The Unfinished Hero

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And during the few moments that we have left,

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we want to talk right down to Earth,

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in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

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♪ Look in my eyes, what can you see? ♪

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♪ Compton personality, everything ♪

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♪ I know you're a girl, I know your dreams ♪

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♪ I know everything you want to be ♪

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♪ Oh, I am a copter, I'm so mad ♪

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Hello, everyone. This is Trip and we are back for the eighth and final episode of the Rise of Bonhoeffer.

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It's been quite a journey, Jeff. Very happy to get to do this with you.

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It has been a journey, and now we are in Advent, which is another journey of its all.

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And so we come to this moment of waiting and anticipation for the end of Bonhoeffer's life.

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And I hope that as we've gone through this journey, we have been able to show that Bonhoeffer scholars who care and love Bonhoeffer have not all been wrong.

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And that in the last 50 years, there has been Bonhoeffer scholarship that may in fact have gotten him exactly right.

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As we journey into Bonhoeffer's prison writings, we'll obviously catch these moments of discontinuity.

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Like how is a guy who ran an underground seminary talking about religionless Christianity?

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What in the world does a world come of age and non-religious language look like?

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And for many people familiar with the language in discipleship and life together, this just seems a key change, a dramatic shift.

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But as so many of the Bonhoeffer scholars are going to help us see, there are threads of continuity, a kind of continuity that you see and someone who's wrestling with the reality of a failed state, a failed church.

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And then in prison looking at the world, modernity is rendered and going, "What in the world does faith?"

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And the one seen in the Christ look like in these times, in the face of such death.

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And as those threads of continuity that have inspired so many different people of faith and theologians going forward.

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I think one of the most interesting aspects of that would be the fact that in these prison writings we're going to find not just the continuity, but the continuity going off in a direction that could not have been necessarily anticipated.

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And we will have to ask the question of the prison theology is in fact due to Bonhoeffer's being kept up in a cage and that he is writing from his own projections.

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Or if there is something in his prison writing that speak to the rumors of glory, that there is something there from the beyond that he is struggling with, wrestling with, and offers us possibly a window into something deeper and more profound than many of us live into.

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So with that we can start walking through the events that lead Bonhoeffer to where he is. He's taken prisoner in April of 1943. He's 37 years old.

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In the following year other Bonhoeffer relations would be arrested. There were some that are arrested on the day that he was, but others would be arrested as brother Claus, his sister Christine Hanswanda Nyani's wife, his brother in law, Rudiger Schleichter, and his best friend Everhard Betge.

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And then the first of them are arrested. The initial charges for Bonhoeffer had nothing to do with the conspiracy, but they were for avoiding the draft and for subversion by working with the confessing church.

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There's no mention of operation seven. There's no mention of assassination attempts in these initial charges.

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And for a long time Bonhoeffer felt like he would be let go since they had nothing on him.

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He was a prison prison and he was kept in solitary confinement, but he was soon released from solitary assigned to a little bit bigger cell where he would spend the next 18 months.

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He managed to keep up an early stream of writing into a close to the very end of his imprisonment when he was moved to a series of other prisons.

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And he was also able to find time to read and study uninterrupted by the demands of daily life, which is what generates some of the most profound comments and statements that he has in the prison theology.

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It appears not just to his family, but to Everhard Betge, or collected and published those constitute that spiritual classic that became known as letters and papers from prison.

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But as Vicki Arnett tells us, this prison experience was in its own way frightening, especially when he gets moved to the Gestapo prison after the assassination attempt of July the 20th, 1944.

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That initial period of imprisonment from April 1945 until the summer of 1944 is where he has some freedom where there's a prison guard that is sympathetic to him and he's secretly picking letters in and out.

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And the family can see him. It's still prison. There are parrots. There are people in that prison who are fearful for the lives.

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And he's worried about his family members. One of the key things during that period is especially in terms of Hans van den Aute who is also in prison.

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What's going to happen to him? Because he was really mastermind of things. That changes after those jails, coup attempt on July 20, 1924, not immediately.

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But what happens in the weeks after that is people who are interrogated begin to crack. It becomes very clear that the entire Bonhoeffer family in some way has been involved in this.

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And that's when Carl Sponhoeffer had read your slide or arrested in September. And that's the point which they moved Bonhoeffer to the Gestapo prison.

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And that's also the point which the pressures on Hans van den Aute get interrogations really intensify. And I was sitting in interrogations of Bonhoeffer.

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So from that period until early 1945 is the really tough period. That's where Bonhoeffer briefed out of the courtyard until Joseph Mueller that they threatened to do something to Maria.

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Then he's afraid, maybe he won't be having the family members. The family still thinks he's going to get out because they just don't think there's enough of a case against him and they have mothers.

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Even then, even in the first period of the table where he's not under the worst circumstances.

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It's the person he's afraid, he's alone, he doesn't know what's going to happen. It's a horrible regime, he's aware of what's going on. That's not picnic.

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So I think reading the prison letters was all that in mind. He's also fearful of what's going to happen to other members of the family, especially Maria.

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Vicki draws our attention to the way in which the Nazi pressure campaign on so many potential conspirators wasn't just about them and their own well-being, but about their friends and their family.

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She brings up the kind of threats were being implied about his fiance Maria just knowing how much more intimately involved his family was, this community of conspirators.

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His own well-being was not the front of his own mind, but those he loves. Put yourself in the position of someone who's been moved from his prison to the Gestapo prison to the state security apparatus. His investigations, his interrogations now are intensifying.

