5<\/p>\n
\u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s Last Poem: Texts and Contexts<\/p>\n
Nancy Lukens and Renate Bethge<\/p>\n
\u2018Von Guten M\u00e4chten\u2019<\/p>\n
1. Von guten M\u00e4chten treu und still umgeben,
\nbeh\u00fctet und getr\u00f6stet wunderbar,\u2014
\nso will ich diese Tage mit euch leben
\nund mit euch gehen in ein neues Jahr.<\/p>\n
2. Noch will das alte unsre Herzen qu\u00e4len,
\nnoch dr\u00fcckt uns b\u00f6ser Tage schwere Last.
\nAch, Herr, gib unsern aufgescheuchten Seelen
\ndas Heil, f\u00fcr das Du uns bereitet hast.<\/p>\n
3. Und reichst Du uns den schweren Kelch, den bittern,
\ndes Leids, gef\u00fcllt bis an den h\u00f6chsten Rand,
\nso nehmen wir ihn dankbar ohne Zittern
\naus Deiner guten und geliebten Hand.<\/p>\n
4. Doch willst Du uns noch einmal Freude schenken
\nan dieser Welt und ihrer Sonne Glanz,
\ndann woll\u2019n wir des Vergangenen gedenken,
\nund dann geh\u00f6rt Dir unser Leben ganz.<\/p>\n
5. La\u00df warm und still die Kerzen heute flammen,
\ndie Du in unsre Dunkelheit gebracht,
\nf\u00fchr, wenn es sein kann, wieder uns zusammen!
\nWir wissen es, Dein Licht scheint in der Nacht.<\/p>\n
6. Wenn sich die Stille nun tief um uns breitet,
\nso la\u00df uns h\u00f6ren jenen vollen Klang
\nder Welt, die unsichtbar sich um uns weitet,
\nall Deiner Kinder hohen Lobgesang.<\/p>\n
7. Von guten M\u00e4chten wunderbar geborgen
\nerwarten wir getrost, was kommen mag.
\nGott ist mit uns am Abend und am Morgen,
\nund ganz gewi\u00df an jedem neuen Tag.<\/p>\n
\u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
1. By faithful, quiet powers of good surrounded,
\nso wondrously consoled and sheltered here\u2014
\nI wish to live these days with you in spirit
\nand with you enter into a new year.<\/p>\n
2. The old year still would try our hearts to torment,
\nof evil times we still do bear the weight;
\nO Lord, do grant our souls, now terror-stricken,
\nsalvation for which you did us create.<\/p>\n
3. And should you offer us the cup of suffering,
\nthough heavy, brimming full and bitter brand,
\nwe\u2019ll thankfully accept it, never flinching,
\nfrom your good heart and your beloved hand.<\/p>\n
4. But should you wish now once again to give us
\nthe joys of this world and its glorious sun,
\nthen we\u2019ll recall anew what past times brought us
\nand then our life belongs to you alone.<\/p>\n
5. The candles you have brought into our darkness,
\nlet them today be burning warm and bright,
\nand if it\u2019s possible, do reunite us!
\nWe know your light is shining through the night.<\/p>\n
6. When now the quiet deepens all around us,
\nO, let our ears that fullest sound amaze
\nof this, your world, invisibly expanding
\nas all your children sing high hymns of praise.<\/p>\n
7. By powers of good so wondrously protected,
\nwe wait with confidence, befall what may.
\nGod is with us at night and in the morning
\nand oh, most certainly on each new day.<\/p>\n
(Translation: Nancy Lukens)<\/p>\n
I. The context<\/p>\n
This poem, though very well translated, is not the same in English as in its original German. It touched us deeply when it arrived. It reached us in a time of deep depression. Marie von Wedemeyer, Dietrich\u2019s fianc\u00e9e, had brought it in December 1944 from the Gestapo prison where Dietrich had been since the beginning of October and where no personal contact was possible as it had been before to a limited extent in Tegel. We had the good luck that Dietrich\u2019s prosecutor was fond of Maria. So we rightly hoped that if she would come to the prison he would give her things that Dietrich wanted her and us to have.
\nFirst I will tell you of whom Dietrich thought when he wrote this poem: of Maria, his fianc\u00e9e, his parents, living in Berlin next door to their daughter Ursula, whose husband R\u00fcdiger Schleicher was also in prison, as was Dietrich\u2019s brother Klaus; and Hans von Dohnanyi, husband of his sister Christine, and their respective children. It is easiest to see it from the perspective of Dietrich\u2019s parents: two sons and two sons-in-law were in prison as well as now Eberhard Bethge, husband of a granddaughter (myself, i.e. Dietrich\u2019s niece).
\nThe prison where Dietrich was held now was the Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrecht-Stra\u00dfe, formerly a palace. The few important prisoners held there were kept in the cellar. Some were tortured there, but we don\u2019t know that about Dietrich. In any case all were interrogated there. This is also the place where \u2018our\u2019 prisoners, like others, were brought for questioning, from the beginning of the arrests until this time. During some of the time Dietrich was held in this cellar prison. Hans von Dohnanyi was also detained briefly there. Once Dietrich managed to go into Dohnanyi\u2019s cell and confer with him, as we heard from a man who was later released. Hans had been very ill, paralyzed after a case of diphtheria. But now he went on pretending to be paralyzed, practising at night to walk, since he hoped somehow to escape one day.
\nDietrich\u2019s brother Klaus and my father, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, were in another prison, Lehrter Stra\u00dfe, waiting for their trial, which took place on 2 February 1945, with eventual death sentences for both. But when Dietrich wrote this poem, the trial had not yet taken place. Dietrich\u2019s closest friend, my husband Eberhard Bethge, was also in the Lehrter Stra\u00dfe prison. He was the only one of the five imprisoned men from our families who was released at the end of the war. He later published the illegal prison letters to him from Dietrich that had survived, and after that he wrote the big Bonhoeffer biography.
\nIn addition to worrying about the men in prison there was also the worry about the air raids. The Dohnanyis lived outside Berlin in Sakrow, so Dietrich\u2019s parents now and then spent some nights there because one would not expect as much bombing there as in the Marienburger Allee, where they and their daughter Ursula lived with her family. At the very end of the war my parents\u2019 house there was hit. But this news did not reach either Dietrich or my father in prison. Yet you always had to expect news of this kind and worse. My brother Walter Schleicher was in the air force and had been shot down, without being hurt. Dietrich often asked about him in his letters.
\nWe knew that all our men didn\u2019t get enough to eat. Prisoners in Tegel were allowed to receive a parcel every ten days. When Maria came to Berlin she always brought Dietrich something to eat from her family estate in Pomerania. My mother managed to cook hot food for the three men in Lehrter Stra\u00dfe prison every day though we ourselves didn\u2019t have much, but it was easier to cook for the three than to bring them items such as butter, cheese or meat. Friends and relatives helped us sometimes with food stamps. My aunt Emmi, wife of Klaus Bonhoeffer, and I would carry the three portions, wrapped in newspaper and woolen shawls and blankets, to the prison: one portion in the middle between us and one for both of us in the other hand. There were two guards who usually took the things and brought them to the three men. And, of course, for the guards there were always some of the few cigarettes we got from our ration cards. Most went to the prisoners, but it was just as important to keep the guards in good spirits.
\nAfter a fairly long time one could apply for a \u2018Sprecherlaubnis\u2019, i.e. a date when one would be given permission to visit the prisoner. Parents, wives, sons and daughters would get it from time to time. I, for instance, could not get one to visit Dietrich in spite of my applications, though of course I did later get to visit my father and my husband. In summer 1944, however, Dietrich had arranged for Eberhard and me to visit him without official permission. Now only one guard had to be won over for that risky enterprise, but Dietrich had enough good friends among the guards at Tegel prison that apparently he was able to risk this, and they dared to do this for him. Dietrich was in astonishingly good spirits, because he must have heard about the planned plot against Hitler, which then occurred on 20 July 1944. When we saw him in Tegel we sometimes wondered how he seemed to know more than we did through our regular listening to the BBC (which was, of course, strictly forbidden). Our visit with Dietrich was cut short because of an air raid; we had to get to a large shelter outside the prison district.
\nBut after the coup attempt failed everything was different, and now Dietrich was transferred to the Prinz-Albrecht-Stra\u00dfe prison. They have now re-named the street and the rubble of the bombed building has been removed to expose the cellar.
\nAfter that we had very little contact. But of course we had in common the knowledge how Christmas and New Years\u2019 Eve were celebrated in our family. And Dietrich was sure that this year, too, things would be as every year in spite of the great distress: on Christmas Eve the reading of the Christmas story by my grandmother, and then the Christmas carols sung by everybody; on New Year\u2019s Eve the reading of Psalm 90, and with all the family, believers and non-believers alike, joining in the singing of all 15 verses of Paul Gerhardt\u2019s \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn und treten mit Singen und mit Beten zum Herrn, der unserm Leben bis hierher Kraft gegeben\u2019 \u2026 (literally: \u2018Now let us go with singing and praying to the Lord, who has granted us strength for living until now.\u2019)
\nThe knowledge that the whole extended family would stick to that custom gave Dietrich the strength \u2018to live these days with you in spirit\u2019. These are the \u2018powers of good\u2019, which he knew would be strong even, and especially, in that very dark time.<\/p>\n
II. Publication history and reception of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
This poem was very soon fairly well known. It was published by Willem A. Vissert\u2019t Hooft in Geneva for the ecumenical council and by my husband in 1946 at the first anniversary of Dietrich\u2019s death in a booklet for schools in Berlin. In the same year there appeared two different English translations and soon different settings to music. Today there are innumerable musical versions of that poem, even though at first, knowledgeable musicians had said that this poem was unsuited to being set to music. They said that because the poem is written in pentameter, with five metric \u2018feet\u2019, and none of our hymns have that rhythm, Dietrich could not have thought of a hymn in writing the poem.
\nNow, later than in other countries, there are two versions in our German protestant hymnbook. The one had won over the \u2018Kirchentag\u2019 (the biennial all-church assembly), without the blessing of the official church authorities, when groups of young people sang it to the guitar. This is now the most popular version, but we are not so fond of it because it has the rhythm of a dance, which does not correspond to the situation when the poem was written. The other tune in our hymn book is more suitable; it\u2019s more in the manner of other hymns, but it\u2019s not very striking.
\nIt took a very long time before the church decided to accept \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 into our hymnbook. There are several possible explanations for this hesitancy. First, there were certain reservations about Bonhoeffer in Germany. He was seen as someone who had perhaps become guilty by joining the conspiracy to kill Hitler. Others argued: If he had been right, most of us other Germans would have been wrong. Even a very good man from the Confessing Church told me shortly after the war that he could not have taken the step that Dietrich took.
\nBut later on, when people had read more of what Bonhoeffer had written and what was written about him, the mood changed. Also, people in the meantime had become more fully aware of the terrible harm deliberately brought to Jews and other people during the \u2018Third Reich\u2019. Also a new generation that had not been so involved with National Socialism had now grown up. So they understood when Bonhoeffer wrote, for instance, that it is \u2018God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith, and promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture\u2019.<\/p>\n
III. To be or not to be a poem: the genre of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019<\/p>\n
As Renate Bethge indicated, \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 has had a life of its own through its reception as a hymn, quite apart from its relevance to his prison theology or, indeed, equally importantly, the shifting views in Germany and elsewhere of Bonhoeffer\u2019s political witness. This is not the place to elaborate on the important and understandable reasons for the decades it has taken for the churches and civil society in Germany as well as elsewhere to begin to sort out the implications of Bonhoeffer\u2019s political witness. I would argue that a careful rereading of the ten poems as texts, especially in the new, complete versions with editorial apparatus and references to events and writings of the same time period, would shed important light on these questions. My purpose in looking at \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 as one of Bonhoeffer\u2019s last known utterances before his deportation from Berlin, is to make a modest beginning towards that end, but focusing primarily on the text itself, its addressees, and its contextual references.
\nBut this poem more than many others raises the question of its genre as a prerequisite to interpretation. In the more than six decades since Visser t\u2019Hooft\u2019s first little publication of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 on the first anniversary of Bonhoeffer\u2019s death, parts of the poem have travelled the globe in numerous translations and musical settings. It is not my purpose to trace that history here. J\u00fcrgen Henkys, professor of theology with expertise in German literary criticism, hymnology, and Bonhoeffer studies, author of a 2005 monograph on the prison poetry, documented published listings of musical settings of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 in his first book-length study of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems in 1986. Here he cited a 1976 documentation of five musical settings, already then asserting that his own updated list of seventeen composers was certainly incomplete. I find it striking, given the familiarity to many Western German and English speaking Bonhoeffer aficionados of the seven-verse hymn or the published poem, that the best known melody of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 was, as Henkys reports, composed after the fact of repeated use in the context of East German Church youth group gatherings in the 1950s. There, the last verse of the poem would be recited out of context as a prayer or meditation, from memory, without anyone necessarily knowing there were other verses, or perhaps even its author\u2019s name or the circumstances of its writing. Precisely because of its popularity, Theophil Rothenberg then asked Otto Abel to compose a melody for this last verse to be included in his youth hymnal. Henkys asks: \u2018What happens to a work when it is \u201cused\u201d (gebraucht) [i.e. as a hymn or prayer]? What is attributed to it or added to it in the process? What do people get from it, what is taken away from it?\u2019 Specifically in this case, what does the final verse of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 mean in a context when Church youth, say in 1950s Soviet-controlled East Berlin, find that it speaks to their situation? \u2018By powers of good so wondrously protected\/we wait with confidence, befall what may\/God is with us at night and in the morning\/and oh, most certainly on each new day.\u2019
\nConsidering the dramatic progression of the seven-verse sequence in \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019\u2014entering the new year together in spirit with absent loved ones, bearing the weight of evil times that still try to torment the heart, terror-stricken souls seeking the salvation for which human beings were created, gratefully and unflinchingly accepting the possibility of drinking the cup of suffering, but then confessing the desire for earthly joys, for reunion, for the sound of all God\u2019s children singing hymns of praise in an invisibly expanding universe\u2014it may seem \u2018cheap grace\u2019 to leap straight to the comforting lines of the final verse, or perhaps worse, to consciously lift it out of context. In another setting, participants at the 2000 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Congress in Berlin sang with inmates in Tegel Prison chapel the more dance-like melody of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 referred to by Renate Bethge above. This version included only vv. 1\u20134, with v. 7 as the refrain. Given that, as far as the written record indicates, Bonhoeffer had no intention of his poem being read by others outside his extended family and his fianc\u00e9e, the question remains: Who are we to decide in this next millennium how it should be \u2018used\u2019, what should it \u2018mean\u2019 in contexts beyond late December 1944? Perhaps these two examples may serve to suggest how the interpretation of texts, including both prayer and song, is conditioned by their reception and vice versa.
\nThus \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 is widely known as a hymn, in many diverse translations and musical versions. Some versions omit certain verses or use only the final verse; some re-arrange the order of the verses, which are numbered by Bonhoeffer in the recently published original version in his own hand. The text uses forms of address typical of prayer in all but the opening and closing stanzas of the poem, i.e. in stanzas 2\u20136, after the intimate circle of addressees have been brought into the shared moment in v. 1. Thus one might be tempted to read the text, in fact, as a hymn. But is this its poetic genre?
\nAs Renate Bethge remarked, it appears unlikely that Bonhoeffer had in mind a hymn tune when writing the seven verses of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019. Bonhoeffer\u2019s intended audience, well read in German classical literature, would immediately feel at home reading these seven strophes, more so than they would read or sing an unfamiliar hymn text. His extended family were not churchgoers or particularly religious; they belonged to the secular Bildungsb\u00fcrgertum, the classically educated upper-middle class. The seven original German verses of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 are composed in strict iambic pentameter, the basic form adopted for classical German sonnets, terzines, and stanzas by German poets from J. W. von Goethe, Gottfried August B\u00fcrger, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, and C. F. Meyer, to Stephan George and R.M. Rilke, based originally on the Italian eleven-syllable stanza form. The verses consist of five metric feet per line, each line beginning with an unstressed syllable, alternating lines ending with an unstressed or stressed syllable, with a consistent ABBA rhyme scheme. It would appear that Bonhoeffer can hardly have had a hymn melody in mind when composing these verses, as Henkys asserts, for nowhere in German hymnody is there a hymn in iambic pentameter! As much as Bonhoeffer is known to have made a practice of reciting familiar hymns on a daily basis in prison, this poem does not appear to be conceived as such.
\nBut as Henkys has recently discovered, appearances can deceive. He concedes that his view has shifted on this point since discovering that the melody, metric pattern, and final verse of the Gottfried Arnold hymn, \u2018So f\u00fchrst du doch recht selig, Herr, die Deinen\u2019 (\u2018Thus you lead your people, Lord, to blessing\u2019), are strikingly similar to those of the final verse of \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019. On 9 September 1943, Bonhoeffer urged Maria to read the hymn, one of his favourites, despite its unfamiliarity and difficulty, saying \u2018it grows on one\u2019; on 29 September she replies that she often read it and was grateful for it. I shall return to Paul Gerhardt shortly. But first let us consider the poem as a poem.
\nUntil Henkys\u2019 1986 monograph, Bonhoeffer\u2019s ten poems attracted little critical attention as poetry per se\u2014much less as \u2018prison poetry\u2019, a genre in its own right. Eberhard Bethge devotes no more than several sentences of his biography to the poetry, describing these \u2018literary experiments\u2019 as \u2018efforts to overcome his isolation\u2019, \u2018so densely packed that they burst the forms of the poem.\u2019 Bethge devotes four lines to \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019, calling it \u2018the last theological and developed witness from Bonhoeffer\u2019s hand\u2019, and \u2018a prayer\u2019. As suggested by the title, the first separate German publication of the poems by Johann Christoph Hampe, Gebete und Gedichte (Prayers and Poems), gives the three prayers and ten poems equal weight, omitting mention of their genesis in prison. Its English equivalent ignores the texts\u2019 genre with the title Prayers from Prison. Not until the 1990s has there been greater attention to the prison poems as poetry, as exemplified by Henkys\u2019 critical study Geheimnis der Freiheit, or Edwin Robertson\u2019s adaptation of the 10 poems in English, appearing in the U.K. in 1998 and the U.S. a year later.
\nSo how and why does Bonhoeffer, who had written poetry as a youth and now returned to the genre in prison, go about communicating in this form? Bethge and others have justifiably asserted that Bonhoeffer\u2019s stylistic forte is the essay and the letter. Why, then, would he choose the classical Italian stanza form and pack such important material into it in order to communicate these end-of-year thoughts to an intimate circle of extended family and friends?
\nThe distinctly personal tone is set by Bonhoeffer\u2019s lyrical first person in v. 1 by creating an \u2018I-you\u2019 relationship: \u2018I want to live these days with you in spirit\u2019. Amidst terror and bombardment, imprisoned family members and a most uncertain future, there is an abyss to be crossed to affirm the connection between separated loved ones. How does Bonhoeffer do this?
\nOne answer to this question is: He does not do it merely by sending a poem. The poem is embedded in a letter. So, technically, we are looking at a more complex genre, as it turns out a kind of epistolary last testament with an embedded poetic jewel. Secondly, there are two separate letters and two slightly different surviving versions of the poem. In early editions of LPP, \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 is placed after Bonhoeffer\u2019s letter of 28 December 1944 to his mother, with wishes for her birthday. The updated English version of Eberhard Bethge\u2019s biography, as well as DBW 8, describe the poem as having been sent for his mother\u2019s 70th birthday on 30 December, \u2018through [his fianc\u00e9e] Maria [von Wedemeyer]\u2019. If we can assume Paula Bonhoeffer had already read the poem or received it about the time of the letter at New Years Eve, the following sentences will have struck a chord (cf. especially vv. 1, 2, and 5):<\/p>\n
I think these difficult years have brought us even closer together than we ever were before \u2026 I wish you and Papa and Maria and all of us that the new year might at least bring us a glimmer of light here and there and that we might be able to have the joy of being together again after all.<\/p>\n
As we know since the publication of LLC 92, the original manuscript of the poem comprised the conclusion of Bonhoeffer\u2019s Christmas letter of 19 December to Maria, delivered to her by Commissar Sonderegger for the holidays. The original was kept by her under lock and key until her death, with only the typed copy she gave the family circulating among them and then finding publication in the forms we knew until recently. In the lines of the letter immediately preceding the poem, Bonhoeffer describes it to Maria as, \u2018my Christmas greeting to you, my parents, and my brothers and sisters.\u2019 Thus we know that Bonhoeffer intended multiple addressees for the poem, as implied by Renate Bethge\u2019s remarks.
\nThe fact that Bonhoeffer\u2019s last poem is embedded within the last letter to his fianc\u00e9e arouses the interest of textual critics who look at intertextual resonances. The echoes here are striking: \u2018My dearest Maria \u2026 Our homes will be very quiet at this time [cf. vv. 1 and 6 of \u201cBy Powers of Good\u201d: \u201cBy faithful, quiet powers \u2026\u201d, and \u201cWhen now the quiet deepens all around us \u2026\u201d]. But I have often found that the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you all.\u2019 The world that read \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 in LPP without reference to the original would not have noticed the certainly conscious reference by Bonhoeffer in his letter to the poem that followed, because the LPP translation omitted the German word for \u2018quiet\u2019 in the first line.Knowing the custom of the family gathering, the correspondent and poet affirms his presence with them by alluding to the quiet and the ritual gathering. Quiet is a dominant motif in the poem, yet Bonhoeffer immediately re-defines it in v. 1: it is not the sentimental quiet of undisturbed middle-class life, but the quiet force of \u2018faithful powers of good\u2019 amidst the \u2018evil times\u2019 and \u2018terror-stricken\u2019 souls of v. 2. Bonhoeffer uses his final letter of 19 December to his fianc\u00e9e, which again was only published after her death, and his letter of 28 December to his mother, to introduce the prayer-like poem in secular language.
\nMaria once broke her oath of silence by reading aloud during a talk at Union Seminary in New York City the following passage from this letter. It, too, is alive with resonances with the poem, as if in writing the letter Bonhoeffer is finding his way towards the wording of the poem:<\/p>\n
It is as if, in solitude, the soul develops organs of which we\u2019re hardly aware in everyday life. So I haven\u2019t for an instant felt lonely and forlorn. You yourself, my parents\u2014all of you including my friends and students on active service\u2014are my constant companions. Your prayers and kind thoughts, passages from the Bible, long-forgotten conversations, pieces of music, books\u2014all are invested with life and reality as never before. It is a great, invisible realm in which one lives and of whose real existence there can be no doubt. The old children\u2019s song about the angels says \u2018two to cover me, two to wake me\u2019\u2014and today we grown-ups are no less in need than children of preservation, night and morning, by kindly, unseen powers. So you mustn\u2019t think I\u2019m unhappy.<\/p>\n
Motifs that reverberate through the poem cannot have been lost on the readers of the letter. The \u2018great, invisible realm \u2026 of whose real existence there can be no doubt\u2019, echoes in v. 6: \u2018your world, invisibly expanding\u2019. In this sense one could arguably consider this a coded piece. The language of the code specifically bridged the secular world of his readers and his own discovery of new theological dimensions. J\u00fcrgen Henkys\u2019 recent work on Paul Gerhardt has thrown new light on this possibility.
\nPermit me a closer look at one thread that may have contributed to a code I believe Bonhoeffer thought might unite him, consciously or unconsciously, with his fianc\u00e9e and extended family at the close of 1944. Renate Bethge told us that Paul Gerhardt\u2019s hymn \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn und treten\u2019 was sung every New Year\u2019s Eve by believers and unbelievers alike in the Bonhoeffer household, all fifteen verses. Unfortunately, the English version available to me in a current Lutheran hymnal does not at all reflect the original Paul Gerhardt text, which echoes \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 in striking ways.
\nMy literal, unrhymed translation of \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn und treten\u2019 follows here:<\/p>\n
1. Now let us go with singing and praying
\nbefore the Lord, who has given us strength up till now.<\/p>\n
2. We journey along and wander from one year to the next;
\nwe live and thrive from the old year into the new<\/p>\n
3. through so much fear and suffering, through trembling and faintheartedness,
\nthrough war and great horrors that cover the whole world.<\/p>\n
4. For just as the little children in heavy storms
\nhere on earth are conscientiously protected by faithful mothers,<\/p>\n
5. thus also and no less faithfully God keeps us, his children,
\nsafe in his bosom when dire need and tribulation strike.<\/p>\n
6. Oh, Protector of our life, in truth, all we do is in vain
\nunless your eye watches over us.<\/p>\n
7. Praised be your faithfulness, which is new each morning,
\nPraise be to the strong hands that turn all heart\u2019s sorrows.<\/p>\n
8. May we also ask of you, O Father, that you remain
\nin the midst of our sufferings a fount of our joys.<\/p>\n
9. Give me and all those whose hearts long for you
\nand your favor, a heart that knows patience.<\/p>\n
10. Close the gates of wailing and let everywhere
\nthe streams of joy flow over so much bloodshed.<\/p>\n
11. Give your kind blessing on all our paths,
\nlet the sun of your grace shine on the great and the small.<\/p>\n
12. Be the Father of the abandoned, counselor of the Lost,
\nGift for those not taken care of, Provision for the Poor.<\/p>\n
13. Help graciously all who are ill, give glad thoughts
\nto the sorely grieved souls that torment themselves with melancholy.<\/p>\n
14. And finally, most importantly, fill us with your Spirit,
\nthat it might adorn us here and lead us heavenward.<\/p>\n
15. May you grant all this, O Life of my Life,
\nto me and to the host of Christians at this blessed New Year.<\/p>\n
Like Bonhoeffer, Paul Gerhardt creates a \u2018we\u2019 position in relation to the war and terror all are experiencing as the old year ends (vv. 2\u20133). Bonhoeffer\u2019s letter to his mother is direct in its gratitude to her for her loving care; the faithful attention of loved ones is among the powers of good he mentions in both letters. The poem\u2019s emphasis on faithfulness (Treue) links it to Gerhardt\u2019s v. 7, which creates a feminine image of God caring \u2018no less faithfully\u2019 for \u2018us, his children\u2019 in times of dire need, than little children are protected in storms \u2018by faithful mothers\u2019. To all the poem\u2019s recipients familiar with the Gerhardt hymn, other links would surely have been sensed: \u2018your faithfulness, new each morning\u2019 (v. 7, as in v. 7 of the poem: \u2018God is with us each night and in the morning\u2019); the motif of tormented souls in v. 2 of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 and v. 13 of Gerhardt\u2019s hymn.
\nA striking contrast in \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 in contrast to the 17th century model, despite a close parallel in theme and language about joy and suffering, is found in the transition from v. 3 to v. 4 of the poem as compared to v. 8 of \u2018Nun la\u00dft uns gehn\u2019. Where Gerhardt, poet of the Thirty Years\u2019 War, pleads for God to be the fount of joy amidst suffering, Bonhoeffer lays the full weight of v. 3 on the act of unflinching acceptance of the \u2018cup of suffering\u2019, only then beginning v. 4 with a stressed \u2018But\u2019: \u2018But should you wish \u2026 to give us\/the joys of this world \u2026\u2019 Surely both the theological and the personal meaning of this allusion to Gethsemane and the cross\u2014especially with its significant reversal of conventional piety\u2014\u2018let us have just this one human request and then we\u2019ll accept the suffering that comes with doing your will\u2019\u2014will not have been lost on Maria or the family as they continued to the \u2018befall what may\u2019 of v. 7. Yet the poem\u2019s voice is distinctly familiar and nonreligious.
\nIn my view the poet chose a classical, secular lyrical form that his audience would know, at the same time infusing his lines with allusions to a beloved ritual that held deep meaning for them. As the Paul Gerhardt hymns had unexpectedly proven eye-opening to him once he began to study them in prison, this one, Bonhoeffer may have thought, could provide for his extended family and fianc\u00e9e some links between the themes of his New Year\u2019s poem and the key nuggets of his new theology. It remains for us to wonder whether he thought beyond that audience.<\/p>\n
IV. Interpreting the text<\/p>\n
Beyond the links between the poem, his cover letters to his mother and to Maria and to hymn texts, \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 contains numerous motifs that refer to the core ideas in Bonhoeffer\u2019s concurrent late prison writings. This is not the place to elaborate in detail on these. I shall focus on just three motifs of both poetic and theological significance in the poem and briefly illustrate how they work between several prison writings to help us understand the breadth and depth of Bonhoeffer\u2019s reach as a creative writer and thinker.
\nFirst, Bonhoeffer refers in his Ethics, as in almost every volume of his writings, to \u2018M\u00e4chte\u2019 as earthly, historical \u2018powers\u2019. In this poem, as in the letters, \u2018gute (kindly, goodly, generous, magnanimous) M\u00e4chte\u2019 are defined not in religious or spiritual terms, but as kind deeds of faithful loved ones, beloved pieces of music, letters, remembered conversations. But in this poem, as in the cover letter to Maria, the powers are associated with a guiding, protecting presence akin to that of angels.
\nSecondly, there is a striking connection between \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019, the letter of 19 December to Maria and \u2018The \u201cEthical\u201d and the \u201cChristian\u201d as a Topic\u2019 in Ethics where Bonhoeffer speaks of God\u2019s commandment as allowing human beings to be human before God, to be without inner conflict, to be confident (cf. v. 7 of the poem) because their action is preceded by the decision to obey God\u2019s call, and \u2018to be guided, accompanied and guarded on their way by the commandment as by a good angel.\u2019 Thus the affirmation voiced in the poem, concluding with the confidence of God\u2019s presence \u2018befall what may\u2019, can be seen as the fruit of a new understanding of the connection between God\u2019s commandment and the freedom of responsible action, shared in this lyrical form to be appreciated and loved for its beauty by his family who were not privy to his theological writings. Code, yes, but also Dichtung, condensed matter for thought and reflection\u2014perhaps, I would argue, even for his own clarification in the absence of conversation partners such as Bethge who had served that function.
\nThat brings us to the third motif, that of \u2018Geborgenheit\u2019 (safety, comfort, protection). \u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten wunderbar geborgen\u2019 (literally \u2018wonderfully sheltered by powers of goodness\u2019), the opening line of the final stanza of the original poem, states the condition for confidence, now extending the \u2018I\u2019 of verse 1 to the \u2018we\u2019 whose experience has been drawn into the sequence of seven verses. The cadence and melody of \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 with its iambic lines express it more simply, but one cannot help but hear the poem when contemplating Bonhoeffer\u2019s reflection on responsible action from \u2018History and the Good\u2019:<\/p>\n
Responsible action \u2026 gains its unity, and ultimately also its certainty, from this very limitation by God and neighbor \u2026 [I]t is creaturely and humble. This is precisely why it can be sustained by an ultimate joy and confidence, knowing that in its origin, essence and goal it is sheltered in Christ.<\/p>\n
\u2018Von guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 is an affirmation of human and spiritual \u2018Geborgenheit\u2019 amidst the terror of evil times. It features a Gethsemane perikope without naming Christ. The motif of \u2018sheltering\u2019 here is a final expression of confidence in God\u2019s presence. The word is surely not chosen arbitrarily by the poet of \u2018Night Voices\u2019, written perhaps six months earlier, which uses the same rhyming pairs and the same motifs from Humperdinck\u2019s familiar children\u2019s lullaby from H\u00e4nsel und Gretel, but in consciously harsh juxtaposition to create a dissonant image of isolation:<\/p>\n
Twelve cold, thin clangs from the clock tower awaken (wecken) me.
\nNo resonance or warmth in them to cover (decken) me.
\nHowling, vicious dogs at midnight terrify (schrecken) me.<\/p>\n
Instead of the protection and comfort associated with the words and rhymes of the lullaby, Bonhoeffer uses them here in negation to describe the isolation of confinement. In \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019, by contrast, the images and allusions all serve to comfort the addressees, even while affirming the call to share in God\u2019s suffering in the world, and at the same time desiring to enjoy once more the abundance of earth\u2019s joys.
\n\u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 works as a hymn, a poem, a prayer or meditation. Its context as an embedded text within significant smuggled, uncensored messages from prison complicates the task of interpretation. Bonhoeffer\u2019s literary experiments with poetry may have helped him not only overcome his isolation but also, as Bethge put it, to find his way through the discipline of reading and writing poetry through the \u2018stations on the way to freedom\u2019. In exploring each poetic text and the wider contexts from which the poems arose we may better understand why Bonhoeffer\u2019s prison theology continues to expand our vision of that \u2018invisible realm \u2026 of whose real existence there can be no doubt.\u2019<\/p>\n
6<\/p>\n
\u2018The Friend\u2019<\/p>\n
Reflections on Friendship and Freedom<\/p>\n
Stanley Hauerwas<\/p>\n
\u2018Der Freund\u2019<\/p>\n
Nicht aus dem schweren Boden der Erde,
\nwo Blut und Geschlecht und Schwur
\nm\u00e4chtig und heilig sind,
\nwo die Erde selbst
\ngegen Wahnsinn und Frevel
\ndie geweihten uralten Ordnungen
\nh\u00fctet und sch\u00fctzt und r\u00e4cht\u2014
\nnicht aus dem schweren Boden der Erde,
\nsondern aus freiem Gefallen
\nund freiem Verlangen des Geistes,
\nder nicht des Eides noch des Gesetzes bedarf,
\nwird der Freund dem Freunde geschenkt.<\/p>\n
Neben dem n\u00e4hrenden Weizenfeld,
\nwelches die Menschen ehrf\u00fcrchtig bauen und pflegen,
\ndem sie den Schwei\u00df ihrer Arbeit
\nund, wenn es sein mu\u00df,
\ndas Blut ihrer Leiber zum Opfer bringen,
\nneben dem Acker des t\u00e4glichen Brotes
\nlassen die Menschen doch auch
\ndie sch\u00f6ne Kornblume bl\u00fchn.
\nKeiner hat sie gepflanzt, keiner begossen,
\nschutzlos w\u00e4chst sie in Freiheit
\nund in heiterer Zuversicht,
\nda\u00df man das Leben
\nunter dem weiten Himmel
\nihr g\u00f6nne.
\nNeben dem N\u00f6tigen,
\naus gewichtigem, irdischem Stoffe Geformten,
\nneben der Ehe, der Arbeit, dem Schwert,
\nwill auch das Freie
\nleben
\nund der Sonne entgegenwachsen.
\nNicht nur die reife Frucht,
\nauch die Bl\u00fcten sind sch\u00f6n.
\nOb die Bl\u00fcte der Frucht,
\nob die Frucht der Bl\u00fcte nur diene\u2014
\nwer wei\u00df es?<\/p>\n
\u2018The Friend\u2019<\/p>\n
Not from the hard ground,
\nwhere blood and race and binding oath
\nare sacred and powerful;
\nwhere the very earth itself
\nkeeps guard and defends
\nthe consecrated orders of creation
\nagainst the madness and frenzy of disorder;
\nnot from the hard ground of the earth,
\nbut freely chosen and desired,
\nthe longing of the spirit,
\nwhich neither duty nor law requires,
\nthe friend will offer to the friend.<\/p>\n
Beside the nourishing field of corn,
\nwhich men faithfully plant and tend,
\nlabouring and sweating in the field,
\nand, if needs be,
\nsacrifice their life\u2019s blood;
\nbeside the field of daily bread,
\nthose same men also leave
\nthe lovely cornflower to bloom.
\nNo one planted, nor watered it,
\ndefenseless it grows in freedom
\nand supremely confident
\nthat it will be allowed to live
\nunder the open sky
\nand undisturbed.
