even more widely known and read, and my copy, signed by Bethge when he visited us in Johannesburg in 1973, has been a constant companion ever since.

In 1981 Bethge and his German colleagues decided that the time had come to revise and re-issue all of Bonhoeffer’s works in a new critical edition comprising sixteen volumes. This prompted some of us to meet together in Chicago a few years later to discuss the translation of these 16 volumes into English. I was asked to edit volume 3 entitled Creation and Fall which was published in 1997. I breathed a sigh of relief when that was done and thought that was the end of my responsibilities. But then in 2005 I was asked to edit the new edition of Letters and Papers from Prison, volume 8 in the series. This was a far more daunting task requiring the assistance of seven translators and running to 750 pages! By the beginning of this year the task was done and I breathed an ever bigger sigh of relief. But it was an amazing privilege and a great experience to have done the task, and done it here at Volmoed even though you weren’t always too sure about what I was up to!

I vividly recall how the tears welled up in my eyes as I worked through the last of the letters Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents and those they wrote in return, never to be received. I knew full well how the story would end. How his parents Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer would not only lose Dietrich, but also their son Klaus and sons-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher, all murdered on Hitler’s orders shortly before the end of the war. So LPP is no ordinary compilation of letters and papers or theological text. It is an intensely human record of the life of the extended Bonhoeffer family during the final eighteen months of the Third Reich when Berlin was subjected to daily Allied bombing and increasingly threatened by the advancing Russian army. While some members were incarcerated, interrogated and tortured, others struggled to cope with daily life, celebrate family events in the absence of loved ones, live in hope amidst the increasingly dire circumstances of the times – and write thoughtful letters about matters both ordinary and extraordinary. And scattered throughout are passages in which Bonhoeffer shares his insights into his experience as a prisoner, his struggles and fears, his concerns and hopes, not least about his ardent wish to be released so that he could marry his young fiancé, Maria, and continue his close friendship with his friend Bethge. But then all of sudden and quite unexpectedly, he begins to share with Bethge some fresh and even radical theological thoughts, as he pondered fundamental questions which, at some time or another, we all ask:

What does it mean to believe in God? Who is Jesus Christ actually for us today? Do we have to be “religious” in order to be Christian? What is the future of Christianity in the modern world? As he pondered such questions, daily reflecting on Scripture and his own experience in prison, so he helps us to think about them more deeply in relation to our own experience. We cannot explore all of his responses now. But at the heart of his faith and life was the conviction that in Jesus Christ we become more truly human and have life in its fullness. “Being a Christian,” he writes to Bethge, “does not mean being religious in a certain way, making oneself into something or other…according to some method or other. Instead it means being human, not a certain type of human being, but the human being Christ creates in us.” And then he adds: “It is not a religious act that makes someone a Christian, but rather sharing in God’s suffering” as we participate in the life of Christ in the world. (DBWE 8 480)

Perhaps nowhere does Bonhoeffer express this conviction more than in the poems he wrote in which he speaks to us so profoundly from his own experience of suffering and hope. Isobel, who has shared much of my journey with LPP, has more recently discovered Bonhoeffer’s poetry. So I have asked her to read one of the poems, not in the new translation, but her own version of the poem, and as she does so I invite you to think about it in terms of your own experience and faith as an act of meditation and prayer.

Blessing and Disaster

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his prison cell, mused on the fact that an event can bring both fortune and calamity: bombs falling on Berlin is a calamity, but also a blessing, because they bring nearer the end of Nazi rule. For an individual, for example, the death of an abusive father can be both a disaster and a blessing. Bonhoeffer expressed these thoughts in a poem, “Gluck und Ungluck”. There are a number of alternative words in English to translate this. In my version I use blessing and disaster. I wrote it a few weeks after Steve died earlier this year.

Blessing and disaster
overwhelm us suddenly.
Their first strike,
like the first touch of fire and ice
is hard to distinguish –
as they burn alike.

Blessing and disaster:
brilliant and menacing,
like a meteor from space,
tracing its path above us;
till it strikes –
to leave us speechless
among the shattered ruins
of our ordinary lives.

Blessing and disaster,
majestic and mighty,
compelling and destroying;
make their entry,
invited or uninvited,
into broken people’s lives,
wrapping around them a cloak
of transfiguring solemnity.

Blessing has its horrors:
disaster its sweetness.
Both seem to fall from eternity;
both powerful, both terrible;
can we distinguish between them?

People come running from every direction
to gaze at the awesome sight,
where powers from beyond our earth
have entangled us in a drama
of both blessing and disaster –
they gaze - half envious, half horrified.

For what is blessing?
What is disaster?
Only time will tell them apart.
When the thrilling, memorable event
drags on into tedious grueling toil,
and disaster reveals its true colours,
then most of us turn away,
weary, without hope,
as disaster’s repercussions
relentlessly persist.

But from beginning to end
is the time for faithfulness:
faithfulness,
mothers and lovers,
friends and brothers
can transform disaster
by gently enfolding it
in love’s eternal radiance.

(John W. de Gruchy is Emeritus Professor of Christian Studies, University of Cape Town and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. This is a weekly meditation given at the Eucharist service at Volmoed Christian Community Centre, Hermanus.)