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And then they bring up your fiance Maria and they say, if you don't give us what we want or you don't tell us what we want, we're going to punish Maria.

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On your behalf the reality is that any of us at that point would be so attempted as was bonhoeffer well this does occur later on in his interrogations when he gets to the Gestapo prison, but earlier he is exploring what theology means what Jesus Christ means what a lifetime of theology means in the midst of this dark dark shadow under which he's living.

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And so in a letter dated on April the 30th of 1944 Bonhoff had been imprisoned for just over a year he writes to his friend Everhard Betge.

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What might surprise or perhaps even worry you would be my theological thoughts and where they are leading. And here is where I really miss you very much.

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I don't know anyone else with whom I can talk about them and arrive at some clarity. What keeps knowing at me is the question. What is Christianity or who is Christ actually for us today?

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In this is a perennial, powerful question one that still resonates with us today. Bonhoffer perceives that a different kind of world is coming.

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He understands that Christian words, Christian sermons, even the very word God would be unable to persuade a broken world that Christ was the answer to their problem.

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In the ashes of a society and a country that had decimated itself that had committed nation side the question of where is Christ in the midst of these ashes both literally and figuratively by the failures of Christianity to speak to human life as it was.

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It would turn away from religion altogether. He writes.

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We are approaching a completely religionless age. People as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.

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Even those who honestly describe themselves as religious aren't really practicing that at all. They presumably mean something quite different by religious.

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In this letter Bonhoffer goes on to reflect on his liberal theological education, the idea that he had been taught that there was some kind of religious instinct, some kind of religious opriory and human beings that inclined them.

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If not to be inherently religious at least open and tend to for the religious impulse, but he also questioned whether Christianity itself was a form of religion.

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Historically conditioned, transitory, subject not just to change, but subject to disappearing altogether. And if the foundations were being pulled from a certain historically contingent form of Christianity, then what does that mean for the future?

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Can Christianity survive? Can it survive the realities? A religion just like all the other religions. Bart tried to protect Christianity.

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When he gave his critique of religion, he wanted Christianity to be extracted from that critique. But if you're a thorough going with a critique, you would have to come face to face with the reality that Christianity itself shares all the conditions, shares all the circumstances, shares all of the reality of every other religion.

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It is a socially constructed reality. Can Christianity survive the reality that when we turn our critical reflection to it, it is subject to the same historical forces and questions that all human constructions contain.

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Here you're starting to see a number of questions emerge in his prison reflection that have continued to shape Christian theology and not even just the Christian tradition.

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There's an ongoing research in anthropology and cognitive science as to whether human beings are naturally religious. What is it in the human being that generates a kind of culture, a kind of symbolic reflection and ritual and enactment that as a phenomena, religion, if it refers to something, shows up ubiquitously across culture?

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And that's something we can track and reflect on in different ways. The moment that category of religion begins to get problematized in modernity where human beings aren't orienting the fullness of their reality around this cultural, social product religion, then the question of Christianity becomes something anew.

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And I think you're right that for Bonhoeffer, the relationship of Christianity to religion is something that too often the stewards of a tradition aren't honest about. That what we call Christianity, while it may have connections to something transcendent is at least describable as any other historical social product that we put in the category of religion.

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That question that you see early on in Bart, early on in Bonhoeffer around the revelation of God, the way in which whatever happened in the event of Christ, what part of it exists beyond the bounds of a humanly constructed sociologically contingent and historically accidental religion.

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We come to Bonhoeffer articulating to Betgate one of his first striking phrases when he writes.

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If we eventually must judge even the Western form of Christianity to be only a preliminary stage of a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us for the whole church?

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How can Christ become Lord and the religion less as well? Is there such a thing as a religion less Christian?

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If religion is only the gap in which Christianity is clothed and this gap has looked very different in different ages, what then is religion less Christianity?

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So, Dariusin, who we've heard from before from this series, gives us just a quick hint of the fact that religion less Christianity is maybe something different than when it first hits our ears, she says.

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The religion less Christianity that Bonhoeffer is talking about is not leaving church or leaving ritual or leaving your tradition.

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And that's actually how I understood it in the first time I read it.

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Religion less Christianity is putting Christ at the centre and pressing into the world around us, not divorcing ourselves from the world around us.

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But trying to bring things that we're doing secret, those arcane truths and mysteries, bringing that to be so that the world can see Christ in us as well and be brought up and be magnified and given abundant life through the lives that we lead.

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Not that we kind of bash them over the head with a Bible or with laws or with institutions which oppress people and really suck the life out of them rather than bring joyful life into them.

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This concept of religion, those Christianity, raises a host of questions, Jeff.

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I'm interested in what this concept of religion as Bonhoeffer is using it.

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Is it actually end up opening up for Christianity in the way it both critiques its own history, its relationship to culture, modernity and the kind of ethical challenges that Bonhoeffer sees the church struggling to even acknowledge?

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One of the things that Bonhoeffer opens up for us is how the future of how contested the term religion would become.

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A lot of people had an idea of religion when it's mentioned what they mean, but as the years developed out of Bonhoeffer's time, the word religion became one of the most contested terms certainly in Acidine.

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But also in other places was religion the sort of label or the category that we put on practices habits, structures that human beings do that then we put that category on to it.

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This is religion, a number of people say that's exactly what happened and then we use that term to sequester off religion from the rest of life so that political life or other kind of life is sequestered off religion is a thing separate.

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So this is exactly one of the things that Bonhoeffer attacks in his theology throughout his entire career.