\nBeside the necessary growth
\nproduced from heavy, earthy work,
\nbeside marriage, work and the sword,
\nthe unplanned will also
\nflourish,
\nand grow towards the sun.
\nNot only the ripening fruit,
\nbut also flowers are beautiful.
\nWhether the fruit serves the flower
\nor the flower the fruit only\u2014
\nwho knows?
\nDoch sind uns beide gegeben.
\nKostbarste, seltenste Bl\u00fcte\u2014
\nder Freiheit des spielenden,
\nwagenden und vertrauenden
\nGeistes in gl\u00fccklicher Stunde entsprungen\u2014
\nist dem Freunde der Freund.<\/p>\n
Spielgef\u00e4hrten zuerst
\nauf den weiten Fahrten des Geistes
\nin wunderbare,
\nentfernte Reiche,
\ndie im Schleier der Morgensonne
\nwie Gold ergl\u00e4nzen,
\ndenen am hei\u00dfen Mittag
\ndie leichten Wolken des blauen Himmels
\nentgegenziehen,
\ndie in erregender Nacht
\nbeim Schein der Lampe
\nwie verborgene, heimliche Sch\u00e4tze
\nden Suchenden locken.<\/p>\n
Wenn dann der Geist dem Menschen
\nmit gro\u00dfen, heiteren, k\u00fchnen Gedanken
\nHerz und Stirne ber\u00fchrt,
\nda\u00df er mit klaren Augen und freier Geb\u00e4rde
\nder Welt ins Gesicht schaut,
\nwenn dann dem Geiste die Tat entspringt,
\n\u2014der jeder allein steht und f\u00e4llt\u2014
\nwenn aus der Tat
\nstark und gesund
\ndas Werk erw\u00e4chst,
\ndas dem Leben des Mannes
\nInhalt und Sinn gibt,
\ndann verlangt es
\nden handelnden, wirkenden, einsamen Menschen
\nnach dem befreundeten und verstehenden Geist.
\nWie ein klares, frisches Gew\u00e4sser,
\ndarin der Geist sich vom Staube des Tages reinigt,
\ndarin er von gl\u00fchender Hitze sich k\u00fchlet
\nund in der Stunde der M\u00fcdigkeit st\u00e4hlt\u2014
\nwie eine Burg, in die nach Gefahr und Verwirrung
\nder Geist zur\u00fcckkehrt,
\nYet both are given to us.
\nCostly, rare blooms\u2014
\nsprung from the freedom of the playful,
\nbrave and trusting spirit
\nin a happy hour\u2014
\nsuch is the friend to the friend.<\/p>\n
Playful, at first,
\non the far journeys of the spirit,
\ninto wonderful,
\ndistant realms,
\nwhich in the haze of the morning sun
\nglitter like gold;
\nbut in the heat of the day
\nare by thin clouds in a blue sky
\nencompassed;
\nwhile in the stirrings of the night,
\nlit only by the lamp,
\nlike hidden private treasures,
\nthey beckon the seeker.<\/p>\n
Then when the spirit moves a man
\nto great, serene, audacious thoughts
\nof heart and mind,
\nhe may look the world in the face
\nwith clear eyes and open countenance;
\nthen, if action is joined to the spirit
\n\u2014by which alone it stands or falls\u2014
\nfrom this action,
\nsound and strong,
\nthe work grows,
\ngiving content to thought and meaning
\nto the life of the man;
\nthen the active, lonely man
\nlongs for
\nthe befriending, understanding spirit of another.
\nLike a clear, fresh flow of water,
\nin which the spirit cleanses itself from the dust of the day,
\ncooled from the burning heat,
\nstrengthened in the hour of tiredness\u2014
\nlike a fortress, to which after the dangers of battle
\nthe spirit retires
\nin der er Zuflucht, Zuspruch und St\u00e4rkung findet,
\nist dem Freunde der Freund.<\/p>\n
Und der Geist will vertrauen,
\nohne Grenzen vertrauen.
\nAngeekelt von dem Gew\u00fcrm,
\ndas im Schatten des Guten
\nvon Neid und Argwohn und Neugier sich n\u00e4hrt,
\nvon dem Schlangengezisch
\nvergifteter Zungen,
\ndie das Geheimnis des freien Gedankens,
\ndes aufrichtigen Herzens
\nf\u00fcrchten, hassen und schm\u00e4h\u2019n,
\nverlangt es den Geist
\nalle Verstellung von sich zu werfen
\nund sich vertrautem Geiste
\ng\u00e4nzlich zu offenbaren,
\nihm frei und treu zu verb\u00fcnden.
\nNeidlos will er bejahen,
\nwill anerkennen,
\nwill danken,
\nwill sich freuen und st\u00e4rken
\nam anderen Geist.<\/p>\n
Doch auch strengem Ma\u00df
\nund strengem Vorwurf
\nbeugt er sich willig.
\nNicht Befehle, nicht zwingende fremde Gesetze und Lehren,
\naber den Rat, den guten und ernsten,
\nder frei macht,
\nsucht der gereifte Mann
\nvon der Treue des Freundes.
\nFern oder nah
\nin Gl\u00fcck oder Ungl\u00fcck erkennt der eine im andern
\nden treuen Helfer
\nzur Freiheit
\nund Menschlichkeit.
\nto find safety, comfort and strength\u2014
\nsuch is the friend to the friend.<\/p>\n
And the spirit wants to trust,
\ntrust unconditionally.
\nDisgusted by the worm,
\nhidden in the shadows of the good,
\nnourishing itself on envy, scandal and suspicion,
\nand the poisonous tongues of a nest of vipers,
\nwho fear and hate and vilify
\nthe secret of the free mind,
\nand of the sincere heart.
\nThe spirit longs to cleanse itself
\nfrom all hypocrisy
\nand trust itself to the other spirit
\ntotally open,
\nbound to that spirit,
\nfreely and in truth.
\nThen, ungrudgingly, he will respond,
\nwill praise,
\nwill give thanks,
\nwill find joy and strength
\nin the other spirit.<\/p>\n
Even under severe pressure
\nand strong rebuke
\nhe willingly submits.
\nNot by command, nor by alien laws and doctrines,
\nbut by good and earnest counsel,
\nwhich liberates,
\nthe mature man seeks
\nfrom the true friend.
\nFar or near
\nin success and in failure,
\nthe one recognizes in the other
\nthe true helper
\ntowards freedom
\nand humanity.<\/p>\n
Am 28.8. Morgens4<\/p>\n
Als die Sirenen heulten um Mitternacht,
\nhabe ich still und lange an dich gedacht,
\nwie es dir gehen mag und wie es einst war
\nund da\u00df dir Heimkehr w\u00fcnsche im neuen Jahr.<\/p>\n
Nach langem Schweigen h\u00f6re ich um halb zwei
\ndie Signale, da\u00df die Gefahr vor\u00fcber sei.
\nIch habe darin ein freundliches Zeichen gesehen,
\nda\u00df alle Gefahren leise an dir vor\u00fcbergehen.<\/p>\n
Addendum written on the morning of 28 August 1944:<\/p>\n
At the midnight hour, the hideous siren\u2019s song,
\nI thought of you in silence and for long,
\nhow you fare now and how once you were
\nand that I wish you home for the New Year.<\/p>\n
At half past one, the silence ended at last,
\nI heard the siren\u2019s cry, all danger past.
\nIn that I have seen a kindly omen thereby,
\nthat all danger will surely pass you by.<\/p>\n
(Translation: Edwin Robertson)<\/p>\n
I. Bonhoeffer and Bethge<\/p>\n
Edwin Robertson reports that when LPP was published in 1953 it was not known that Bethge was the friend who received the letters. Nor was it known who was the subject of the poem \u2018The Friend\u2019. However, in 1957 Bethge was speaking at a student conference in New Hampshire where one of the participants asked him who the recipient of letters and poem might be, because \u2018it must be a homosexual partnership\u2019. As Robertson reports: \u2018Bethge replied immediately, \u201cNo, we were fairly normal!\u201d, and he went on to show that there was no such sexual relationship.\u2019
\nI suppose we should not be surprised that an American assumed a poem as intense and intimate as \u2018The Friend\u2019 must indicate a sexual relation. Such an assumption betrays the impoverished understanding of friendship characteristic of America in the 1950s and even more prevalent in our current context. However, it is certainly true that the friendship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge was, as any real friendship must be, unusual depending as it did on their ability to negotiate their very different backgrounds and personalities.
\n\u2018The Friend\u2019 not only witnesses the intensity of Bonhoeffer\u2019s friendship with Bethge, but Bonhoeffer\u2019s friendship obviously was equally important for Bethge. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography is surely a testimony to this extraordinary friendship. In his lovely book, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer\u2019s Friend Eberhard Bethge, John de Gruchy observes that Bonhoeffer and Bethge seldom expressed in public their deep feelings about anything much less than their friendship. Indeed, Bethge says he refrained from becoming involved in debates surrounding Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology because his \u2018friendship (with Bonhoeffer) was of an intimacy that makes it impossible for me to enter the debate about him. I have quite deliberately kept out of that.\u2019 Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem, therefore, at once celebrates without betraying their friendship.
\nFor Bethge\u2019s birthday of 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote \u2018Stations on the Road to Freedom\u2019, but quickly followed this up a month later with \u2018The Friend\u2019. Upon receiving the first, Bethge wrote to Bonhoeffer observing,<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t give anything more personal than a poem. And you could hardly give me greater joy. There is no greater self-sacrifice, no better way of signifying an otherwise unattainable nearness than in a poem. And it is probably the form, because it makes visible the inwardness that is bound up and held in check within it. Unlimited surrender of the spirit awakens anxiety in the receiver. But this restrained surrender seems to me to be the highest degree of friendship and understanding. And as a result there is something very cheering and stimulating about it. Its touch is steadier and more far-reaching than that of a letter. Many thanks.<\/p>\n
The poetry Bonhoeffer wrote in the last year of his life, as Kelly and Nelson suggest, no doubt reflects Bonhoeffer\u2019s sense of loss at being separated from those he so desperately loved. In his letter to Bethge of 5 June 1944, Bonhoeffer says he would be behaving like \u2018a shy boy\u2019 if he hid from Bethge that he has begun to write poetry. Bonhoeffer would soon acknowledge that \u2018I\u2019m certainly no poet!\u2019, but I do not think it was his lack of talent for poetry that made him hesitant to reveal he was writing poetry. Rather it was his sense that poetry, as Bethge suggested, made visible an inwardness that Bonhoeffer found difficult. Indeed, Bonhoeffer notes he has not even told Maria he is writing poetry because he was unsure whether it \u2018wouldn\u2019t frighten her more than please her\u2019. It means, I believe, that the intimacy his poem \u2018The Friend\u2019 displays is a commentary on all his poems.
\n\u2018The Friend\u2019 is not only the poem that illumines Bonhoeffer\u2019s other poems, but that which cannot be read well separate from LPP. Indeed, LPP is better read in its light. LPP was made possible by Bonhoeffer and Bethge\u2019s friendship, but the book is also a testimony to, and constitution of, that friendship. Therefore, to appreciate the poem it helps to catch glimpses into how Bonhoeffer and Bethge understood their friendship. I do not, however, want to give the impression that the poem is an explanation of their friendship. For I assume that one of the tasks of poetry is to teach why \u2018explanations\u2019 are not all that interesting. However, a few initial remarks about Bonhoeffer and Bethge as people are in order.
\nFrom an external perspective, Bethge and Bonhoeffer were unlikely friends. Bethge described himself as a \u2018country boy\u2019 in contrast to the cultured world from which Bonhoeffer came. Bethge had not had Bonhoeffer\u2019s education nor did Bethge understand himself to be an intellectual; at least, Bethge did not pretend he ever desired to be a German professor. Bethge was first and foremost a pastor, which no doubt was one of the reasons Bonhoeffer admired him. Bethge\u2019s commitment to the church must have been one of the reasons Bonhoeffer found him such a kindred spirit at Finkenwalde, but also important was their common love of music.
\nBonhoeffer captures the sheer enjoyment they seem to have taken in their early relationship in the lines of the poem:<\/p>\n
Playful, at first,
\non the far journeys of the spirit,
\ninto wonderful,
\ndistant realms,
\nwhich in the haze of the morning sun
\nglitter like gold;
\nbut in the heat of the day
\nencompassed;
\nwhile in the stirrings of the night,
\nlit only by the lamp,
\nlike hidden private treasures,
\nthey beckon the seeker.<\/p>\n
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that Bonhoeffer and Bethge\u2019s friendship was always easy. Bethge admired Bonhoeffer, but he did not stand in awe of him. In one of his letters to Bethge, Bonhoeffer reports that the soldier who supervised Bethge\u2019s visits to Bonhoeffer in prison, was amazed that Bethge did not flatter Bonhoeffer. Neither Bethge nor Bonhoeffer would have befriended anyone who only told them what they wanted to hear. For example, Bethge, though he liked the poem \u2018The Friend\u2019 very much, suggested that \u2018lovely\u2019 in the line, \u2018the lovely cornflower to bloom\u2019 could be omitted because \u2018at that point you suddenly move from a continuous view point into a value judgment.\u2019
\nIt is not, therefore, surprising that in a letter dated 18 November 1943, Bonhoeffer writes to Bethge concerning his wish to discuss a story he is writing about a middle-class family. Bonhoeffer observes this is a subject that he and Bethge had often talked about, which makes him feel how much he misses their conversations. Bonhoeffer says, \u2018I may often have originated our ideas, but the clarification of them was completely on your side. I only learnt in conversation with you whether an idea was any good or not \u2026 Your comments on details are so much better than mine.\u2019 In a later letter Bonhoeffer even tells Bethge that he lives in a daily spiritual exchange with him. \u2018I can\u2019t read a book or write a paragraph without talking to you about it or write a paragraph without talking with you about it.\u2019
\nBonhoeffer quite simply trusted and depended on Bethge in a manner different to anyone else in his life, including Maria. The kind of doubts Bonhoeffer explores in the poem, \u2018Who Am I?\u2019, he hopes some day to share with Maria, but he cannot expect her to yet be ready for him to speak so directly. According to Bonhoeffer, Bethge was the only person who knew \u2018how often accidie, tristitia, with all its menacing consequences, has lain in wait for me.\u2019 Bonhoeffer knew that Bethge was in many ways a much more attractive person than he was. Bonhoeffer, for example, observed that he did not know anyone who did not like Bethge, but many people did not like him. He acknowledged that he was not particularly concerned about this, because \u2018where ever I find enemies I also find friends, and that satisfies me. But the reason is probably that you are by nature open and modest, whereas I am reticent and rather demanding.\u2019<\/p>\n
II. The poem<\/p>\n
The inspiration and language for writing \u2018The Friend\u2019 came directly from Bethge. Bonhoeffer had written to Bethge on 18 November 1943, observing that it was not easy to resolve the conflict between marriage and friendship. However, the marriage of Eberhard and Renate, a marriage he himself celebrated and for which he wrote a wedding sermon, Bonhoeffer implied would be spared this problem because of Bonhoeffer\u2019s imprisonment. Bethge, however, responds challenging Bonhoeffer\u2019s claim that friendship, next to marriage, should be considered one of the stable aspects of life. Bethge observes,<\/p>\n
But that is not the case, at least as far as the recognition and consideration of others is concerned. Marriage is recognized outwardly\u2014regardless of whether the relationship between the couple is stable or not\u2014each person, in this case the whole family, must take into account and finds it the right thing that much should and must be undertaken for it. Friendship\u2014no matter how exclusive and how all-embracing it may be\u2014has no necessitas \u2026 Friendship is completely determined by its content and only in this way does it have its existence.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer responded agreeing, in contrast to marriage and kinship, that friendship depends entirely on its own inherent quality, making friendship hard to classify sociologically. He speculates that perhaps friendship can be regarded as a sub-heading of culture and education, but that may not be much help, because in contrast to work, state, and the church, each of which has a divine mandate, it is not clear where culture and education are to be classified. Culture and education do not belong to the sphere of obedience, but to freedom, which surrounds the three spheres of the mandates. But it is freedom that makes a good father, citizen, or worker a Christian. Therefore,<\/p>\n
Just because friendship belongs to this sphere of freedom (\u2018of the Christian man\u2019?!), it must be confidently defended against all the disapproving frowns of \u2018ethical\u2019 existences, though without claiming for it the necessitas of a divine decree, but only the necessitas of freedom. I believe that within the sphere of this freedom friendship is by far the rarest and most priceless treasure, for where else does it survive in this world of ours, dominated as it is by the three other mandates? It cannot be compared with the treasures of the mandates, for in relation to them it is sui generis; it belongs to them as the cornflower belongs to the cornfield.<\/p>\n
\u2018Cornflower belongs to the cornfield\u2019 becomes the major image Bonhoeffer uses in his poem, \u2018The Friend\u2019. Although the poem is written to celebrate his friendship with Bethge, it becomes the occasion to explore the relation of friendship and the mandates. As early as 1932 Bonhoeffer had challenged the assumption that the \u2018orders of creation\u2019 could be considered revelations of the divine commandments. But, as a good Lutheran, for him the mandates remained givens\u2014givens that are to be Christologically disciplined, that give form to our life together. In Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Non-Violence, I suggested that Bonhoeffer\u2019s attempt to rethink the mandates remained incomplete, but that he never quite made up his mind about the status of the mandates is exactly what makes his poem, \u2018The Friend\u2019 so interesting.
\nBonhoeffer begins the poem reminding us that the mandates are literally grounded in the ground.<\/p>\n
Not from the hard ground,
\nwhere blood and race and binding oath
\nare sacred and powerful;
\nwhere the very earth itself
\nkeeps guard and defends
\nthe consecrated orders of creation
\nagainst the madness and frenzy of disorder;
\nnot from the hard ground of the earth,
\nbut freely chosen and desired,
\nthe longing of the spirit,
\nwhich neither duty nor law requires,
\nthe friend will offer to the friend.<\/p>\n
The mandates are not arbitrary, but rather constitutive of our very ability to live life together. The state and work are rooted in the ground, but so is marriage. In a letter to Maria dated 12 August 1943, Bonhoeffer says,<\/p>\n
When I think about the situation of the world, the complete darkness over our personal fate and my present imprisonment, then I believe that our union can only be a sign of God\u2019s grace and kindness, which calls us to faith. We would be blind if we did not see it. Jeremiah says at the moment of his people\u2019s great need \u2018still one shall buy houses and acres in this land\u2019 as a sign of trust in the future. This is where faith belongs. May God give it to us daily. And I do not mean that faith which flees the world, but the one that endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage shall be a yes to God\u2019s earth; it shall strengthen our courage to act and accomplish something on earth. I fear Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven.<\/p>\n
I have no doubt that Maria loved Bonhoeffer, but it is nonetheless remarkable that she was not offended by his suggestion that their marriage was equivalent to Jeremiah\u2019s purchase of land in the face of the exile. That purchase, as well as Bonhoeffer\u2019s engagement, was of course a gesture of hope against hopelessness, but even Maria would have wanted Bonhoeffer to regard her as something more than the occasion of a prophetic sign-act. Maria makes clear that she knew well Bonhoeffer\u2019s love observing that he \u2018had the ability to convert his annoyance at the limitations of our relationship, and the misunderstandings that resulted from them, into a hopeful and eager expectation and challenge. He was able to transform the fumblings and erratic emotions of a young girl into the assured certainty that this was an addition and a source of strength to his own life.\u2019
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s understanding of marriage as a mandate is developed in his wedding sermon for Eberhard and Renate. \u2018Marriage,\u2019 he observed, \u2018is more than your love for each other\u2019, because marriage is a \u2018post of responsibility\u2019 towards the world and mankind. Accordingly, it is not love that will sustain their marriage, but marriage that sustains their love, making marriage indissoluble. There is a given relationship between husband and wife requiring that the wife be subject to the husband and the husband is to love the wife. By divine ordinance the wife honours the husband when he properly performs his office, representing to the world that as Christ was head of the church so the husband is head of his family.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s account of marriage and the family may betray his class presuppositions, but far more important is how his account of marriage and the family is grounded in the ground. Marriage, like the field of corn, is given life by the realm of freedom in which friendship flourishes making possible the transformation of the mandates by the gospel. No one planted or watered the \u2018lovely cornflower\u2019 but it comes to life bringing life to those that have sacrificed their life\u2019s blood \u2018beside the field of daily bread\u2019.
\nSuch a growth by necessity is unplanned and defenceless trusting its very beauty to make its existence possible. The fruit and the flower are alike beautiful:<\/p>\n
Whether the fruit serves the flower
\nor the flower the fruit only\u2014
\nwho knows?
\nYet both are given to us.
\nCostly, rare blooms\u2014
\nsprung from the freedom of the playful,
\nbrave, and trusting spirit
\nin a happy hour\u2014
\nsuch is the friend to the friend.<\/p>\n
So the mandates make friendship possible, but without friendship the mandates are divested of their life-giving potential.
\nThe spirit, Bonhoeffer tells us, will move a man to \u2018great, serene, audacious thoughts of heart and mind\u2019, making him look the world in the face, \u2018with clear eyes and open countenance\u2019. Then, in lines in which I think give expression to Bonhoeffer\u2019s sense of isolation, he says,<\/p>\n
then action is joined to the spirit
\n\u2014by which it stands or falls\u2014
\nfrom this action,
\nsound and strong,
\nthe work grows,
\ngiving content to thought and meaning
\nto the life of the man;
\nthen the active, lonely man
\nlongs for
\nthe befriending, understanding spirit of another.<\/p>\n
Loneliness was surely Bonhoeffer\u2019s fate as he confronted and opposed the Nazis. Bethge befriended Bonhoeffer, but he seems to have done so in a manner that acknowledged the necessary loneliness that Bonhoeffer (and he) had to endure. Their loneliness, however, was bounded by the discovery of common judgements that made a history possible. Bonhoeffer, in a letter to Bethge dated 4 February 1944, his birthday, recalls that for eight years he had celebrated this day with Bethge. He reminisces:<\/p>\n
Eight years ago we were sitting at the fireside together. You had given me as a present the D major violin concerto, and we listened to it together; then I had to tell you a little about Harnack and past times; for some reason or other you enjoyed that very much, and afterwards we decided definitely to go to Sweden. A year later you gave me the September Bible and a lovely inscription and your name at the top. There followed Schlonwitz and Sigurdshof, and we had the company of a good many people who are no longer with us. The singing at the door, the prayer at the service that you undertook that day, the Claudius hymn, for which I\u2019m indebted to Gerhard\u2014all those things are delightful recollections that are proof against the horrible atmosphere of this place. I hope confidently that we shall be together again for you next birthday, and perhaps\u2014who knows?\u2014even for Easter. Then we shall get back to what is really our life\u2019s work; we shall have ample work that we shall enjoy, and what we have experienced in the meantime will not have been in vain. We shall probably always be grateful to each other for having been able to go through this present time as we\u2019re now doing. I know you\u2019re thinking of me today, and if our thoughts include not only the past, but also the hope of a future lived with common purpose, even though in a changed circumstance, then indeed I\u2019m very happy.<\/p>\n
A long passage, but one essential to understand the \u2018befriending\u2019 that Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem describes. Bethge and Bonhoeffer\u2019s friendship, as any significant friendship must be, was constituted by contingencies. That is why friendship, and in particular the friendship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge, can only be captured by a story to be told, retold, and revised. In the same letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer wishes that Bethge might meet someone who has more in common with him, but observes, \u2018I think that we, who have become more exacting than most people with regard to friendship, have more difficulty in finding what we miss and are looking for. In this respect, too, it isn\u2019t a simple matter to find a \u201csubstitute\u201d.\u2019 Of course a substitute is not possible, because no one else has shared their history. What can be hoped for rather is that such a friendship opens the friends to new friendships that their history requires.
\nThe next lines of the poem might suggest that Bonhoeffer understood his friendship with Bethge as an escape from the political struggle:<\/p>\n
Like a clear, fresh flow of water,
\nin which the spirit cleanses itself from the dust of day,
\ncooled from the burning heat,
\nstrengthened in the hour of tiredness\u2014
\nlike a fortress, to which after the dangers of battle
\nthe spirit retires
\nto find safety and, comfort and strength\u2014
\nsuch is the friend to the friend.<\/p>\n
No doubt Bonhoeffer and Bethge\u2019s friendship was a zone of safety, comfort, and strength, but I think it would be a mistake to read Bonhoeffer\u2019s understanding of friendship as an escape from the political. Rather, as the first lines of the poem suggest, friendship is that which saves the mandates from their potential to be repressive. Such an interpretation I believe is justified by the stanza of the poem in which friendship becomes the necessary condition for the trust that saves us from cynicism and despair. In \u2018After Ten Years\u2019, placed at the beginning to LPP, Bonhoeffer observed that one of the characteristics of their time was the experience of betrayal. \u2018The air that we breathe is so polluted by mistrust that it almost chokes us.\u2019
\nYet where mistrust has been broken through, Bonhoeffer notes that a confidence is discovered otherwise unimagined. Without trust life is impoverished. Indeed, without trust life is impossible. To trust requires that we put our lives, our very understanding of ourselves, into the hands of others. Accordingly our duty is to foster and strengthen trust whenever possible because trust is \u2018one of the greatest, rarest and happiest blessings of our life in community, though it can emerge only on the dark background of a necessary mistrust. We have learnt never to trust a scoundrel an inch, but to give ourselves to the trustworthy without reserve.\u2019
\nIt is not surprising, therefore, in his \u2018Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm R\u00fcdiger Bethge\u2019, that Bonhoeffer observed that the presumption of modernity, that is, that people could make their way in life with reason and justice, has failed. Believing that no enemies existed, those who prided themselves on their ability to be rational found themselves in a war they did not want but for which they must now risk losing all they hold dear. Consequently, they learned that the world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing. In contrast, Bonhoeffer declares to baby Dietrich, his namesake: \u2018You know that you have enemies and friends, and you know what they can mean in your life. You are learning very early in life ways (which we did not know) of fighting an enemy, and also the value of unreserved trust in a friend.\u2019
\nTrust, the trust made possible by friendship, is for Bonhoeffer not a retreat into the private, but rather an alternative politics to the privatization of the self and of friendship that is the natural breeding ground for totalitarian politics. Friendship is not a safe-haven from the struggle, but rather the source of the truthfulness necessary to challenge the despair produced by the betrayal of trust.<\/p>\n
And the spirit wants to trust,
\ntrust unconditionally.
\nDisgusted by the worm,
\nhidden in the shadows of the good,
\nnourishing itself on envy, scandal and suspicion,
\nand the poisonous tongues of a nest of vipers,
\nwho fear and hate and vilify
\nthe secret of the free mind,
\nand of the sincere heart.
\nThe spirit longs to cleanse itself
\nfrom all hypocrisy
\nand trust itself to the other spirit
\ntotally open,
\nbound to that spirit, freely and in truth.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s love of the Psalms clearly shapes these lines of the poem. We were made to trust in God, but the very trust in which we were created becomes the source of distrust creating a world that flourishes on envy and scandal. Such a world cannot escape violence, because \u2018there can only be a community of peace when it does not rest on lies and on injustice.\u2019 \u2018The Friend\u2019 is certainly a celebration of Bonhoeffer and Bethge\u2019s friendship, but the poem also provides Bonhoeffer with the opportunity to claim the significance of friendship, and the trust friendship requires, as well as makes possible, for a political alternative to the terror that was Germany.
\nBonhoeffer refuses to hide, however, the difficulty friendship can create. The friend befriended gives praise and thanks, finds,<\/p>\n
joy and strength
\nin the other spirit.
\nEven under severe pressure
\nand strong rebuke
\nhe willingly submits.
\nNot by command, nor by alien laws and doctrines,
\nbut by good and earnest counsel,
\nwhich liberates,
\nthe mature man seeks
\nfrom the true friend.
\nFar or near
\nin success and in failure,
\nthe one recognizes in the other
\nthe true helper
\ntowards freedom
\nand humanity.<\/p>\n
This is the necessitas of freedom Bonhoeffer had named in response to Bethge\u2019s suggestion that friendship has no necessitas. This is the sui generis character of friendship that makes the \u2018cornflower belong to the cornfield\u2019. Bonhoeffer had learned to trust Bethge to tell him the truth, but he knew he was not one that always received the truth gladly. We should not, therefore, read it as an empty gesture that Bonhoeffer writes to Bethge on 18 November 1943, to express his gratitude that Bethge \u2018bore with such patience and tolerance all the things with which I have sometimes made life hard for you. I ask you for forgiveness, and yet I know that we have shared spiritually, although not physically, in the gift of confession, absolution, and communion, and that we may be quite happy and easy in our minds about it. But I did just want to tell you this.\u2019<\/p>\n
III. Poetry is the political<\/p>\n
Does Bonhoeffer, the poet, say in his poetry what he was not able to say more directly? I see no reason to ask or to answer such a question. I have, however, tried to suggest that in this poem, \u2018The Friend\u2019, Bonhoeffer explored how friendship, as Aristotle suggested, is the test case for any politic. In his reply to Bethge\u2019s claim that friendship has its own necessitas, Bonhoeffer observed,<\/p>\n
Our \u2018Protestant\u2019 (not Lutheran) Prussian world has been so dominated by the four mandates that the sphere of freedom has receded into the background. I wonder whether it is possible (it almost seems so today) to regain the idea of the church as providing an understanding of freedom (art, education, friendship, play), so that Kierkegaard\u2019s \u2018aesthetic existence\u2019 would be re-established within it? I really think that is so, and it would mean that we should recover a link with the Middle Ages. Who is there, for instance, in our times, who can devote himself with an easy mind to music, friendship, games, or happiness? Surely not the \u2018ethical\u2019 man, but only the Christian.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Friend\u2019 is Bonhoeffer\u2019s attempt not only to say, but to enact in a world of terror, that God\u2019s church exists making friendship possible. \u2018The Friend\u2019 is Bonhoeffer\u2019s prayer thanking God for Bethge\u2019s friendship, but the poem is also his alternative politic.<\/p>\n
7<\/p>\n
\u2018Voices in the Night\u2019<\/p>\n
Human Solidarity and Eschatological Hope<\/p>\n
Philip G. Ziegler<\/p>\n
\u2018N\u00e4chtliche Stimmen\u2019<\/p>\n
Langgestreckt auf meiner Pritsche
\nstarre ich auf die graue Wand.
\nDrau\u00dfen geht ein Sommerabend,
\nder mich nicht kennt,
\nsingend ins Land.
\nLeise verebben die Fluten des Tages
\nan ewigem Strand.
\nSchlafe ein wenig!
\nSt\u00e4rk\u2019 Leib und Seele, Kopf und Hand!
\nDrau\u00dfen stehen V\u00f6lker, H\u00e4user, Geister und Herzen in Brand.
\nBis nach blutroter Nacht
\ndein Tag anbricht\u2014
\nhalte stand!<\/p>\n
Nacht und Stille.
\nIch horche.
\nNur Schritte und Rufe der Wachen,
\neines Liebespaares fernes, verstecktes Lachen.
\nH\u00f6rst Du sonst nichts, fauler Schl\u00e4fer?
\nIch h\u00f6re der eigenen Seele Zittern und Schwanken.
\nSonst nichts?
\nIch h\u00f6re, ich h\u00f6re,
\nwie Stimmen, wie Rufe,
\nwie Schreie nach rettenden Planken,
\nder wachenden, tr\u00e4umenden Leidensgef\u00e4hrten
\nn\u00e4chtlich stumme Gedanken.
\nIch h\u00f6re unruhiges Knarren der Betten,
\nich h\u00f6re Ketten.<\/p>\n
Ich h\u00f6re, wie M\u00e4nner sich schlaflos werfen und dehnen,
\ndie sich nach Freiheit und zornigen Taten sehnen.
\nWenn der Schlaf sie heimsucht im Morgengrauen,
\nmurmeln sie tr\u00e4umend von Kindern und Frauen.<\/p>\n
Ich h\u00f6re gl\u00fcckliches Lispeln halbw\u00fcchsiger Knaben,
\ndie sich an kindlichen Tr\u00e4umen laben,
\nIch h\u00f6re sie zerren an ihren Decken
\nund sich vor gr\u00e4\u00dflichem Albtraum verstecken.<\/p>\n
\u2018Voices in the Night\u2019<\/p>\n
Stretched out upon my prison bed,
\nI stare at the empty wall.
\nOutside, a summer evening,
\nregardless of me,
\ngoes singing into the country.
\nSoftly ebbs the tide of the day
\non the eternal shore.
\nSleep awhile!
\nRefresh body and soul, head and hand!
\nOutside, people, houses; hearts and spirits are aflame.
\nUntil the blood-red night
\ndawns upon your day\u2014
\nhold your ground!<\/p>\n
In the stillness of the night,
\nI listen.
\nOnly footsteps and shouts of the guards,
\na loving couple in the distance, stifled laughter.
\nCan you hear nothing else, you sluggish sleeper?
\nI hear my own soul totter and tremble.
\nNothing else?
\nI hear, I hear,
\nlike voices, like shouts,
\nlike cries for help,
\nthe waking dreams of fellow-sufferers,
\ndumb thoughts in the night.
\nI hear the restless creaking of the beds,
\nI hear chains.<\/p>\n
I hear men toss and turn in sleeplessness,
\nlonging for freedom and vengeful action.
\nWhen sleep overcomes them in the morning hours,
\nthey murmur in their dreams of wife and children.<\/p>\n
I hear the lisping pleasure of half-grown boys,
\nenjoying their childish dreams.
\nI hear them pull up their blankets
\nand hide themselves from the horrible nightmares.<\/p>\n
Ich h\u00f6re Seufzen und schwaches Atmen der Greise,
\ndie sich im Stillen bereiten zur gro\u00dfen Reise.
\nSie sah\u2019n Recht und Unrecht kommen und gehen,
\nnun wollen sie Unverg\u00e4ngliches, Ewiges sehn.<\/p>\n
Nacht und Stille.
\nNur Schritte und Rufe der Wachen.
\nH\u00f6rst du\u2019s im schweigenden Hause
\nbeben, bersten und krachen,
\nwenn Hunderte die gesch\u00fcrte Glut ihrer Herzen entfachen?
\nStumm ist ihr Chor,
\nweit ge\u00f6ffnet mein Ohr:<\/p>\n
\u2018Wir Alten, wir Jungen,
\nwir S\u00f6hne aller Zungen,
\nwir Starken, wir Schwachen,
\nwir Schl\u00e4fer, wir Wachen,
\nwir Armen, wir Reichen,
\nim Ungl\u00fcck gleichen,
\nwir Guten, wir B\u00f6sen,
\nwas je wir gewesen,
\nwir M\u00e4nner vieler Narben,
\nwir Zeugen derer, die starben,
\nwir Trotzigen und wir Verzagten,
\nwir Unschuldigen und wir schwer Verklagten,
\nvon langem Alleinsein tief Geplagten,
\nBruder, wir suchen, wir rufen dich!
\nBruder, h\u00f6rst du mich?\u2019<\/p>\n
Zw\u00f6lf kalte, d\u00fcnne Schl\u00e4ge der Turmuhr
\nwecken mich.
\nKein Klang, keine W\u00e4rme in ihnen
\nbergen und decken mich.
\nBellende b\u00f6se Hunde um Mitternacht
\nschrecken mich.
\nArmseliges Gel\u00e4ute
\ntrennt ein armes Gestern
\nvom armen Heute.
\nOb ein Tag sich zum andern wende,
\nder nichts Neues, nichts Besseres f\u00e4nde,
\nals da\u00df er in Kurzem wie dieser ende\u2014
\nwas kann mir\u2019s bedeuten?
