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Prayer and Righteous Action: exploring Bonhoeffer's suggestion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
Today you will be baptized a Christian. All those great ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be spoken over you, and the command of Jesus to baptize will be carried out on you, without your knowing anything about it. But we are once again being driven right back to the beginnings of our understanding. Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship—all these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture any more to speak of them. In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it. That is our own fault. Our Church, which has been fighting in these years only for self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to man and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and sense, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organising, must be born anew out of this prayer and action.
That was written by Bonhoeffer during that period of his imprisonment in Tegel between April and August 1944 when, having faced up to the prospect of a long time in prison due to the delay of his trial, he settled down to critical and creative theological work.
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- Copyright © 1985 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rudiger Bethge, May 1944” by Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison, Enlarged Edition, ed. by Bethge, Eberhard, S.C.M. London 1971, pp. 299fGoogle Scholar.
2 Ibid, 11th April 1944, p. 272.
3 Ibid. 22nd April 1944, p. 276.
4 Ibid. 30th April 1944, p. 279.
5 Ibid. 16th July 1944, p. 361.
6 Ibid. p. 240. Bonhoeffer's quotation of Archimedes (‘Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the earth’) comes from Pappus, Synagoge.
7 Ibid. 21st July 1944, p. 369.
8 Ibid. 16th July 1944, p. 360.
9 The sense of completeness here is not of a static perfection but of an overflowing, expanding completeness and perfection of the sort that is involved in ‘the glory of God’. Cf. Hardy, Daniel W. and Ford, David F., Jubilate: Theology in Praise D.L.T. London 1984Google Scholar, Chs. 2, 7; Appendix A.
10 Ibid. p. 298.
11 Doubleday, New York, 1958.
12 Op. cit. p. 107.
13 Ibid. p. 158. Cf. Bonhoeffer: ‘Every real action is of such a kind that no one other than oneself can do it’. (Letters and Papers, op. cit., 8th June 1944, p. 325).
14 Ibid. p. 39.
15 Hans Frei, in The Identity of Jesus Christ, Fortress, Philadelphia 1975, gives an account of the resurrection in these terms, the best that I have found.
16 Cf. Hardy and Ford, op. cit., Chs. 7, 9, Appendix A.
17 These pointers to an ecclesiology Thomas Day, in a perspective essay, calls ‘Bonhoeffer's main point–and the purpose of his writings’. (‘Conviviality and Common Sense: The Meaning of Christian Community for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’ in A Bonhoeffer Legacy. Essays in Understanding Ed. Klassen, A.J., Erdmans, Grand Rapids 1981, p. 225Google Scholar).
18 The Human Condition, op. cit., pp. 178–9.
19 Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, Duquesne, Pittsburgh 1969, offers a philosophical account of ethics that embraces this aspect together with action and theory, ‘the welcoming of the face and the work of justice–which condition the birth of truth itself (p. 28).
20 Letters and Papers, op. cit. p. 383.