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There is no demarcation between the sacred and the secular, we talked about this earlier, it is all of life is one thing, one thing only.

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So the notion that religion could be a separable category with which we might interpret life, I think Bonhoeffer is looking at the deeper understanding of that.

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The second thing that we could say probably is that the Christianity that Bonhoeffer is criticizing is certainly a Christianity that he does not see embodying the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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And Reggie Williams helps us understand the types of Christianity that are religious in their fullest sense of the term.

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Imperial Christianity left no way of knowing the work of God in the world without reference to powerful white men.

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This is how the category of religion emerged in modernity at the same time as anthropology was emerging as a field of study.

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Religion emerged as a subset of anthropology and was mobilized in the assessment of Germany's colonial subjects.

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Christianity as religion in Germany moved in step with Nazism both were guided by practices of comparison for classification, containment and control.

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In relationship to the Jew, the Roma and Sinti and to Jehovah's Witnesses religion served as justification of us and apologetic for practices of cruelty.

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Bonhoeffer asks a question that seems to anticipate this field of study that emerged later a study of the system that comes out of enlightenment he asks, how do we go about being religious, worldly Christians?

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How can we be ecclesia those who are called out without understanding ourselves as religiously privileged?

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But instead seeing ourselves belonging wholly to the world it is because of these very significant problems with Christ and the category of religion.

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What goes by the name Christian is fairly sick and incapable of healthy response to totalitarianism.

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What would it mean to belong to the world rather than take possession of it which religion is one of those mechanisms in the argument for right ownership?

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What if the white European had stood alongside the black African in mutual recognition of dignity and potential for human flourishing rather than a need to dominate and to justify domination?

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Again Bonhoeffer makes sense as we imagine this.

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He says Christ within no longer be the object of religion but something else entirely, truly Lord of the world.

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Just one of the things that Reggie brings to the fore is just how Bonhoeffer's criticism of religion and the way it has made the gospel so compatible with an imperial culture, politics, military and agenda is that Bonhoeffer's criticism is on behalf of what happened in Christ.

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And I think we look at the history of Christianity. There are patterns that show up. One is where those who look at the Lord of history, the crucified Lord and then say, "Well on behalf of the crucified one let's build crosses for God's enemies and they just so happen to be ours."

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And when we look at that problem of religion, seizing a narrative and then inverting it to kill, to dominate and to render other its objects of control, Bonhoeffer and Reggie here asking us what happens if the crossbearing one becomes a legitimation for crossbuilding in our own time?

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Yeah, Bonhoeffer lays it all out on the table in his letters. The intense questions of a religion that too often mimics the culture within which one found oneself.

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Critiques of Feuerbach and Freud I think are important that we should pay attention to. This notion that the God that we create oftentimes emerges from within our own fears, our own desires, our own hopes, our own wishes and that we project that out into the world.

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We absolutely desire it and then we call it God. I think Bonhoeffer is on to something when he is sitting here looking at the critique of religion in a certain sense saying, "Yeah, we have projected too much of ourselves into the world and called it God."

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So if the critique leveled at Christianity contains the seeds of truth, how does Christianity respond to that? And that's what Bonhoeffer is struggling with.

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He's sitting in the ruins of a country that's been influenced by Christianity for millennia, but it seemed have no ability to create persons who lived faith the way that Bonhoeffer had conceived of it and think involved in indecisive bullshit.

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In fact, it's cultural hero Luther, an icon of German nationalism, had been used to stir up Christian anti-Semitism by pastors.

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They reprinted the pamphlets on Luther's screed against the Jews on the Jews in their lives and passed them out among their congregations where he proclaims that synagogues must be burned, sacred texts destroyed Jews driven from their own.

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This is Luther and it's passed around by a Christianity that saw Luther as a cultural hero.

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This is the type of Christianity that seeks the power of Caesar to destroy its enemies like you just said, Truth. A religious Christianity meant to legitimate domination as God's will.

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And so when that moment comes, German Christians did not just collapse into fear and imponence before the political powers of the state.

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They became joyfully complicit. Hitler was going to make Germany great again. He was going to deal with all of the liberal degradation, all of the liberal degeneracy. He was going to take care of all of that art.

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He was going to take care of all the Doddys. He was going to take care of anything that happened in the Bimar Republic and they were thrilled.

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They were thrilled with the starting of a theological center to create an Aryan Jesus. Well-funded, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life.

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Read Susanna Heschel's book The Aryan Jesus for more information about this. It reveals a bankrupt Christianity, unable to bear faithful witness to the worst horse humankind was capable of inflicting.

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And in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, a new path is going to have to be forged in Bonhoeffer sitting in prison. And he's saying, "What is a radical Christianity fashioned to tear down the fascist architecture of the soul constructed by the Nazis look like?

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To address the world on its own terms, Christianity in its religious garb as Bonhoeffer knew it would have to die."

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What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religious world?

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How do we talk about God without religion, that is, without the temporarily conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, the inner life, and so on?

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How do we speak, or perhaps we can no longer even speak, the way we used to, in a worldly way about God? How do we go about religious worldly Christians?

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Very harbied, who we've also heard from before in this series. He has some things to say about Bonhoeffer's critique of religion.

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Bonhoeffer picks up a critique of the concept of religion from part, but takes it in a different direction.

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A Christian has been one of these ways to try to develop an understanding of the world in which different things have their proper place.

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There's a niche, a call religion, that Christianity belongs to. Bonhoeffer tries very hard to critique that notion.