\nI hear the sighs and light breathing of the old,
\nwho prepare themselves quietly for the great journey.
\nThey have seen right and wrong come and go,
\nnow they wish to see the imperishable and eternal.<\/p>\n
Night and silence.
\nOnly footsteps and shouts of the guards.
\nDo you not hear it in this silenced house,
\nshaking, breaking and collapsing,
\nas hundreds kindle the glowing ember of their hearts?
\nTheir songs they hide,
\nmy ears are open wide.<\/p>\n
\u2018We who are old, and we who are young,
\nwe children of every tongue,
\nwe who are strong, and we who find it hard,
\nwe who sleep, and we who guard,
\nwe who are poor, and we who have all,
\ntogether into failure fall,
\nwe who are good and we who are unclean,
\nwhatever we have been,
\nwe men with scars we cannot hide,
\nwe witnesses of those who died,
\nwe who are defiant and we who are bemused,
\nwe who are innocent and we who are accused,
\nby long isolation, sorely abused.
\nBrother, we seek and call for thee!
\nBrother do you hear me?\u2019<\/p>\n
Twelve cold, thin strokes of the tower clock
\nawaken me.
\nThere is in them no music, no warmth,
\nto shelter and comfort me.
\nAngry, barking dogs at midnight
\nstartle me.
\nCold, joyless strokes,
\ndivide a poor yesterday
\nfrom a poor today.
\nCan one day change to another,
\nfinding nothing new, nothing better,
\nand in a short time end like this\u2014
\nwhat can it mean to me?
\nIch will die Wende der Zeiten sehen,
\nwenn leuchtende Zeichen am Nachthimmel stehen,
\nneue Glocken \u00fcber die V\u00f6lker gehen
\nund l\u00e4uten und l\u00e4uten.<\/p>\n
Ich warte auf jene Mitternacht,
\nin deren schrecklich strahlender Pracht
\ndie B\u00f6sen vor Angst vergehen,
\ndie Guten in Freude bestehen.<\/p>\n
B\u00f6sewicht,
\ntritt ins Licht
\nvor Gericht.<\/p>\n
Trug und Verrat,
\narge Tat,
\nS\u00fchne naht.<\/p>\n
Mensch, o merke,
\nheilige St\u00e4rke
\nist richtend am Werke.<\/p>\n
Jauchzt und sprecht:
\nTreue und Recht
\neinem neuen Geschlecht!<\/p>\n
Himmel, vers\u00f6hne
\nzu Frieden und Sch\u00f6ne
\ndie Erdens\u00f6hne.<\/p>\n
Erde, gedeih\u2019,
\nMensch, werde frei,
\nsei frei!<\/p>\n
Ich habe mich pl\u00f6tzlich aufgerichtet,
\nals h\u00e4tt\u2019 ich von sinkendem Schiffe Festland gesichtet,
\nals g\u00e4be es etwas zu fassen, zu greifen,
\nals s\u00e4he ich goldene Fr\u00fcchte reifen.
\nAber wohin ich auch blicke, greife und fasse,
\nist nur der Finsternis undurchdringliche Masse.
\nI will see the times change,
\nwhen signs light up the heavens,
\nnew bells ring over the people,
\ngrowing louder and louder.<\/p>\n
I wait for that midnight,
\nin which the shining splendour
\ndazzles and destroys the evil in our fear,
\nto establish with joy that which is right.<\/p>\n
Evil concealed
\nis revealed
\nat the bar.<\/p>\n
Betrayal and tricks,
\nintolerable conflicts,
\nwill find atonement soon.<\/p>\n
Let people confess,
\nthe power of goodness
\nworks righteousness.<\/p>\n
Rejoice and declare:
\njustice and care
\nto a new generation.<\/p>\n
Heaven, give birth
\nto peace and worth
\nfor the sons of earth.<\/p>\n
Earth will see,
\npeople, become free,
\nbe free!<\/p>\n
Suddenly, I wake up,
\nas though, from a sinking ship, I sighted land,
\nas though there was something firm to grasp,
\nas though fruit was ripening to gold.
\nBut when I look, grasp or hold,
\nthere is only an impenetrable mass of darkness.<\/p>\n
Ich versinke in Gr\u00fcbeln.
\nIch versenke mich in der Finsternis Grund.
\nDu Nacht, voll Frevel und \u00dcbeln,
\nto dich mir kund!
\nWarum und wie lange zehrst du an meiner Geduld?
\nTiefes und langes Schweigen;
\ndann h\u00f6r\u2019 ich die Nacht zu mir sich neigen:
\nich bin nicht finster, finster ist nur die Schuld!<\/p>\n
Die Schuld! Ich h\u00f6re ein Zittern und Beben,
\nein Murmeln, ein Klagen sich erheben,
\nich h\u00f6re M\u00e4nner im Geiste ergrimmen.
\nIn wildem Gewirr unz\u00e4hliger Stimmen,
\nein stummer Chor
\ndringt zu Gottes Ohr:<\/p>\n
\u2018Von Menschen gehetzt und gejagt,
\nwehrlos gemacht und verklagt,
\nunertr\u00e4glicher Lasten Tr\u00e4ger,
\nsind wir doch die Verkl\u00e4ger.<\/p>\n
Wir verklagen, die uns in S\u00fcnde stie\u00dfen,
\ndie uns mitschuldig werden lie\u00dfen,
\ndie uns zu Zeugen des Unrechts machten\u2014
\num den Mitschuldigen zu verachten.<\/p>\n
Unser Auge mu\u00dfte Frevel erblicken,
\num uns in tiefe Schuld zu verstricken,
\ndann verschlossen sie uns den Mund,
\nwir wurden zum stummen Hund.<\/p>\n
Wir lernten es, billig zu l\u00fcgen,
\ndem offenen Unrecht uns zu f\u00fcgen.
\nGeschah dem Wehrlosen Gewalt,
\nso blieb unser Auge kalt.<\/p>\n
Und was uns im Herzen gebrannt,
\nblieb verschwiegen und ungenannt.
\nWir d\u00e4mpften das hitzige Blut
\nund zertraten die innere Glut.<\/p>\n
I sink into brooding,
\nI lower myself into the heart of darkness.
\nYou, night, full of horror and evil,
\nmake yourself known to me!
\nWhy and how long will you gnaw at our patience?
\nSilence, deep and long,
\nthen I hear the night, as it comes down to me:
\n\u2018I am not dark, the darkness is your guilt!\u2019<\/p>\n
Guilt! I hear a trembling and a shudder,
\na murmur and a cry,
\nI hear men in angry mood.
\nInnumerable voices in wild confusion,
\na dumb choir
\nassaults the ear of God.<\/p>\n
\u2018Hunted by men and maligned,
\ndefenseless and guilty to their mind,
\nby intolerable burdens abused,
\nyet we declare them the accused.<\/p>\n
We accuse those who drove us to the evil deed,
\nwho allowed us to share their guilty seed,
\nwho made us witnesses of the just abused,
\nonly to despise those they had used.<\/p>\n
Our eyes must see violence,
\nentangling us in their guilty offence;
\nthen as they silence our voice,
\nlike dumb dogs we have no choice.<\/p>\n
We learnt to call lies just
\nuniting ourselves with the unjust.
\nWhen violence was done to the weak,
\nour cold eyes did not speak.<\/p>\n
And what in sorrow our hearts had broken,
\nremained hidden and unspoken.
\nWe quenched our burning ire
\nand stamped out the inner fire.<\/p>\n
Was Menschen einst heilig gebunden,
\ndas wurde zerfetzt und geschunden,
\nverraten Freundschaft und Treue,
\nverlacht waren Tr\u00e4nen und Reue.<\/p>\n
Wir S\u00f6hne frommer Geschlechter,
\neinst des Rechts und der Wahrheit Verfechter,
\nwurden Gottes- und Menschenver\u00e4chter
\nunter der H\u00f6lle Gel\u00e4chter.<\/p>\n
Doch wenn uns jetzt Freiheit und Ehre geraubt,
\nvor Menschen erheben wir stolz unser Haupt.
\nUnd bringt man uns in b\u00f6ses Geschrei,
\nvor Menschen sprechen wir selber uns frei!<\/p>\n
Ruhig und fest stehn wir Mann gegen Mann
\nals die Verklagten klagen wir an.<\/p>\n
Nur vor Dir, alles Wesens Ergr\u00fcnder,
\nvor Dir sind wir S\u00fcnder.<\/p>\n
Leidensscheu und arm an Taten
\nhaben wir Dich vor den Menschen verraten.<\/p>\n
Wir sahen die L\u00fcge ihr Haupt erheben
\nund haben der Wahrheit nicht die Ehre gegeben.<\/p>\n
Br\u00fcder sahen wir in gr\u00f6\u00dfter Not
\nund f\u00fcrchteten nur den eigenen Tod.<\/p>\n
Wir treten vor Dich als M\u00e4nner,
\nals unsrer S\u00fcnde Bekenner.<\/p>\n
Herr, nach dieser Zeiten G\u00e4rung,
\nschenk uns Zeiten der Bew\u00e4hrung.<\/p>\n
La\u00df\u2019 nach so viel Irregehn
\nuns des Tages Anbruch sehn!<\/p>\n
La\u00df\u2019 soweit die Augen schauen,
\nDeinem Wort uns Wege bauen.<\/p>\n
Sacred bonds by which we once were bound
\nare now torn and fallen to the ground,
\nfriendship and truth betrayed,
\ntears and remorse in ridicule displayed.<\/p>\n
We sons from upright men descended,
\nwho once rights and truth defended,
\nhave now become despisers of God and man,
\namidst the mocking laughter of hell\u2019s plan.\u2019<\/p>\n
Though robbed of freedom and honor,
\nwe stand tall before men with pride.
\nAnd when we are wrongly decried,
\nbefore men we declare our innocence freely.<\/p>\n
At peace and firm, we stand man to man,
\nas the accused, we accuse.<\/p>\n
Only before Thee, maker of all,
\nbefore Thee alone are we sinners.<\/p>\n
Shrinking from pain and poor in deeds,
\nwe have betrayed Thee before men.<\/p>\n
Though we saw lies raise their head,
\nwe dishonoured the truth instead.<\/p>\n
We saw brothers dying while we had breath
\nand feared only our own death.<\/p>\n
We come before Thee as men,
\nconfessing our sins.<\/p>\n
Lord, after the ferment of these days,
\nsend us times to prove us.<\/p>\n
After so much wrong,
\nlet us see the day dawn!<\/p>\n
As far as the eye can see,
\nlet thy word provide ways for us.<\/p>\n
Bis Du ausl\u00f6schst unsre Schuld,
\nhalt uns stille in Geduld.<\/p>\n
Stille wolln wir uns bereiten;
\nbis Du rufst zu neuen Zeiten,<\/p>\n
bis Du stillest Sturm und Flut
\nund Dein Wille Wunder tut.<\/p>\n
Bruder, bis die Nacht entwich,
\nbete fur mich!\u2019<\/p>\n
Erstes Morgenlicht schleicht durch mein Fenster
\nbleich und grau.
\nLeichter Wind f\u00e4hrt mir \u00fcber die Stirn
\nsommerlich lau.
\n\u2018Sommertag!\u2019 sage ich nur, \u2018sch\u00f6ner Sommertag!\u2019
\nWas er mir bringen mag?<\/p>\n
Da h\u00f6r\u2019 ich drau\u00dfen hastig verhaltene Schritte gehn.
\nIn meiner N\u00e4he bleiben sie pl\u00f6tzlich stehn.<\/p>\n
Mit wird kalt und hei\u00df,
\nich wei\u00df, o, ich wei\u00df!<\/p>\n
Eine leise Stimme verliest etwas schneidig und kalt.
\nFasse dich, Bruder, bald hast du\u2019s vollbracht,<\/p>\n
bald, bald!<\/p>\n
Mutig und stolzen Schrittes h\u00f6r\u2019 ich dich schreiten.
\nNicht mehr den Augenblick siehst du, siehst k\u00fcnftige Zeiten.
\nIch gehe mit dir, Bruder, an jenen Ort,
\nund ich h\u00f6re dein letztes Wort:
\n\u2018Bruder, wenn mir die Sonne verblich,
\nlebe du fur mich!\u2019<\/p>\n
Until you have washed away our guilt
\nhold us in quiet patience.<\/p>\n
We will prepare ourselves in quietness
\nuntil you call us to new times.<\/p>\n
Until you still the storm and abate the flood,
\nand your will works wonders.<\/p>\n
Brothers, until the night is passed,
\npray for me!\u2019<\/p>\n
The first light of morning steals through my window,
\npale and bleak.
\nA light wind brushes my brow
\nwith the warmth of summer.
\nA summer\u2019s day\u2019, all I can say is, \u2018lovely summer\u2019s day\u2019.
\nWhat might it bring to me?<\/p>\n
Outside I hear hurried, hesitant steps go by.
\nThey suddenly stop by me.<\/p>\n
I go hot and cold,
\nI know, O, I know!<\/p>\n
A soft voice reads something cuttingly and cold.
\nHold fast, brother, soon it will be all over,<\/p>\n
soon, soon.<\/p>\n
I hear you march with brave and proud steps.
\nThis moment you see no longer,
\nyour eyes are on future times.
\nI go with you, brother, to that place,
\nand I hear your last word:
\n\u2018Brother, when the sun shines no longer for me,
\nyou must live for me!\u2019
\nLanggestreckt auf meiner Pritsche
\nstarre ich auf die graue Wand.
\nDrau\u00dfen geht ein Sommermorgen,
\nder noch nicht mein ist,
\njauchzend ins Land.
\nBr\u00fcder, bis nach langer Nacht
\nunser Tag anbricht,
\nhalten wir stand!<\/p>\n
Stretched out upon my prison bed,
\nI stare at the empty wall.
\nOutside a summer morning,
\nregardless of me,
\ngoes rejoicing into the country.
\nBrother, while the long night waits,
\nuntil our day dawns,
\nwe shall hold our ground!<\/p>\n
(Translation: Edwin Robertson)<\/p>\n
\u2018Can we wish to be anything other and better than men of hope, or anything additional?\u2019<\/p>\n
I. Introduction<\/p>\n
In early July 1944, Bonhoeffer writes to Bethge enclosing two of his best known poems, \u2018Who Am I?\u2019 and \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019. In that same letter however, he comments that he \u2018would prefer to show [him] a long one (about this place here)\u2019 which he did not think was \u2018too bad\u2019 and indeed hopes \u2018one day \u2026 will get out\u2019. This far longer poem, running to over two-hundred lines, was \u2018N\u00e4chtliche Stimmen\u2019, or \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019. Writing again later that summer and after the failure of the 20 July plot, Bonhoeffer asks whether Bethge has yet read his poems and insists that he only \u2018read the very long one (in rhyme) \u2026 some time later\u2019. The poem\u2019s ultimate preservation testifies that Bethge did receive it and no doubt also read it, though no further mention of it is made in the remainder of their extant correspondence. Curiously, the poem also goes unmentioned in the whole course of Bethge\u2019s monumental biography. \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 is listed neither among those of Bonhoeffer\u2019s literary works Bethge adjudges should endure because \u2018they convey the particular situation in an original statement and in an appropriate form\u2019, nor among those which he considers merely \u2018ponderous\u2019. Of course, Bethge\u2019s silence may itself express a personal judgement on the merits and significance of the poem. We may wonder whether his reaction to Bonhoeffer\u2019s other verse poem from the summer of 1944\u2014\u2018The Death of Moses\u2019\u2014could reasonably be extended to \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019: namely, that it suffers unhappily from \u2018the fetters of rhyme\u2019. Certainly, English translators have at times judged \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 \u2018strained\u2019 by \u2018a difficult rhyme and rhythm\u2019. The commentary from one widely read edition of the prison poems considers it flawed and unpolished, noting \u2018its forced rhyme and the recurring clich\u00e9s\u2019. Moreover, the poem is very lengthy and made rather unruly by its frequently changing voices, surprising shifts in perspective and irregular stanzas. J\u00fcrgen Henkys\u2019 characterization of the piece as a \u2018rhapsody\u2019 is thus extremely apt. Perhaps the rather ungainly form of \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019\u2014including its strained pulse and rhyme, its length and shifting voices\u2014itself communicates something of Bonhoeffer\u2019s experience of existence within the walls of Tegel prison.
\nYet for all that, \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 is far from being formless, either poetically or thematically. For instance, there is certainly something psalmic about the work. Like a psalm of lament, much of the text is given over to rehearsing aloud\u2014and ultimately to God\u2014the sufferings and despair of the prisoners, whether in the solitary voice of the imprisoned author or the corporate voice of the chorus. Like a psalm of lament, complaint is interlaced with expressions of hope, summons to patience, and petitions to God to act to set things right. And finally, again like the lamenting psalmist, the author and other prisoners are principally and desperately waiting\u2014waiting for relief, for release or for final justice. Yet, comparison with such psalms, while instructive, does not provide the interpretative key to the poem\u2019s form.
\nConsidering the shape of the work as a whole, one may be reminded of an oratorio, and rightly so. For at the level of literary structure, the poem\u2019s diverse voices and elements are fitted within an overarching storyline wherein they are related to one another in illuminating ways. The concentrated setting of a single night frames a journey through a series of incidents, auditions and mediations, conversations and confessions\u2014some actual, some imagined. The poem invites us to read it as a brief theological drama during the course of which the imprisoned author is schooled in the actualities of the humanity of his fellow prisoners, confronts the ultimate ground of all their hopes, and finally shares with them in a corporate act of confession and invocation; only then does he arrive at a new kind of solidarity with them, the character of which is made manifest in the poem\u2019s closing lines. Whereas at first the author simply \u2018heard\u2019 his brethren, now in hearing he \u2018goes with\u2019 the condemned man \u2018to that place\u2019 of execution. Whereas the opening summer evening is indifferent to him, isolated in his cell (it \u2018knows me not\u2019), by the end the new summer morning is \u2018not yet mine\u2019 or, as the hand-corrected draft has it, \u2018not yet ours\u2019. Here two shifts are registered: that the new morning is \u2018not yet ours\u2019 and that it is \u2018not yet ours\u2019. The time of the present, initially cast as indifferent and alien, now belongs to the author in the mode of promise. And the solitude of the prisoner has given way to a solidarity in which the present is pregnant with promise for us. This newly won solidarity with his fellow prisoners receives a further and final emphasis at the poem\u2019s close. Whereas, at the outset, the call to \u2018stand fast!\u2019 is declaimed as mere self-encouragement, at the poem\u2019s close that same imperative is transformed into a pledge of commitment which the poet himself now shares: \u2018We will stand fast!\u2019 Whatever transpires during the night brings about a reconciliation, a new reality. Without undoing the fact of imprisonment, the night\u2019s labour changes the character of the present and secures new and different relations with other human beings. But what exactly does transpire? Answering this question requires a more detailed consideration of the structure and movement of Bonhoeffer\u2019s oratorio and its distinctive theological themes.
\nThe poem unfolds as a series of three monologues separated from one another by two choruses. Each of the monologues is itself interrupted by an act of hearing or listening introduced by the repeated use of \u2018ich h\u00f6re\u2019. The auditions reach through the \u2018night and silence\u2019 and bring the wider world surrounding the imprisoned author into his enclosed cell. Indeed, the two choruses themselves break forth during such acts of hearing and represent moments when the prisoner is supremely laid open to the address of others. All three monologues climax with the prisoner hearing an explicit and personal address: the poet is beseeched in turn to hear, to pray for and to live for the others who call out to him: \u2018Brother, we seek and call for thee!\/Brother do you hear me?\u2019 and again, \u2018Brother, until the night is passed, \/pray for me!\u2019 and finally, \u2018Brother, when the sun shines no longer for me, \/you must live for me!\u2019
\nSignificantly, the poem also has another structure underlying it. For at the centre of the work lies this prophetic-eschatological outburst, which serves as an axis around which the poem as a whole turns:<\/p>\n
Evil concealed
\nis revealed
\nat the bar.<\/p>\n
Betrayal and tricks,
\nintolerable conflicts,
\nwill find atonement soon.<\/p>\n
Let people confess,
\nthe power of goodness
\nworks righteousness.<\/p>\n
Rejoice and declare:
\njustice and care
\nto a new generation.<\/p>\n
Heaven, give birth
\nto peace and worth
\nfor the sons of earth.<\/p>\n
Earth will see,
\npeople, become free,
\nbe free!<\/p>\n
As Henkys notes, the voice of this proclamation is unclear\u2014angels? saints? God?\u2014though he adjudges it in any case to be an \u2018audition\u2019 rather than part of the author\u2019s own interior monologue. More crucial than the identity of the preacher however is the proclamation itself, which is simply the very substance of the gospel interrupting the poet\u2019s speech as a verbum externum: these words in short order set out a vision of divine judgement, atonement, righteousness, reconciliation, re-creation and so, finally of human freedom and flourishing. And though in good Lutheran fashion, the poet as an auditor of the gospel is immediately beset by Anfechtung\u2014brought on by the \u2018an impenetrable mass of darkness\u2019 and the seeming fleetingness of the announcement. Something decisive has shifted. For, as indicated by the extended chorus, which follows hard upon this turning point, the remainder of the drama now goes forward self-consciously, coram Deo. The choir of prisoners, which previously had only the poet\u2019s ear, now \u2018assaults the ear of God\u2019; their earlier chorus of human despair now, before God, is transmuted into acknowledgement of guilt and sin: \u2018Only before Thee, maker of all, \/before Thee alone are we sinners\u2019 they sing out. In short, the development of the poem\u2019s central story and cardinal themes turns upon the inexplicable announcement of the eschatological gospel in the midst of the night\u2019s reveries.
\nWith this firmly in view, we can now explicate more fully the key theological themes of the poem. While not merely \u2018versified theology\u2019, \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 is shot through with many of the characteristic preoccupations of Bonhoeffer\u2019s late thought. Like the other Tegel poems, this work keeps thematic company not only with the closely contemporary prison letters and papers, but also with Bonhoeffer\u2019s wider corpus of wartime writings, including the fragmentary Ethics. Read with an eye to both the immediate and broader context of Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology, the poem presents several motifs for comment, of which I shall treat only two, namely those of human fellowship and justice, and disconsolate time and Christian hope. Together, these themes tell of a perhaps under-appreciated eschatological dynamic at work in Bonhoeffer\u2019s later thought.<\/p>\n
II. \u2018About this place here \u2026\u2019\u2014human fellowship and justice<\/p>\n
As already intimated, one of most notable elements of the poem is the dramatic role played by listening and hearing. Some interpreters consider \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 an exercise in the kind of \u2018clear, open and reverent seeing\u2019 for which Bonhoeffer once praised Bethge. And there is clearly a sense in which the expanding capacity of the poet here to regard his fellow prisoners is an instance of that \u2018view from below\u2019 that Bonhoeffer felt he and others had acquired by virtue of their recent experiences. Yet, it is highly significant that the noetic burden of the poem\u2019s drama falls upon hearing rather than sight. This is not only because the poet finds himself encompassed by \u2018the grey wall\u2019 of his cell. More than this, the privileging of hearing recalls the crucial role played by external address\u2014by both the neighbour, and the Word of God as a verbum externum\u2014in Bonhoeffer\u2019s theological anthropology. It also recalls the central place afforded to listening and hearing in the life of the Christian community. Several years before, Bonhoeffer had noted that,<\/p>\n
The first service one owes to others in the community involves listening to them \u2026 Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been entrusted to them by the one who is indeed the great listener and in whose work they are to participate. We should listen with the ears of God, so that we can speak the Word of God.<\/p>\n
The poet\u2019s ever more attentive listening is an act of humanizing Christian obedience. It is an exercise of that \u2018will to hold fellowship\u2019 with others of which Bonhoeffer speaks elsewhere.
\nIt is by way of such attentive listening that the poet breaks free of his isolation and discovers his fellow prisoners. The \u2018sluggish sleeper\u2019 can at first only attend to himself, and hears only his \u2018own soul totter and tremble\u2019. But insistent questioning\u2014\u2018Is that all you hear \u2026 nothing more?\u2019\u2014provokes a new listening, signalled by the repetition of \u2018I hear, I hear\u2019. What the listening prisoner now hears are the traces and indications of the lives of others; in these he meets his \u2018companions in suffering\u2019. The first monologue is given over to the poet\u2019s discernment of these companions, as he imagines the variety of the circumstances and dreams of the \u2018half-grown boys\u2019 and \u2018men grown grey\u2019 with whom he shares his prison. But this sympathetic imagination of others is then surpassed when with ears now \u2018wide open\u2019 the poet hears the imprisoned chorus. Intimations of their identities inferred from mere noises\u2014from sleepless \u2018tossing and turning\u2019, from the \u2018restless creaking of cots\u2019 and \u2018chains\u2019\u2014are overreached by the prisoners\u2019 own voices. Imploring the poet to hear them, these prisoners \u2018hunted by men and maligned\/defenceless and guilty to their mind\u2019 now speak to him of themselves:<\/p>\n
We who are old, and we who are young,
\nwe children of every tongue,
\nwe who are strong, and we who find it hard,
\nwe who sleep, and we who guard,
\nwe who are poor, and we who have all,
\ntogether into failure fall,
\nwe who are good and we who are unclean,
\nwhatever we have been \u2026<\/p>\n
But the human fellowship cultivated by such hearing is not yet fulfilled; it is beset by the pretence of immediacy and suffers the ambiguities of life assailed by the unnatural. It has not yet broken through to the truly human fellowship whose shape is praying and then, finally living for others. For this to happen the society of the prisoners must be transformed by being brought coram Deo, disclosing the fact that their solidarity with one another is ultimately mediated by Jesus Christ. As noted already, it is the eschatological proclamation at the heart of the poem that makes possible and elicits the confession of sin in which the second chorus culminates. And, as Bonhoeffer once contended, \u2018genuine community is not established before confession takes place \u2026 If anyone remains alone in his evil, he is completely alone despite camaraderie and friendship. If he has confessed, however, he will nevermore be alone. He is borne by Christ on whom he has laid his sin, and by the community which belongs to Christ \u2026\u2019 So, it is only by way of their common confession of sin, that the prisoners\u2014and the poet among them\u2014can ultimately deepen their human community.
\nBefore that, however, Bonhoeffer gives a fuller, almost biographical, rendering of the identity of the other prisoners. For in their second chorus, they go on to tell the story of their own undoing and corruption. Here the focus shifts from the emerging, natural fellowship between the poet and his fellow inmates, to the question of natural justice:<\/p>\n
Hunted by men and maligned,
\ndefenseless and guilty to their mind,<\/p>\n
\u2026
\nOur eyes must see violence,
\nentangling us in their guilty offence;
\nthen as they silence our voice,
\nlike dumb dogs we have no choice.<\/p>\n
\u2026
\nThough we saw lies raise their head,
\nwe dishonored the truth instead.<\/p>\n
We saw brothers dying while we had breath
\nand feared only our own death.<\/p>\n
\u2026
\nSacred bonds by which we once were bound
\nare now torn and fallen to the ground,
\nfriendship and truth betrayed,
\ntears and remorse in ridicule displayed.<\/p>\n
The close parallels between this self-description of the prisoner chorus as men \u2018thrust into sin\u2019 and Bonhoeffer\u2019s own self-description of the conspirators in his 1942 Christmas letter are notable. The response of the prisoners\u2019 chorus to their plight is a properly penultimate and natural one: they lament their abuse and accuse those who have brought it about; they assert their right in a struggle for what is humane and good, and demand a provisional measure of human justice. The horizon of this is a demand that the natural imperative of suum cuique to be honoured. The chorus of accusation and complaint in effect insists that \u2018the relative differences within the human and the natural\u2019 can and will be taken seriously. Thus, it culminates,<\/p>\n
Though robbed of freedom and honor,
\nwe stand tall before men with pride.
\nAnd when we are wrongly decried,
\nbefore men we declare our innocence freely.<\/p>\n
At peace and firm, we stand man to man,
\nas the accused, we accuse.<\/p>\n
This struggle, as Bonhoeffer makes clear here, is \u2018man against man\u2019, a fight for natural justice on the human plane. The whole matter of justice and fellowship at this point is strictly coram hominibus. It is no less necessary for being so, but its limitations are made plain\u2014for the solidarity of the prisoners threatens to collapse into merely shared grievance, into the corporate ressentiment that fuels the revolt of mistrust from below, just as the pursuit of justice threatens to degenerate into the intractable conflict of asserted rights. This juncture in the poem is thus the climatic expression of natural life; it is at once fraught with the natural promise of humane solidarity and provisional justice, and the natural peril of false intimacy and obstinate conflict. The voice of the chorus of the wronged is not the viva vox Dei. It is rather that utterly human voice to which the Word of God can and will give sovereign reply.
\nOnly the transposition of the prisoners\u2019 fellowship and struggle coram Deo is able to make good on the hope for human solidarity and stave off the collapse of empathy and responsibility into ressentiment. And this is what takes place in the drastic transition\u2014unexplained, unaided\u2014that occurs within the second chorus from accusation to confession of sin:<\/p>\n
Only before Thee, maker of all,
\nbefore Thee alone are we sinners.<\/p>\n
Shrinking from pain and poor in deeds,
\nwe have betrayed Thee before men.<\/p>\n
\u2026
\nWe come before Thee as men,
\nconfessing our sins.<\/p>\n
The invocations, which follow this confession (and which are discussed more fully below), are all forward looking and take up matters of hope and time. They bespeak the new horizon which opens up when one knows the present is lived not only \u2018before men\u2019 but also \u2018before Thee\u2019, i.e., before God. They bespeak the difference \u2018the ultimate\u2019 makes when its formative pressure upon the present is acknowledged and confessed.<\/p>\n
III. \u2018From a poor today\u2019\u2014disconsolate time and Christian hope<\/p>\n
Early in his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents that he was \u2018trying [his] hand at a little study on \u201cThe feeling of time,\u201d a thing that is especially relevant to anyone who is being held for examination\u2019. He explained,<\/p>\n
One of my predecessors here has scribbled over the cell door, \u2018In 100 years it will all be over.\u2019 That was his way of trying to counter the feeling that life spent here is a blank; but there is a great deal that might be said about that, and I should like to talk it over with father. \u2018My time is in your hands\u2019 (Ps 31:15) is the Bible\u2019s answer. But in the Bible there is also the question that threatens to dominate everything here: \u2018How long, O Lord?\u2019 (Psalm 13).<\/p>\n
In another letter thereafter, thanking his father for the loan of his copy of Kant\u2019s Anthropology, Bonhoeffer remarks in particular that \u2018Kant\u2019s exposition of \u201csmoking\u201d as a means of entertaining oneself is very nice\u2019. Kant described tobacco as a stimulant by which we \u2018always jerk our attention awake again\u2019, recalling ourselves to attend to \u2018the state of one\u2019s own thoughts, which would otherwise be soporific or boring owning to uniformity and monotony\u2019. He concluded that \u2018this kind of conversation of the human being with himself takes the place of social gathering, because in place of conversation it fills the emptiness of time with continuous newly excited sensations and with stimuli that are quickly passing, but always renewed\u2019. Bonhoeffer\u2014himself a vigorous smoker\u2014clearly appreciated Kant\u2019s insight into the way smoking could help disrupt the sheer tedium of extended imprisonment.
\n\u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 can be read in part as Bonhoeffer\u2019s late poetic exploration of the feeling of time. The drama unfolds during the \u2018long night\u2019 that spans the ebbing of one day and the \u2018pale and grey\u2019 morning of the next. The night is an ordeal that \u2018gnaws on\u2019 human patience; and mere chronology brings no relief. Indeed, Bonhoeffer paints a picture in which the passage of time is utterly disconsolate, its experience an emptiness desperate to be filled. The cardinal expression of this comes at the beginning of the second monologue, where the poet, woken by \u2018twelve cold, thin clangs from the clock tower\u2019, finds no \u2018shelter\u2019 or \u2018warmth\u2019 in their sounding. He despairs:<\/p>\n
Cold, joyless strokes,
\ndivide a poor yesterday
\nfrom a poor today.
\nCan one day change to another,
\nfinding nothing new, nothing better,
\nand in a short time end like this\u2014
\nwhat can it mean to me?<\/p>\n
This is time as meaningless duration, time without advent, time as sheer temporariness. Such disconsolate time tempts one to be \u2018consumed by the present moment\u2019, to live \u2018just for the moment, irresponsibly, frivolously, or resignedly\u2019. In \u2018After Ten Years\u2019, Bonhoeffer had adjudged this to be an \u2018impossible\u2019 course in a famous remark:<\/p>\n
There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be great future \u2026 Thinking and acting for the sake of the coming generation, but being ready to go any day without fear or anxiety\u2014that, in practice, is the spirit in which we are forced to live.<\/p>\n
What makes this possible is not the innate capacity to realize human plans\u2014events have stripped away precisely this power\u2014but rather a \u2018sign from God and pledge of a fresh start and a great future\u2019. Talk of the future is properly subjunctive (\u2018as though there were to be\u2019) not chiefly because it is uncertainly contingent upon the present, but rather and more profoundly, because it is given to the present by God in the mode of promise.
\nAgain, we find \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 revisiting a central theme from \u2018After Ten Years\u2019. For here, the despair to which the imprisoned poet gives voice is met by an \u2018eschatological credo\u2019, and this provides the basis upon which the experience of the present is transformed. Neither present preoccupation, nor utopian longing, but rather only a pledge from God is able to obviate the disconsolate grind of the present. Only God makes the present penultimate by lending it an ultimate horizon and thus investing it with promise. Hence the desperate poet longs to see,<\/p>\n
\u2026 the times change,
\nwhen signs light up the heavens,
\nnew bells ring over the people,
\ngrowing louder and louder.
\nI wait for that midnight,
\nin which the shining splendor
\ndazzles and destroys the evil in our fear,
\nto establish with joy that which is right.<\/p>\n
This hopeful plea is met with the declaration of the coming of a Kingdom that, as we have already noted, is the axis of the poem as a whole. Bonhoeffer\u2019s tropes for this vision\u2014\u2018sighted land\u2019 and \u2018fruits ripening\u2019\u2014hold it in the future as promise. Though not in hand, its power as promise changes the very character of the night, i.e., of the present. In light of the vision, the inmate discovers the night does not \u2018mean\u2019 inert and empty darkness. Rather, the time of the night is time filled with the business of fellowship, the struggle for natural justice, the confession of sin, and finally, the invocation of God. The final prayer of the prisoners\u2019 chorus is suffused with this new sense of the present time made penultimate. Their confession ended, they plead:<\/p>\n
Lord, after the ferment of these days,
\nsend us times to prove us.
\nAfter so much wrong,
\nlet us see the day dawn!<\/p>\n
As far as the eye can see,
\nlet thy word provide ways for us.<\/p>\n
Until you have washed away our guilt
\nhold us in quiet patience.<\/p>\n
We will prepare ourselves in quietness
\nuntil you call us to new times.<\/p>\n
By virtue of the ultimacy of the gospel, the present time now gestures towards the coming day; disconsolate, unnatural time is remade, becoming properly penultimate by the scourge of the ultimate.
