None of us can claim to own Bonhoeffer, but all over the world those who pay attention to him say “my Bonhoeffer”, or “He gave me this; he says this to me”. There is something about Dietrich Bonhoeffer the human being; if you want to understand him, you must interact with him. It is difficult for me to assume the kind of ‘objective’ stance required by academic research, which leaves the personal dimension aside. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has got too much under my skin, in several contexts and continuing to this day. Many people around the world have had the same experience: the liberation theologians in South America, who were encouraged by Bonhoeffer the resistance figure to set out into a “world come of age”;2 2 Falcke refers throughout this essay to Bonhoeffer's term mündige Welt (“world come of age”), regarding the movement of humanity towards a sense of autonomy or maturity, learning to live and manage their affairs without reference to God. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, DBWE 8, 23–24. See also Immanuel Kant's definition of Enlightenment: “the emergence of humanity from its self-imposed immaturity (Unmündigkeit)”. Citations, unless otherwise noted, are from Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition (DBWE, 16 vols.) including title, vol. number, publication date and page reference. For detailed bibliographical information, go to: http://www.augsburgfortress.org. the South African anti-apartheid movement, which was inspired by Bonhoeffer, who had spoken out for the persecuted Jews and demanded the same of his Confessing Church;3 3 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question”, DBWE 12: Berlin 1932–33 (2009), pp. 361–70. the Minjung theologians in South Korea who referred to Bonhoeffer's theology “from below.”4 4 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years”, DBWE 8: Letters and Papers from Prison (LPP) (2010), p. 52. In 2005, a friend wrote to me from the United States that, increasingly, the policies that President George W. Bush were implementing in the name of Jesus were creating for them a “Bonhoeffer situation”, challenging them to a Confessional refusal of this pseudo-Christian legitimization of policies. This is why I want to speak about “my” Bonhoeffer. I have encountered him in three contexts. Each time he has spoken to me differently and challenged me to new directions in my path of discipleship. For another thing about Bonhoeffer is that he does not produce dependence, but maturity. In 1945 I turned 16. Just barely escaping from East Prussia with my life and landing in the Altmark,5 5 The heavily forested, rural area of eastern Germany between Hamburg and Magdeburg comprising the northern third of the state of Saxony-Anhalt. The name refers to its origin as part of the Margraviate (Mark) of Brandenburg. now part of eastern Germany, I was more or less without a clue to what I should do with my life or what I should aim at. I found my way into a church youth group and there I met a pastor who had studied in Berlin with the young university instructor Bonhoeffer. They had both lived in the preachers' seminary at Finkenwalde. I thus encountered Dietrich Bonhoeffer in this pastor, one of Bonhoeffer's “young brothers”. It was a powerful encounter for me. He noticed my questioning and offered to read a book with me: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book Discipleship. It became my first theological reading. This book taught me – naturally, without grasping the theological implications of this discovery – that it is very difficult to find the meaning or purpose of one's life if one focuses on cognitive reflection and thus remains an observer of one's own life. One must make a commitment to the meaning of one's life, for example, by hearing the call “Follow me!” So this book by Bonhoeffer helped influence my decision to begin theological studies at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Berlin Zehlendorf. Only years later did I realize that discipleship is a key concept for understanding Bonhoeffer's life. Whoever follows Jesus enters upon a journey and follows a living voice that shows the way. The way leads into different situations and into historical and biographical transformations. In the midst of these changes the disciple remains true to himself or herself only by remaining true to the call of the living Christ. We shall see this especially clearly in the context of Bonhoeffer's peace ethics. He did not take the kind of position, such as pacifism, out of principle, where you always know immediately what is right or wrong. He entered upon a journey and remained accountable to this choice. His word and his way can be understood only in relation to each another; this coherence of word and life journey is perhaps the secret of the authority that one senses as one encounters him. My second encounter with Bonhoeffer happened like this. In 1952, as a young theologian who had studied in West Germany, I went