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Since Christ claims the whole of life, the church can't be satisfied with what is properly religion.

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And indeed, the reality of Christ is a reality in the world that coexist with all these structures of modernity, states, civil societies, cultures, and the like.

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And as one of my friends puts it, the point of the church is to try to convince and limber people whose lives are orchestrated by these structures of the technological light, to come over and to understand what it means to live lives with charity, injustice, and peace.

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And how to cultivate it within the church community. There's the church community is not doing that. If it's just doing the religious thing, if it's just doing the spiritual thing, then it has very little to do with Christ.

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Very hardy helps us understand this juxtaposition or this maybe tension between Christianity and the world, the way that Christianity as religion constructs not just us, but interacts with the world as well.

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In this letter of April, Bonhoeffer expresses a sentiment that occurs to many people of faith.

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I don't know if you've ever experienced a trip, but oftentimes I find myself more comfortable around pagans.

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I use that word loosely. I find myself sometimes more comfortable around people who are not Christian. Now there is a host of cases where Bonhoeffer may have experienced that.

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It was more of a realization that he shared more in common with people that weren't gladly using the word God through their common humanity than he did with Christians who were malding pious platitudes that really spoke to nothing other than their own inner world of fear, maybe they're on inner world of desire.

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And so when religious people start talking, they often malve these pious words, but oftentimes even our very theologies can become cheaply acquired, not really struggled with with no sense of another person's lives or struggles, no appreciation of the difficulties that people endure.

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For God too often and the critiques of religion may be right about this becomes the proverbial crutch. A lot of times what religious speak shows up and it's really language of legitimation is legitimation around some structure, some power, some reality.

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It is a claim for authority to dictate to the other or legitimate ones virtue or judgment and for Bonhoeffer the idea that the God who showed up in Christ is a legitimation structure for authority or power or judgment is just anti-Christian.

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When he uses the word God, it's not so much about legitimation, but in tarragation, the Christ event is an interrogation of reality in the world as it is in conflict, it being challenged by the world as it will be in the life of God, the one who embraced death and sin and law, not legitimated it.

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I think that challenge of just how language functions for so many people who are religious, it can drive someone nuts Jeff, you can get a little frustrated and go, you know what, I would rather just talk about seeking justice with people who don't want to waste their time legitimating their prejudice and power with the word God.

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And for, and a very pointed thing to say about human beings who employ God for the very reasons that you were just talking about when he writes.

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Religious people speak of God at a point where human knowledge is at an end or sometimes when they are too lazy to think further or when human strength fails.

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Actually, it's a deal as ex-markina that they are always bringing on the scene, either to appear to solve insoluble problems or to provide strength when human powers fail, thus always exploiting human weakness or human limitations.

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I'd like to speed up God's nut at the boundaries, but in the center, not in weakness, but in strength, thus not in death and guilt, but in human life and human goodness.

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So I know that as we are thinking about the American Christianity scene, Bonhoeffer speaks to everyone who has deconstructed their faith over time.

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It's a process that does not erode faith for many, but endures. It enhances people's faith.

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But at some point in that deconstruction, you can understand that the contingent nature of human thought does become apparent.

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How do we find the eternal in a transitory? Are there realities amidst the rumors of angels that help us construct a better world into one scarred by death camps and emaciated bodies?

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And as we sit in the ashes of our own creations created by the state created by our politics, created by our economic orders, where is God, God's self to be found?

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Well, it's certainly not in the abstract theological discussions about omnipotence or omniscience or any of those other kind of traditional categories.

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And Bonhoeffer also has something to say about that when he writes.

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God's beyond is not what is beyond our cognition. Epistemological transcendence has nothing to do with God's transcendence.

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This is the beyond in the midst of our lives. The church stands not at the point where human power fails at the boundaries, but in the center of the village.

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That's the way it is in the Old Testament. And in this sense, we don't read the New Testament nearly enough in the light of the Old.

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I am thinking a great deal about what this religious Christianity looks like, what format takes, and I'll be writing you more about it soon.

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Bonhoeffer, in fact, does write to bedgate pretty soon on May the 5th, 1944, explores the way that language has been used to frame op theology and Christianity.

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And one of the things that he takes a deep dive in a hard look at is the way that metaphysics, how we define and understand God in the world, and the role of the individual interpreting reality, how that has shaped our beliefs and our practices.

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And what he says is that maybe we need to discard the words, the concepts, the ideas that we have used to define God because they get us nowhere close to God God's self.

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And I think a lot of it has been the way in which so much of the theological tradition of Christianity has understood perfection.

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It understood perfection around, say, the question of power that he brings up on nipotence. So like, what would the, what would perfect power look like? Well, it would be all of the power.

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And then what happens, or the culture in a state that wants to walk in the ways of a all powerful God, you're probably going to have a, I don't know, a monarch.

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You're going to have a ruler, you're going to have a sovereign to embody the sovereignty of God. But in there are all these elements of what perfection looks like to get assumed in Christianity that Bonnover sitting there in a cell thinking about the testimony history is given against a God who is in control against a God who's will is being perfectly rendered in the death camps in the violence and suffering that's there.

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He's looking at a church that cannot figure out what it would be like to follow a crucified Lord. But instead is putting its energy and adoration towards one that is building crosses for the people of God, the people of Israel.

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These kinds of things are sitting right before him and he goes, well, what in the world do we talk about when we talk about God? If our definitions of God sound more like Caesar on steroids than the one who died cross dead, perhaps our notion of perfection is problematic.