\nWhat can happen and what can be done in such renatured time? As the final stanzas of the poem describe, the actualities of the present are not overcome, for the \u2018summer morning\u2019 and \u2018beautiful summer day\u2019 are \u2018not yet ours\u2019; they remain outside the prison walls. Furthermore, as the poet overhears, the dawn brings the death sentence and execution to one of the prisoners. Yet in the penultimate present\u2014that is, in a time remade by the apocalypse of the gospel, the confession of sin, and the invocation of God\u2014new and unheard of things take place. In such a time, the condemned man strides forth \u2018courageous and proud\u2019 because he now looks firmly upon \u2018future times coming clear\u2019. And the poet-prisoner, himself in the depth of renewed fellowship, now goes \u2018along with [him] \u2026 to that place\u2019 and receives there a commission: \u2018Brother, when the sun shines no longer for me, \/you must live for me!\u2019 Bonhoeffer indicates at the close of the poem that the community of prisoners as a whole takes up this commission: \u2018Brother, while the long night waits, \/until our day dawns, \/we shall hold our ground!\u2019
\nNot only the precise diction\u2014the final recurrence of standhalten\u2014but also the punctuation of the poem\u2019s overarching themes makes this final stanza a warrant to read \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019 as a reply to the question Bonhoeffer raised in \u2018After Ten Years\u2019: \u2018Who stands fast?\u2019 There, he answered,<\/p>\n
Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he called to obedient and responsible action in fact and in exclusive allegiance to God\u2014the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.<\/p>\n
In this poem, the question and call of God are confronted in a more decidedly eschatological key, as Bonhoeffer asks in effect how obedient and responsible action is presently possible. The answer is that such action is possible on this day, near this midnight, and in this dawn, because\u2014and finally, only because\u2014of the effective presence of the reality of that day, that midnight and that dawn. Men and women may \u2018redeem the time\u2019 amidst such evil days because even in the present they stand \u2018in the daylight\u2019 that Christ sheds forth (Eph. 5:16, 8). As he had written previously to pastors in the Pomeranian Confessing Church, the Christian life is lived \u2018between having and waiting\u2019 because Jesus has \u2018transposed us into the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6)\u2019 such that the \u2018future is present, and the present already past\u2019.
\nCentral to the poem then is the distinctive eschatological vision of Bonhoeffer\u2019s late writing. In this vision, all eschatological affirmations and the hope they secure send one back to one\u2019s life on earth \u2018in a wholly new way which is even more sharply defined than it is in the Old Testament. The Christian, unlike the devotees of the redemption myths, has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself, he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he is crucified and risen with Christ\u2019.
\nThis insight is confirmed in the letter of 25 July 1944, which I take as Bonhoeffer\u2019s own definitive gloss upon the theme of \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019. He had been reading Dostoevsky\u2019s The House of the Dead, itself a meditation on the harrowing experiences of imprisoned life. Of this, he writes to Bethge,<\/p>\n
It contains a great deal that is wise and good. I\u2019m still thinking about the assertion, which in his case is certainly not a mere conventional dictum, that man cannot live without hope, and that men who have really lost all hope often become wild and wicked. It may be an open question whether in this case hope = illusion. The importance of illusion to one\u2019s life should certainly not be underestimated; but for a Christian there must be hope based on a firm foundation \u2026 how great a power there is in a hope that is based on certainty, and how invincible a life with such hope is. \u2018Christ our hope\u2019\u2014this Pauline formula is the strength of our lives.<\/p>\n
We know that Bonhoeffer wrote more on the theme of the future during the summer of 1944, expressing ideas that Bethge found \u2018bold and even comforting\u2019. As noted already, these are lost to us. As it stands, Bonhoeffer\u2019s long and unruly verse poem from this final year of his life serves as our entr\u00e9e into his latest thinking regarding the ultimate sources and nature of Christian hope. Bonhoeffer admits that hope based in mere progress of time, even if illusory (\u2018This day will see me set free \u2026\u2019) is not without its power. Yet, the hope that arises from the certainty of the advent of God\u2014of the dawning of that day\u2014is the fount of the humanizing strength of Christian life. In this strength the Christian can answer \u2018yes and amen\u2019 to the summons, \u2018Brother, live for me!\u2019 In this strength, the Christian, together with his or her comrades, can \u2018stand fast!\u2019
\nIn an extraordinarily insightful essay, Marilynne Robinson observes that Bonhoeffer\u2019s writing as a whole is pervaded by the language of hymns and by expressions \u2018virtually creedal in their use of imagery\u2019 whose effect is \u2018beautiful, musical\u2019. This ought not to surprise us since, she avers, \u2018great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry\u2019. Yet, as she rightly notes, for Bonhoeffer the poetic \u2018functions not as ornament but as ontology\u2019, which is to say that even at its most stylized\u2014as in the prison poems\u2014his writing advances nothing less than decisive claims about reality. That this is so has been the underlying contention of this essay. Foremost among such claims poetically set forth in \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019, is that the eschatological reality of the gospel has the power simultaneously to qualify the present as intensely pertinent and utterly provisional, and to create and sustain Christian faithfulness therein. In this, it confirms what Bonhoeffer wrote in his Ethics manuscripts:<\/p>\n
Christian life is the dawn of the ultimate in me, the life of Jesus Christ in me. But it is also always life in the penultimate, waiting for the ultimate. The seriousness of Christian life lies only in the ultimate; but the penultimate also has its seriousness, which consists, to be sure, precisely in never confusing the penultimate with the ultimate and never making light of the penultimate over against the ultimate \u2026<\/p>\n
Alongside \u2018Voices in the Night\u2019, both such remarks are late echoes of what Bonhoeffer, at the height of his eschatological forthrightness in the 1930s, had declaimed to students in Berlin: that the Christian community only receives the world \u2018from Christ; or better, in the fallen, old world it believes in the world of the new creation, the new world of the beginning and the end, because it believes in Christ and in nothing else\u2019. Thus, against any \u2018abstract concept of the future\u2019, Bonhoeffer himself was driven to testify that a concrete future\u2014of forgiveness, judgement, and redemption in Christ\u2014is already present making the present a time of \u2018having and waiting\u2019, and so a time in which both to act courageously and to pray, \u2018After going far astray\/may we see the break of day!\u2019<\/p>\n
8<\/p>\n
\u2018Stations on the Way to Freedom\u2019<\/p>\n
The Presence of God\u2014The Freedom of Disciples<\/p>\n
Hans G. Ulrich<\/p>\n
\u2018Stationen auf dem Wege zur Freiheit\u2019<\/p>\n
Zucht
\nZiehst du aus, die Freiheit zu suchen, so lerne vor allem
\nZucht der Sinne und deiner Seele, da\u00df die Begierden
\nund deine Glieder dich nicht bald hierhin, bald dorthin f\u00fchren.
\nKeusch sei dein Geist und dein Leib, g\u00e4nzlich dir selbst unterworfen,
\nund gehorsam, das Ziel zu suchen, das ihm gesetzt ist.
\nNiemand erf\u00e4hrt das Geheimnis der Freiheit, es sei denn durch Zucht.<\/p>\n
Tat
\nNicht das Beliebige, sondern das Rechte tun und wagen,
\nnicht im M\u00f6glichen schweben, das Wirkliche tapfer ergreifen,
\nnicht in der Flucht der Gedanken, allein in der Tat ist die Freiheit.
\nTritt aus \u00e4ngstlichem Z\u00f6gern heraus in den Sturm des Geschehens,
\nnur von Gottes Gebot und deinem Glauben getragen,
\nund die Freiheit wird deinen Geist jauchzend umfangen.<\/p>\n
Leiden
\nWunderbare Verwandlung. Die starken, t\u00e4tigen H\u00e4nde
\nsind dir gebunden. Ohnm\u00e4chtig und einsam siehst du das Ende
\ndeiner Tat. Doch atmest du auf und legst das Rechte
\nstill und getrost in st\u00e4rkere Hand und gibst dich zufrieden.
\nNur einen Augenblick ber\u00fchrtest du selig die Freiheit,
\ndann \u00fcbergabst du sie Gott, damit er sie herrlich vollende.<\/p>\n
Tod
\nKomm nun, h\u00f6chstes Fest auf dem Wege zur ewigen Freiheit,
\nTod, leg nieder beschwerliche Ketten und Mauern
\nunsres verg\u00e4nglichen Leibes und unsrer verblendeten Seele,
\nda\u00df wir endlich erblicken, was hier uns zu sehen mi\u00dfg\u00f6nnt ist.
\nFreiheit, dich suchten wir lange in Zucht und in Tat und in Leiden.
\nSterbend erkennen wir nun im Angesicht Gottes dich selbst.<\/p>\n
\u2018Stations on the Road to Freedom\u2019<\/p>\n
Discipline
\nIf you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things
\nto govern your soul and your senses, for fear that your passions
\nand longings may lead you away from the path you should follow.
\nChaste be your mind and your body, and both in subjection,
\nobediently, steadfastly seeking the aim set before them;
\nonly through discipline may a man learn to be free.<\/p>\n
Action
\nDaring to do what is right, not what fancy may tell you,
\nvaliantly grasping occasions, not cravenly doubting\u2014
\nfreedom comes only through deeds, not through thoughts taking wing.
\nFaint not nor fear, but go out to the storm and the action,
\ntrusting in God whose commandment you faithfully follow;
\nfreedom, exultant, will welcome your spirit with joy.<\/p>\n
Suffering
\nA change has come indeed. Your hands, so strong and active,
\nare bound; in helplessness now you see your action
\nis ended; you sigh in relief, your cause committing
\nto stronger hands; so now you may rest contented.
\nOnly for one blissful moment could you draw near to touch freedom;
\nthen, that it might be perfected in glory, you gave it to God.<\/p>\n
Death
\nCome now, thou greatest of feasts on the journey to freedom eternal;
\ndeath, cast aside all the burdensome chains, and demolish
\nthe walls of our temporal body, the walls of our souls that are blinded,
\nso that at last we may see that which here remains hidden.
\nFreedom, how long we have sought thee is discipline, action, and suffering;
\nDying, we now may behold thee revealed in the Lord.<\/p>\n
(Translation: John Bowden)<\/p>\n
I. Some preliminaries<\/p>\n
a. The Bonhoeffer phenomenon and the grammar of his theology<\/p>\n
Our generation participates in the \u2018Bonhoeffer phenomenon\u2019 (as Stephen R. Haynes has described it). This phenomenon is manifold, with various \u2018Bonhoeffers\u2019 living within the same discourse. But to be part of this phenomenon\u2014like me as a German theologian of a specific generation\u2014means something different from simply receiving an influential, theological concept. We live in a world of theology and, therefore, are not able to look at Bonhoeffer directly. Our task is rather to mark the contours from within this world in order to learn from him, instead of simply being part of it. In particular, Bonhoeffer\u2019s poetry, and especially \u2018Stations on the Way to Freedom\u2019, invites us to ask if this way is adequate for doing and living theology\u2014or, to use a different metaphor, if there is a grammar of theological work.<\/p>\n
b. How to read the poems?<\/p>\n
In this way, I am already asking how to read Bonhoeffer\u2019s poetry. Is it possible to read Bonhoeffer\u2019s letters, poems, and manuscripts seeking insights and theological knowledge in the way we do, for instance, with the letters of St. Paul? Might we compare his poems with the Psalms? Bonhoeffer\u2019s texts have certainly been treated as a sort of scripture by some. It is clear that Bonhoeffer\u2019s writings cannot be separated from his life, especially his letters from prison to which some of the poems belong. Yet, Stanley Hauerwas is right when he argues that Bonhoeffer was a political theologian quite independent of his situation under the Nazi Regime. In Bonhoeffer\u2019s case, we are confronted not only with a biographical story but with a life-story, which is the genuine subject of his writing, as it is the case with many biblical texts and authors. What Bonhoeffer articulates in his writings is the life of a human being in patient and attentive expectation of God\u2019s action, ready to surrender to God\u2019s will and plan\u2014which makes him a disciple. In this way, Bonhoeffer\u2019s teaching is close to that of Jesus, and as such, we may ask whether we can study it as a source for theological insights or knowledge. Jesus teaches primarily through his life\u2014his living with God\u2014as does Bonhoeffer. It was Bonhoeffer himself who saw this parallel and suggested reflecting in this way.
\nBut Bonhoeffer\u2019s own particular \u2018way of life\u2019 is not an abstract template for Christian living. His life was an historic event, a story of discipleship, not as a pattern for Christian life but as a particular story of living with God. And this must be reflected in how we read this poem. \u2018Stations on the Way to Freedom\u2019 is the witness of a \u2018disciple\u2019\u2014defined as a human being sanctified by God, because God is allowed to work on him. This is the parallel to Jesus\u2014with the difference that our human discipleship is already a \u2018following\u2019. I would like to argue along this reading\u2014as has been done by such commentators as Larry Rasmussen.
\nIf we read \u2018Stations\u2019 in Robertson\u2019s biographical manner (taking the stations as periods in Bonhoeffer\u2019s life: from discipline to death), we have already changed this perspective. The poem no longer presents itself as Bonhoeffer\u2019s summary or reflection on the Christological logic of the life he had to live, but becomes a sequential biography, describing \u2018steps\u2019 (as some translations suggest for the German \u2018Stationen\u2019), or chapters of his life on a way to a certain goal\u2014perhaps to the goal to become a saint. Such a reading suggests that the poem is a teaching on what the Christian life should be like, making it into a sort of catechetical teaching. But discipleship, in the sense of being delivered into God\u2019s will and plan, is something altogether different. Discipleship cannot be taught in a catechetical fashion, or described in a catechetical manner\u2014it is a way of living with God, who is present in this life in a way that cannot be foreseen or transformed into a pattern: we can only be ready for God\u2019s will and plan, experiencing complete submission. Faith, then, means this kind of readiness. Catechetical teaching can only point to this readiness and attentiveness to God\u2019s presence; it cannot describe a way of life that is in itself sufficient. Rather, such a life is an empty space, a stage upon which God can act. And this is the life of a saint. Therefore there can be saints everywhere, at all places where people pray: veniat regnum tuum fiat voluntas tua. Whether a saint exists does not depend on the saint himself, but on whether God\u2019s will is fulfilled and whether God involves him in His will, as He involved His own son.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s witness would cease to exist if rendered a catechetical form, independent of the particular story (which is more than \u2018the biographical context\u2019) in which he was involved, shorn from his unconditional dedication to God\u2019s will. Bonhoeffer\u2019s witness is not found in his death but in his desire to fulfil the will of God in His plan for the world. God\u2019s will could have unfolded in a totally different way, yielding a different story. But the decisive question is whether it is God\u2019s story or not. And this does not depend on our interpretation, for it is the message addressed directly to us; it requires only that we, the listeners, pray with the speaker: \u2018Thy will be done\u2019. This prayer includes the story the speaker has to tell, a story with a specific message and a particular teaching.
\n\u2018Thy will be done\u2019: the realization of this prayer is the subject of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem as it is of his writings. Bonhoeffer is describing a way of life for us that in the end is dedicated to God\u2019s will, not because we have made a method of it, but because it is God\u2019s way with those who follow him. Otherwise Christians would turn out to be religious people instead of human beings dedicated to God\u2019s story with them. To have a religion means to have something that represents the \u2018real thing\u2019, something that can really be taken as if it were the real thing.
\nI have started with this remark because it touches the very content and Christological grammar of the poem. The point is neither to read the poem biographically in the context of Bonhoeffer\u2019s life, nor as a blueprint for the Christian life. The point is to read the poem as a schedule for God\u2019s presence.
\nIn \u2018Stations\u2019, therefore, Bonhoeffer is not teaching how Christians should live. Rather he is examining God\u2019s overwhelming presence in a human life. Bonhoeffer considers the places where God\u2019s presence is felt, if and only if one comes to these places rather than roaming elsewhere or looking for substitutes in a religious way. The poem indicates the places of God\u2019s acting, of God\u2019s presence:<\/p>\n
He is present where discipline is lived,
\nHe is present where we really do what is right,
\nHe is present where we suffer because of our dedication to Him,
\nand He is present where all earthly bounds and blindness dissolve to reveal his will.<\/p>\n
These are the stations where we find Jesus\u2014in discipline, in action, in suffering, and finally in death.
\nSo our first question has to be: What is the subject matter of the poem? And the answer: the stations of God\u2019s presence in our life. Bonhoeffer calls this presence freedom\u2014freedom in living with God. But, this living with God is not to be understood as a way of life distinct from its everyday forms. Living with God means submission, dedicating oneself to God\u2019s will and action in any walk of life. It is the same dedication about which Paul wrote in Rom. 12:1; a submission to God\u2019s will and action that is distinct from any other way of living. Here we have not only a method for understanding but also the poem\u2019s very subject.
\nThis submission to God\u2019s will and action is not a general submission as in fatalism, nor a deist submission because God has set in motion all natural occurrences; nor is it a submission to a God who is the author of a history that we understand and follow. Rather, Bonhoeffer is like Job, who refused the abstract submission of his friends\u2019 advice and insisted on gaining knowledge of God\u2019s judgement and will directly, face to face. In this sense, Bonhoeffer is talking about a life coram Deo, a life \u2018before the face of God\u2019, a life within the drama, in which God is involved with us.
\nBonhoeffer suggests, through the sections of this poem, that there are specific places for submission: discipline, action and suffering. But in considering these places, we must consider carefully the word \u2018stations\u2019 that Bonhoeffer chose for his title. The German word \u2018Stationen\u2019 has many meanings, not all of which are captured by the English word, \u2018stage\u2019. I would like to argue that \u2018stations\u2019 are places of submission to God\u2019s will, where we expect and experience God\u2019s presence. These \u2018stations\u2019 are places where discipleship happens, coming close to the traditional concept of \u2018orders\u2019, \u2018estates\u2019, or \u2018institutions\u2019, which Bonhoeffer came to refer to as \u2018mandates\u2019. This reading of the poem connects it with a Lutheran understanding of discipleship, a connection that has been unfolded by other Lutheran theologians like Hans Joachim Iwand and Ernst Wolf. This understanding of discipleship is what makes Bonhoeffer a Lutheran theologian, not potential relics in his political ethics or adoption of the concept of orders.<\/p>\n
c. A literal message<\/p>\n
During his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer included his poems within letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge. This shows again that these poems carry a message\u2014to the Church. This poem, in particular, is addressed to the Church community as it contains an open message about the secret, in which the Church is involved. The poems in general were Bonhoeffer\u2019s preferred means of encapsulating the core of his message, and therefore every single word has its specific importance. For this reason, Bonhoeffer had many editorial discussions with Bethge about their wording, debating individual words, and asking him how the poems could be improved. And yet even after these debates and revisions, Bonhoeffer was not always fully satisfied. Just as the form of a poem suggests the reader must cling to its very wording and shape, so Bonhoeffer argues, concerning the attention to God\u2019s activity within our lives, that we must not follow our own thoughts and fantasies but rather God\u2019s will.
\nThe various English versions of our poem indicate problems of understanding. Taking into account that translations always reformulate what they suggest they \u2018translate\u2019, the translations of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem present quite different interpretations. The German version is strongly marked by biblical language, sometimes echoing Luther\u2019s translation of the Bible. These considerations demand at least some philological comments. Thus far not nearly enough attention has been paid at this philological level\u2014even though it is well known that Bonhoeffer, like Luther, was keenly attentive to philological details and specific keywords or phrases, all of which served to articulate a specific part of the message. There are many phrases within this poem that have such a resonance, for instance, \u2018flight of thoughts\u2019 highlighting the escape by, and momentariness of, thoughts.
\nThus Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems remain open for a re-reading in order to adhere more firmly to the literal form of their message. Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems are destined to be read in this way, not least because they functioned as a grammar for a whole theology that he wished to have smuggled out of prison. The poems are, as it were, messages in a bottle, sent out with a hopeful expectation that someone will eventually find them. Perhaps Paul had this expectation, too, when he wrote his letters. Bonhoeffer\u2019s poems, too, are pastoral messages, designed to comfort and teach their readers. They are written for the others. In this sense they fulfil the criteria of the \u2018form of biblical narratives\u2019, as Franz Rosenzweig has described them.<\/p>\n
d. Stations\u2014public places of submission to God\u2019s will and places of expectation<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018stations\u2019 are public places, places of public existence, visible to the world, presenting the secret of God\u2019s guidance and action. They are not related to a specific sphere, not confined to any separated area, but located in the world, in the midst of the world that God has not given up. The \u2018stations\u2019 are the public places\u2014the fora\u2014of God\u2019s presence, making Bonhoeffer\u2019s a thoroughly political theology, a positive political theology revealing a specific way to freedom. Political theology is about how God\u2019s will is present in the world we are involved in\u2014according to the Lord\u2019s prayer: \u2018Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done\u2019. Political ethics is about how we actually live and act in accordance to these places of God\u2019s presence.
\n\u2018Stations\u2019 are the places of God\u2019s presence. There are no specific areas where we can find God in His presence other than in these \u2018stations on the way\u2019. Thus, there are no religious places, places of pilgrimage, spheres, or symbols etc. that are dedicated for or determined to reliably provide the experience of God\u2019s presence. Freedom is, first of all, the freedom from any religion; and \u2018religion\u2019 means (as we have already mentioned) the representation of God in His action by human practices or institutions. Jesus Christ is the only representative, and this sets Christians free from religious representations.<\/p>\n
e. Stations\u2014the visible Church<\/p>\n
The \u2018stations on the way to freedom\u2019 are not the biographical stations of an individual, but rather places where God\u2019s presence is to be expected, where God\u2019s people meet and come together in order to meet God. As Stanley Hauerwas stresses, altogether we may call the Church the \u2018visible Church\u2019. It is the visible Church of people who hand themselves over to God and who are therefore free from any other occupation or condition. The Church is not a religious space where God is represented. The Church is the people who live this freedom and witness it\u2014through discipline, action, and suffering\u2014to the world and within the world. This Church therefore is visible, and this visible Church is the obvious presence of God\u2019s hidden kingdom. But the Church only exists where and when we find people on the way to freedom in discipline, action, and suffering. It is an actual, particular Church, a Church of today and tomorrow, a Church of this actual worship. It does not represent something universal, something beyond these stations.<\/p>\n
II. First stanza\u2014discipline<\/p>\n
The structuring of the poem into blocks or sections is significant as a comment on the form of\u2014political\u2014discipleship. Bonhoeffer is rejecting the idea that we human beings must shape or design our life, rather than being conformed to a \u2018reality\u2019 that is already structured. This point is made explicit in the first stanza, and we can read the whole poem from this opening perspective. From there, we learn that our life is destined to receive a structure rather than being carried off in any direction by cupidity enchaining us.
\nBonhoeffer is making a fundamental point about \u2018learning\u2019. Learning is not something we have to initiate or manage. It is something passive that happens if we follow a certain path. Learning is connected with obedience, not in the sense of obeying a command, but rather in the sense of following our cues in the well-directed story, which God wants to live with us. The German word \u2018Zucht\u2019, which Luther used in his translation of Ps. 94:12, is close to \u2018teaching\u2019. This kind of education or learning keeps people free from obeying something else.
\nPhilological clues tell us that this stanza can be read as a meditation on Galatians 5, to which Bonhoeffer referred on numerous other occasions. In Gal. 5:16 Paul writes: \u2018Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.\u2019 The Greek word for \u2018desire\u2019 or \u2018cupidity\u2019 (\u2018desire\u2019 is too easily open to other interpretations) indicates an endless hunt for any kind of fulfilment yielding an unformed, amorphous living. Paul does not demand a form of self-discipline or self-control programme, as some translations of Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem suggest. There is no hint of the discipline through labour or other kinds of disciplining techniques whose history we have learned from Michel Foucault, among others. In Bonhoeffer\u2019s stanzas and Pauline logic, the contrast and conflict are between an endless and aimless amorphous cupidity on the one hand, and a given, structured, formed life, on the other hand, not as an end in itself, that can be learned and experienced. In this sense, Bonhoeffer is talking in his Ethics about \u2018gestaltetes Leben\u2019 (\u2018Natural life is formed life\u2019)\u2014a life not shaped and designed by our disciplining (or spiritual) practices. Our \u2018senses\u2019 and our \u2018soul\u2019 learn to be structured only by following a goal (Phil. 3:14) not fixed by ourselves but rather given to us, \u2018set\u2019 for us, by God. The Hebrew word for \u2018give\u2019 includes the meaning of \u2018set\u2019\u2014e.g. Num. 6:26: \u2018The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give\/set you peace.\u2019 The Lord is the one who sets aims and realities. This is a non-Aristotelian reading insofar as Aristotle did not know of an externally given end.
\nThe German word for \u2018chastity\u2019 (or \u2018continence\u2019), \u2018keusch\u2019\u2014in similarity with \u2018Zucht\u2019 (which is used by Luther in his Bible translation)\u2014means to be formed, to be shaped. It is therefore not only or primarily our body which has to receive a structure, but also\u2014and more importantly\u2014our mind. Our aimless thinking and endless reflecting do not lead anywhere and cut us off from freedom. Freedom is not lost when we submit ourselves to somebody or to our desires, but because of the insatiable aspiring of human desires. Freedom must not be equated with openness or a plurality of options; freedom is something experienced at those places (stations) where we can expect God\u2019s guidance and action. It is the freedom of disciples who expect God.
\nIn summary, this first stanza rejects any ethics that assumes a dichotomy between liberty (or liberation) and discipline. Instead, it points to the interconnection of freedom and dedication\u2014with the caveat that this freedom cannot be generalized into a method we can learn. Any kind of self-control again would be arbitrary. The disciple\u2019s freedom remains the expectation of the continuation of God\u2019s particular story with each person, a freedom that will be felt where we experience God\u2019s concrete guidance toward the goal he has set for us. To this end, we must always ask: What will this goal be? (Phil. 3:14).<\/p>\n
a. The secret<\/p>\n
Freedom has to be experienced. But, it can only be experienced at the stations of God\u2019s presence and guidance. Consequently, freedom remains secret, a secret of God. Freedom is not the result of processes of liberation. As described in stanza four, freedom is beyond our human condition, beyond the chains and walls of our body and mind, beyond the blindness of our soul, and beyond the (religious) practices that attempt to overcome such boundaries. Freedom is the secret of a new life with God\u2014face-to-face with Him. This is the goal of God\u2019s will and not the fulfilment of our own. Freedom is alien to us, libertas aliena. Where God is present, there is freedom. Consequently, freedom is found at these stations, where God is present in various ways. Bonhoeffer\u2019s whole theology is permeated by a quest for God\u2019s presence in our world. God has not\u2014as Bonhoeffer constantly stresses\u2014given up the world, which is still his very own, in which he wants to reign through Jesus Christ in all times and places. This is the secret of freedom, which is promised to us\u2014found in the stations on the way to the eternal freedom.
\nYet the freedom of God remains enclosed in a secret. We cannot have a firm \u2018knowledge\u2019 of it, but must simply have faith in both its existence and creation through the stations. The secret of freedom cannot be disclosed by any kind of liberating reflection, pronouncement of conscience, or enlightenment. This stanza contradicts any concept of human freedom that can be grasped, whether as the freedom of conscience and its (metaphysically reasonable) certainty, or the freedom of the human spirit, or any other mask. Freedom is something for God\u2019s designated children (Rom. 8:21) who have become acquainted with God\u2019s presence: because freedom belongs to God. That freedom is \u2018secret\u2019 does not mean that it is beyond our horizon or that it is a closed reality we cannot reach. Rather, it is the present secret of a kingdom to which we are called, along whose way we journey.
\nAs declared in the fourth stanza, our souls are blinded. To be able to see is not a question of a better or deeper knowledge that may overcome the limits or boundaries of our human condition. Bonhoeffer often criticized theology that concentrates on the limits of the human condition instead of reflecting on what can be experienced from God in the midst of our life. As \u2018Stations\u2019 declares, the first station is about this fundamental experience and focuses our attention on life\u2019s only goal: the presence of God. This concentration yields a discipline. However, this discipline is not an aim in its own right\u2014some sort of intrinsically necessary antidote to uncontrollable desires or passions. Rather, discipline necessarily develops on the way to freedom because it deals with a twofold fatal danger: of becoming lost in the endless force of our cupidities, on the one hand, and of becoming enchained to the \u2018project\u2019 of disciplining ourselves, on the other hand.<\/p>\n
b. \u2018Stations\u2019 and institutions<\/p>\n
If we read stations parallel to the traditional ethical concept of \u2018orders\u2019 or \u2018institutions\u2019 (or \u2018mandates\u2019, as Bonhoeffer came to refer to them), they represent the fundamental locus of God\u2019s presence. The first stanza reminds us of God\u2019s oeconomia, of God\u2019s all-embracing economy in contradiction to the wastefulness of our endless wishes and cupidities. As we will see, the second stanza reminds us of God\u2019s politia or political work, and the third stanza of the ecclesia, the place of suffering in God\u2019s will and plan.<\/p>\n
III. Second stanza\u2014action<\/p>\n
The focus of the second stanza, as in the first, is the contrast between our diffusion by our own thoughts and the possibilities we see ahead of us, and an active assertiveness in obedience to God\u2019s will.<\/p>\n
a. Thoughts\u2014reality<\/p>\n
In various remarks Bonhoeffer criticized \u2018thinking\u2019 as endangering our grasp of the reality in which we are involved. What he has in mind is not a distinction between \u2018theory\u2019 and \u2018praxis\u2019, but rather a distinction between a reality that engages our whole life and another \u2018reality\u2019 that we have both created and manipulated. Bonhoeffer is directing our attention to a theological understanding of \u2018reality\u2019 (\u2018Wirklichkeit\u2019) or\u2014we have to say\u2014to the only theologically reasonable understanding of reality. \u2018Das Wirkliche ergreifen\u2019 (\u2018grasping what is the real\u2019) is not a positivistic realism that pretends to know or recognize what is real, but an attentiveness to the given reality in which we have to be involved, to the reality addressed to us, because it is the reality within God\u2019s will. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer stressed that this reality includes the events of the presence of Jesus Christ and his cross, and God\u2019s involvement in that reality. God\u2019s plan and story have, before our arrival, been imbedded in reality; otherwise we would be able to make it what we, whoever we pretend to be, intend or think should be real. Bonhoeffer\u2019s theological point is not unlike Luther\u2019s, in his Heidelberg disputation, which pointed to a theology of the cross that refers to what is \u2018res\u2019: theologia crucis dicit quod res est (\u2018a theology of the cross names\/points out what is real\u2019).
\nReality is God\u2019s reality, and we are involved in that reality as he is. \u2018Thinking\u2019 misses this reality insofar it does not aim at God\u2019s acting but on possibilities that we have in mind or fantasize about. This point is reflected in Gen. 8:21: \u2018I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man\u2019s heart is evil from his youth\u2019.
\nToday, we often talk about \u2018having a vision\u2019 etc. instead of asking for God\u2019s will. The poem stresses the point that freedom is not where thoughts escape from reality. Freedom is to be found only by staying involved with the reality in which God is already involved. And that \u2018staying\u2019 must be focused in certain deeds. There is no activism implied here. Freedom crystallizes in specific deeds, and these deeds become part of the reality according to God\u2019s will, in which we are involved. Deeds are rooted in our dedication to God\u2019s will, to His beginning and to His reality\u2014they cannot be deduced from antecedent conditions, nor are they to be judged in terms of consequences or necessities. They are independent of that kind of reflection and that kind of \u2018responsibility\u2019 or thoughtfulness, which we call in a specific sense \u2018responsibility\u2019. \u2018Responsibility\u2019, according to Max Weber, means taking into account the reaction of other people, being ready to respond to them and to justify what you have done. Unlike this kind of responsibility, deeds in the very meaning of political deeds are free, free from our own burden of \u2018responsibilities\u2019. Actions are \u2018supported only by God\u2019s commandments and your faith\u2019, manifest in a disciple\u2019s worldly vocation. This is their political vocation.<\/p>\n
b. Political vocation\u2014living within the politia<\/p>\n
It is a political existence that consists of just such deeds. This is close to Hannah Arendt\u2019s definition of political power: in contrast to violence as the opposite to any \u2018action\u2019, political power is the power to act together, to enact a common deed, and this means to do something independent, something new, something beyond what can be accounted for by cause and effect. Such acts are political and not administrative or governmental; they are related to real (political) power\u2014i.e. the possibility to truly act rather than to rely upon particular technical abilities or competences. Actions are political in this sense. \u2018Pray and do what is just\u2019\u2014these were the only possible actions Bonhoeffer could see for Christians in the future.
\nEthical significant action is to do something specific that has no other aim than to do the just thing in the here and now, whatever it may be. This has nothing to do with a \u2018situation ethic\u2019 that claims all actions according to necessity. Rather, it is the core of a political ethic in being related to God\u2019s freedom. God will choose, we hope, this specific deed for his plan. God will decide what is right. For every moment, for a particular, single occasion, our action is the fulfilling and enacting of God\u2019s will\u2014and so participates in His freedom. It is \u2018supported\u2019 by God\u2019s commandment, and our faith.<\/p>\n
c. Faith<\/p>\n
Faith is trust in God\u2019s plan. Therefore, the opposite of faith is \u2018Anfechtung\u2019, temptation in both directions: to be chained into a false certainty about what is right and wrong, and to be chained into doubts about whether it is really God\u2019s will or not. To be faithful means not to surrender to temptation.
\nFor this single, and perhaps short, moment, freedom will \u2018embrace your spirit with rejoicing\u2019. This is the opposite of a \u2018spiritual freedom\u2019 where our human spirit enjoys its independence from any \u2018reality\u2019 or earthly existence. In doing God\u2019s will our spirit will be embraced by God\u2019s freedom. In fulfilling God\u2019s will, guided by his commandments and by all we are invited to believe, we participate in God\u2019s own freedom\u2014not by saying, \u2018God with us\u2019, but rather praying, \u2018Thy will be done\u2019\u2014God\u2019s will as it is articulated in His commandments. Bonhoeffer has shown that this belongs to a political existence.
\nNowhere more than here are we at the core of Bonhoeffer\u2019s ethics. It is an expression of Jesus\u2019 prayer in Gethsemane: \u2018Again he went away for the second time and prayed, \u201cMy Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done\u201d \u2019 (Mt. 26:42). The Greek reads more literally, \u2018your will should be realized\u2019\u2014but the question is, by whose power? This points to the whole story, which must be fulfilled.<\/p>\n
IV. Third stanza\u2014suffering<\/p>\n
We have already anticipated the point that actions are confined to a single moment\u2014the \u2018blissful moment\u2019 of freedom. But actions are soon followed by powerlessness and loneliness. As described in Mk. 15:34: \u2018And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, \u201cEloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?\u201d, which means, \u201cMy God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?\u201d \u2019<\/p>\n
a. Suffering<\/p>\n
The third stanza is entitled \u2018suffering\u2019. To suffer means to be unable to change or transform things, but rather to be transformed (\u2018Verwandlung\u2019) by losing the power to act. Yet this station, too, this bounding of our power, is the place of transformation, is one further place for experiencing God\u2019s freedom\u2014it is the place where we hand our \u2018right doing\u2019 over to God. This handing over of our deeds and ends to God will become for us a new place for the presence of God\u2019s freedom. Bonhoeffer is again talking about things happening to us from God in His presence. Wherever we do the right and wherever we are in that way involved in reality, we experience comfort in God\u2019s power of fulfilling it. This means suffering\u2014what Reinhard H\u00fctter refers to as \u2018suffering divine things\u2019\u2014and must include earthly suffering, because God does not fulfil what is right beyond reality, its conflicts, and contradictions. He himself is involved in that reality. This understanding allows Bonhoeffer to talk about a history guided by God where we are His instruments. This is of course different from theologies of history, which show history as the ongoing revelation of God\u2019s triumph and not the revealed story of His secret. The cross belongs to that story of God\u2019s secret, which should not be deciphered by theological interpretation\u2014which is not part of doing the just. This is not a \u2018negative\u2019 theology or a negative theology of history, because it is the story of a real, positive contradiction and resistance. It is a theology of a positive, broken history, in which God is present, not of a negative, dark side of history, which leads into the abyss.