to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as did many other young theologians. The first edition of Letters and Papers from Prison, the letters Bonhoeffer had written from the Gestapo prison, had just been published. They became my life support as I set out in the new and unprecedented situation in German Protestantism of being a church under communist rule. Bonhoeffer had predicted the demise of traditional church institutions: “All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew.”6 6“Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge, May 1944”, DBWE 8: LPP, p. 389. The proclamation of the gospel, he said, is not bound to religious presuppositions; rather, the Church's task is to make known the claim of Christ in the midst of the secular world come of age, through Christ. Its task is not to fight for its self-preservation, but to be a church for others. This was a perspective for church work in a state that taught and sought to bring about the dying out of all religion: to work within this situation of oppression for the renewal of the Church through the gospel and to fight for a truly responsible and humane society! I shall return to this point. And here is my third encounter with Bonhoeffer. The context was the pursuit of peace in the 1970s and ‘80s. World peace hung by a thread. That thread was the challenge of maintaining a balance of power between East and West through nuclear deterrence. Renewed escalation of the arms race endangered the balance. The peace movement became a mass movement. In the peace groups and in the ecumenical movement, we recalled that Bonhoeffer had demanded in 1934 that the ecumenical movement should, with the authority of an ecumenical council, speak a clear “No” without any “Yes” to the war that at that time appeared to be looming. Friends in West Germany and the GDR who were involved in the ecumenical movement in the early 1980s made a proposal for a Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (JPIC). This proposal was accepted in 1983 by the assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver, leading to the Ecumenical Assembly of churches in the GDR, which met from 1988 to 1989. Moreover, both the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR and the Roman Catholic Berlin Bishops' Conference formally accepted the results of this process. These were the three ways I have concretely encountered Bonhoeffer. Now I would like to go in to greater detail about Bonhoeffer's thought in the latter two areas that I have described, and ask what they might have to say to us today. In August 1934, Bonhoeffer took part in a conference of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work and the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. As youth secretary of this World Alliance, he belonged there. But he also belonged to the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) that had just been founded in Nazi Germany. This non-Nazi church had just published the “Barmen Theological Declaration” in May 1934. Bonhoeffer had spoken publicly in favour of this declaration, so the anxious German church officials did not want to allow him to go to Fanø, where the conference was taking place. They knew why. Bonhoeffer saw, with astounding foresight, that Hitler and the tide of nationalism that was carrying him forward would start a second world war. More deeply, Bonhoeffer saw a widespread confusion of all ethical standards taking hold in society. Looking even further ahead, he predicted what became clear to everyone only after the first atomic bomb had been dropped: that modern weaponry would make war into “the certain self-annihilation of both combatants”7 7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “A Theological Basis for the World Alliance” in No Rusty Swords, E. H. Robertson (ed) Harper & Row, New York/Evanston, 1965, p. 170. and was therefore pointless. In Fanø he gave a spellbinding speech to resist the beginnings of this movement towards war. He ended with the appeal to the conference to understand itself as the Ecumenical Council that broadcasts “the radical call to peace” in the name of God. “Only the one great Ecumenical Council of the Holy Church of Christ over all the world can speak out so that the world, though it gnash its teeth, will have to hear, so that the peoples will rejoice because the Church of Christ in the name of Christ has taken the weapons from the hands of their sons, forbidden war, and proclaimed the peace of Christ against the raging world”.8 8“address to the Fanø Conference”, DBWE 13: London, 1933–1935 (2007), p. 309. How did Bonhoeffer arrive at this radical position, unheard of in that time? In my view, Bonhoeffer's Fanø speech grew from three roots in his thinking. First, it grew from the political formation in the context of his educated, upper middle-class family home. There was a cosmopolitan way of thinking, a network of international relationships that included professors and lawyers in high political positions. The day of Hitler's so-called seizure of