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Perhaps we've rendered unto God, what should have been rendered the Caesar who is not the Savior, but the one who put Jesus on the cross.

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In some ways, Bonnover cuts us all from a metaphysically constructed God, the categories that we've used, the way that we have understood, the way that we have defined, the attributes that we have given to the divine life are not necessarily found in those traditional categories, but also interestingly enough.

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He comes back and asks the question about the relationship of the individual to Christianity. And I guess this is a part where in some ways the American evangelicals might be cool to the prison letters because he continues to think in this context in the ways that people have conceived God, the ways that they point to certain biblical concepts.

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And he has something important to say about not only just the language, but the role of the individual in interpreting what God's purpose, what God's intentionality is in the reign of God being made manifest in the world.

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And he writes in a compelling statement.

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"Hasn't the individualistic question of saving our personal souls almost faded away for most of us? Isn't it our impression that there are really more important things than this question?"

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I know it sounds outrageous to say that, but after all, isn't it fundamentally biblical? Does the question of saving one's soul even come up in the Old Testament?

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This is such a powerful concept, a powerful statement because for millions of Christians, the saving of the soul is the whole point of Christianity.

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What Bonhoeffer is trying to tell us is that the saving of the soul is really unimportant. What's important is the manifestation of the reign of God in human life.

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What's important is the embodying of God's intentionality for human beings to flourish, to live, to have a full life. And that's why he invokes the Old Testament Hebrew scripture.

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He invokes that increasingly in his prison letters. He starts to frame things in terms of when the Old Testament, they did things, they married, they traded, they did all of these worldly things.

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And they were never all that concerned about the light that came after. What they were concerned about was what does God look like in the midst of our day to day lives are in the center of the village.

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One of the things that's helpful to notice right here, they will clarify what Bonhoeffer is doing. In many ways he's developing a kind of Christian humanism, one that makes what is central to the Christian life and theoretically the mission of the church is human life.

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Material existence, a very place God shows up in Christ, the very drugs of it that which has been embraced in the life of Christ. And if this question of an individual's eternal salvation isn't the driving question in scripture, it's not even when it exists in the Hebrew Bible.

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That's not the central focus. Then what does our responsibility look like and maybe even more pointed, what happens if we think the central question is the wrong one? If we as a church are obsessed with an individual's eternal salvation, then what else could be getting itself done in all of our energy, all of our worship and all of our formation?

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Perhaps we could end up forming individuals who don't recognize that their allegiance to Christ has been hijacked to an allegiance to a state that their allegiance to Christ has been hijacked and oriented them to deeply anti-Semitic expressions of the faith. It makes them servants of authority, a culture of supremacy and domination.

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In all the while, there's clinging to this vision that at the heart of Christianity is what an individual does when they die. And Bonhoeffer, looking at just how perverted the life of the church has become addressing the wrong question, goes, "Hm, what if that isn't the question?"

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And what if getting the question wrong, orients the whole life of the church in problematic ways? The interesting part about that is that if we start to probe or push too hard to pull that thread too much, we might end up with an entirely different understanding of what Christianity looks like.

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It might be one that's freer from the domination structures of the world. Bonhoeffer addresses the necessity for looking at new languages about Christianity when he has an occasion ever hard and not a Bet-Gay or married when he is in prison, and he writes a piece for their son's baptism.

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And he addresses not just the boy on the thoughts of the day of baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm, Rudiger, Bet-Gay. He addresses us all about the present and future faith. He analyzes the world that he's been doing in that prison cell he's thinking about in the face of growing institutions and bureaucracies, how is Christianity going to define itself? And he writes.

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Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-provisation that weren't in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the world of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world.

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So the words we use before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings.

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All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born a new out of that prayer and action.

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Entire adult forums could probably be run in churches in America on just that one statement. But he goes on and he anticipates that the new form of Christian faith would need new languages to carry its message forward.

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It is not for us to predict the day, but the day will come when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed.

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It will be in a new language, perhaps quite non-religious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus' language.

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So that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power. The language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God's kingdom is drawing near.

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One of the theologians that we talked to earlier in our series, Robert Boselu of the University of Stelonbosch, theology department has some things to say about this issue of Bonhoeffer

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and the way that new language can help us.

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What I see with Bonhoeffer was this kind of search for a new language and for a way of articulating the faith in a liberating way.

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We can find many instances of that within his writing, so that was important.

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And I think together this kind of new language was never disconnected from new practices. So the way in which thought this language and the practices not as separate things, or even that you have the one and then the other and you need to connect them, they are simultaneously there.

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What one sense in Bonhoeffer is actually amidst all the searching, metaphors that he used and so on.

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There seems to be a kind of deep trust in the gospel, in the tradition that actually liberate the team for a kind of freedom, even a kind of playfulness to a point that is highly attractive.

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In some ways he's sense of the disciplines of the secret. What was actually a way of saying this is something worth passing on.

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This is something with extreme power and therefore it should not be banalized, it should not be trivialized, the integrity of this should be protected.

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And that is still a very important challenge for us today to think through this kind of understanding of tradition, not merely as something coherent that we have control over containing these kind of powerful fragments, ideas that is not just something that change our own lives but has this kind of creative and transformative potential.