\nThrough faith, we can find comfort in this\u2014but not through \u2018knowledge\u2019 as it remains the secret of freedom. Here again we find the Lutheran grammar in Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology. In this sense we are justified only by faith, by this kind of trust in God\u2019s justice, i.e. his trustworthiness to his people. This faith includes comfort for our human life\u2014it is not about something beyond, it is about a human life, reliant on God\u2019s comforting justice. This \u2018comfort\u2019 is \u2018Trost\u2019 in German, which Luther used in his translations of the Bible, akin to the English word \u2018trust\u2019. However, the action must be given back to God. God has to fulfil our human plans (Psalm 127). In this way, the plot on Hitler\u2019s life in which Bonhoeffer was involved could not be justified; God\u2019s justice includes justice not only for the individual, but for the whole of the politia. \u2018Aren\u2019t righteousness and the kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything\u2019, Bonhoeffer wrote on 5 May 1944, \u2018and isn\u2019t it true that Rom. 3:2ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous?\u2019 In doing what is right, we must hand ourselves over to God\u2019s righteousness, to God\u2019s political justice.
\nParadoxically, in a literally fatal mistake, one of the conspirators of the 20 July plot, General Oster, refused to destroy the files containing all the information about the conspiracy because he wanted to have material after the war to justify the plotters against the possible accusation of having acted too late. Oster\u2019s desire for justification meant that the files were hidden carelessly in a garden, only to be discovered later by the authorities. This, of course, can only be said as an aside, and not in order to judge anyone. The fact is, however, that this is how things happened, in direct contrast to what Bonhoeffer has been urging about the form of responsibility. Again, there was a Judas working in the context of God\u2019s plan\u2014paralleled from the other side by the courageous action of the soldier who delivered Bonhoeffer\u2019s letters, including the poems, at the risk of his life. Because of this one soldier, Knobloch, because of his deeds, we are able to study the poems and listen to their messages. They are messages that needed a human being, who was unconstrained by human claims, free enough to deliver them.<\/p>\n
b. Standing in our place<\/p>\n
Freedom will only be fulfilled by God. God himself acts with us, instead of us, in our place. In Jesus Christ, God stands in our place in our deeds, sufferings and guilt. We do not stand in for Him or even serve as representatives for Him. We are not Christ\u2014however much we share God\u2019s sufferings. This is our faith\u2014faith in God\u2019s presence, as it was the faith of those who stood under the cross at Jesus\u2019 death. We are disciples that way.
\nNo one and no thing can represent God or divine things. The logic of religion is to offer representatives, a logic that also generates political theologies and ecclesiologies, on the assumption that there is something on earth representing God\u2019s action or gifts. But representation of God is different from God\u2019s presence: the presence of God includes that He stands in our place\u2014and there happens our suffering, because we cannot act any more. We stop acting, we stop fighting, and we hand over to God. However, God does not work as a deus ex machina, as religious thinking may expect. Rather, He fulfils His story, in which He and we are involved. And this includes suffering\u2014suffering in God\u2019s presence in the reality in which He is involved. God\u2019s will is enacted that way in the midst of reality, directly relevant to our living with God.<\/p>\n
c. The Church\u2014and the logic of responsibility<\/p>\n
When Bonhoeffer refers to God\u2019s presence in the Church, he does not mean His representation in any form or action of the Church, but rather how the Church is part of God\u2019s present action through his disciples. Just as God fulfilled His will with Jesus, He does it continually with His disciples who follow him. He is not a God who avoids reality. He is still the God who let His son suffer. He stands in our place in His son\u2014and His disciples again stand in the place of others. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer calls this \u2018responsibility\u2019: to be responsible means to stand in for somebody in order that God\u2019s will might be fulfilled.
\nSuch a position cannot fit within any political theology interested in representing God\u2019s achievement or even\u2014\u2018religious\u2019\u2014triumph on earth beyond or outside reality, which is relevant for our living with God. Religion is always about triumphant representation. And any such political theology is religious because it sets up a positive representative, so causing rivalries about what or who can provide proper representation. Does peaceful behaviour of the Church represent God\u2019s peace? Does doing right represent God\u2019s righteousness? In contradiction to this logic of representation, God himself overcomes our ways with his own. Jesus therefore is not the last triumphant representative of God\u2014he is the one in whom God himself suffers, stepping into our human powerlessness and loneliness. Standing in for the other and not representation is described as the logic of responsibility in Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics: to be responsible means to do something instead of the other, standing in for him, even taking on the guilt that the other cannot evade.
\nThis was the logic behind Bonhoeffer\u2019s involvement in the plot against Hitler. In his eyes, this involvement was a stepping in for the other\u2014not a kind of ultima ratio or even a justifiable way of revolution. It was no longer possible for \u2018right\u2019 to be done, for this action to manifest both responsibility for the other and the experience of freedom, to begin something new (as we have learnt from stanza 2). Someone had to kill the tyrant. This was \u2018the end of your action\u2019 (stanza 3), handing everything over to God, remaining powerless, casting aside the \u2018powerful deed\u2019, and, in this case, embracing the ethically \u2018wrong\u2019. The point was never to use violence in order to achieve power. Rather, the plot was the admission of powerlessness, submission to God, and suffering whatever the consequences might be. Consequently, the plot belongs to this third station rather than the second\u2014the station of suffering on the way to freedom.
\nBonhoeffer could accept himself becoming a victim, but he could not accept that the other should have to become a victim. This is a thoroughly Lutheran logic: you may abstain from your rights, but you cannot expect the same abstinence from the other\u2014and this includes also the willingness to take on guilt.
\nTo resist the evil means to do good works (Romans 12), to do what is right. However, this can also mean \u2018the end of your action\u2019 and hence suffering. To suffer means to give oneself over to God and his story, which through Jesus has already been revealed to be precisely that suffering. One\u2019s suffering must be part of that story if it is not the making of our own story. This stands in opposition to a political theology which points to a politically significant representation of God, which is beyond His presence in bearing us on the way to freedom. It stands, of course, also against any church that pretends to be beyond suffering for God\u2019s presence. The consequence of this would be not an invisible church, but a church that is visible in the wrong way.
\nThere is a sharply delineated uniqueness about political theologies and political ethics, which are embedded in God\u2019s economy and rule. God\u2019s ruling in freedom is to be experienced beyond any political theology that claims to administer the representation of God. God\u2019s presence is something different. His political presence takes over reality and transforms it for us. When we give up all that we do to him, his rule occurs.<\/p>\n
V. Three stations\u2014three \u2018orders\u2019<\/p>\n
At this point we start to touch on Bonhoeffer\u2019s understanding of the Church within the Lutheran scheme of the three stations. As the oeconomia is the place where we are involved in God\u2019s all-embracing work, and as the politia is the place of action in its fragmented freedom and involvement in God\u2019s will, so the ecclesia is the place of transformation by God\u2019s action and involvement in His story. Bonhoeffer is talking about a visible Church, which is at the same time political by its praying and doing justice. The Church does not replace the politia, as would be the case in \u2018religious\u2019 political theology, because God\u2019s kingdom is present in different ways, including those deeds that belong to the politia. God\u2019s kingdom belongs to the secret of freedom. The Church suffers in place of the world, stepping in for the world, which God has not given up.
\nBonhoeffer always stressed that God has\u2014because of Jesus Christ\u2014not given up this world, rather, he \u2018was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself\u2019 (2 Corinthians 5). The Church steps in for the world, living the redemption in Christ and participating in his sufferings. In the Church\u2019s suffering, God\u2019s will for his world appears, and in the powerlessness of the Church God\u2019s power becomes visible. The Church steps in for the world by being involved in its affairs, which are transformed into God\u2019s affairs through the Church\u2019s involvement. However, by standing as the place holder for God\u2019s acting in the world, the Church does not become the new polis. The Church is the place of transformation, the place of change, the place of giving oneself over to God: a station on the way to freedom, on the way to God\u2019s heavenly kingdom.
\nThis \u2018living in transformation\u2019 has to be witnessed to the world as it is (aion)\u2014as Paul described it in Rom. 12:2: \u2018Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.\u2019 To prove what is the will of God is not an intellectual task. It is our experience of God\u2019s will taking the place of our own will. And the Church is the place of that reversal. With the fragmentary presence of God\u2019s freedom within the stations God\u2019s Kingdom is also present. It is beyond a political theology that pretends to show or know what represents God. God himself will remain within the secret and be visible in discipline, action, and suffering. This is a Lutheran grammar of theology, which follows the grammar of a theologia crucis, not a theologia gloriae\u2014it has to articulate what is \u2018real\u2019.
\nBonhoeffer argues that the kingdom of God \u2018assumes form in the Church\u2019 and\u2014at the same time\u2014in the \u2018state\u2019:<\/p>\n
The kingdom of God exists in our world exclusively in the duality of Church and state. Each is necessarily related to the other; neither exists for itself. Every attempt of one to take control of the other disregards this relationship of the kingdom of God on earth. Every prayer for the coming of the kingdom to us that does not have in mind both Church and state is either otherworldliness or secularism. It is, in any case, disbelief in the kingdom of God.
\n\u2026 The kingdom of God assumes form in the Church insofar as here the loneliness of being human is overcome through the miracle of confession and forgiveness. This is because in the Church \u2026 one person can and should bear the guilt of another \u2026
\n\u2026 The kingdom of God assumes form in the state insofar as here the orders of existing communities are maintained with authority and responsibility. Lest humankind fall apart through the desires of individuals who want simply to go their own way, the state takes the responsibility in a world under the curse for the preservation of the orders of communities, such as marriage, family, and nation \u2026
\nThe kingdom of Christ is God\u2019s kingdom, but God\u2019s kingdom in the form appointed for us. It does not appear as one, visible, powerful empire, nor yet as the \u2018new\u2019 kingdom of the word; on the contrary, it manifests itself as the kingdom of the other world that has entered completely into the discord and contradiction to this world. It appears as the powerless, defenseless gospel of the resurrection, of the miracle; and, at the very same time, as the state that possesses authority and power and maintains order. The kingdom of Christ becomes a reality only when these two are genuinely related to each other and yet mutually limit one another.
\n\u2026 The kingdom of God is not to be found in some other world beyond, but in the midst of this world. Our obedience is demanded in terms of its contradictory appearance, and, then, through our obedience, the miracle, like lightning, is allowed to flash up again and again from the perfect, blessed new world of the final promise \u2026
\n\u2018Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom!\u2019 This the Lord will say to no other than the one to whom he says: \u2018I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink \u2026 Just as you did to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.\u2019<\/p>\n
We can read the poem in this context\u2014it is about the form the kingdom of God assumes within the oeconomia, the politia, and the ecclesia\u2014in discipline, action, and suffering. The witness of the Church of the kingdom is different from the witness of the politia; it is the witness of practices like forgiveness, not powerful deeds\u2014as it is for the politia. Here something can be done for the other, for the right of the other. The kingdom is not beyond this world\u2014but there remains a mystery\u2014and this will be understood in a last and final station where we meet God face to face. The point is not \u2018beyond\u2019 the world, but the immediate presence of God. Thus we arrive at the fourth stanza of the poem.<\/p>\n
VI. Fourth stanza\u2014death<\/p>\n
Death is not a further station analogous to the previous three. Death is the final end not only of our doing and experience, but of our very way: a feast of transition. From this point we do not act or suffer anymore, but go to meet God, going now to the sphere of knowledge and understanding: \u2018Dying we recognize it now in the face of God\u2014freedom\u2019.<\/p>\n
a. Death<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer considered death and resurrection in many contexts. In this poem, death becomes a specific theological place\u2014it is the feast of transition (not transformation) to God himself. The decisive element\u2014which is seldom sufficiently reflected on by theology\u2014is that Christian hope is not about expecting another world, but rather an encounter with God himself in this world. It is not the religious expectation of a new life that is to be sought, but the encounter and understanding of God himself, and the embracing of His freedom. Here again, Bonhoeffer follows strictly the grammar of this theology of God\u2019s presence:<\/p>\n
Fundamentally we feel that we really belong to death already, and that every new day is a miracle. It would probably not be true to say that we welcome death \u2026 Nor do we try to romanticize death, for life is too great and too precious \u2026 We still love life, but I do not think that death can take us by surprise now \u2026 It is we ourselves, and not outward circumstances, who make death what it can be, a death freely and voluntarily accepted.<\/p>\n
How can death be freely and voluntarily accepted? \u2018Stations\u2019 answers that difficult question\u2014that is not at least its particular message. Death appears as the feast at the end of our way along the secret of freedom.<\/p>\n
b. The secret and the understanding<\/p>\n
Death unburdens us from our chains and destroys the walls of our blinded souls. Plato\u2019s parable of the cave comes to mind, in which blinded souls\u2014human beings in chains\u2014are sitting in the cave and have no understanding of what is outside the cave. Bonhoeffer sometimes maintained that all of life is about gaining cognition of all that God has prepared for us\u2014it is about the secret and its understanding. As long as we\u2014like Job or Jesus\u2014do not fully see God\u2019s plan and will, we are experiencing the secret of freedom. Therefore, Bonhoeffer talked about a \u2018discipline of the arcane\u2019, a theology that explores God\u2019s secret will and plans rather than our religious conscience, language, and thoughts, that explores God\u2019s secret plan rather than what represents God and what we pretend to understand or not to understand about God. It is the discipline of God\u2019s secret\u2014about whose existence we are certain. It is revealed to us as a secret; the secret of freedom that we know already through discipline, action, and suffering.
\nWe can have insight into God\u2019s secret only when we are face to face with God. Only here, beyond our temporal cave, can we gain understanding, and only then can we gain an understanding of freedom. To know what God\u2019s will is, brings us knowledge of freedom. This is the situation of Jesus who freely conformed to God, and it will happen to us beyond the chains and walls of our bodies and souls.
\nAfter transformation (stanza 3), there is transition into this new existence. Death is the feast of transition to God\u2019s kingdom. As Bonhoeffer writes in his booklet on the Psalms about \u2018the end\u2019:<\/p>\n
Life in community with the God of revelation, the final victory of God in the world, and the establishing of the messianic kingdom are all subjects of prayer in the Psalms.
\nDeath is indeed the irreversible bitter end for body and soul. It is the wages of sin, and this must not be forgotten (Pss. 30, 90). But on the other side of death is the eternal God (Pss. 90, 102). Therefore death will not triumph, but life will triumph in the power of God (Pss. 16:9ff., 56:14 [13], 49:16 [15], 73:24, 118:15ff.).
\nThe Psalms of the final victory of God and of God\u2019s Messiah (2, 96, 97, 98, 110, 148\u2013150) lead us in praise, thanksgiving, and petition to the end of all things when all the world will give honor to God, when the redeemed community will reign with God eternally, and when the powers of evil will fall and God alone will retain power.<\/p>\n
It is here that we are in transition into a realm of an unbroken political theology\u2014beyond death\u2014in the eternal kingdom. This, then, is the place of eternal freedom because it is the place of a full understanding of God\u2019s will.
\nStanza 4 can be read as a meditation on 1 Corinthians 2:<\/p>\n
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, \u2018What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,\u2019 God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what person knows a man\u2019s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit, which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. \u2018For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?\u2019 But we have the mind of Christ.<\/p>\n
Knowledge, face to face with God, is the final goal on the way to freedom, because this is the only way to gain knowledge of what happens to us, of what reality is about. Such understanding is not generated by interpreting history\u2014as theologians often have\u2014pretending to know God\u2019s will, or pretending not to be able to know and looking for a cognition beyond reality. We can find understanding only through our submission to God\u2019s own reality, which is not separated from our human reality\u2014finally through death. Therefore, Bonhoeffer criticizes theological reflections that seek God at the borders or limits of our human horizon. The \u2018beyond\u2019 is the other and his story in which we are involved. \u2018God is beyond in the midst of our life.\u2019
\nAs Bonhoeffer writes about knowledge, \u2018There are degrees of knowledge and degrees of significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation. The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself.\u2019 Theology, on the one hand, has to preserve the secret instead of transforming it into the religious, and on the other, it must follow God\u2019s reality\u2014again refusing to transform it into a particular religious reality. At the very least, the Church must learn not to replace God\u2019s reality in a religious way, but seek instead to be involved with God\u2019s presence wherever and whenever it appears in our reality. This needs attention to God\u2019s presence\u2014and will finally lead to understanding.<\/p>\n
VII. Final remarks\u2014in the light of God\u2019s presence in his secret freedom<\/p>\n
The \u2018stations\u2019 on the way to freedom can be read as stations of theological engagement concerning the message of freedom, which Bonhoeffer put into a poem, expecting and hoping that it might reach the world. Bonhoeffer described in his poem human life as it passes through these three places of God\u2019s presence and the feast of death, the last station on the way to freedom.
\nHas this message reached the world? Has it forged how Bonhoeffer has been received? Is this reception on the way to freedom\u2014with a message for an oeconomia in discipline, a politia in action, and an ecclesia in suffering? The theology that follows these stations follows God\u2019s will, follows the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane, and prays together with him, \u2018My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt\u2019 (Mt. 26:39).
\nThis is the place of a Church for others (no other ground), and a theology for others. It must keep the secret without pretending to know \u2018God\u2019. There is no representation\u2014there is no religion. Bonhoeffer has been criticized because he failed to foresee that religion did not disappear but, on the contrary, once again has become more and more present on various sceneries. However, this criticism misunderstands the concept of \u2018religion\u2019 in Bonhoeffer\u2019s argument. for Bonhoeffer, what is bound to disappear is the possibility of trust (a faith) in religious representations. The globalized world today may or may not preserve a multitude of religions, but the question is: will there be a grounded trust in religion, religious people and their \u2018religious a priori\u2019?
\nSome may argue that religious fundamentals are still maintained, such as security, moral responsibility, values, identity, and spirituality. Religious representations change or disappear, and this is true\u2014according to Bonhoeffer\u2014especially for the Christian religion. Therefore, the secret, as God himself, remains and has to be experienced as the secret of freedom. We should not go into a religious economy, looking for what we need for our desires, but rather look for the goal that is set: to meet God in His freedom. And on the way to this freedom, there are these three: discipline, action and suffering. Without religious substitutes, without this kind of comfort\u2014which is destined to be a thing of the past\u2014we are confronted with God who is involved in our human reality. There is no trustworthy new religious behaviour. There is only discipline (not to get lost in our desires), action (not to get lost in our thoughts), and suffering (not to get lost in our human activities).<\/p>\n
If we are to learn what God promises, and what God fulfills, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus. It is certain that we may always live close to God and in the light of God\u2019s presence, and that such living is an entirely new life for us; that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God; that no earthly power can touch us without God\u2019s will, and that danger and distress can only drive us closer to God.
\nChristians are called to compassion (\u2018Mit-leiden\u2019: to share suffering) and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters, for whose sake Christ suffered.<\/p>\n
This Church of shared suffering is visible although its case, as the visible secret of freedom, remains hidden. In its living for others, the Church is not a religious representation, but rather expects God\u2019s presence wherever we are involved in reality. This Church may be difficult to identify for those who expect a religious appearance. The Church is present where God\u2019s people stand in for others in the experience of freedom in discipline, action, suffering and death for God\u2019s world, which he has not given up. This happens in any sphere of our human life where God\u2019s presence is expected: in the oeconomia of life, in the politia of action, and in the ecclesia of being transformed.<\/p>\n
9<\/p>\n
\u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019<\/p>\n
Towards a Trans-Religious Second Na\u00efvet\u00e9 or How to be a Christological Creature<\/p>\n
Bernd Wannenwetsch<\/p>\n
\u2018Christen und Heiden\u2019<\/p>\n
1. Menschen gehen zu Gott in ihrer Not,
\nflehen um Hilfe, bitten um Gl\u00fcck und Brot,
\num Errettung aus Krankheit, Schuld und Tod.
\nSo tun sie alle, alle, Christen und Heiden.<\/p>\n
2. Menschen gehen zu Gott in Seiner Not,
\nfinden ihn arm, geschm\u00e4ht, ohne Obdach und Brot,
\nsehn ihn verschlungen von S\u00fcnde, Schwachheit und Tod.
\nChristen stehen bei Gott in Seinen Leiden.<\/p>\n
3. Gott geht zu allen Menschen in ihrer Not,
\ns\u00e4ttigt den Leib und die Seele mit Seinem Brot,
\nstirbt f\u00fcr Christen und Heiden den Kreuzestod,
\nund vergibt ihnen beiden.<\/p>\n
\u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019<\/p>\n
1. Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
\nPray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
\nFor mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
\nAll men do so, Christian and unbelieving.<\/p>\n
2. Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
\nFind him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
\nWhelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
\nChristians stand by God in his hour of grieving.<\/p>\n
3. God goes to every man when sore bestead,
\nFeeds body and spirit with his bread;
\nFor Christians, pagans alike he hangs dead,
\nAnd both alike forgiving.<\/p>\n
(Translation: John Bowden)<\/p>\n
I. What Christianity really is?<\/p>\n
\u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019 is the shortest prison poem we have from Bonhoeffer and at the same time the most formally structured. It comes in numbered stanzas, with a regular meter, and rhymed. Both the pencilled draft version and the edited final version are preserved. The poem\u2019s inception can be traced back to a piece of scrap paper from July 1944 where Bonhoeffer put down two simple lines:<\/p>\n
Men go to God in their distress.
\nMen go to God in his distress.<\/p>\n
The poem accompanied a letter to Eberhard Bethge from 8 July. Ten days later, in another letter to his friend, Bonhoeffer summarized the core idea of the poem as follows:<\/p>\n
The poem about Christians and pagans contains an idea that you will recognize: \u2018Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving\u2019; that is what distinguishes Christians from pagans. Jesus asked in Gethsemane, \u2018Could you not watch with me one hour?\u2019 That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God.<\/p>\n
In his previous correspondence with Bethge, Bonhoeffer had begun to use key notions such as \u2018Christianity\u2019 or \u2018religion\u2019 in inverted commas. These familiar terms he no longer considered to be safe\u2014it dawned on Bonhoeffer that he witnessed a time of transition that rendered ambiguous any previous meaning these terms may have had. As opposed to the mental and spiritual draught that Bonhoeffer admits to have gone through during his first period in prison, we begin to see the fruits of a concern that set his mind in unfamiliar territory: \u2018What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.\u2019
\nBonhoeffer sought to unpack this question along various routes, the most obvious of which concerned the relationship of Christianity and religion. Is Christianity a religion at all? The one and true religion? Or is it rather an anti-religion? Although the title pairs Christians and pagans (\u2018Christen und Heiden\u2019), it would perhaps have been more aptly titled \u2018Christians and Other Religious People\u2019, as it does not address the problem of the relationship of Christianity to any concrete non-Christian religion but rather how Christianity relates to the homo religious\u2014humankind in their notorious transcendental striving.
\nOn the backdrop of some of Bonhoeffer\u2019s paragraphs in the surrounding letters of theological prose, we might be tempted to read the poem from the vantage point of the theological verdict on religion that Karl Barth had famously issued in his Church Dogmatics where he spoke of \u2018The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion\u2019, characterizing religion as a human attempt to justify oneself in front of the self-made image of God, or even more bluntly as \u2018unbelief\u2019. Bonhoeffer was clearly impressed by Barth\u2019s uncompromised characterization of the Christian faith as essentially revealed anti-religion. Bonhoeffer, too, describes the \u2018reversal\u2019 that the gospel brings about in the attitude of the religious man. In the aforementioned letter of 18 July, he characterizes the Christian faith\u2019s difference from religion in terms of metanoia, conversion:<\/p>\n
To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man\u2014not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia: not in the first place thinking about one\u2019s own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer, no less than Barth, is aware of the critical difference in which the Christian faith stands from religion. And this perception is only enhanced by the disturbing and novel ideas in his Tegel correspondence where Bonhoeffer famously envisions a \u2018religion-less Christianity\u2019 and inaugurates a quest for a \u2018non-religious interpretation of the Bible\u2019. If, however, we were to read this tendency straight into the poem \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019, we would miss precisely the most interesting twist that Bonhoeffer\u2019s thoughts take here. Approaching the poem without a prefigured interpretative foil, we can hardly suppress a sense of surprise. Given the tendency in the movement referred to as \u2018Dialectical Theology\u2019 to stress to distance of Christianity from religion, we notice a significantly different take in the poem: Here, Bonhoeffer first emphasizes what Christians and pagans\u2014religious people outside of Christianity\u2014have in common. Although the second stanza moves on to emphasize the uniqueness of the Christian faith, and the third stanza eventually performs the move we might expect in turning the man-to-God approach around, the poem as a whole is framed by expressions that stress the commonalities of Christians and other religious people. For example, the German original repeats the \u2018all\u2019 in the last line of the fist stanza: \u2018all men do so, all\u2019. The importance that Bonhoeffer put on this emphasis is evidenced in that the second \u2018all\u2019 was added by him in the revised version over against the pencilled draft. Likewise, in the third stanza, he added another \u2018all\u2019 to \u2018men\u2019 in the revision of the draft, so that it now reads: \u2018God goes to all men\u2019. And much in the same vein, he ended the poem with the word \u2018both\u2019 (\u2018beiden\u2019), by which the final rhyme (to \u2018Heiden\u2019) and accent is found and placed.
\nIs Bonhoeffer less radical than Barth in his criticism of religion, when the antithesis of Christianity to religion appears to be eventually absorbed into a dialectical move towards a sort of both-and, yes-and-no? We can certainly reckon with Bonhoeffer\u2019s Lutheran sensitivities in emphasizing the finitum capax over against Barth\u2019s Reformed tendencies of non-capax and the corresponding contrasting of God\u2019s sovereignty with the natural world. But we can understand the difference of Bonhoeffer\u2019s account from Barth\u2019s only if we allow for a sort of dramatic reading of Bonhoeffer\u2019s account of \u2018religion\u2019. Bonhoeffer\u2019s understanding of Christianity and religion is not unlike Luther\u2019s teaching of the law that has proved to be prone to many misunderstandings when read as a fixed system. Just as Luther\u2019s doctrine of the law must be understood according to the dramatic narrative of its institution by God in the Garden of Eden, its subsequent distortion through the fall, and the process of its restoration to its original purpose as God\u2019s loving and love-worthy rule, so it is also with Bonhoeffer\u2019s account of religion. Rather than being cast into one all-encompassing theory, religion must be narrated as a plot featured within God\u2019s salvific story, in which the meaning of individual concepts change as they relate to each respective act within that divine play. My suggestion is that within Bonhoeffer we find a three-staged dramatic notion of \u2018religion\u2019 as \u2018cry\u2019, \u2018try\u2019, and \u2018sigh\u2019.<\/p>\n
II. A dramatic account of religion<\/p>\n
As \u2018cry\u2019, religion echoes humankind\u2019s primal scream, and is understood as a matter of the original state of creatureliness. As \u2018try\u2019, religion represents the domain of the fallen man who seeks to domesticate the divine for his own benefit. As \u2018sigh\u2019, religion is turned on his head, when the new evangelical creature willingly partakes in the eager longing and groaning of creation (Rom. 8:18\u201322) or in the \u2018loud cries and tears\u2019 (Heb. 5:8) of Christ\u2019s distressed prayers in the garden of Gethsemane (Mt. 26:36\u201346). It is to this third notion that this essay\u2019s subtitle refers: religion as the second na\u00efvet\u00e9 of a restored, christologically mediated creatureliness.
\nThese three modes of understanding religion according to the drama of creation, fall, and redemption are not completely parallel to the three stanzas of our poem, but I think that something like this typology is required if we are to make sense of the three stanzas and Bonhoeffer\u2019s further musings on the matter in his theological prose. Although the poem, unlike Bonhoeffer\u2019s theological prose, does not explicitly dwell on the second mode\u2014religion as strategy\u2014it may be said to be implicitly and tacitly represented in the way in which the second stanza characterizes the Christian way as a formal reversal of the first. We must now look at the three modes in further detail.<\/p>\n
a. Religion as \u2018cry\u2019: calling on God<\/p>\n
According to the first stanza, religion deals with elemental human needs as they are characterized by the polarity of fear and hope, the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of suffering: those who go to God \u2018pray for help, happiness and bread.\u2019 In this light, Bonhoeffer shows no concern in acknowledging that humankind is religious from the outset. The need, desire, and liberty to cry to God for help are simply characteristics of being a creature. It is worth mentioning that Luther, on whose theology Bonhoeffer depends a great deal in this case, speaks in his Genesis Lectures of such an original religion when he envisages an original \u2018church in the garden\u2019, a church sine muris (without walls) that is brought into being by God\u2019s giving of his first command, \u2018Eat, do not eat\u2019, which offers his creatures a concrete way of responding to the divine address in obedient worship.
\nYet this religion of the original state in its primal na\u00efvet\u00e9 is no longer present among God\u2019s creatures after the fall. Religion, too, has now become a matter of what Bonhoeffer calls \u2018the natural\u2019 as distinct from \u2018creation\u2019. \u2018Through the fall, \u201ccreation\u201d became \u201cnature\u201d \u2026 The natural is that form of life preserved by God for the fallen world that is directed towards justification, salvation, and renewal through Christ.\u2019 In this sense, it is \u2018natural\u2019 for humans to be religious as a matter of corresponding to God\u2019s providential caring for his creatures. But the way in which religion is enacted in the concrete of the post-lapsarian state, precisely reveals the need for \u2018renewal\u2019. In his letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer captures this ambiguity in the image of \u2018religion as a garment of Christianity\u2019. A garment is a useful and healthy thing, as it warms and protects the skin of those who wear it. Yet, as the very image of \u2018covering\u2019 conveys, it contains a potentially dark side: a garment also covers up, conceals, and potentially deceives.<\/p>\n
b. Religion as \u2018try\u2019: domesticating God<\/p>\n
This dark side resides in the prefix of the word re-ligio: the \u2018re\u2019-ligare (binding oneself back onto something) becomes problematic when humans do not merely cry out to the divine in their need but make arrangements to secure the desired divine help, or even advise a distinct and \u2018safe\u2019 sphere to God (as in the temple principle), thus eventually rendering him a functionary of their interests and identity politics; seeking protection for the sake of self-enclosure, guidance for the sake of the constitution of a \u2018moral self\u2019, and so on. The perversion of the religion of the original state eventually amounts to the domestication of God. Bonhoeffer senses this when he compares religion to circumcision as a symbol of a self-assuring identity politics: \u2018Freedom from peritome is also freedom from religion.\u2019
\nIn the letters that surround the poem, Bonhoeffer identifies a number of problems that are typically associated with the homo religious, in particular the problems of religious inwardness, individualism, and metaphysics. In regards to the problem of individualism, Bonhoeffer refers to the \u2018soteriological egotism\u2019 of the religious person\u2014save my soul and may perish the world\u2014which he finds so refreshingly absent from the Old Testament in particular, where salvation is conceived as a social and communal event. Yet, there is more to this problem of individualism than the salvation egotism described. I\u2019d like to suggest an intermediary interpretative step that, although not explicitly taken by Bonhoeffer, allows us to see how two of his lines of thought are conceptually interwoven. Bonhoeffer\u2019s criticism of religious individualism is, as I will attempt to demonstrate, in an interesting way related to his persistent emphasis on undivided wholeness as the hallmark of the Christian calling for a life responsible to God.
\nTo understand how religious individualism and the failure to live an unsegregated life (as a di-psychos: a man with two souls in his chest) are connected is to understand the way in which the call to wholeness and perfection is mirrored by, and rooted in, God\u2019s own being: \u2018You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect\u2019 (Mt. 5:28). As Luther famously put it: man is a rational animal, who possesses a \u2018fabricating heart\u2019. Anticipating by centuries Feuerbach\u2019s idea of religion as \u2018projection\u2019, Luther\u2019s notion of the human heart as a fabrication plant of gods can be understood as a critical theological reading of the classical pantheon where the individual gods appear at first as simple names for human passions: Irene, Eris, Eros, and so forth. Religion is bound to serve human needs and affections, because the venerated gods arise from these in the first instance. Accordingly, the religious way of \u2018coming to God in hours of need\u2019, as Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem expresses it, comes with a natural (i.e. inherent) tendency to eventually reduce God to small capitals. Religion tends towards individualism precisely to the degree in which it treats God as a functionary, like any one god of the pantheon of gods that were all neatly assigned their respective and limited spheres of competence.
\nIn contrast to such an individualizing account, the Biblical God is characterized by an all-embracing perfection and singularity: God is a giver of daily bread, but not reducible to a bread-god; God is granting procreative blessing, but he is still not a fertility god; God may at times fight for Israel, but he is far from being a war-mongering god. The complexity, comprehensiveness, and perfection of the Biblical God is, then, mirrored in the calling of his people to be whole and perfect: tamim (Hebrew), teleios (Greek)\u2014a concept that Bonhoeffer never tired of stressing. The followers of the Biblical God are called to be \u2018perfect\u2019 in that they refuse to separate their lives into individual self-enclosed spheres\u2014as though they had to satisfy the demands of various deities who each rule over just one respective sphere with their own demand and autonomous rationality. \u2018The \u201creligious act\u201d is\u2019, as Bonhoeffer puts it, \u2018always something partial; \u201cfaith\u201d is something whole, involving the whole of one\u2019s life.\u2019 This wholeness of human life that comes as a gift of the gospel, restoring human beings to their created un-dividedness, at the same time rules out \u2018inwardness\u2019 as a special anthropological faculty or sphere in which religion is at home \u2018within\u2019 the human being. \u2018The Bible does not recognize our distinction between the outward and the inward \u2026 It is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man \u2026 The discovery of the so-called inner life dates from the Renaissance, probably from Petrarch. The \u2018heart\u2019 in the biblical sense is not the inner life, but the whole man in relation to God.\u2019
\nAs regards to the \u2018metaphysical\u2019 problem associated with religion, we are reminded of Bonhoeffer\u2019s distinction between a \u2018knowing of God\u2019 (\u2018Wissen um Gott\u2019) and \u2018knowing God\u2019 (\u2018Gott kennen\u2019). This he had borrowed from Luther\u2019s exegesis of a distinctive Hebrew term for knowing, yada, as an intimate form of loving-knowing that could even be used to describe the sexual act (Adam \u2018knew\u2019 his wife, Gen. 4:1). It is precisely because the former \u2018metaphysical\u2019 type of knowledge can never reach beyond the deus absconditus, the anonymous God whose presence is perceived as ambiguous\u2014where threat and promise are never disentangled, never certain, never clear\u2014that this type of knowledge yields religion as a means of constant and recurrent appeasement.
\nA third characteristic of the theological predicament of the religious person is that he or she notoriously misses out on God the question and interrogator, by stylizing him merely as answer and answerer. Here, Bonhoeffer speaks out against the existentialist credo that regards \u2018religion a precondition of faith\u2019, against the claim that the \u2018addressability\u2019 needs to precede the address, and that the question must be prior to the answer. In a move characteristic already of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer reverses the existentialist order. For him, Christ\u2019s calling is authoritative in that it generates the need, wish, and will to follow the command\u2014while at times explicitly rejecting the human need, wish and will to follow him as insufficient. Thus Christ becomes the one whose question becomes more determinative for his followers than the answers they receive from him to their own questions: \u2018Can you not stay and watch with me for one hour?\u2019
\nWe need not go far today to appreciate the force of this reversal in the light of the contemporary tendency of Western churches to sell themselves as \u2018experts in religion\u2019, quality providers of \u2018spirituality\u2019, and to organize and present themselves like service-agencies whose efficiency and quality depend on the prior analysis of the wants and needs of their clientele. We may find it easy to despise the sometimes outrageous forms the commodification of religion takes on today. But in order to resist it, we may need an understanding and practice of Christianity as deep and challenging as Bonhoeffer\u2019s.<\/p>\n
c. Religion as \u2018sigh\u2019: suffering with God<\/p>\n
Given Bonhoeffer\u2019s analysis of the temptations of any religious life in the domain of the \u2018natural\u2019, i.e. this side of the fall, we are well advised to pay attention to the fact that just like the first stanza of the poem, the second begins with \u2018men\u2019: \u2018Men go to God \u2026\u2019 Only in the last line are they then identified as \u2018Christians\u2019, but not so from the start. We are again reminded of a passage in Ethics, where Bonhoeffer stresses that what counts as Christian or worldly, cannot be decided in advance\u2014it is only ever revealed in the moment of a concrete situation and therefore bears the corresponding challenge to be faithful to the gospel in the unpredictable and underivable newness that characterizes the life of discipleship.