power, Dietrich's brother-in-law, the lawyer Rüdiger Schleicher, came into his family's living room uttering a single sentence: “This means war!” This was a place where it was expected that one would demonstrate judgment in political matters, and that demanded that one resist evil beginnings. So I see a direct line from the Fanø address on peace in August 1934 to the conspiracy of 20 July 1944. Both were acts of political resistance: first against the beginnings, then, when war was raging, the attempt to end it by means of an assassination. And both actions served the cause of peace: first, the appeal to the Christian ecumenical movement, later in the paradoxical form of conspiracy and violence in which one's hands get dirty in the interests of peace. The second root is in Bonhoeffer's turn to Christian discipleship. Eberhard Bethge, his friend and biographer, called this “the turning from theologian to Christian”. This experience occurred around 1930. Bonhoeffer discovered the Sermon on the Mount for himself in a new way and, with it, the Beatitude of the peacemakers, the pacifici. In the Fanø speech he called “peace on earth” a commandment because of the presence of Christ. The peace commandment is specific, just as the way of discipleship means specific steps within history. “The church may not therefore preach timeless principles, however true, but only commandments which are true today. God is ‘always’ God to us ‘today’.”9 9 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “A Theological Basis for the World Alliance”, p. 162. Thus Bonhoeffer must not be considered a pacifist out of principle who rejects all violence, even if it involves the sacrifice of human beings. He became a concrete pacifist who, in listening to Christ's peace commandment, judges each case anew and discerns concretely what serves peace. The “commandment given because of the presence of Christ” also means that no other ultimate claim can be placed beside him, or before him. At the end of May 1934, the Confessing Church had declared in Barmen that Jesus Christ … is “the one Word of God” and beside him no other word or event can demand our loyalty – neither the word of the Führer nor that of the “sacred fatherland”. Bonhoeffer carried forward the Barmen Confession further into the realm of the ethical: Jesus Christ is the one Word of God that we are to hear as his command, which we are to trust and obey. The “sacred fatherland” cannot take his place and claim our first loyalty. But this is exactly what was taught by German theologians of the day, and large numbers of Christians in Germany allowed themselves to be swept up by the dizzying nationalist wave. This brings me to the third root of the Fanö speech: the ecumenical movement. It was in its beginnings at that time, but Bonhoeffer had been involved in it since 1931. Right away it took on a high theological priority for him. The ecumenical movement, he felt, must not see itself as a more or less loose international association of churches, but as Church that can also speak with the binding authority of an ecumenical council. Rooted in Christ, and thus in its very being, the Church is universal and must transcend all boundaries of state and nation in its faith, speech and action. Here, too, Bonhoeffer was incredibly ahead of his time. For this postulate of his remained controversial even after the World Council of Churches had been founded in 1948, and remains all the more so today. Bonhoeffer demanded that ecumenical bodies understand themselves as Church, as the one universal body of Christ. Where does this profound and extensive appeal for the ecumenical movement come from? By 1934, Bonhoeffer had already had many international stops on his life's journey: Rome, Barcelona, London, New York. By the mid-1930s, he had looked beyond the Christian ecumenical horizon and made contact with Mahatma Gandhi in India in order to study Gandhi's strategy of non-violent action. Bonhoeffer was truly free of the narrowness of denominational in-fighting and the small-minded thinking within the horizons of local church politics. But what is exciting about this kind of ecumenism when it comes to peace is that it connects the theological with the political. For Bonhoeffer, the Church was Christ present in the world. But the Church lives in all peoples and encompasses all peoples. The brothers and sisters of this Church, he says in Fanø, are bound together, through the commandment of the one Lord Christ, whose Word they hear, more inseparably then men are bound by all the ties of common history, of blood, of class and of language … They cannot take up arms against Christ himself—yet this is what they do if they take up arms against one another! Even in anguish and distress of conscience there is for them no escape from the commandment of Christ that there shall be peace.10 10 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Address to the Fanø Conference”, DBWE 13: London 1933–1935 (2007), p. 308. We can hardly escape the directness and clarity