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Shortly after Bonhoeffer writes this baptismal message, he writes a letter to Betque on June 8, 1944, where he focuses on the work that he's been doing, the reading he's been doing in physics, in other areas, other disciplines, he focuses on his most recent reading of a thinker by the name of Bill Ollmdilteye,

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and other thinkers to reflect on human kinds coming of age, and this is where we get that well-known phrase, the world coming of age. Bonhoeffer has been tracing for some time in his letter that trajectory that human kind has followed since the Renaissance, how have human beings constructed law or science or theology in short the world,

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and he's exploring that rise of that period that we call the Enlightenment. What's on Bonhoeffer's mind seems to be the way that human rationality has developed, and the way that they have constructed that rationality to the point where God is an unnecessary hypothesis to understand and interpret the world, he writes.

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Human beings have learned to manage all important issues by themselves, without recourse to working hypothesis, God. In questions of science or art, as well as an ethical question, this has become a matter of course, so that hardly anyone dares rock the boat anymore.

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But in the last hundred years or so, this has also become increasingly true of religious questions. It is becoming evident that everything gets along without God and does just as well as before.

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To Bonhoeffer observes it in response to a world coming of age, one ought to have its own autonomy, a world that does not need God. Christianity tries often to secure its space by opposing a kind of worldly self-confidence, convincing the world it needs God to answer its ultimate questions.

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Most notably death, which sort of takes me to Tillik's notion of ultimate concern, but Bonhoeffer realizes that this approach and the resulting attacks on secularity of the world are wrong. One of the theologians that we talked to in this series is Elinorm Glothin, who has written a book about Bonhoeffer's unconscious Christianity, and she addresses this issue of the world coming of age.

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In his ideas here, he's heavily influenced by the writer Dullhand Dalte, who narrated the development of humanity through historical framework.

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And through reading Dalte, Bonhoeffer starts thinking about what it means to be human and interact in the world as humans in a historical way, and so he looks back to count and the enlightenment.

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And he identifies that point as the point at which humanity starts reaching maturity, and he uses as a pattern for this, a person who has reached adulthood.

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And he says, you know, when we're children, we need someone to guide our decisions, we need someone to help us figure things out that when we reach adulthood, we are able to do those things for ourselves.

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And he talks about things like historically a long time ago when humans didn't really understand weather patterns and that kind of thing.

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You do a rain dance to try to get rain or you'd pray to your particular God to try to get rain, but now we understand weather patterns and we're able to tell her, okay, well, we're going to have rain in three days because we understand mutual logical movements.

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He's saying, we've reached adulthood. This isn't a value-made in statement. It's just how things are. And in our adulthood, in this situation of the world come of age, we no longer need God to explain stuff for us because we can basically work things out for ourselves.

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There's even extreme questions like questions of gilts and questions of death. We can work these out for ourselves though. We don't need a divine framework to do that.

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And he uses this image of our own knowledge of expanding to fit an ever-growing circle. And he says, okay, so you might think then that God is occupying this ever-decreasing out of ring, because our knowledge is expanding and expanding.

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And God is occupying a tighter and tighter space on the margins of our understanding. But then he says, but that's not really what's happening. Yes, our knowledge is expanding. Yes, we don't need a God who answers our questions at all.

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But the Christian God is a God who inhabits the center anyway. God isn't a God who hangs around on the margins and waits to be called in by humanity. God is a God of the center and this traced right from the beginning of His work.

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For Bonnotha in fact, almost as this liberation, this human emancipation means that we can connect with God in a much truer way because we end up finding God in the center of existence rather than just thinking about God as being on the margins where our knowledge breaks down.

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Belenor helps us understand that it is not God at the margins that we're looking for. It's God in the center. And when we're looking for God in the center, we often don't use the same tools that Christian people have used. Most notably the apologetic tool Bonnotha writes.

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I consider the attack by Christian apologetics on the world's coming off H.S. First of all, pointless, second, ignoble, and third and Christian.

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Once again, Josh McDowell's evidence that demands a verdict is not going to be the path to winning over a world that is autonomous.

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And according to Bonnotha for in a hilarious image, you can't shove an adult back in the puberty. I love that.

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Which is what Christianity tries to do when it tries to address the world's autonomy by using guilt or weakness or manipulative tools.

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It's best to acknowledge that the world is the world, but it has its own way of constructing itself. Christianity does not need to take over the levers of governmental power to influence or make the world conform to its being.

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It's just better to acknowledge that the world constructs itself. You don't have to surrender to the world. You don't have to buy into the logics that the world uses to construct itself.

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If you allow the world its own autonomy, that means the church can maintain its own integrity to resist. The state or the culture without resorting to manipulative appeals to guilt or fear of death or salvation.

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In the face of the way that the world constructs itself, is it the case that Christianity should try to take over that world?

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Or what is the purpose of Christianity in addressing that world? Does it secure and legitimate that order by addressing up in Christian closures or something more profoundly compelling about Christianity that it can offer the world in its own strength, something else?

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Bonnotha is arguing, the gospel and the reality of the divine is more than necessary and it's not a part of reality that you have to legitimate.

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It's an orientation to the fullness of reality, one scene in Christ. This criticism that Bonnotha is raising is one that brings true even today that so often religious communities and traditions get anxious.

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When our telling of reality isn't being centered in the public square, if our discourse or our identity isn't always being celebrated, it's easy for us to become anxious, to then want to see power, find allies that can dominate culture and put us back at the center.

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And I think what Bonnotha is inviting us to see is that that dream of being at the center of culture and reality isn't inherently problematic.

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The idea that we win when we play golf with Pharaoh as opposed to telling him to let the people go is troubling. The idea that the greatest preacher should be the one that golfs with a president and has access to power is uncomfortable.