\nWhat is \u2018Christian\u2019 cannot be put in timelessly valid conceptual distinctions that can be known ex ante, but must emerge from responsible action in response to Christ\u2019s own life. Even if the determining of the genuinely Christian remains a matter of active recognition and actual judgement, rather than a matter of pre-stabilized knowledge, it is, on the other hand, far from being opaque and mysterious. In fact, the poem states it with unambiguous clarity: it is the \u2018standing by God in his suffering\u2019 that characterizes Christians over any other potential denominator.
\nIn a lost letter by Eberhard Bethge in which he commented on the poem, the friend must have questioned the notion of \u2018standing by\u2019 as potentially too static. Bonhoeffer\u2019s reply from 10 August alerts the friend to the following: \u2018 \u201cStand by God\u201d probably arose from thinking about the cross.\u2019 J\u00fcrgen Henkys points to the rich traditional background of this concept of \u2018standing by God\u2019 that must have triggered Bonhoeffer\u2019s imagination here: starting from the Johannine portrayal of the scene under the cross, by way of the medieval sequence stabat mater dolorosa iuxta crucem lacrimosa, up to the influence of Bonhoeffer\u2019s favourite hymn writer, Paul Gerhardt. The latter\u2019s work became ever the dearer to Bonhoeffer during his imprisonment, and whose passion hymn, \u2018O Sacred Head, now Wounded\u2019, refers to Mary and John under the cross in his passion. \u2018I wish to stand by you here, do not despise me\u2019 (\u2018Ich will hier bei dir stehen, verachte mich doch nicht\u2019).
\nIn his letter of 18 July, Bonhoeffer summarizes the uniqueness of the Christian life with the following definition: \u2018Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions: Man\u2019s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God\u2019s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.\u2019
\nIn directing the attention to the suffering God, the second stanza hints at a crisis. In their turning to God, people eventually find\u2014or shall we say, hit upon\u2014a God who suffers. In spite of the quiet tone suggested by the parallelism with the first stanza, \u2018Men go to God\u2019, crisis looms large here. The God they eventually face is strangely different from the one they sought in the first place, a mighty provider of bread, shelter, meaning, and redemption. Instead, women and men find God \u2018tormented by sin, weakness, and death\u2019. In contrast to the first stanza\u2019s emphasis on universality, \u2018all do so, all\u2019, this discovery must entail a discrimination; those among the multitude of religious beings reaching for the divine who are not put off by what they find in the suffering God and do not turn away, are eventually named \u2018Christians\u2019. These are marked as the ones who \u2018stand by\u2019 God in his hour of grieving. In characterizing Christians in this way, Bonhoeffer reveals his epistemological principle. \u2018It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life\u2019. What brings women and men to acknowledge the suffering God whom they encounter as their God is precisely their existential sharing in his very life, not finding a satisfactory answer to the philosophical question: can God suffer? Without the willingness to know the suffering God by sharing in his suffering, however, women and men are thrown back to an endlessly repetitive religious quest that never gets beyond the anonymous God that \u2018exists\u2019 rather than reveals himself.<\/p>\n
III. The commonality of forgiveness<\/p>\n
The most interesting move, however, is found at the end of the third stanza as the climax of the whole poem: \u2018\u2026 both alike forgiving\u2019. Just as in the German original, the English translation rhymes the last words of the respective stanzas\u2014\u2018unbelieving\u2019, \u2018grieving\u2019, and \u2018forgiving\u2019. However, in the German, the final rhyme is not with \u2018vergibt\u2019 (\u2018forgiving\u2019) but rather \u2018beiden\u2019 (\u2018alike\u2019), rhyming with \u2018Heiden\u2019 (\u2018heathen\u2019), and \u2018Leiden\u2019 (\u2018suffering\u2019). In this climactic ending, Bonhoeffer stresses both the need for and the reality of forgiveness as a further commonality between Christians and others. As others share the religious quest, so too are they united in receiving the divine gift of forgiveness. To end with a need for forgiveness that frames both previous stanzas indicates an understanding of forgiveness not exhausted by reference to the atoning effect of Christ\u2019s death for the individual. The striking and potentially perturbing point I believe Bonhoeffer is making here is this: Christians need to be forgiven not merely or primarily because of their involvement in human religion, but precisely as Christians, as those who are willing to suffer with God and perhaps do amazingly unselfish things along this way.
\nTo understand this point, we must briefly turn to Bonhoeffer\u2019s biography. Bonhoeffer could not help but find the poor, despised, and homeless God (according to Matthew 25) in the fate of the victims of an evil regime. He realized that for him, as a German Christian under Hitler, standing by God would have to mean sharing in God\u2019s suffering in and through the suffering of his covenantal people. As Bonhoeffer declared in 1935, following the propagation of the Nuremberg laws, \u2018Only those who shout for the Jews are permitted to sing Gregorian chants!\u2019 Bonhoeffer was keenly aware that \u2018shouting for the Jews\u2019 would eventually lead to his own suffering and he was willing to take this on. But he also came to realize that standing by the suffering God, and coming to the aid of those in whom God suffers, would inevitably lead to a further, more outrageous and demanding calling: the calling to \u2018take on guilt\u2019 on behalf of others.
\nFor example, \u2018Operation Seven\u2019, in which Bonhoeffer smuggled Jewish individuals out of Germany as an undercover agent of the Secret Service, would have been unthinkable without the willingness to fake documents, deceive and lie to frontier guards, and so forth. Belonging to Christ under Hitler pushed Bonhoeffer far beyond his comfort zone as a dutiful theologian and Christian. Yet he understood this was the only way in which he could actually remain a Christian, \u2018standing by God in his hour of grieving\u2019. Anything else would have been a flight from responsibility and eventually from God.
\nMy suggestion is that these observations help us understand the emphasis on God\u2019s forgiving mercy in the final line of the poem\u2014although this is not to imply that Bonhoeffer was simply organizing the poem according to his own personal experiences or longings. The weight given to the last line is wholly in keeping with his more principled considerations elsewhere. In his Ethics, for example, Bonhoeffer repeatedly notes how vital it is for Christians to leave all judgement to God and his mercy, instead of anticipating it by attempt to establish in advance that a particular course of action must be deemed sound, right, and justified. Christian existence is, therefore, marked by a distinctive risk, according to Bonhoeffer: not merely the risk of suffering, but also to need forgiveness in a more unsettling way than those who are primarily concerned about their own integrity, purity and untroubled identity.<\/p>\n
IV. Religious super-sessionism or theology of the cross?<\/p>\n
When I first approached this poem, admittedly, I thought Bonhoeffer had the order of the stanzas not quite right. At first sight, a reversed order of stanzas two and three would seem closer to theological common sense, resulting in a far more familiar argument:<\/p>\n
1. Humans are hopelessly religious, Christians and non-Christians alike. They naturally pray to God as creatures, but also as sinners who tend to manipulate God or even \u2018fabricate gods\u2019 according to their own desires and wishful imagination.
\n2. Hence the need for the great reversal: Instead of men-to-God, the movement must be from God to men\u2014as God\u2019s own response to the shortcoming of human religion. Christianity then, in acknowledging this reversal, is established as a thing beyond and above religion, if not as anti-religion.
\n3. From this would then neatly follow what the second stanza describes as a final climax: Those who have learned to overcome religion are thereby \u2018empowered\u2019 to aid God in helping to overcome the suffering in the world.<\/p>\n
If a reordering of stanzas two and three would seem to make theological common sense and would, in addition, lend itself nicely to a Trinitarian scheme of Creator, Redeemer, and Transformer of mankind, why does Bonhoeffer resist this obvious ordering? From the numerous corrections made to the draft version, we have ample evidence that he had been indeed tempted by a more conventional rationale at first, and that the final form of the poem was rather wrought from him. In the draft version, the last line of the second stanza read: \u2018Christians grasp their salvation in God\u2019s suffering\u2019\u2014much closer to the conventional account of \u2018accepting\u2019 the efficacy of Christ\u2019s atoning death for one\u2019s own individual salvation.
\nWhat led Bonhoeffer eventually to abandon the conventional scheme is, I believe, owed to his commitment to the theologia crucis tradition. The most obvious ordering of the poem\u2019s dramatic unfolding would have resulted in a triumphalist account of Christianity. Not only would it have exalted Christians over non-Christians, but also suggested Christianity\u2019s super-session of religion per se: on this reading, Christians may start out as religious beings, but having been converted through God\u2019s own initiative, they would eventually leave behind religion as a premature form of dealing with the divine.
\nIn this scheme, forgiveness, then, would be less a constant mark of the Christian life and more a way station, tied and confined to a shrunken moment of justification that is then \u2018put in effect\u2019 in practice to enable a noble self-sacrificial attitude. However, as Bonhoeffer understood, such a supersessionist account of religion would not only compromise the need for forgiveness or foster arrogance towards others who are deemed \u2018still\u2019 religious, it would also compromise what Bonhoeffer emphasized as the need to be faithful to the earth. The idea of a transcending religion as the elemental man-to-God movement eventually would compromise human creatureliness itself. It would make us forget that women and men are created nepheschim, throaty animals whose bodily and spiritual needs are not to be transcended in a quest towards autonomy and self-sustenance, but are precisely there to be satisfied by the Creator and Redeemer of all things. Creatures have no business in superseding the petition of the Lord\u2019s Prayer: \u2018Give us today our daily bread\u2019. Even the Eucharistic consummation of the bread of life remains, after all, a bodily, sensual, \u2018throaty\u2019 experience.<\/p>\n
V. Restored creatureliness: neither super-religion nor anti-religion<\/p>\n
To sum it up to this point: according to Bonhoeffer, we encounter religion in the ambiguity of being both a genuine reflection of our creatureliness and an expression of the human drive to secure one\u2019s own life. While the heathens are seen as religious in a total sense, \u2018lost in religion\u2019 as it were, in terms of a complete immersion into it, Christians are to take and are given to take a stand both inside and outside religion: when Bonhoeffer calls this stance outside religion \u2018metanoia\u2019\u2014away from the organizing of oneself as sinner, penitent or saint\u2014he is not speaking out against religion or proclaiming Christianity as anti-religion. The Christians\u2019 staying by God in his suffering is rather trans-religious: neither religious nor anti-religious; it is a form of existence sui generis that does not result from a criticism of religion or the abandoning of it, but from the listing to Christ\u2019s call to stay with him in the garden as something that is simply beyond anything a religious mind could possibly think up. Yet, for Bonhoeffer, the trans-religious standing by God opens up a renewed appreciation of the natural, earthly, this-worldly. It even opens up a new practice of religion\u2014a practice of religion that is incorporating the two other motions in its own life.
\nWe can take an illustration of this point from two of Bonhoeffer\u2019s other poems. In \u2018The Powers of Good\u2019, the third stanza reads: \u2018Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving \u2026 we will not falter, thankfully receiving all that is given by thy loving hand.\u2019 And the fourth stanza reads: \u2018But should it be thy will once more to release us to life\u2019s enjoyment and its good sunshine, that which we learned from sorrow shall increase us, and all our life be dedicated as thine.\u2019
\nWhile the third stanza envisions Bonhoeffer\u2019s own faithful \u2018standing by God\u2019, not shying away from partaking in God\u2019s suffering, the subsequent stanza is surprising as it speaks out in hope of a resumed enjoyable life, although not as a superseding of the former suffering, but as a ripe fruit of the former. \u2018All our life as thine\u2019\u2014this we may take a shortcut depiction of the new, restored, and converted religion of Christianity that does \u2018go to God\u2019 without rendering him \u2018one of the gods: as problem solver, sunshine maker, and health restorer. The line seems to envision a sort of converted religion in that it takes the creaturely goods that humans may and should desire, pray and hope for, not as occasions to eventually forget about God once these are received, but precisely as occasions to dedicate \u2018all our life as thine\u2019. To put the same idea in traditional Augustinian terms, the new, restored religion of the Christian faith alerts human beings to the beauty of the created goods whose using (uti) will be itself a matter of enjoying (frui) God\u2014the very same thing that the trans-religious act of staying by God in His suffering is teaching and instilling in those who partake in it.
\nA similar thrust can be observed in the poem that accompanied the same letter as \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019 on 8 July 1944: \u2018Who am I?\u2019 Read from the perspective of the homo religiosus, we would have expected the last line of the poem to offer a solution to the author\u2019s nagging question: when the God who truly knows us is to finally reveal to us our true identity. But, oddly, Bonhoeffer contents himself with a mere address of trust: \u2018Thou knowest, O God, I am thine\u2019. To know that God knows is enough. God-knowledge need not become self-knowledge in order to be validated in the here and now. It is enough to be \u2018in God\u2019, in his hands, embedded in his zachar, his divine remembering: there, humans can live in the midst of their unrest, nagging questions, and unresolved tensions.
\nSuch life means to assume the place assigned to us as creatures\u2014as it was symbolized in the religion of the original state of righteousness under the tree of knowledge. In this eon, though, we will have to bear in mind that genuine creatureliness is itself a miracle, a form of existence made possible in and through Christ as the one that restores the creaturely na\u00efvet\u00e9 to those who live a \u2018natural life\u2019. This is literally a second na\u00efvet\u00e9 that comes second in the order of reception\u2014it is adopted by our being adopted by Christ first\u2014but is also secondary in the sense of being a necessary corollary of the former. Without such christologically mediated this-worldliness, any appreciation of the natural love of the earth, and passion for the neighbour, would remain pagan, while the focus on Christ would remain Gnostic, oblivious of incarnation, cross, resurrection, and ascension.
\nWe see Bonhoeffer\u2019s diagnosis in his prison correspondence that we are heading towards a \u2018religion-less\u2019 age, and his commending of \u2018non-religious\u2019 modes of proclamation need to be carefully related to the threefold account of religion that we suggested. Within this threefold account, it is obvious that Bonhoeffer\u2019s critical emphasis targets the second mode: religion as strategy, and in particular the form it adopted in the history of Christianity since the time of the Renaissance. Only the deus ex machina as a working hypothesis has worn off, and only the domesticating form of religion is to be abandoned in a religion-less Christianity, while the first type of religion will remain a factor, as long as human beings are sojourners on this earth: crying for God\u2019s help in need is, of course, not alien even to those who have long abandoned God as a working hypothesis for their explaining the world.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s caveat for the Church in regards to its proclamation or pastoral strategies remains pressing in both cases: whether or not the religious a priori is in the process of withering or can, indeed, ever wither, it will be decisive for the Church not to rely on this religious a priori anyway: not to exploit an artificially nourished \u2018sense of ultimate dependency\u2019 or the weak hours that befall every human being, but rather to proclaim Christ as the one who confronts human pride, calls on whatever human gifts are there, and transforms them into the likeness of his image. The idea of a non-religious Christianity relates precisely to this strategic chastity that Bonhoeffer prescribes to the Church, and which our churches have found so hard to keep.
\nThe exciting turn in Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology of religion, as it is represented in our poem is, however, that trusting in Christ, living in Christ, and suffering with Christ will eventually also restore religion to us creatures, and us creatures to religion. It will initiate us into ways of crying for help without reducing God to a problem solver, into ways of asking for bread without succumbing to greed, and ways of observing the laws of nature and history without divinizing them, celebrating their autonomy or our own sensus historicus.<\/p>\n
VI. The paradigm of liturgy in a \u2018religion-less\u2019 world<\/p>\n
Indicative of this hopeful turn is the third stanza of the poem. We first notice how the grammatical subject changes: from men to God, who was part of the predicate in the first two stanzas. The third stanza relates the characterizing of God\u2019s activities to both previous stanzas and their respective domains: the God that \u2018goes to men in their distress\u2019 serves them with his atoning death at the cross and forgiveness, but he also \u2018feeds them\u2019 with bread. God is, in other words, not alien to the human needs that the homo religiosus articulates, when she \u2018prays for bread\u2019. Yet God chooses to answer this prayer by feeding the spirit alongside the body; he feeds the spirit, too, with his bread\u2014that is, with Jesus himself and his Word (Jn. 6:32\u201358). Feeding humans with his word, God does not merely respond to their spiritual need and hunger, but challenges them together with the articulation of their needs. In this sense, we can say that in responding to human religion, God is at the same time overcoming it. Yet he overcomes religion not in a way that legitimizes any sort of Christian supersessionism, but rather by laying bare religion\u2019s genuine domain: learning to live as creatures.
\nBy this, we are lead back to the first stanza which is to be read anew in the light of the third: by the power of the third stanza\u2014the power of the Holy Spirit\u2014religion as a \u2018cry\u2019 will be transformed into a restored creatureliness or a converted religion. This harks back to Luther\u2019s image of the primal church in and of the garden, where the giving of the law was meant to provide Adam with a means of concrete worship in obedience, and where he would gather with his family under the tree of knowledge to have their liturgy there. Just as Luther imagined liturgy as the core enactment of the (primal) religion in the state of original righteousness, so Bonhoeffer reckons with the practice of liturgy in a religion-less time: \u2018What do a church, a community, a sermon, a Christian life mean in a religion-less world?\u2019
\nIn fact, it is in liturgy that we can see the double-coded nature of \u2018religion\u2019 as through a prism: on the one hand, liturgy is religion, as it represents the organized, concrete, external, physical, social side of Christianity; on the other hand, it is also anti-religion, as the very content of the preaching of divine grace and its reception by the congregation depends on God\u2019s own activity. However, this latter fact does not demand the dissolution of the former either gradually or by revolutionary force (as the spiritualist movement in the Reformation era misunderstood). The very form of the liturgy, its rhythm, intervals, and so forth, we may call trans-religious as it goes beyond the sheer antinomy of pure religion and radical anti-religion. The very form of the liturgy, while in a sense being religious in itself (a \u2018made\u2019 ritual or \u2018organized\u2019 God encounter) takes the encounter eventually out of the hands of humans: a liturgical \u2018agenda\u2019 says what \u2018is to be done\u2019 as opposed to a pastor\u2019s or congregation\u2019s wilful fancy. This regularity and its shaping of time are structurally critical of human organizing and domesticating of the encounter with the divine. While we may think it is on us to \u2018schedule\u2019 worship, it is actually rather the liturgy that shapes our time\u2014literally in the praying of the hours, but also in terms of structuring the day, the week, and the church year.
\nThis dialectic finds an echo in the Lord\u2019s Prayer, where the petitions are not only framed and preceded by the plea for the coming of the kingdom, but are prescribed, in a sense, independently of the actual state of affairs: a Christian is required and used to pray for bread, even when not hungry, and perhaps fitted with a full storage room at home; she is used to pray for forgiveness even when not currently haunted by guilt or not even being aware of any recent trespasses; the petition on temptation does not have to be validated through a particular occasion on hand that might turn into a temptation. The Lord\u2019s Prayer as the grammar of any Christian addressing and approaching of God contains religious petitions, but it is not a religious prayer. The individual petitions address individual human needs and predicaments, but they are united in their overall service to the coming of God\u2019s Kingdom that is not a religious idea. The Lord\u2019s Prayer trains disciples of the one who told them to pray like this in the second na\u00efvet\u00e9 of a \u2018converted\u2019 religion or christologically mediated creatureliness.<\/p>\n
VII. Nothing more and nothing less<\/p>\n
The position and content of the third stanza reminds us again that what the second stanza emphasizes as distinctively Christian is not an achievement, although it is certainly a form of action; it is no claim to superiority, although certainly responsive to a calling from on high. The notion of \u2018standing by God\u2019 is itself indicative here. There is, as Bonhoeffer stresses, a certain passive aspect to it: \u2018to let oneself be drawn into Jesus\u2019 way\u2019. \u2018To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man\u2014not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.\u2019
\nParticipating in the sufferings of God in the world, however, does not make one a bystander. It is active persevering in the face of potentially infinite impulses to flee. What Bonhoeffer recalls as having had in mind when composing this line, is the fraught abiding of Mary, the women, and John as recounted in Jn. 19:24f, who are described as \u2018standing by the cross\u2019. At one point in Bonhoeffer\u2019s life, \u2018standing by God\u2019 actually took the shape of an action that he explicitly contrasted to fleeing: when his American friends invited him back to New York in 1939 for an extended lecture visit in order to protect him from likely threats in Germany, Bonhoeffer, after wrestling with himself for days, eventually came to a decision to return. In a farewell letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, he etched his thoughts: \u2018I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.\u2019
\nWhile the twists and turns of his own life helped Bonhoeffer understand that \u2018standing by God in his trials\u2019 can be daringly active, resulting perhaps in the most difficult, demanding, or even heroic deeds on behalf of \u2018the least of these brothers and sisters of his\u2019 (Matthew 25), his theological insights also compelled him to emphasize the same claim the other way round: no matter how outrageous, heroic, and praiseworthy the deeds that emerge from the Christian calling, their very essence is no more than simply standing by Christ, sharing in his life, his suffering, and the trials of his people. If this is the understanding of the Christian life, then there is nothing in it that claims merit or honour or favour with God or at least in one\u2019s self-estimation. Nor is there anything to suggest that the idea of \u2018making the world a better place\u2019 could ever be the driving force of Christian action in the world.
\nSuch an idea would, for example, have rendered Operation Seven a futile if not ridiculous undertaking, as some of Bonhoeffer\u2019s secular friends in the resistance movement actually saw it: why risk your life and potentially the future success of the attempts to end the nightmare for the sake of only a handful of Jewish lives? Bonhoeffer knew very well that the 14 people he managed to smuggle over the Swiss border would appear as nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of Jews tortured and killed in the concentration camps. Yet, it needed to be done, as fleeing their request for help would have meant fleeing from Christ\u2019s suffering and hence from his own identity as a Christian. For it is not by success, or any other scale that the Christian is measured: no more and no less is asked from a Christian than standing by God in his suffering\u2014which is Bonhoeffer\u2019s version of \u2018faith active in love\u2019 (Gal. 5:6).
\n\u2018I discovered later and I\u2019m still discovering right up to this moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith \u2026 By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life\u2019s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely in the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world\u2014watching with Christ in Gethsemane.\u2019 As this was what he regarded the only \u2018prerogative\u2019 of Christians, Bonhoeffer understood that to want Christianity to be more, whether a \u2018superior\u2019 religion or an \u2018anti-religion\u2019, would, in effect, be less.<\/p>\n
10<\/p>\n
\u2018Jonah\u2019<\/p>\n
Guilt and Promise<\/p>\n
Stephen Plant<\/p>\n
\u2018Jona\u2019<\/p>\n
Sie schrieen vor dem Tod, und ihre Leiber krallten
\nsich an den nassen, sturmgepeitschten Tauen,
\nund irre Blicke schauten voller Grauen
\ndas Meer im Aufruhr j\u00e4h entfesselter Gewalten.<\/p>\n
\u2018Ihr ewigen, ihr guten, ihr erz\u00fcrnten G\u00f6tter,
\nhelft oder gebt ein Zeichen, das uns k\u00fcnde
\nden, der Euch kr\u00e4nkte mit geheimer S\u00fcnde,
\nden M\u00f6rder oder Eidvergess\u2019nen oder Sp\u00f6tter,<\/p>\n
der uns zum Unheil seine Missetat verbirgt
\num seines Stolzes \u00e4rmlichen Gewinnes!\u2019
\nSo flehten sie. Und Jona sprach: \u2018Ich bin es!
\nIch s\u00fcndigte vor Gott. Mein Leben ist verwirkt.<\/p>\n
Tut mich von Euch! Mein ist die Schuld. Gott z\u00fcrnt mir sehr.
\nDer Fromme soll nicht mit dem S\u00fcnder enden!\u2019
\nSie zitterten. Doch dann mit starken H\u00e4nden
\nverstie\u00dfen sie den Schuldigen. Da stand das Meer.<\/p>\n
\u2018Jonah\u2019<\/p>\n
In fear of death they cried aloud and, clinging fast
\nto wet ropes straining on the battered deck,
\nthey gazed in stricken terror at the sea
\nthat now, unchained in sudden fury, lashed the ship.<\/p>\n
\u2018O gods eternal, excellent, provoked to anger,
\nhelp us, or give a sign, that we may know
\nwho has offended you by secret sin,
\nby breach of oath, or heedless blasphemy, or murder,<\/p>\n
who brings us to disaster by misdeed still hidden,
\nto make a paltry profit for his pride.\u2019
\nThus they besought. And Jonah said, \u2018Behold,
\nI sinned before the Lord of hosts. My life is forfeit.<\/p>\n
Cast me away! My guilt must bear the wrath of God;
\nthe righteous shall not perish with the sinner!\u2019
\nThey trembled. But with hands that knew no weakness
\nthey cast the offender from their midst. The sea stood still.<\/p>\n
(Translation: John Bowden)<\/p>\n
I. Introduction<\/p>\n
b. Megillah 31a\u2014On the Day of Atonement we read \u2018After the death\u2019 [Lev. 16] and for haftarah, \u2018For thus said the high and lofty one\u2019 [Isa. 57:15]. At minchah we read the section of forbidden marriages [Lev. 18] and for haftarah the book of Jonah.<\/p>\n
(Directions in the Talmud for texts to be read at Yom Kippur).<\/p>\n
Guilt and promise are at odds: guilt pulls life into the past, promise pushes life into the future. Guilt draws a life back to things that have been and that cannot be changed; promise directs a life forward to things that are not, but which can yet be. Yet though guilt and promise appear opposing forces, in God they are eventually reconciled. In the atonement effected by Jesus Christ, God leads human beings from sin to the promise of new life; in Him, guilt is transformed into promise.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019 is a poem in which the transformation of guilt into promise is transfixed in a moment of its happening; a moment in which a life configured by Jonah\u2019s past sin is reconfigured towards its future by God\u2019s promise. Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019 imagines a crisis in which a past act which cannot be changed is placed humbly into the hands of God, who alone stills storms and calms seas. In confessing his guilt, Jonah confesses God. In this poetic renarration of an episode in the biblical book of Jonah\u2014at a point in time when Bonhoeffer himself was about to be cast into the malevolent sea of fin de r\u00e8gne Germany under National-Socialist tyranny\u2014we sense Bonhoeffer entrusting his life to the judgement and promise of God.
\nIt is tempting, in reading Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019, to be drawn into a quest for meaning; but whose quest, and which meaning? The quest and the meaning of the author\/s of the biblical book of Jonah?\u2026 Bonhoeffer\u2019s quest for meaning in the biblical book of Jonah?\u2026 Or our quest for meaning in Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem? These are seductive questions: but if Bonhoeffer is to be believed, all quests for meaning\u2014existential and hermeneutical\u2014need to be understood in the light of what in the scriptures is called promise. Writing not long before he wrote \u2018Jonah\u2019, Bonhoeffer warned Bethge:<\/p>\n
In these turbulent times we repeatedly lose sight of what really makes life worth living. We think that, because this or that person is living, it really makes sense [Sinn] for us to live too. But the truth is that if this earth was good enough for the man Jesus Christ, if such a man as Jesus lived, then, and only then, has life a meaning [Sinn] for us \u2026 The unbiblical idea of \u2018meaning\u2019 [Sinnes] is indeed only a translation of what the Bible calls \u2018promise\u2019 [Verhei\u00dfung].<\/p>\n
The search for meaning and the hearing of promise are related but not identical events. The point is amplified by Heinz Eduard T\u00f6dt, who explains that for Bonhoeffer, the term promise \u2018points out that something, brought from God by the gospel, comes to meet the human being, whereas meaning is something that the human being looks for in human life and its surroundings, in the past, the present, and the future\u2014often enough in vain.\u2019 A promise, then, is something given and received, while meaning is something one searches for oneself. Accepting this, we may decide that in reading Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019, a distinction needs to be drawn between seeking meaning and being receptive to promise. Good textual exegetes come in many forms and may hold many convictions; but promise is something one only prepares for in a mind-frame of what Simone Weil called attente de Dieu. It is this sense of waiting on God that Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem conveys, and which commentary on the poem should pray, if dimly, to reflect.
\nThe essay that follows proceeds in three stages. In the first stage, I want to turn attention away from Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem towards the biblical book of Jonah. My intention here is to situate Bonhoeffer in a community of interpretation and to probe the question of why this particular book was the one that proved fit for purpose at this decisive moment in his life. Turning back to Bonhoeffer, I next want to situate the poem in time and place before, thirdly, reading the poem in light of the themes of guilt and promise adumbrated above\u2014themes brought into focus through Bonhoeffer\u2019s understanding of vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung). These are not the only interesting or possibly fruitful directions one might take in reading the poem, but they are, I hope, ones that arise naturally from the text of the poem itself.<\/p>\n
II. The Book of Jonah: a whistle-stop tour<\/p>\n
Why Jonah? Of all the passages in all the books in all the Bible, Bonhoeffer walks in to this one: why? We can readily understand why a \u2018profoundly biblical theologian\u2019, at a key moment in his life, might use a biblical passage or a biblical book as a still to condense thoughts and feelings to their essence; but what was it about this book that drew Bonhoeffer to it? In early December 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote that for some months \u2018[my] thoughts and feelings seem to be getting more and more like those of the Old Testament, and in recent months I have been reading the Old Testament much more than the New\u2019. And yet there is no indication that Bonhoeffer had the book of Jonah in mind. Prior to writing the poem, Jonah\u2019s story left scarcely any trace on Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology. Bonhoeffer neither underlined nor made marginal notes on the text of Jonah in his \u2018Lutherbibel\u2019; he mentions Jonah in an undergraduate essay in connection with repentance; in 1937 he again mentions Jonah, this time as God\u2019s witness, in a circular letter to the Finkenwalde brethren; and a year later we once again find a passing mention in a lecture on theology in the Confessing Church. But compared to his engagement with the book of Genesis, or with the Psalms, or with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, or in his sermons with other Major and Minor Prophets, Bonhoeffer\u2019s engagement with the book of Jonah prior to writing the poem appears, on the basis of what he wrote, to have been slight. At least once Bonhoeffer had unflatteringly been likened to Jonah\u2014when Karl Barth instructed Bonhoeffer in London to stop \u2018playing Elijah under the juniper tree or Jonah under the gourd\u2019 and to return to Germany \u2018with all guns blazing\u2019\u2014but this was more than a decade before the poem was written and refers to quite a different episode in the story of Jonah to that taken up by Bonhoeffer in 1944. Which still leaves the question \u2018why Jonah?\u2019
\nThe biblical book of Jonah has several unusual features. The eponymous prophetic books of the Bible generally contain three elements, though typically not in equal proportions: they contain direct and indirect words given by God through the prophet to the people; words addressed by the prophet to God (for example in prayer or in lament); and material relating to the biographical experiences of the prophet. The book of Jonah has all three, but material detailing the biography of Jonah is proportionately its main focus. This makes it\u2014by comparison with the other prophetic books\u2014the only prophetic book to be primarily about the prophet. In his Ethics Bonhoeffer had argued that, for Christians, what matters is not to pattern one\u2019s life on some biblical character\u2014such as Abraham or Peter\u2014but to be conformed to the \u2018Gestalt\u2019\u2014the form or character\u2014of Jesus Christ. Does Bonhoeffer now identify himself with a moment in Jonah\u2019s story, an aspect of his experience or a feature of his character?
\nA second unusual feature of Jonah is that it is the only prophetic book in which the prophet is sent to proclaim his message in a foreign land. When Bonhoeffer arrived in America in 1939 it immediately became clear to him that he had made a mistake. One of the reasons he gave to Reinhold Niebuhr for his decision to return to Germany was that he felt the necessity of living through \u2018this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany\u2019. Is it possible that Bonhoeffer should see himself in the story of a prophet whose calling was to a nation other than his own?
\nA third unusual aspect concerns what genre Jonah belongs to. The book can be broken down into several episodes: Jonah\u2019s call and decision to run from it; the sea voyage and its stormy outcome; the fish that swallows Jonah and his prayer in the fish\u2019s belly; Jonah\u2019s prophesy to the Ninevites and their repentance; Jonah\u2019s anger with God\u2019s mercy; God\u2019s dialogue with Jonah seated beneath a miraculous bush. But what sort of book is it? If it contains too much biographical material and too little oracular text to fit neatly with the other Minor Prophets, is it best classified as history, or legend, didactic story, parable or allegory? Or is it a \u2018chowder\u2019 of several genres? One intriguing possibility is that it takes the form\u2014very loosely speaking\u2014of a \u2018midrash\u2019 either on the miraculous exchanges between God and Elijah in the book of Kings or more likely, on Exod. 34:6\u20137a, cited in Jon. 4:2b as a summation of the book\u2019s message: \u2018The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin\u2019. The body of biblical commentary termed \u2018midrash\u2019 arose, properly speaking, in the Rabbinic schools in the early centuries of the Christian era. They varied in form and content, but tended to be characterized by use of story to convey meaning and by the use of questions that, by interrogating characters in the story, serve as a literary device to put the hearer in the place of the character questioned. Is this method foreshadowed in Jonah? There are fourteen questions in the book of Jonah: seven addressed to Jonah, and seven addressed by Jonah to God\u2014a symmetry that can hardly be unintended. This suggests that the book was developed as an interactive story to be spoken and heard with a view to instructing listeners willing to participate in its narrative twists and turns.
\nFinally, the book of Jonah is unusual because of the extent of uncertainty about its setting. Other prophetic books, to be sure, lack an explicit social and political context, but their contents usually lead commentators to agree about their likely Sitz im Leben. The text of Jonah, however, leads to no such consensus about when, where or why it was written. Though it is clear from Jon. 1:1, and from the reference to Jonah the prophet in 2 Kgs 14:23\u20137 that it is intended to be set in the 8th century BCE, the book itself is adrift from a historical context. It is likely to have been written towards the end or soon after the end of the exile. But\u2014even for the shrewdest commentator\u2014fixing its date can only be a matter of guesswork. Which leaves us still with the question why did this book draw Bonhoeffer in?<\/p>\n
III. Jonah: a biblical text and its afterlives<\/p>\n
if Bonhoeffer himself won\u2019t give us a direct answer to that question, perhaps an answer is suggested by the history of the book\u2019s interpretation. Fortuitously, just such a history exists: in colourful imagery invited by the fabulous qualities of the book of Jonah itself, Sherwood\u2019s A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture gives us a glimpse \u2018into the Taylor\u2019s shop and gourmet restaurant that is the interpretive history of the book of Jonah\u2019. Sherwood\u2019s analysis helps us to see Bonhoeffer within the community of readers stretching from the Patriarchs, through Rabbis and Reformers, and on into the 19th century, when the plausibility or implausibility of a sea creature that could swallow a man became a battleground for those slugging out the factual truth of the biblical record. What is often true in the history of biblical interpretation is particularly true in the case of Jonah: \u2018knowledge and meaning are agglutinative \u2026 new products can be made by bringing together existing traditions and recombining them\u2019. Readers of Jonah, even new readers interpreting the story in new situations, stand on the shoulders of readers before them.