of this thought. But in light of it we cannot help but have the absurdity and the scandal of the division of Christianity weigh heavily on our soul and conscience. The fact that the new beginning on the political world stage that occurred in 1989–90 was followed by the confessionalization of the churches, and Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholics shooting at one another in the Balkans, what a regression! What a loss of what had long been recognized and lived in the ecumenical movement! If we want to live up to Bonhoeffer's ecumenical idea, we must in fact go further than he did. In order to strengthen the oikoumene, Bonhoeffer tended to identify Christ and Church. Today, this can become a block to the coexistence of religions. The universal Christ is broader than the church. Today we must understand and grasp the reality of the coexistence of religions under the triune God. Bonhoeffer understood the oikoumene as a peace movement. Today the oikoumene must prove itself as a peace movement in that it seeks not only conversation, but cooperation, coexistence and “pro-existence” with others, and above all with the Abrahamite religions. In the 1980s, the ecumenical movement picked up Bonhoeffer's idea of an ecumenical council that could speak in a binding way about peace. At the 1983 Vancouver assembly, the “council” became a “conciliar process”, a consultative process of the churches, because peace issues had become complex. They had to be tied in with economic and social justice and with ecological responsibility. It was also no longer sufficient, as it had been in 1934 and in the early postwar decades, to call out a clear “No without any Yes” to war. Since 1989, peace requires a concrete political form – in the Balkans, in Africa, in Asia, and a very different form in each place. What Bonhoeffer had set in motion conceptually in Fanö and wanted to study with Gandhi – namely, ways of pursuing conflict resolution without violence – was now of utmost importance: forms of service in the cause of peace that can assist with civilian conflict resolution. (Why do our churches not do much more towards this end today?) And on one last point we must take Bonhoeffer's peace ethic further. He had objected to the dominance of thinking in terms of security. “There is no peace by way of security,” he had said. By this he meant the striving for security that wants to prevail over others. When it became important in the 1970s and early 1980s to overcome the dynamic of escalation in the nuclear deterrence system, a commission under the leadership of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme developed an alternative concept of security: that of “common security”– a political model built no longer on confrontational patterns of thought and action, but on cooperative ones. This concept was based on the insight that in the world of modern weapons technology, we can no longer arm ourselves to security against one another, but can only negotiate our way towards security with one another. In the Middle East, too, it will only be through cooperative models of politics that peace will be able to be gained, not via confrontative dualisms between an “axis of evil” and the “free world”. Let me return to my second encounter with Bonhoeffer. As I mentioned, many people in the GDR churches found in his letters from prison new ways to understand what it meant to be Christians and churches in the GDR. Proclaiming the gospel does not depend on religious presuppositions. To what world should Christ's claim on it be proclaimed if not the world come of age (mündige Welt) that gets along without the working hypothesis of God? This is why the church in the GDR needed to be present for the people in the GDR as a “church for others”, and hence consciously a church within this GDR socialism. This idea was cited in the GDR churches again and again – unfortunately, to the point of clichéd loss of meaning. And unfortunately, too, there were bad episodes in the GDR in which Bonhoeffer was misused. Theologians, even bishops, invested the “actually existing socialism” with Bonhoeffer's term of a “world come of age” to praise the “actually existing socialism”, even though the Party that was “always right” did everything in its power to keep an entire population from “coming of age”.11 11 Unmündig halten: literally, to keep from speaking for themselves (as responsible adults). Bonhoeffer's concept of maturity, “coming of age”, could come to the fore under GDR socialism only through social critique. But I will leave this point for now12 12 I have written in greater detail about this topic; see Publik-Forum, March 2005. and instead address his idea of the “religionless world” and “religionless Christianity”, which is now especially controversial again. What did Bonhoeffer say about religion, and what does he say to us about it? In the euphoria of secularization in the 1950s and 1960s, everyone was using the phrase we know from Bonhoeffer's thesis – or, rather, hypothesis – of the