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There's this aha moment for Bonnotha in these prison letters where the centrality of Christ becomes more and more the only thing he can see because so much of what calls itself Christianity has defiled and falsified itself through its enactment of its very allegiance to the Antichrist, to a way of death under the Christian flag.

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This is a shorthand way of saying that if we look at totalitarian movements today, many of them, the religion of Christianity stands at the center of legitimating and justifying those particular political orders.

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The Bonnotha he says, look, God is the working hypothesis for morality for politics, the natural sciences, philosophy, religion, that God has been overcome and done away with in the world.

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A lot of people interpret the world now as increasingly secular and they have to go back and rethink their theories.

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But Bonnotha is speaking about living in the world without God as if God did not exist and this is not a new idea for him, but the power of the absence of God is intensified in the context within which he writes.

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And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world at C.D.O.S. Nondareto.

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And this is precisely what we do recognize, before God. God himself compels us to recognize it.

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Thus our coming of age leads us to true recognition of our situation before God.

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God would have us know that we must live as those who manage their lives without God.

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The same God who is with us is the God who forceks us. Mark 1534.

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The same God who makes us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.

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Before God and with God we live without God. God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross.

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God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way and only so is at our side and helps us.

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Matthias 817 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us not by virtue of His omnipotence but rather by virtue of His weakness and suffering.

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This is the crucial distinction between Christianity and all religions.

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Human religiously directs people in need to the power of God in the world. God is the deus ex-Makina, the Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God.

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Only the suffering God can help. To this extent one may say that the previously described development toward the words coming of age which has cleared the way by eliminating a false notion of God

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preys us to see the God of the Bible who gains ground and power in the world by being powerless. This will probably be the starting point for our worldly interpretation.

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We read things like this and ask so wish that Bonhoeffer had survived this moment because he's sitting in his cell reflecting on centuries of human thought and action, really understanding in a self critically reflective way the way that the world has constructed itself and he's doing that in the face of over 75 million lives erased by war.

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God's absence in the world is apparent and the truth is that for all appearances we all live in the world as though God does not exist. I know that sometimes in our religious fervor we want to say that God gave us a parking space or that God did this or that God saved this person or but the fact of the matter is is that once you start down that particular road, there are some theological problems that come up.

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Bonhoeffer is not saying God doesn't exist but all the constructs of God that we have created through time all of the attributes omnipotence, omniscience, all the other concepts who have used to describe do not begin to touch the reality of a situation in which people are burning and ovens and dying on battlefields.

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And here we find a turn that not many are able to make or follow and it's probably one of the reasons why people like Eric and Pataxis is not real fond of the prison writings. It is the powerlessness of God that is our reality.

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And that brings us up short. I remember the first time I read this I was stunned shocked by that sort of phrase but the more I lived into it, the more I sought to understand it, the more I realized that Christian faith is not defined by social or political power.

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And that's defined on the story of a God who gains power in the world by being powerless. That's profoundly compelling. The unexpected way of the cross calls into question all of our theologies that have been built on notions of power.

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We have taken powers that we know as humans knowledge or action. We've made those aspects absolute and projected those on to God and Bonhoeffer is saying, nope.

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The God of the Bible is something entirely different than our theologies and doctrines have offered us. And then he comes out with that compelling statement only the suffering God can help.

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Bonhoeffer offers us a flash of insight about deconstruction. I think it's very helpful. It's not a bad word. It's not a bad thing. When we come to grips with the reality of our faith, it has the potential to clear away the idols that we have created.

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To clear away the idols to behold the reality of the divine life in the world, the life of suffering, the life of the suffering God.

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And one wonders today if Christians in love with their political power lost or those who as one person on Twitter said it, suck on the mummified teeth of bright bishop Mueller.

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Bonhoeffer's challenge to let go of God for the sake of God may not make an elusive presence, perhaps all that more real. It's profound to think about the fact that to immerse ourselves into the suffering of the world is the conodic path to the presence of God.

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That concept there of Kenosis, self-emptying, self-giving is central in Christian thought because Paul quotes it in Philippians 2 from one of the earliest hymns in the early church.

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That passage begins with Paul saying, let the same mind be in us, the body of Christ that was in Christ Jesus who didn't count equality with God, something to be grasped but humbled himself, taken the form of a servant.

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Even the death on a cross. And when we think of Bonhoeffer's entire life, one of those elements that has been a driving theme has been the reality of Christ in the face of the other.

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That face of the other has expanded Bonhoeffer's vision of God be it his time in Barcelona, his travels with his brother going to New York, the Harlem experience, serving the working class in Berlin and on and on and on.

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There's been this recognition that the reality of the world that God has redeemed and received into the divine life in Christ demands a bigger gospel demands a bigger vision and then to have that transformation and then to look at the results of a world dominated by people bearing Christ's name.

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It's not surprising to me that he then orient us back to that very gathering place that Paul brings up in one of the earliest writings of the New Testament.

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The body of Christ is to have that same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus. It's the kind of enactment you see in discipleship where the call to faith and obedience and grace happen in that very same moment that the encounter with the divine orient us towards obedience.

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Not because we have to but because we get to having encountered a reconciling love that is for neighbor, enemy and self.

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This vision of a self giving love is not ultimately a rejection of power is a rejection of the world's definition of power one that thinks it accomplishes itself and succeeds by seizing the reins and determining other people's lives.

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If Bonhoffer is right that the reality of the world in its truest sense is revealed in the coming and embrace of all those who die cross dead through God's own encounter with death in the life of Christ, then in the very heart of God is a father who saw and experienced his son dying abandoned and is the son who is wounded to this day with the scars.