\nFor the Patriarchs, Jonah and Jesus were typological twins. This was not only because, as Augustine observed, \u2018[t]o the healthy and pure internal eye [Christ] is everywhere\u2019, but also because the gospels themselves warranted typological comparisons between Jonah and Jesus. For Luke the correlation has to do with judgement and repentance: \u2018just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation\u2019 (Lk. 11:30). Matthew shares with Luke an emphasis on judgement but adds, \u2018just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth\u2019 (Mt. 12:40), drawing an analogy between Jonah in the whale and Jesus in the tomb. From the loam of these typologies, elaborate analogies bloomed for both Patriarchs and Rabbis in which ship, sailors, waves, and fish became symbolically employed: the ship became the Church, humanity, or the synagogue; the sailors became the apostles, Romans, or Jews opposed to Christ; the storm became humankind\u2019s affliction, the storms that shipwrecked Peter or Paul, or the work of the devil; the fish came to symbolize the devil, its jaws representing the jaws of hell, or even the concept of time, consuming all things; the Ninevites then represented either the gentiles or (for Bede) the splendid Church. However, above all, Jonah proved a wonderfully malleable symbol. For most of the Patriarchs, Jonah represented Christ (the exception was Augustine, who saw in him both Christ and fleshly Israel); for some Rabbis, and for later Christian interpreters, Jonah was the Torahbound Jew, a personification of cruel law, clinging to the letter while God goads him with mercy. For Jerome he was a nationalist, defending Israel against the widening of God\u2019s mercy to mere gentiles; while for Luther, struck by the animistic reference of his Hebrew name, Jonah was the dove who pointed towards the Holy Spirit.
\nIt matters little how much or, as seems more likely, how little of this history of interpretation Bonhoeffer was conscious of or influenced by in his own appropriation of Jonah. What matters are the possible interpretations that this history invites. Sherwood\u2019s conclusion is that:<\/p>\n
[m]eme-like, the book seems to cue in a whole range of survivals\/mutations: with its chowder-like mixtures of death wishes and aqua-psalms and shivering ships, the book spawns comic riffs on prophets \u2018snoring slobberingly\u2019 and serious meditations on the alienation and powerlessness of the human protagonist; and by anticipating the alliterative, cartoonish, paranomastic, and associative linguistic effects through which the rabbis, Auster and the Gawain-poet will go on prolonging and stretching the life of the \u2018Word\u2019, it seems to inaugurate and legitimate an expansive approach to interpretation.<\/p>\n
Jonah is a questioning and non-conformist book that delights in questioning and non-conformist readings, a story begging to be remade and retold, a book richly empathetic to human beings and \u2018lacking in reassurance of the comfort of the divine\u2019. Why did Bonhoeffer fix his eye on the book of Jonah? Might the answer simply be that it presents an especially suitable surface for a palimpsest on which Bonhoeffer could enscribe his own meaning? That is part of the answer, but I do not think it is the whole answer. For that, we need to return to where we began, to the themes of guilt and promise in this episode in the book of Jonah and their resonance with Bonhoeffer\u2019s own situation.<\/p>\n
IV. Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019 in its Sitz im Leben<\/p>\n
The catastrophic failure of the 20 July bomb plot set the scene for the events leading up to the composition of \u2018Jonah\u2019. Many whose involvement was immediately clear were unhesitatingly executed; others lasted only as long as their interrogation. The plotters were intelligent calculators of risk, and it was clear that it was only a matter of time before nooses tightened around all their necks. The Allied landings in Normandy and the inexorable advance of the Soviet army, however, meant that there was always a chance that the war would end before their execution. Bonhoeffer, aware of all the ramifications, worked on determinedly with his prison theology and waited to see what events would unfold.
\nThe answer came on 22 September 1944, when the Gestapo discovered records of the Abwehr conspiracy, which General Beck\u2014against the advice of Hans von Dohnanyi that they should be destroyed\u2014had ordered to be held in a branch of the Military Intelligence in Zossen. Probably acting on information yielded in the files, on 1 October the Gestapo arrested Bonhoeffer\u2019s brother Klaus. A day later Corporal Knobloch, the guard with whom Bonhoeffer had planned to escape Tegel prison, called at the Schleicher home to say that Dietrich had called off escape plans to avoid making matters worse for Klaus and of placing his fianc\u00e9e and family in further danger. The arrest of Dietrich\u2019s brother in law, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, followed on 4 October and of his Confessing Church colleague Friedrich Justus Perels on 5 October. This was the date on which he wrote \u2018Jonah\u2019. Eberhard Bethge was arrested a few days later. Unaware that the snare was closing on Bethge himself, Bonhoeffer passed the poem to Maria von Wedemeyer with the instruction: \u2018please type out the poem and send it to Eberhard. He\u2019ll know who it\u2019s from without being told\u2019, adding \u2018You may find it a trifle incomprehensible. Or will you?\u2019 On 8 October, as he had been expecting, Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Gestapo prison in the cellar of the Reich Central Security Headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Stra\u00dfe. He was able to send only one more poem beyond this before communication with his family ceased. The poem \u2018Jonah\u2019 can be placed, then, very precisely at the moment at which Bonhoeffer gave up his plans for escape and accepted the likelihood of death. It was written in the days in which he finally accepted what must for some weeks have been increasingly obvious, that his survival could only come about at the cost of unacceptable risk to others. But the urgency of this immediate context should not replace, but complement wider contextual cues. Bonhoeffer\u2019s sense of responsibility extended beyond his immediate family and friends\u2014to the conspiracy, to the Church, and to Germany. The essay for co-conspirators, \u2018After Ten Years\u2019\u2014which contained insights Bonhoeffer found important enough to incorporate into his Ethics\u2014wrestled with the moral impact on the conspirators of a decade of secret opposition and dissimulation. And the Church, too, had failed, leading Bonhoeffer to draft a post-war confession of guilt. The likelihood of death acted as a lens focusing reflections on guilt and promise that had kept Bonhoeffer company since the early thirties.<\/p>\n
V. Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019<\/p>\n
The poem is short\u2014after \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019, it is the next shortest of the prison poems. Its four stanzas, each of four lines, follow a disciplined ABBA rhyming pattern. Both the brevity of the poem and the tightness of its form help convey the tense mood of the poem\u2019s subject matter, a tension emphasized by the staccato effect of some of the poem\u2019s short phrases and sentences, e.g. in the last line of the third stanza, \u2018Ich s\u00fcndigte vor Gott. Mein Leben ist verwirkt\u2019 (\u2018I sinned against God. My life is forfeit\u2019). This is especially effective in the last line of the poem, in which Bonhoeffer uses a direct citation from the Lutherbibel: \u2018Da stand das Meer\u2019\u2014\u2018the sea was still\u2019. At key moments, such as the final line and in the preceding stanza when Jonah owns up to his responsibility for God\u2019s anger saying \u2018Ich bin es\u2019\u2014\u2018I am the one\u2019\u2014, Bonhoeffer pares his language down to words of one syllable. If indeed Bonhoeffer is identifying with Jonah at this point, what is he guilty of? What is the sin to which Bonhoeffer owns up? In popular reception of the book (in medieval as well as modern times) Jonah and the whale have been as inseparable as Laurel and Hardy: the medieval scribes and modern children\u2019s book illustrators had a whale of a time picturing one in particular of the book\u2019s episodes. It is therefore striking that Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem renarrates what is effectively seen in two of the drama-scenes of Jonah (Jon. 1:4\u201316), and concludes at the instant before the great fish rears its head. Possibly, in its title and leading character, Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem evokes the whole drama of the book, but its focus is very narrowly on one aspect of Jonah\u2019s story and its cut-off point\u2014the storm stilled as Jonah sinks beneath the waves (v. 15)\u2014seems quite deliberate in ignoring the book\u2019s voracious co-star. Yet though Bonhoeffer decided to focus the action of the poem on vv. 4\u201315, it then follows the biblical account very faithfully. The biblical story is beautifully crafted in a symmetrical pattern:<\/p>\n
A. The Lord hurls a storm
\nB. The sailors pray
\nC. The sailors act
\nD. The sailors question Jonah
\nE. Jonah speaks
\nD. The sailors question Jonah
\nE. Jonah speaks
\nC. The sailors act
\nA. The storm ceases<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer reduces the elements of the story somewhat, but retains the essential symmetry of the pericope:<\/p>\n
A. The storm breaks
\nB. The sailors pray
\nC. Jonah speaks
\nB. the sailors act
\nA. The storm ceases<\/p>\n
The first stanza describes, in compelling physical detail, a fearful storm that beats the ship in which Jonah is travelling. The second and the first two lines of the third stanzas are in direct speech reporting the prayer of the sailors asking that the guilty one be identified. In the following six lines, Jonah answers, first acknowledging his guilt, and then instructing the sailors to cast him overboard, since the pious shall not share the sinner\u2019s fate. In the closing lines, trembling, the sailors cast Jonah overboard, and the sea is stilled. Bonhoeffer\u2019s decision to end the poem before the prophet is saved from drowning focuses attention on Jonah\u2019s willingness to sacrifice himself for his fellow travellers. The theme, in other words, is not so much Jonah\u2019s salvation, but his willingness to die for the salvation of others, even though they are not fellow countrymen (since they have no knowledge of Yahweh until Jonah names Him). A natural supposition is that Bonhoeffer senses here an intimation of the conspirators\u2019 willingness to sacrifice themselves for the German people. The fact that he cuts off the poem at v. 15 heightens the sense that this is what he intends to convey, since it means he does not attend to the sailors\u2019 assertion of the sovereignty of Yahweh above all other gods in v. 16. Neither is this the only key theme excluded by the poem\u2019s narrow focus: the narrator seems to draw everything towards the \u2018punch-line\u2019 in Jon. 4:2, which sums up the story with the mercy of Yahweh who may change his mind about punishing the sinful where there is true repentance. for Bonhoeffer, the penultimate note of guilt in the last line is followed not by the ultimate affirmation of God\u2019s mercy, but with the more open end \u2018the sea was still\u2019. This is Jonah in close-up, with all attention focused on God\u2019s judgement, a judgement expressed in the powerful imagery of the stilled sea. But the judgement Bonhoeffer is concerned with is not simply an event in which God and Jonah alone are involved: it is a judgement that impacts upon the sailors\u2019 lives too. Jonah\u2019s acknowledgement of guilt and his instruction to cast him overboard suggests both acknowledgement of guilt and a taking of responsibility for the lives of others. Described in this way, does Jonah appear to be an archetypal Stellvertreter\u2014one who stands in place of others? Is Jonah\u2019s action in telling the sailors to cast him overboard, an instance of Stellvertretung, of vicarious representative action?<\/p>\n
VI. Guilt, promise and \u2018the structure of responsible life\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Vicarious representative action\u2019 was one of Bonhoeffer\u2019s longest standing and most cherished theological and ethical ideas\u2014one that he had been thinking through since writing Sanctorum Communio. The fullest expression of the theme, however, unfolds in the fragment \u2018History and Good\u2019 in Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics. There, vicarious representative action is described as a form of responsible life, that is, of a life \u2018lived in answer to the life of Jesus Christ\u2019. Less complete forms of responsibility exist in other ethics, to be sure, but in the strict sense Bonhoeffer\u2019s unfolding of \u2018responsibility\u2019 \u2018denotes the complete wholeness and unity of the answer to the reality that is given to us in Jesus Christ\u2019. Such responsibility is accountable not to criteria such as usefulness, or adherence to a principle (such as honour), or to an abstract ideal such as patriotism. It is accountable only to Jesus Christ in his \u2018Yes and No to our life\u2019. There are two aspects to this \u2018representivity\u2019. The first is that the vicarious representative represents Jesus Christ. This is because the Stellvertreter gives up any attempt to justify himself; \u2018[r]ather\u2019, continues Bonhoeffer, \u2018I take responsibility and answer for Jesus Christ, and with that I naturally also take responsibility for the commission I have been charged with by him.\u2019 Yet, secondly, the vicarious representative also represents other people. Taking up responsibility is always something embedded in social structures\u2014such as the family, government, or work place; responsibility is always responsibility for another person.
\nTowards the end of the fragment, Bonhoeffer sums up his attempt to grasp the \u2018structure of responsible life\u2019 under the rubrics of \u2018vicarious representative action, accordance with reality, [and] taking on guilt\u2019. Taking on guilt (\u2018Schuld\u00fcbernahme\u2019) rolls together a free acceptance of one\u2019s own guilt and a taking on of the guilt of others (e.g., of church, or of nation). Bonhoeffer writes:<\/p>\n
Those who in acting responsibly take on guilt\u2014which is inescapable for any responsible person\u2014place this guilt on themselves, not on someone else; they stand up for it and take responsibility for it. They do so not out of a sacrilegious and reckless belief in their own power, but in the knowledge of being forced into this freedom and of their dependence on grace in its exercise.<\/p>\n
The poem \u2018Jonah\u2019 distils Bonhoeffer\u2019s sense of what is involved in vicarious, representative action. In doing so, something of the flavour of Bonhoeffer\u2019s action in taking responsibility transfers to his representation of Jonah, as an Islay malt whisky takes on the flavour of the sea beside which it is distilled and aged.
\nIf this is indeed what is going on in Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem, then we have here a reading of the Jonah story in perfect harmony with the centuries-old Jewish tradition, prescribed by the Talmud, of reading Jonah on the festival of atonement.<\/p>\n
11<\/p>\n
\u2018The Death of Moses\u2019<\/p>\n
Why Moses?<\/p>\n
Craig J. Slane<\/p>\n
\u2018Der Tod des Mose\u2019<\/p>\n
Auf dem Gipfel des Gebirges steht
\nMose, der Mann Gottes und Prophet.<\/p>\n
Seine Augen blicken unverwandt
\nin das heilige, gelobte Land.<\/p>\n
Da\u00df er auf das Sterben ihn bereite,
\ntritt der Herr dem alten Knecht zur Seite,<\/p>\n
will auf H\u00f6hen, wo die Menschen schweigen
\nselber ihm verhei\u00df\u2019ne Zukunft zeigen,<\/p>\n
breitet zu des Wandrers m\u00fcden F\u00fc\u00dfen
\nseine Heimat aus, ihn still zu gr\u00fc\u00dfen,<\/p>\n
sie im letzten Atemzug zu segnen
\nund dem Tod in Frieden zu begegnen.<\/p>\n
\u2018Aus der Ferne sollst das Heil du sehen,
\ndoch dein Fu\u00df soll nicht hin\u00fcbergehen!\u2019<\/p>\n
Und die alten Augen schauen, schauen
\nferne Dinge wie im Morgengrauen.<\/p>\n
Staub von Gottes m\u00e4cht\u2019ger Hand geknetet
\nIhm zur Opferschale\u2014Mose betet.<\/p>\n
\u2018So erf\u00fcllst Du, Herr, was Du versprochen,
\nniemals hast Du mir Dein Wort gebrochen.<\/p>\n
Ob es Deine Gnaden oder Strafen
\nwaren; immer kamen sie und trafen.<\/p>\n
Aus dem Frondienst hast Du uns gerettet,
\nuns in Deinen Armen sanft gebettet,<\/p>\n
bist durch W\u00fcste und durch Meereswogen
\nwunderbar vor uns einhergezogen,<\/p>\n
hast des Volkes Murren, Schrein und Klagen
\n\u00fcberlange in Geduld getragen.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Death of Moses\u2019<\/p>\n
On the summit of the mountain stands
\nMoses, the prophet, in God\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n
His eyes are steady and his vision clear,
\nto see the holy, promised land appear.<\/p>\n
That he might for his death be ready,
\nGod held his aged servant steady.<\/p>\n
On the heights where no one goes,
\nto him, the promised land God shows.<\/p>\n
Spread beneath the wanderer\u2019s tired feet,
\nlies the home he longs to greet,<\/p>\n
blessing it with his last breath,
\nhe is prepared in peace for death.<\/p>\n
\u2018From afar, you see the saving work of my hand,
\nbut shall not enter, nor tread upon, the promised land.\u2019<\/p>\n
And the old eyes gazed upon the distant sight,
\nappearing dimly in the morning light.<\/p>\n
Clay, moulded by God\u2019s mighty hand, he was made
\na sacrificial vessel. Moses prayed:<\/p>\n
\u2018Thus you fulfil what you have spoken,
\nyour word to me was never broken.<\/p>\n
Whether your grace or punishment was set,
\nit always came and must be met.<\/p>\n
Out of the house of bondage have you set us free
\nthat we your belov\u00e9d children might be.<\/p>\n
Through raging waters and desert land
\nwonderfully have you led us by the hand;<\/p>\n
the people\u2019s grumbles, complaints and scorn,
\nwith patience you have graciously borne.<\/p>\n
Nicht durch G\u00fcte lie\u00dfen sie sich leiten
\nzu des Glaubensweges Herrlichkeiten,<\/p>\n
lie\u00dfen Gier und G\u00f6tzendienst gew\u00e4hren
\nstatt vom Brot der Gnade sich zu n\u00e4hren,<\/p>\n
bis Dein Zorn mit Pest und Schlangenbissen
\ntiefe L\u00fccken in Dein Volk gerissen.<\/p>\n
Des verhei\u00df\u2019nen Landes k\u00fcnft\u2019ge Erben
\nfielen als Emp\u00f6rer ins Verderben.<\/p>\n
In der Mitte ihrer Wanderschaft
\nhast Du sie im Grimm hinweggerafft.<\/p>\n
Wolltest eins nur an den Deinen schauen
\nZuversicht und gl\u00e4ubiges Vertrauen.<\/p>\n
Aber alle, die Dir Treue schwuren,
\ndie am Schilfmeer Deine Macht erfuhren,<\/p>\n
von Dir haben sie ihr Herz gewandt;
\nihre Leiber deckt der W\u00fcstensand.<\/p>\n
Die zu ihrem Heile Du gef\u00fchrt
\nhaben Aufruhr gegen Dich gesch\u00fcrt.<\/p>\n
Von dem einst begnadeten Geschlecht
\nblieb Dir auch nicht einer treu und recht.<\/p>\n
Als die V\u00e4ter Du dahingenommen,
\nals ein neu Geschlecht heraufgekommen,<\/p>\n
und als nun die Jungen wie die Alten
\nDeine Worte h\u00f6hnten und Dich schalten,<\/p>\n
Herr, Du wei\u00dft, da ist in hohen Jahren
\nmir ein Wort des Unmuts j\u00e4h entfahren.<\/p>\n
Ungeduld und zweifelnde Gedanken,
\nmeinen Glauben brachten sie ins Wanken.<\/p>\n
Not by kindness only have they learnt in those days
\nthe stubborn paths of faith and triumphant praise,<\/p>\n
when they lusted after idols to your face,
\ninstead of feeding upon the bread of your grace,<\/p>\n
until your anger with plague and deadly snake
\ngreat gaps among your people make.<\/p>\n
The future heirs of the promised land
\nfell like outcast rebels in the sand.<\/p>\n
In the midst of their wandering way,
\nin your fury, you cast them away.<\/p>\n
You sought for one the multitude through;
\none that was faithful and true,<\/p>\n
but all those who swore to be true
\nwhen the sea of reeds your power knew,<\/p>\n
departed from you in their hearts
\nand left their bodies in desert parts.<\/p>\n
Those you led to their salvation
\nhave risen against you, a rebel nation.<\/p>\n
Of this generation, once your delight,
\nnot one remained true to you and right.<\/p>\n
When you rejected the elders with scorn,
\nwhen a new generation was born,<\/p>\n
and now when the young like the old in their day
\nscoff at your word and from you turn away,<\/p>\n
Lord you know, in the course of the years,
\na careless word from me reached your ears.<\/p>\n
Doubting and impatient thought
\nalmost brought my faith to nought.<\/p>\n
Du vergabst; doch ist\u2019s ein brennend Feuer,
\nvor der Treue stehn als Ungetreuer.<\/p>\n
Deine N\u00e4he und Dein Angesicht
\nsind dem Reuigen ein schmerzend Licht.<\/p>\n
Deine Trauer und Dein gro\u00dfer Zorn
\ngr\u00e4bt sich in mein Fleisch als Todesdorn.<\/p>\n
Vor dem heil\u2019gen Wort\u2014von Dir entflammt,
\nda\u00df ich\u2019s predige\u2014bin ich verdammt.<\/p>\n
Wer des Zweifels schale Frucht genossen,
\nbleibt vom Tische Gottes ausgeschlossen.<\/p>\n
Von des heil\u2019gen Landes voller Traube
\ntrinkt allein der unversehrte Glaube.<\/p>\n
Du l\u00e4\u00dft mich, Herr, der Strafe nicht entrinnen,
\ndoch g\u00f6nnst Du mir den Tod auf hohen Zinnen,<\/p>\n
Du einst auf bebendem Vulkan Erschauter,
\nich war ja Dein Erw\u00e4hlter, nah Vertrauter,<\/p>\n
Dein Mund, die Quelle aller Heiligkeit,
\nDein Auge f\u00fcr der \u00c4rmsten Qual und Leid,<\/p>\n
Dein Ohr f\u00fcr Deines Volkes Schrein und Schmach,
\nDein Arm, an dem der Feinde Macht zerbrach,<\/p>\n
der R\u00fccken, der die Schwachgewordnen trug,
\nund den der Zorn von Freund und Feinden schlug,<\/p>\n
der Mittler Deines Volkes im Gebet,
\nDein Werkzeug, Herr, Dein Freund und Dein Prophet.<\/p>\n
Drum schenkst Du mir den Tod auf steilem Berge,
\nnicht in der Niederung der Menschenzwerge,<\/p>\n
Den Tod des freien Blickes in die Weite,
\ndes Feldherrn, der sein Volk gef\u00fchrt im Streite,<\/p>\n
You forgive; but \u2019tis a blazing fire
\nto stand before the Truth, a liar.<\/p>\n
Your nearness and of your face the sight
\nare to the penitent, a wounding light.<\/p>\n
Your sadness and your great scorn
\nbury into my flesh, a deadly thorn.<\/p>\n
Before your holy word, which you inflamed,
\nthat which I preached, I am ashamed.<\/p>\n
He who has tasted the fruit of doubt,
\nfrom God\u2019s table is shut out.<\/p>\n
From the holy land\u2019s fruitful vine,
\nuntarnished faith alone can drink the wine.<\/p>\n
You allow me no escape Lord, from your punishment,
\nbut favour me with death on this high battlement.<\/p>\n
Once you did in trembling fire ascend.
\nI was then your chosen and your friend.<\/p>\n
Your mouth the source of holiness,
\nyour eyes to see the poorest in lowliness,<\/p>\n
Your ear to hear your people\u2019s cry and plight,
\nyour arm to break the enemy\u2019s might,<\/p>\n
the back, carrying the weak who could no further go,
\nand destroying the anger of friend and foe,<\/p>\n
the mediator of your people as their prayers ascend
\nI was your instrument, Lord, your prophet and your friend.<\/p>\n
Therefore you send me death on this steep mountain side,
\nnot in the depths where lesser men have died,<\/p>\n
the death with clear vision and distant sight,
\nof the commander, who led his people in the fight,<\/p>\n
das Sterben, \u00fcber dessen ernsten Grenzen
\nschon die Fanale neuer Zeiten gl\u00e4nzen.<\/p>\n
Wenn mich die Nacht des Todes nun umh\u00fcllt,
\nseh\u2019 ich von ferne doch Dein Heil erf\u00fcllt.<\/p>\n
Heil\u2019ges Land, ich habe dich geschaut,
\nsch\u00f6n und herrlich als geschm\u00fcckte Braut,<\/p>\n
jungfr\u00e4ulich im lichten Hochzeitskleide,
\nteure Gnade ist dein Brautgeschmeide.<\/p>\n
La\u00df\u2019 die alten, vielentt\u00e4uschten Augen
\nDeine Lieblichkeit und S\u00fc\u00dfe saugen,<\/p>\n
la\u00df\u2019 dies Leben, eh\u2019 die Kr\u00e4fte sinken,
\nach, noch einmal Freudenstr\u00f6me trinken.<\/p>\n
Gottes Land, vor Deinen weiten Toren
\nsteh\u2019n wir selig wie im Traum verloren.<\/p>\n
Schon weht uns der frommen V\u00e4ter Segen
\nkr\u00e4ftig und verhei\u00dfungsvoll entgegen.<\/p>\n
Gottes Weinberg, frisch vom Tau befeuchtet,
\nschwere Trauben, sonnenglanzumleuchtet,<\/p>\n
Gottes Garten, Deine Fr\u00fcchte schwellen,
\nklares Wasser sprudeln Deine Quellen.<\/p>\n
Gottes Gnade \u00fcber freier Erde,
\nda\u00df ein heilig neues Volk hier werde.<\/p>\n
Gottes Recht bei Starken und bei Schwachen
\nwird vor Willk\u00fcr und Gewalt bewachen.<\/p>\n
Gottes Wahrheit wird von Menschenlehren
\nein verirrtes Volk zum Glauben kehren.<\/p>\n
Gottes Friede wird gleich starken T\u00fcrmen
\nHerzen, H\u00e4user, St\u00e4dte treu beschirmen.<\/p>\n
beyond the gloomy limits of the dying
\nalready the signs of new times espying.<\/p>\n
When now the shades of death o\u2019ercome me
\nyour salvation fulfilled from afar I see.<\/p>\n
Holy Land, to me you have appeared,
\nlike a bejewelled bride, lovely and endeared,<\/p>\n
the bridal dress lights up your virgin face,
\nyour bridal jewels are of costly grace.<\/p>\n
Let these old eyes so oft betrayed,
\ndrink in your sweet loveliness displayed.<\/p>\n
Let this life, before its powers shrink,
\nonce more from the streams of joy drink.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Land, before your doors open wide
\nwe stand, lost in a dream, no joy denied.<\/p>\n
The blessing of the patriarchs we feel already
\nblowing towards us, full of promise and steady.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s vineyard, moistened by the dew in the early hour,
\nbunches of grapes, nourished and cradled by the sun\u2019s power,<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Garden, where your fruits swell
\nand clear water gushes from your well,<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Grace, flowing over a free earth,
\nto a holy and new people will give birth.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Law will protect both strong and weak
\nfrom those who by tyranny and force the mastery seek.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Truth will guide from human learning
\nan erring people, to faith returning.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Peace will, like strong towers,
\nhearts, houses, cities protect with its powers.<\/p>\n
Gottes Ruhe wird auf alle Frommen
\nals ein gro\u00dfer Feierabend kommen.<\/p>\n
Und stilles Volk in einfachem Gen\u00fcgen
\nwird Reben pflanzen und den Acker pfl\u00fcgen,<\/p>\n
und einer wird den andern Bruder nennen,
\nnicht Stolz noch Neid wird in den Herzen brennen,<\/p>\n
und V\u00e4ter werden ihre Knaben lehren
\ndas Alter achten und das Heil\u2019ge ehren,<\/p>\n
und M\u00e4dchen werden, sch\u00f6n und fromm und rein,
\ndes Volkes Gl\u00fcck und Zier und Ehre sein.<\/p>\n
Die selber einst das Brot der Fremde a\u00dfen,
\nden Fremdling werden sie nicht darben lassen.<\/p>\n
Der Waisen und der Witwen und der Armen
\nwird der Gerechte willig sich erbarmen.<\/p>\n
Gott, der Du wohntest unter unsern V\u00e4tern,
\nla\u00df unsre S\u00f6hne sein ein Volk von Betern.<\/p>\n
In hohen Festen soll zu Deinem Ruhme
\ndas Volk hinaufziehn zu dem Heiligtume.<\/p>\n
Dir werden sie sich, Herr, zum Opfer bringen
\nund Dir die Lieder der Erl\u00f6sten singen.<\/p>\n
In Dank und Jauchzen tut mit einem Mund
\nDein Volk den V\u00f6lkern Deinen Namen kund.<\/p>\n
Gro\u00df ist die Welt; es weitet sich der Himmel,
\nschaut auf der Menschen t\u00e4tiges Get\u00fcmmel.<\/p>\n
In Deinen Worten, die du uns gegeben,
\nzeigst allen V\u00f6lkern Du den Weg zum Leben.<\/p>\n
Stets wird die Welt in ihren schweren Tagen
\nnach Deinen heil\u2019gen zehn Geboten fragen.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Rest will on his faithful people fall
\nlike a great celebration at his call.<\/p>\n
And a peaceful people on simple lines
\nwill plough the earth and plant the vines,<\/p>\n
and each will call the other brother,
\nproud hearts burn not with envy of another,<\/p>\n
and boys by their fathers will be told
\nto honour the sacred and respect the old,<\/p>\n
and girls will be beautiful and dutiful and pure,
\nthe people\u2019s joy and honour and adornment to endure.<\/p>\n
Those who once ate the strangers\u2019 bread
\nwill not therefore leave the stranger dead.<\/p>\n
On the orphan, the poor and the widow,
\nthe righteous man will freely his care bestow.<\/p>\n
God who dwelt among our fathers in the past,
\nlet our sons be prayerful people to the last!<\/p>\n
In high festival, may this to thy glory
\nlead the people up to holiness by sacred story.<\/p>\n
To you, Lord, we will the offering bring,
\nand to you the songs of salvation sing.<\/p>\n
In thanks and rejoicing with one voice,
\nmay your people proclaim they are your choice.<\/p>\n
The world is great; it stretches to the sky,
\npeople behold, as they in deep confusion lie.<\/p>\n
In your Word, which you to us make known,
\nto all peoples you have the way to life now shown.<\/p>\n
Always, the world will in days of heavy task,
\nof your holy ten commandments ask.<\/p>\n
Stets wird ein Volk, wie schuldig es gewesen,
\nallein an Deinem Heiligtum genesen.<\/p>\n
So zieh denn hin, mein Volk, es lockt und ruft
\ndie freie Erde und die freie Luft.<\/p>\n
Nehmt in Besitz die Berge und die Fluren,
\ngesegnet von der frommen V\u00e4ter Spuren.<\/p>\n
Wischt von der Stirn den hei\u00dfen W\u00fcstensand
\nund atmet Freiheit im gelobten Land.<\/p>\n
Wacht auf, greift zu, es ist nicht Traum noch Wahn,
\nGott hat den m\u00fcden Herzen wohlgetan.<\/p>\n
Schaut des gelobten Landes Herrlichkeit,
\nalles ist euer und ihr seid befreit!\u2019<\/p>\n
Auf dem Gipfel des Gebirges steht
\nMose, der Mann Gottes und Prophet.<\/p>\n
Seine Augen schauen unverwandt
\nin das heilige gelobte Land.<\/p>\n
\u2018So erf\u00fcllst Du, Herr, was Du versprochen,
\nniemals hast Du mir Dein Wort gebrochen.<\/p>\n
Deine Gnade rettet und erl\u00f6st
\nund Dein Z\u00fcrnen z\u00fcchtigt und verst\u00f6\u00dft.<\/p>\n
Treuer Herr, Dein ungetreuer Knecht
\nwei\u00df es wohl: Du bist allzeit gerecht.<\/p>\n
So vollstrecke heute Deine Strafe,
\nnimm mich hin zum langen Todesschlafe.<\/p>\n
Von des heil\u2019gen Landes voller Traube
\ntrinkt allein der unversehrte Glaube.<\/p>\n
Reich\u2019 dem Zweifler drum den bittern Trank,
\nund der Glaube sagt Dir Lob und Dank.<\/p>\n
Always, a people, however guilty they be,
\nalone in your holiness will healing see.<\/p>\n
And thus my people are called with attractions fair,
\nto the free land and the free air.<\/p>\n
Possess the mountains and the fertile lands,
\nblessed by your fathers\u2019 godly hands,<\/p>\n
wipe from their brows the hot desert sand
\nand breathe freedom in the promised land.<\/p>\n
Awake, take hold, it is no mirage you have dreamed,
\nGod has the tired hearts redeemed.<\/p>\n
Look at the glory of the promised land and see
\nall is yours and you are set free.\u2019<\/p>\n
On the summit of the mountain stands
\nMoses, the prophet, in God\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n
His eyes are steady and his vision clear
\nto see the holy, promised land appear.<\/p>\n
\u2018Thus you fulfil what you have spoken,
\nyour word to me you have never broken.<\/p>\n
Your grace saves and delights,
\nbut your anger disowns and smites.<\/p>\n
Faithful Lord, your servant faithless in distrust,
\nbut knowing well: you are forever just.<\/p>\n
So enforce your punishment today,
\ntake me in the long sleep of death away.<\/p>\n
Of the holy land\u2019s fruitful vine,
\nuntarnished faith alone may drink the wine.<\/p>\n
Pour for the doubter the bitter draft of his ways,
\nand let faith alone speak thanks and praise.<\/p>\n
Wunderbar hast Du an mir gehandelt,
\nBitterkeit in S\u00fc\u00dfe mir verwandelt,<\/p>\n
L\u00e4\u00dft mich durch des Todes Schleier sehn
\ndies, mein Volk, zur h\u00f6chsten Feier gehn.<\/p>\n
Sinkend, Gott, in Deine Ewigkeiten
\nseh\u2019 mein Volk ich in die Freiheit schreiten.<\/p>\n
Der die S\u00fcnde straft und gern vergibt,
\nGott,\u2014ich habe dieses Volk geliebt<\/p>\n
Da\u00df ich seine Schmach und Lasten trug
\nund sein Heil geschaut\u2014das ist genug.<\/p>\n
Halte, fasse mich! mir sinkt der Stab,
\ntreuer Gott, bereite mir mein Grab.\u2019<\/p>\n
Wonderfully have you dealt with me,
\nblends of bitterness and sweet to see,<\/p>\n
let me through the veil of death behold,
\nmy people at their festival bold.<\/p>\n
God, into your eternities going,
\nI see my people march with freedom glowing.<\/p>\n
You who punish sin and forgive readily,
\nGod, you know I have loved this people steadily.<\/p>\n
That I have borne their shame and sacrifice
\nand seen their salvation\u2014will suffice.<\/p>\n
Hold, support me, I lose my stave,
\nfaithful God, prepare me for my grave.\u2019<\/p>\n
(Translation: Edwin Robertson)<\/p>\n
I. Introduction<\/p>\n
\u2018Tell all the truth, but tell it slant\u2019, said the American poet Emily Dickinson. As I was contemplating the writing of this essay, one of my colleagues in the English department reminded me that poetry is a genre of the soul. In poetry, the soul finds freedom in the dialectic of concealment and revelation. It is hardly surprising that a theologian attracted to dialecticians such as Martin Luther and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard would express himself in poetry, especially in the prison period when he began to catch in waves the scent of his own death. It will be remembered that this theologian was also an aesthete, a musician, who could on occasion lose himself improvising at the piano. His aesthetic sense was intensified in the confines of a prison cell and served to distinguish his final year as one of heightened creativity and personal expression.
\nIn this essay, I will explore the meaning of Bonhoeffer\u2019s self-identification with the biblical prophet Moses. It will become apparent that the theologian-poet did not make his choice of Moses on a whim. To the contrary, it was a choice clearly anticipated in career-long reflections on theological motifs which Bonhoeffer found Moses to exhibit, and motifs which Bonhoeffer thought himself to embody in important ways\u2014important enough, at least, to warrant joining his voice with that of the ancient prophet. I will not deal directly with the poem. Nor will I be able to ignore it completely. It hovers just above my reflections. My intent is to assist the reader by enriching the context in which the poem is read and interpreted.