religion-less world. People were emancipating themselves from every tradition, and that was not entirely a bad thing! But in the 1980s and 1990s, one could observe a return to religiosity in many diverse forms. All over the world there was a resurgence of religion; only the little post-GDR seemed to want to hold onto its habitual atheism. “How much religion does a person need?” is the question asked often today. Many now claim that Bonhoeffer was wrong in his prognosis. And not only that. They say his religion-less Christianity thesis is partially to blame for the spiritual drying up of the Protestant church, for its self-secularization and politicization. In this line of argument, the church must regain its religious content, for after all, faith cannot exist at all without religious forms like prayer, meditation, ritual, sacral spaces and sacramentalism. They point to the Kirchentag13 13 A biennial Protestant or ecumenical church-sponsored gathering in Germany attended by tens of thousands, many of whom are not active church members. as evidence of the degree to which people seek these things. In the 1990s, I asked at a lecture for future religion teachers in Erfurt if they knew who Dietrich Bonhoeffer was. There was a long silence. Finally, one woman raised her hand: Isn't he the one who wrote the poem about the powers of good? They knew nothing about Bonhoeffer the theologian, the pacifist, the resistance figure, but this testament of his piety had reached her. His spirituality had the most extraordinary effect and spoke to people even outside the church. The text of the poem “By Powers of Good”, which can certainly be called religious, offered many people a language for their fears and hopes. I find it grotesque to blame this Bonhoeffer for the spiritual desert into which Protestantism has descended. The letters from his prison cell, his prayers for fellow prisoners, his poems demonstrate just the opposite. But this was a spirituality of the prison cell, not the cloister cell. This was a piety lived in the midst of the world, in the midst of the burning political crises of the time. Here prayed a person who, risking his whole existence, had “thrown himself into the arms of God”. This was the spirituality of discipleship, that is, of “costly”, not “cheap grace”. We can learn from Bonhoeffer that spirituality is not something to be prescribed for a feel-good thing, or something one can acquire during a couple of weeks of down time to get back in shape. Those activities might be useful and good, but the spirituality that comes from the sanctus spiritus, the Spirit of Christ, is of an entirely different dimension. This spirituality speaks to the search for religion we see everywhere today. The search is evident in the widespread reception of Bonhoeffer's poem. But this kind of spirituality brings the religious search into its depth and its truth, and in so doing brings it into a profound process of critical self-examination and renewal. Thus what seems most important to me today about Bonhoeffer's somewhat tentative statement about religion-lessness is his critique of religion. His statement can warn us against investing too uncritically in the religious trends of the day; certainly his spirituality can warn the “ship that calls itself Church”14 14 Allusion to a Paul Gerhardt hymn with the first line “Das Schiff das sich Gemeinde nennt”. against investing in these trends in order to get itself moving. There is no question that a “church for others” must be open for people who, coming from the desert of our calculating world, thirst for the fullness of life. It must be open for the “souls, now terror-stricken”15 15 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “By Powers of Good”, DBWE 8: Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 549. who seek comfort and meaning. But, Bonhoeffer would urge us, we must look closely at what masks itself as religion. In the final analysis, religiosity is also the pseudo-Christian fundamentalism of a George W. Bush and the Muslim fundamentalism of the Islamists. And if the market-orientated “church for others” adapts its message to the religious demands of its customers, can one then still encounter the gospel there – the joyful, but precisely in its joyfulness, nevertheless also alien, message? Bonhoeffer criticized in their essence two things about the religiosity that he experienced and saw. First, the image of God as a “God of the gaps”, important only as a stop gap to fill the void when we are at the end of our rope. The God who keeps people in a position of dependence (Unmündigkeit), whom you can believe only if you return to a pre-modern world in imagination, feeling and thought. Bonhoeffer challenges us to emigrate in a real way to a world of modern rationality and responsibility for the world, rather than regressing to a pre-modern way of thinking and living. This concern of liberal theology is one to which Bonhoeffer also held fast, along with the Confessing Church and in his friendship with Karl Barth. This