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With the scars of imperial and political and religious oppression and violence and if that is the one who has redeemed creation then a suffering God can actually help us because it joins us in all the wounds of material reality and we recognize that in the very life of God the wounds of this world are being embraced.

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And so let that same mind be in us who is in Christ Jesus is a very basic early Christian affirmation and one that has been covered over by idolatrous images of God who have rendered unto the one revealed in the Christ a logic and identity way too similar to the very one who built Jesus own cross.

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In the letters in papers from prison Bonhoffer takes all of the things that we've been talking about over this particular session and he puts them into an outline for a book and he alludes to a radical revisioning of the relationship between human beings in the world such that the church becomes largely irrelevant to life as people live it and he asked the question of who is God not primarily a general belief in God's omnipotence.

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And so on. That is not a genuine experience of God but just a prolongation of a piece of the world encounter with Jesus Christ experience that here there is a reversal of all human experience in the very fact that Jesus only is there for others.

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Our relationship to God is no religious relationship to some highest most powerful and best being imaginable that is no genuine transcendence.

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Instead our relationship to God is a new life in being there for others through participation in the being of Jesus.

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The transcendent is not the infinite unentainable task but the neighbor within reach in any given situation got in human form.

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I'm so sorry that we never got to get that book that Bonhoffer writes but it addresses all of the problems he talks about the church should give up its privilege and sell all of its goods and distribute them to the poor.

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He talks about the church in the new age or in religion as Christianity won't necessarily have priest won't necessarily even have theologians because in some ways theology itself is dead.

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That's a whole nother podcast that we don't have time for.

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Bonhoffer does anticipate a turn in theology, a turn in faith where the old categories of defining God are as is a way.

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That's the last letter on July the 20th the assassination attempt by Klaus von Stoffenberg failed at the Wolfslayer led to retaliation from Hitler and his loyalist hundreds of people were rounded up.

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There were immediate executions of the ring leaders that attempt also brought to light a number of other circles of conspiracy and that leads to a frenzy of ransacked homes, torgic prisoners, papers, diaries, documents.

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Many people were arrested including many in the abbaugh 5000 people are arrested on charges relating to the conspiracy against Hitler.

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On September the 20th there is a set of files located in Zassen that would reveal the secrets of the abbaugh and they would implicate Bontagnani in the plots beyond doubt.

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Even though he'd been imprisoned a year and four months this put him in greater peril in light of the new information uncovered in these files Bonthoffer and his friends and family knew his life was in danger they had prepared actually a plot to have him escape from teagle.

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There was some sense that was going to happen but when members of Bonthoffer's family were arrested he decided not to go through with the plan he wanted to save them from possible retribution he didn't want to save his life at the expense of his family.

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We mentioned earlier in October of 1944 Bonthoffer was transferred to the Gestapo prison on Prince Albert Strasza and from there moved to various other prisons for those who were familiar with the story he's moved out of Berlin in February 1945.

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He moved to a different number of prisons the diaries of Admiral Canaris are discovered on April the 4th in Bonthoffern all those who had worked in the abbaugh were doomed.

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They're called for the execution of all the imprisoned abbaugh conspirators and so we know that on April the 8th Bonthoffer celebrated his last moments with a small worship service and an abandoned school house and was taken to the concentration camp at Flausenberg.

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In the next morning April the 9th Bonthoffer and five others among them Canaris and Oster were executed.

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On the 23rd Bonthoffer's brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rudiger Schleiter were executed. Hans Vandagnani was executed on April the 8th at Soxenhausen camp out of Berlin.

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The Bonthoffer family was devastated by those who fall often in vain against the shadow of wolves who fed on the blood of their victims.

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Earlier Bonthoffer sought to capture his inner world with poetry among the most famous of his prison poetry was one that was entitled "Who Am I?"

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"Who Am I?" They often tell me "I step out from myself, calm and cheerful and poised like a squire from his manor. Who Am I?" They often tell me "I speak with my guards freely, friendly and clear as though I were the one in charge. Who Am I?"

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They also tell me "I bear days of calamity, serenely, smiling and proud like one accustomed to victory. Am I really what others say of me? Or am I only what I know of myself?"

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Restless, yearning, sick, like a caged bird, struggling for life breath as if I were being strangled, starving for colours, for flowers, for birds, so thirsting for kind words, human closeness, shaking with rage at power lust and peteous insult,

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thirsted about waiting for great things to happen, helplessly fearing for friends of our way too tired and empty to pray, to think, to work, very and ready to take my leave of it all? Who Am I?"

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"This one or the other?" "Am I this one today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once before others are hypocrite? And in my own eyes a pitiful, whimpering, weakling?"

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Or is what remains in me like a defeated army fleeing in disarray from victory already won? Who Am I?"

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"They rock me these lonely questions of mine, whoever I am, thou knowest me, oh God, I am thy."

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At the end, Bonhoeffer perishes in the world that theology constructed. And beside the embraces the belief that whatever exists is inherently connected to the will of God,

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that providence is at work as you walk over the graves and sift the ashes of your victims, secure in your own righteousness, the world abages, come to reveal itself in its dark side.

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As you separate the world into the pure in the impure, murdering those considered impure, you vendored into the very sanctum of religion.

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Divine approval of whatever violence you want to inflict on the world you desire to rule over.

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Bonhoeffer, he understood the power of religion to shape and mobilize the mobs if necessary. He had seen it happen with his own eyes.

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He was killed for trying to stop it.

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[Music]

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