is what makes Bonhoeffer so relevant for today. For again we have a conflict between religiosity and modernity – today in the form of the fundamentalist movements, Islamist as well as Christian. Jürgen Habermas, in his 2001 Frankfurt Paulskirche lecture, described international terrorism as coming from the tension between secular society and religion, from the “time-lag between culture and society, which in [the assailants'] home countries has only come to exist as the result of an accelerating and radically uprooting modernization”.16 16 Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 102. He asks how the “rift of speechlessness” between secularization and religion can be healed.17 17 Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 103. Here we are very close to the Bonhoeffer who asks in his prison letters about religion and modernity, and asks who Christ is for us in this modernity. Secondly, Bonhoeffer criticized the religiosity that he saw for its individualism. It happens in a private sphere that is separate from the totality of life. In today's religiosity, we once again experience such a turn to inwardness. I now to turn to the last point that is very important to me. There is something far more fundamental about today's religiosity that is deserving of criticism when seen from Bonhoeffer's vantage point. It can be seen in the widespread question “How much religion does a person need?” Or “Why do I need religion or the church, anyway?” The kind of religiosity behind such questions is based on consumer culture. It is characterized by an approach to life based on the question of what I get out of things. The deciding criterion that determines my perception of everything is its usefulness or value to me. We all know what disastrous consequences globalized industrial culture has inflicted on our natural environment because of this attitude. If this “mentality of usefulness” also dominates religion, then this way of thinking is the real religion behind this surge of interest in religion that we are currently experiencing. This subtext religion of the usefulness of all things, however, cuts off all access to the religiosity that authentically asks about God. For the one who is in Truth called God cannot be used. The person who encounters God experiences that God comes to us absolutely (Paul Tillich). God is to be honoured and loved because God is God –“above all things”! That is precisely the point. The God who is by definition there for others cannot be used to fill the gaps in our needs. God is not the religious extension of our infinite will to create value and usefulness. Instead, God creates a limit to this will, and that limit is a healing force. There are many indications that the future of coming generations depends on our respecting this salutary limit. In his After Ten Years, looking back on 10 years of resistance in Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer wrote in 1943 that the ultimate responsible question to ask is “how a future generation is to go on living.”18 18 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years”, LPP, p. 42. Today we see more clearly than ever that the future of coming generations depends above all on whether our generation can find its way to the freedom to choose such limits. To learn not to want everything we can have, and above all not to do everything that we can do, but only what we can responsibly do in thinking of the coming generations. Bonhoeffer did not yet foresee this issue, but it too could be inscribed with his concept of Mündigkeit : maturity or responsible action. Only the immature, irresponsible human being is driven by delusions of omnipotence. Mature, responsible, independent human beings distinguish between what they can do and what they can responsibly do. This self-limitation cannot be imposed by laws forbidding certain actions. The negative injunction (Verbot) is upheld only if it is freely affirmed. This freedom is more than a matter of morality.; it grows out of the affirmation of our finite life. It grows out of the knowledge of a boundary that saves us, because the One who sets limits for us is the very foundation of our existence. This freedom grows not from a religiosity that intends to expand the limits of human self-realization, but from the responsible affirmation of our finite existence and our creatureliness. I think the new directions on the path of discipleship that we can see in Dietrich Bonhoeffer must lead us today into such maturity. The Reverend Dr Heino Falcke, formerly dean of Erfurt, Germany, was moderator of the Committee on Church and Society of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the German Democratic Republic, and a member of the Working Group on Church and Society of the World Council of Churches.1 1 This article is a translation of a lecture given at a symposium on Bonhoeffer organized by the Theological Faculty of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena on 2 June 2006. Translated and annotated by Nancy Lukens.