\nTo help guide my exploration, I will argue the following proposition: \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 (\u2018Der Tod des Mose\u2019) is a literary testament to Bonhoeffer\u2019s protracted quest to understand theologically and to live personally the so-called responsible life. As such, it is a fitting d\u00e9nouement to a set of ideas that occupied him beginning with Sanctorum Communio and continuing all the way through the prison period. Among the most important of these concepts are vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung) and taking on guilt (Schuld\u00fcbernahme), each of which appears strikingly in the poem. Since the tension-filled concept of penultimate-ultimate is in Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology an important design element in the contemplation of responsible life, unsurprisingly it too plays an important role in our discussion.
\nThe poem\u2019s meaning ranges beyond these themes just as surely as Bonhoeffer\u2019s self-understanding ranges beyond Moses. But one fact the interpreters of this poem can never evade is its uncanny timing. On 20 or 22 September 1944, Gestapo commissar Sonderegger discovered files in the Abwehr bunker in Zossen, which fully exposed Bonhoeffer as a conspirator. This irrefutable evidence prompted the Bonhoeffer family to devise an escape plan. But when his brother Klaus and brother-in-law R\u00fcdiger Schleicher were arrested, Bonhoeffer resolutely abandoned the plan for fear of reprisals on his family and friends. At this moment, Bonhoeffer\u2019s hopes of surviving the war\u2014and with it the hope that he might survive to share in a new German order\u2014dimmed considerably. Under stress, pressed by thoughts of impending death, theological instinct drew him to Moses. I surmise that Bonhoeffer located in Moses\u2019 final ordeal atop Mount Nebo a meaningful representation of his life and theological work. He had for a long time been fascinated by Moses\u2019 solidarity with his people. Not knowing how his life would unfold, however, I suspect he continued to think of himself as a possible participant in post-war Germany and, therefore, did not until this pivotal moment join himself existentially with Moses. And when he finally did so, the interpretive prospects were so explosive, compelling, and revealing, that he chose to veil them in poetry.<\/p>\n
II. Bonhoeffer and Moses<\/p>\n
At the end of his life, Moses was caught between grace and judgement. He was a man of faith who saw the bright future of his people in the land of God\u2019s promise, but he would not experience that future on account of his own sin. Aged and tired, Moses climbed Mount Nebo. And in a single bittersweet episode he absorbed both the fulfilment of the patriarchs\u2019 dream for a homeland and God\u2019s severe wound.
\nThe Italian reserve officer Gaetano Latmiral recalled a conversation with Bonhoeffer during their incarceration at Tegel prison.<\/p>\n
He explained to me that he was writing a poem on the death of Moses, when Moses climbed Mount Nebo and God showed him, before he died, the land that would one day belong to his people, but that he would never enter. He loved this theme \u2026<\/p>\n
O\ufb03cer Latmiral likely didn\u2019t know how steadfastly Bonhoe\ufb00er had occupied himself with the theme of Moses\u2019 death. In Sanctorum Communio (1927) Bonhoeffer tried to articulate the possible lengths to which the intercession of one person for others could go. In reference to Exod. 32:32, Bonhoeffer described Moses as one \u2018who wants to be blotted out from the book of life together with his people\u2019. Moses is adduced as one of two biblical examples of \u2018the love that voluntarily seeks to submit itself to God\u2019s wrath on behalf of the other members of the community, which wishes God\u2019s wrath for itself in order that they may have community with God, which takes their place, as Christ took our place.\u2019 Moses is further described as \u2018heroic\u2019, for he asks God either to accept or condemn him together with his people. In this brief but important early reference, we catch already the prevailing wind that blows through \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019, that is, the cost of the bond forged between Moses and those for whom he had become responsible.
\nDuring his Stipendiat at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer made a trip to Havana (Cuba) along with his friend Erwin Sutz. There he preached to a German-speaking congregation on Deut. 32:48\u201352. It was the final Sunday of Advent, 1930. In this sermon, we find him further exploring the analogy between Moses and Christ: as God judges Moses in death while on the very precipice of the promise, so Advent in its classic meaning thrusts us into penitence in view of the arriving promise. Why Bonhoeffer preached from this text at Christmas is often considered something of a riddle. Bethge indicates that Bonhoeffer, after an interval of not preaching, selected it himself rather than had it assigned to him. Shortly before leaving for Cuba, Bonhoeffer communicated to Helmut R\u00f6ssler that he was finding it difficult to capture Christmas rightly since everything in the world seemed so depressing to him. Bonhoeffer seemed to be caught in something of a personal crisis at this time, though I suspect it was a crisis quite connected to desperate conditions for many human beings around the world. We should also remember that this was precisely the time when Bonhoeffer earnestly read black writers, met black leaders, and experienced first hand the ugly realities of segregation. As we know, the spiritual Go Down, Moses had became a personal favourite to him, and one wonders whether his text selection might have related to some new reflections on the significance of Moses for oppressed peoples. Whether inspired by the spiritual or not, he nevertheless took its climactic stanza as if his own by following Moses onward to Christ as the one who generates hope for those who must live day-to-day in the harsh terrain just shy of the promise-made-good. Towards the end of the sermon (the actual end has been lost), he mentioned the unemployed we see all around us, the millions of children who live in hunger and misery throughout the world, those starving in China, those being oppressed in India, and that despairing helplessness seen in so many people in countries across the world. For them, Christ, the saviour, is born. Bethge includes in his biography an important line supposedly delivered by Bonhoeffer just after his mention of oppression throughout the world: \u2018Who with all this in mind would want to enter the promised land, unsuspecting and unbiased?\u2019
\nEarlier in the sermon, Bonhoeffer had stressed that Moses was a man whose entire life was oriented toward God\u2019s promise to the patriarchs. Moses was the instrument of God whereby God\u2019s people would move from slavery to freedom. From his experience of God\u2019s mystery and glory while protected in the cleft of the rock, to his descent from Sinai with the tablets, through all kinds of troubles and setbacks, God was deepening Moses\u2019 hunger for the promise until at last he became completely seasoned in hope. Just then, only one step away from fulfilment, God led him up the mountain by his word to an abrupt end. Why does Moses have to die precisely at this point, asks Bonhoeffer, when the promise is so near? He answers: because as a sinner, Moses belongs to his people. The sinner dies before the promise is fulfilled.
\nOn 28 May 1933, struggling to adjust in the difficult first months of Hitler\u2019s government, Bonhoeffer again turned to Moses, this time as the prophet standing over and against Aaron, the priest. From the pulpit of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, Bonhoeffer said that while the prophet waits for and receives God\u2019s Word atop Mount Sinai, the priest below grows impatient and succumbs to idolatry in the face of national pressure. Moses represents the church that remains close to God while Aaron represents the church that drifts toward nationalism. In the context of the church struggle, Bonhoeffer\u2019s skilful work with Moses and Aaron is a rather remarkable achievement. It so captivates our attention, in fact, that we, as readers, are prone to stop short of its conclusion. \u2018The rupture [between the church of the word and the church of the world] is not the end\u2019, says Bonhoeffer. Moses\u2019 work is not finished. In a heroic and vicarious act, he shoulders responsibility for Aaron and the people as once again he trudges up the mountain to plead their case before God. As a harbinger of his own fate, Bonhoeffer renders Moses\u2019 prayer with these provocative words: \u2018Reject me with my people, for we are still one. Lord, I love my brother.\u2019 Glancing at the Exodus text, it becomes clear that Bonhoeffer made a decision here to emphasize not the prospect of God\u2019s forgiveness, but rather\u2014anticipating a major theme of our poem\u2014the special bond between Moses and his people. This implies in turn a kind of solidarity between the faithful and the faithless and suggests the possibility that the one might stand before God under the burden of the other\u2019s guilt. Consistent with Bonhoeffer\u2019s treatment of Moses in Sanctorum Communio, the earlier Havana sermon, and even the lines from Go Down, Moses, the Berlin sermon once more pulls the Christological dimension to the foreground. Bonhoeffer proclaims Christ as that prophet and priest who will make of faithful and faithless a single people through his cross.
\nCuriously, Eberhard Bethge cautioned readers of this poem against Christological interpretations of two key stanzas, insisting that \u2018its shame\u2019 did not refer to Christ and \u2018this people\u2019 must refer to Germany, not the church.<\/p>\n
You who punish sin and forgive readily,
\nGod, you know I have loved this people steadily.<\/p>\n
That I have borne their shame and sacrifice
\nand seen their salvation\u2014will suffice.<\/p>\n
Bethge may be correct to put us on the trail of Bonhoeffer\u2019s patriotism at this particular point, though I certainly do not think we should extend Bethge\u2019s caution to the entire ninety stanzas of the poem, at least not in rigorous fashion. First, it is somewhat awkward in light of prevailing interpretations of Bonhoeffer as an advocate for Jews to throw all the weight back upon the German Volk. If these lines also belong credibly to Moses, which I think they do, then Jewish victims may also be included in \u2018this people\u2019. Second, in light of obvious Christological connections in the two sermons we have been considering, it would be strange to preclude Christological interpretations. Granted, Bonhoeffer\u2019s well-publicized attraction to the earthly significance of the Old Testament in the prison period may indicate that he is less willing openly to construe biblical figures as types of Christ, which would provide justification for Bethge\u2019s caution. But Bonhoeffer never surrenders his conviction that Christ is present in the world\u2019s ontology. It is reasonable to suppose that throughout the poem Christ forms a subtext for interpreting Moses, and by implication, Bonhoeffer. We should note that the author of Hebrews explicitly links Moses\u2019 suffering to Christ, saying rather audaciously that Moses suffered for Christ. Furthermore, we ought to remain open to Christological dimensions especially if we harbour sympathies with Bonhoeffer as a Christian martyr (as opposed to merely a political resistor), for the poem anticipates the death of a theologian who forged his bonds with the world on a reasoned Christological foundation. The themes of representative action and accepting guilt cannot finally be rendered as Christian themes without linking them to Christ\u2019s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.
\nWhen Eberhard Bethge received the poem by post on 29 September 1944, he wrote back quickly to his friend,<\/p>\n
Many thanks for Moses. I got it yesterday evening before going on guard and read it afterwards. It moved me very much, but I\u2019m not sure what to make of it. The language is fine, but with the fetters of the rhyme it didn\u2019t seem quite like your other things \u2026 I find your thoughts about the future bold and perhaps even comforting.<\/p>\n
Bethge\u2019s first impression obviously betrays his interpretive uncertainty. Perhaps his exclusion of this poem from the original publication of LPP under the German title Widerstand und Ergebung testifies to his conviction that it would require a special and delicate interpretation, as J\u00fcrgen Henkys suggests. I do not pretend to know confidently why Bonhoeffer returned to Moses for a final time in late 1944. The poet\u2019s choices belong to the poet in a special sense. To be fair, we must acknowledge that he was in those days thinking of other biblical figures, too, as the soon-to-follow poem \u2018Jonah\u2019 reveals. It would be both worthwhile and useful to try to read \u2018Jonah\u2019 alongside \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 to see what that exercise might evince concerning what I have called Bonhoeffer\u2019s search for a biblical pericope, though that would take me beyond my assignment. But in support of my thesis, I will offer four plausible reasons why Bonhoeffer may have continued to think about himself in relation to Moses to the very end. Each of these reasons touches upon the narrative flow of Bonhoeffer\u2019s life in important ways, and adheres structurally to his theology, especially in its most mature form as represented in the Ethics.<\/p>\n
a. \u2018Your eyes to see the poorest in lowliness \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
First, as intimated in our discussion so far, Bonhoeffer found in Moses a theme that proved crucial to his developing theology: Moses learned to see the events of history from below and suffered with his people. Though living in the privilege of Pharaoh\u2019s court, Moses devoted himself to his people, at first in their slavery and oppression and later in their circuitous wanderings en route to a new land and identity. That identification cost Moses a great deal. He became a target of his people\u2019s complaints. He shouldered their sin and died under its burden. But he could not finally decouple himself from the community of those in need. Hebrews portrays Moses as one who suffered in solidarity with Israel for the sake of Christ. Moses \u2018refused to be called a son of Pharaoh\u2019s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God \u2026 He considered abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than all of Egypt\u2019 (Heb. 11:24\u201326). Though born into privilege, Bonhoeffer grew somewhat uncomfortable in his bourgeois status because it represented security and safety instead of authentic discipleship as he had come to understand it. Standing with Jewish and German victims against the brutalities of Nazism, Bonhoeffer\u2019s life can be read as a descent from power and privilege and a deepening attachment to those who suffer. Unlike Moses, there was no old man in Bonhoeffer. But his death by hanging at Flossenb\u00fcrg epitomizes the human being who chose to stand with a suffering generation, rather than exercise the freedoms of his social class.<\/p>\n
b. \u2018Your arm to break the enemy\u2019s might \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
Second, Moses stood against the oppressor. As a young man, Moses witnessed first-hand the abuse of his people. Observing an Egyptian guard abusing one of the Jewish slaves, Moses became angry, killed the guard, and then attempted to hide his crime by burying the body in the sand (Exodus 2). Though his actions were rash, the concrete experience of injustice against his kin moved Moses to action. After fleeing to Midian for refuge, God called him to return to the oppressor\u2019s land, despite his inadequacies, and immerse himself in the excruciating work of confronting earthly powers with God\u2019s message of justice and liberation. Bonhoeffer fled to America in the summer of 1939 as Germany hovered on the brink of war. But as the victims\u2019 cries arose from Egypt, so the plight of Hitler\u2019s victims (Jews and Germans) weighed upon him in his Bible reading and meditation, driving him to the conclusion that remaining in a place of refuge while his country needed him was a mistake. God was calling him to return to a dangerous situation. The eighty-seventh stanza of the poem reveals Bonhoeffer\u2019s sacrificial identification with the German people and all those victimized by Nazism in the words \u2018God you know I have loved this people\u2019.<\/p>\n
c. \u2018He who tasted the fruit of doubt, from God\u2019s table is shut out \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
Third, under the stress of fulfilling his responsibility to others, Moses sinned. Caught without water in the wilderness of Zin, Moses\u2019 followers began to turn against him and against the word of God\u2019s promise. In response, God told Moses to speak to a rock in full view of the congregation. In this way, God would provide water for people and livestock. Moses\u2019 anger got the best of him, however. After assembling the people, he twice slammed the rock with his staff. God provided the water, but Moses\u2019 lack of trust in God\u2019s word became an offence for which he would be excluded from the company of those who would enter the land (Num. 20:12). Rather than express his confidence in the word of God, he took matters into his own hand. Bonhoeffer\u2019s conspiratorial activities were very difficult for him to reconcile inwardly, and at the end he understood himself as a sinner in need of grace. So he found comfort in the fact that Moses\u2019 doubt, though judged, could neither remove him from God\u2019s grace nor subvert faith. Faith could sustain a break and yet survive, for God transacts grace even in judgement. When Bonhoeffer examined the death of Moses, he saw grace in the fact that God had arranged for him a special end on the heights of the mountain instead of the valley below where others had died: \u2018You allow me no escape, Lord, from your punishment\/but favor me with death here on this high battlement.\u2019<\/p>\n
d. \u2018Clay, moulded by God\u2019s mighty hand \u2026 a sacrificial vessel\u2019<\/p>\n
Fourth, in the hands of God, Moses\u2019 death could be construed as a vicarious though guilty sacrifice. As we have said, Moses stood in solidarity with his people and against the oppressor as a sinner before God. But Moses\u2019 sin is not the extraordinary thing here. In itself it shows only the human predicament as such before God. The extraordinary thing is that Moses, the aged prophet who has outlived the faithless ones of his generation, will now die as a representative of that entire generation and bear its guilt collectively by his own death. His death will become the sacrificial altar on which God enacts his gracious promise to others. This ancient Eucharistic prototype of Christ\u2014though we must preserve the uniqueness of Christ\u2019s guilt as a condition resting on the foundation of his personal innocence\u2014establishes the most convincing bond between Bonhoeffer, Moses, and Christ. For whatever asymmetries may be present between them in respect to guilt, in each case guilt is tangled up with the choice to immerse oneself in the plight of others. In sum, Moses lived within the structure of responsible life as Bonhoeffer understood it. He devoted himself to others, got tangled up in their problems, absorbed their guilt, represented them in life and in death, and held them in the delicate tension of God\u2019s judgement and grace.
\nWe cannot fail to note here the martyrological implications of this threefold bond. It is a thin tradition that renders Moses as a martyr, and it would overstep good sense to suggest that in \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 Bonhoeffer is pleading for personal consideration as a Christian martyr. True, Bonhoeffer had predicted that his age would require guilty martyrs, and he thereby cut a channel for such an interpretation. Martyrs do not exercise control over their cases, which eventually must pass to the communities that survive them. Bonhoeffer would have understood this point very well. Yet it does not overstep good sense to suggest that Bonhoeffer is struggling at this time to understand his death along the lines of guilt-bearing and representation by associating with Moses, who opaquely \u2018suffers for Christ\u2019. By linking himself to Christ precisely by way of a third party\u2014whose sin had become a salient feature in the circumstances of his death\u2014Bonhoeffer cordons off a complex literary-theological space in which his problematic status as a martyr can be deliberated free of manipulation and coercion. At the very least, I think Bonhoeffer wants us to be generous enough to consider those ways in which his controversial path of discipleship nevertheless adds up to a life of faith which, like Moses\u2019, points to Christ. The indirectness of poetry here creates the condition necessary for a true relation. For the responsible human being is the one devoted to others, not the one who perseverates about his posthumous reputation. By pointing to Moses, Bonhoeffer can indirectly raise interesting prospects for interpreting his own life at the same time that he deflects attention to God and his word.<\/p>\n
III. Moses as exhibitor of penultimate care<\/p>\n
To those acquainted with Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics, it will be apparent that in the foregoing section, I have been speaking generally in the language of \u2018responsible life\u2019. In this final section, I will continue with the provocative language of the Ethics by situating what has been said so far within the tension of ultimate and penultimate things (Die letzten und die vorletzten Dinge). I hope to show how Moses became (albeit anachronistically) a skilful exhibitor of this tension\u2014a tension which, as Bonhoeffer saw it, characterizes Christian existence as such and the skilful navigation of which is a vital matter in a \u2018world come of age\u2019.
\nBonhoeffer begins his description of ultimate and penultimate things by linking it to the Reformation teaching on justification, that determination of God wherein by faith alone, the self is grounded extra se in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this event, God\u2019s gracious decision regarding a human being is considered ultimate and supersedes all human calculation. By linking the ultimate with justification, Bonhoeffer asserts the primacy of God\u2019s reality over and against the reality of the world. As sinners, our access to the ultimate\u2014in our attempts at self-justification, naturally, but also in our self-understanding and personal agendas\u2014is limited and condemned. Just as justification never passes into the hands of human beings but remains a free act of God, so the ultimate word of God never yields itself completely to human beings.
\nIn this sense justification entails a qualitative ultimacy. God\u2019s word cannot be superseded, and it thereby lends to every other word a penultimate status. But justification also means temporal ultimacy. God\u2019s word arrives as the final word in time, the last in a sequence that configures every other word as something that precedes it. Of this dimension Bonhoeffer says, \u2018The only thing that can be justified is something that has already come under indictment in time. Justification presupposes that the creature became guilty.\u2019 Bonhoeffer\u2019s elaboration cannot be improved upon, so I will simply cite it:<\/p>\n
In order to hear the ultimate word, Luther had to go through the monastery; Paul had to go through his piety toward the law; even the thief \u2018had to\u2019 go through the conviction and the cross. They had to travel a road, to walk the full length of the way through penultimate things; they had to sink their knees under the burden of these things \u2026 We must travel a road, even though there is no road to this goal, and we must travel this road to the end, that is, the place where God puts an end to it. The penultimate remains in existence, even though it is completely superseded by the ultimate and is no longer in force.<\/p>\n
Clearly, the ultimate is for human beings. It meets us as a gracious, redeeming, and liberating word. But God does not immediately fulfil his promises. God remains patient\u2014often painfully so\u2014and thus holds open a space that allows human history to unfold in its own integrity. For this reason, people of faith cannot live solely in the ultimate. Instead, they must navigate through the time of God\u2019s patience with fear and trembling, with suffering and pleading, and with hoping and longing. The difficulty for people of faith can be described as follows: on the one hand, since it is God\u2019s word, the ultimate requires that significant adjustments be made in the realm of the world, and thus it places God\u2019s followers in a place of sober responsibility. On the other hand, the realm of the world is stubbornly penultimate and offers resistance to God\u2019s ultimate word. Such is the predicament for one who wishes to live a responsible life. To shun the penultimate for the sake of the ultimate amounts to a hatred of the world (Bonhoeffer\u2019s so-called radical solution) and a desire for its destruction; to flee the ultimate for the sake of penultimate amounts to a hatred of God\u2019s word (the so-called compromise solution). So how does one navigate?
\nLike Moses the prophet, one prepares the way. Moses\u2014the man who hears God speak from the bush aflame, who becomes the very presence of God to Pharaoh (Exod. 7:1) and his own people, who later stands face to face with God on Sinai, countenance glowing\u2014has heard the word of God once given to the patriarchs and now becomes the instrument by which it can ripen towards fulfilment. But the way from Egypt to shal\u00f4m is challenging to say the least. Though he functions as God to Pharaoh and to Israel, he is emphatically not God. His humility towards and very incapacity for the ultimate, necessary preconditions for faithful representation of it, will in the course of time drive him deep into the conditions of penultimacy. Moses tended to the ultimate by becoming a willing participant in God\u2019s work of justice for an oppressed people and caring for that people along the way of the penultimate. Bonhoeffer reminds us that certain conditions make it quite impossible for God\u2019s ultimate word to be heard. That is why \u2018[t]he hungry person needs bread, and the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom.\u2019 It is precisely by tending to the penultimate needs of his people that Moses prepares the way for the ultimate.
\nAll along, of course, it is God who is preparing the way, as it always must be. In his relationship to Israel, it is the weighty responsibility of Moses to make clear the difference between the ultimate and the penultimate, between God\u2019s word and human words. For it is all too easy to co-opt the ultimate for the sake of human agendas. Moses\u2019 sin can be seen as the refusal to allow the ultimate its place. Striking the rock was a capitulation to the penultimate, a way of managing by means other than God\u2019s word.
\nMoses\u2019 death symbolizes his complete immersion in the penultimate realm by putting the spotlight on his temporal location\u2014\u2018almost there\u2019\u2014at the very edge of the ultimate. Standing so near the promise, Moses\u2019 experience of exclusion intensifies together with his faith in God\u2019s future. At the moment of death, then, the ultimate comes into view as that which truly lies outside the reaches of human power, but has all along been exerting a pressure upon the penultimate. And the penultimate is revealed as the realm of human life and work which had all along received its meaning from the ultimate. By tending to God\u2019s people and sticking with them through the thick and thin of the penultimate, Moses was tending to the ultimate and preparing the way. In a certain sense, Moses was the way, his death the necessary occasion upon which shal\u00f4m would have a chance.<\/p>\n
IV. Conclusion<\/p>\n
Drawing to a close, I would like to direct our attention to an interesting observation made about Bonhoeffer as a young pianist by his twin sister Sabine.<\/p>\n
Dietrich was a most sensitive accompanist, and here, too, his good character showed\u2014he was always eager to cover the mistakes of the other players and save them any embarrassment. He was most patient and often kept up his accompaniment for hours, so that sometimes he did not have enough time for his own piano practice.<\/p>\n
Though Bonhoeffer went to the trouble and expense of shipping his Bechstein to his London parsonage, Julius Rieger remembered that \u2018he never used his abilities as a pianist to give recitals to others.\u2019 These memories and many more like them hit upon a certain theme: Bonhoeffer did not promote himself, but attended splendidly to the activities of others. \u2018Sensitive accompanist\u2019 strikes me as a fitting epigram for this piece on Moses. Certainly we are not dealing with a recital here. In this artistic rendition, Bonhoeffer does not jump to centre stage and clamour for our attention. Using his skills as an accompanist, he plays behind the figure of Moses and allows Moses\u2019 voice to dominate. But like any accompanist, Bonhoeffer can be heard. And his choice to accompany Moses is among the clearest and most vulnerable self-disclosures Bonhoeffer ever made.
\nTo summarize, in the Moses narrative Bonhoeffer found his own life and thought illuminated. But as we have seen, that is surely in part because the Moses narrative had already done its work on Bonhoeffer\u2019s thinking and living. He found the theme of solidarity with others most compelling, and in \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 he finally risked the suggestion that he himself lived out the complexities of Christian discipleship in the topography of the Moses narrative. This may seem like an odd conclusion. One might ask why Bonhoeffer wouldn\u2019t make Christ more obvious in this poem, especially since he had already set a precedent of dealing with Moses and Christ together in the two sermons we examined. In those writings, the momentum of the Moses narrative was pushing Bonhoeffer toward Christ. We remember an earlier time when Bonhoeffer, the theologian, was drawn to Jesus\u2019 Sermon on the Mount and \u2018became a Christian\u2019. Here, Bonhoeffer\u2019s personal narrative pushed him towards Christ. But much transpired between the early 1930s and 1944 in the life and thought of Bonhoeffer. He had gradually become fastened to the world, to creation, to the Old Testament, and to the penultimate. Now in a striking reversal of momentum, he is drawn back to the Hebrew prophet. The Christ narrative now pushes Bonhoeffer toward Moses. This is not a departure from Christ, but rather an ever-deepening awareness that Christ binds himself to Moses and all those who act responsibly in view of the ultimate. Christ is the bond between Bonhoeffer and Moses, such that when they become guilty and falter at faith in the messiness of responsible living they are not abandoned. Christ carries them even while they carry others.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s reflections on responsible life and the ultimate\u2014penultimate provided him the necessary structure for a more comprehensive theological interpretation of Moses. Outside the poem there is, so far as I am aware, not a shred of evidence that he actually carried out such an interpretation. Certainly, the poem does not constitute evidence in the ordinary sense. Nevertheless, I think it stands as cryptic indication that Bonhoeffer had theologized the Moses narrative along these lines. At the very least, Ethics theologically undergirds his choice for Moses and renders it more intelligible.<\/p>\n
@book{Wannenwetsch_2009,
\nplace={London; New York},
\ntitle={Who Am I?: Bonhoeffer\u2019s Theology through His Poetry},
\npublisher={T&T Clark},
\nyear={2009}}<\/p>\n
Exportiert aus Verbum, 20:06 5. M\u00e4rz 2019.<\/p>\n
\u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019<\/p>\n
Towards a Trans-Religious Second Na\u00efvet\u00e9 or How to be a Christological Creature<\/p>\n
Bernd Wannenwetsch<\/p>\n
\u2018Christen und Heiden\u2019<\/p>\n
1. Menschen gehen zu Gott in ihrer Not,
\nflehen um Hilfe, bitten um Gl\u00fcck und Brot,
\num Errettung aus Krankheit, Schuld und Tod.
\nSo tun sie alle, alle, Christen und Heiden.<\/p>\n
2. Menschen gehen zu Gott in Seiner Not,
\nfinden ihn arm, geschm\u00e4ht, ohne Obdach und Brot,
\nsehn ihn verschlungen von S\u00fcnde, Schwachheit und Tod.
\nChristen stehen bei Gott in Seinen Leiden.<\/p>\n
3. Gott geht zu allen Menschen in ihrer Not,
\ns\u00e4ttigt den Leib und die Seele mit Seinem Brot,
\nstirbt f\u00fcr Christen und Heiden den Kreuzestod,
\nund vergibt ihnen beiden.<\/p>\n
\u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019<\/p>\n
1. Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
\nPray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
\nFor mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
\nAll men do so, Christian and unbelieving.<\/p>\n
2. Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
\nFind him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
\nWhelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
\nChristians stand by God in his hour of grieving.<\/p>\n
3. God goes to every man when sore bestead,
\nFeeds body and spirit with his bread;
\nFor Christians, pagans alike he hangs dead,
\nAnd both alike forgiving.<\/p>\n
(Translation: John Bowden)<\/p>\n
I. What Christianity really is?<\/p>\n
\u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019 is the shortest prison poem we have from Bonhoeffer and at the same time the most formally structured. It comes in numbered stanzas, with a regular meter, and rhymed. Both the pencilled draft version and the edited final version are preserved. The poem\u2019s inception can be traced back to a piece of scrap paper from July 1944 where Bonhoeffer put down two simple lines:<\/p>\n
Men go to God in their distress.
\nMen go to God in his distress.<\/p>\n
The poem accompanied a letter to Eberhard Bethge from 8 July. Ten days later, in another letter to his friend, Bonhoeffer summarized the core idea of the poem as follows:<\/p>\n
The poem about Christians and pagans contains an idea that you will recognize: \u2018Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving\u2019; that is what distinguishes Christians from pagans. Jesus asked in Gethsemane, \u2018Could you not watch with me one hour?\u2019 That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God.<\/p>\n
In his previous correspondence with Bethge, Bonhoeffer had begun to use key notions such as \u2018Christianity\u2019 or \u2018religion\u2019 in inverted commas. These familiar terms he no longer considered to be safe\u2014it dawned on Bonhoeffer that he witnessed a time of transition that rendered ambiguous any previous meaning these terms may have had. As opposed to the mental and spiritual draught that Bonhoeffer admits to have gone through during his first period in prison, we begin to see the fruits of a concern that set his mind in unfamiliar territory: \u2018What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.\u2019
\nBonhoeffer sought to unpack this question along various routes, the most obvious of which concerned the relationship of Christianity and religion. Is Christianity a religion at all? The one and true religion? Or is it rather an anti-religion? Although the title pairs Christians and pagans (\u2018Christen und Heiden\u2019), it would perhaps have been more aptly titled \u2018Christians and Other Religious People\u2019, as it does not address the problem of the relationship of Christianity to any concrete non-Christian religion but rather how Christianity relates to the homo religious\u2014humankind in their notorious transcendental striving.
\nOn the backdrop of some of Bonhoeffer\u2019s paragraphs in the surrounding letters of theological prose, we might be tempted to read the poem from the vantage point of the theological verdict on religion that Karl Barth had famously issued in his Church Dogmatics where he spoke of \u2018The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion\u2019, characterizing religion as a human attempt to justify oneself in front of the self-made image of God, or even more bluntly as \u2018unbelief\u2019. Bonhoeffer was clearly impressed by Barth\u2019s uncompromised characterization of the Christian faith as essentially revealed anti-religion. Bonhoeffer, too, describes the \u2018reversal\u2019 that the gospel brings about in the attitude of the religious man. In the aforementioned letter of 18 July, he characterizes the Christian faith\u2019s difference from religion in terms of metanoia, conversion:<\/p>\n
To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man\u2014not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia: not in the first place thinking about one\u2019s own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer, no less than Barth, is aware of the critical difference in which the Christian faith stands from religion. And this perception is only enhanced by the disturbing and novel ideas in his Tegel correspondence where Bonhoeffer famously envisions a \u2018religion-less Christianity\u2019 and inaugurates a quest for a \u2018non-religious interpretation of the Bible\u2019. If, however, we were to read this tendency straight into the poem \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019, we would miss precisely the most interesting twist that Bonhoeffer\u2019s thoughts take here. Approaching the poem without a prefigured interpretative foil, we can hardly suppress a sense of surprise. Given the tendency in the movement referred to as \u2018Dialectical Theology\u2019 to stress to distance of Christianity from religion, we notice a significantly different take in the poem: Here, Bonhoeffer first emphasizes what Christians and pagans\u2014religious people outside of Christianity\u2014have in common. Although the second stanza moves on to emphasize the uniqueness of the Christian faith, and the third stanza eventually performs the move we might expect in turning the man-to-God approach around, the poem as a whole is framed by expressions that stress the commonalities of Christians and other religious people. For example, the German original repeats the \u2018all\u2019 in the last line of the fist stanza: \u2018all men do so, all\u2019. The importance that Bonhoeffer put on this emphasis is evidenced in that the second \u2018all\u2019 was added by him in the revised version over against the pencilled draft. Likewise, in the third stanza, he added another \u2018all\u2019 to \u2018men\u2019 in the revision of the draft, so that it now reads: \u2018God goes to all men\u2019. And much in the same vein, he ended the poem with the word \u2018both\u2019 (\u2018beiden\u2019), by which the final rhyme (to \u2018Heiden\u2019) and accent is found and placed.
\nIs Bonhoeffer less radical than Barth in his criticism of religion, when the antithesis of Christianity to religion appears to be eventually absorbed into a dialectical move towards a sort of both-and, yes-and-no? We can certainly reckon with Bonhoeffer\u2019s Lutheran sensitivities in emphasizing the finitum capax over against Barth\u2019s Reformed tendencies of non-capax and the corresponding contrasting of God\u2019s sovereignty with the natural world. But we can understand the difference of Bonhoeffer\u2019s account from Barth\u2019s only if we allow for a sort of dramatic reading of Bonhoeffer\u2019s account of \u2018religion\u2019. Bonhoeffer\u2019s understanding of Christianity and religion is not unlike Luther\u2019s teaching of the law that has proved to be prone to many misunderstandings when read as a fixed system. Just as Luther\u2019s doctrine of the law must be understood according to the dramatic narrative of its institution by God in the Garden of Eden, its subsequent distortion through the fall, and the process of its restoration to its original purpose as God\u2019s loving and love-worthy rule, so it is also with Bonhoeffer\u2019s account of religion. Rather than being cast into one all-encompassing theory, religion must be narrated as a plot featured within God\u2019s salvific story, in which the meaning of individual concepts change as they relate to each respective act within that divine play. My suggestion is that within Bonhoeffer we find a three-staged dramatic notion of \u2018religion\u2019 as \u2018cry\u2019, \u2018try\u2019, and \u2018sigh\u2019.<\/p>\n
II. A dramatic account of religion<\/p>\n
As \u2018cry\u2019, religion echoes humankind\u2019s primal scream, and is understood as a matter of the original state of creatureliness. As \u2018try\u2019, religion represents the domain of the fallen man who seeks to domesticate the divine for his own benefit. As \u2018sigh\u2019, religion is turned on his head, when the new evangelical creature willingly partakes in the eager longing and groaning of creation (Rom. 8:18\u201322) or in the \u2018loud cries and tears\u2019 (Heb. 5:8) of Christ\u2019s distressed prayers in the garden of Gethsemane (Mt. 26:36\u201346). It is to this third notion that this essay\u2019s subtitle refers: religion as the second na\u00efvet\u00e9 of a restored, christologically mediated creatureliness.
\nThese three modes of understanding religion according to the drama of creation, fall, and redemption are not completely parallel to the three stanzas of our poem, but I think that something like this typology is required if we are to make sense of the three stanzas and Bonhoeffer\u2019s further musings on the matter in his theological prose. Although the poem, unlike Bonhoeffer\u2019s theological prose, does not explicitly dwell on the second mode\u2014religion as strategy\u2014it may be said to be implicitly and tacitly represented in the way in which the second stanza characterizes the Christian way as a formal reversal of the first. We must now look at the three modes in further detail.<\/p>\n
a. Religion as \u2018cry\u2019: calling on God<\/p>\n
According to the first stanza, religion deals with elemental human needs as they are characterized by the polarity of fear and hope, the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of suffering: those who go to God \u2018pray for help, happiness and bread.\u2019 In this light, Bonhoeffer shows no concern in acknowledging that humankind is religious from the outset. The need, desire, and liberty to cry to God for help are simply characteristics of being a creature. It is worth mentioning that Luther, on whose theology Bonhoeffer depends a great deal in this case, speaks in his Genesis Lectures of such an original religion when he envisages an original \u2018church in the garden\u2019, a church sine muris (without walls) that is brought into being by God\u2019s giving of his first command, \u2018Eat, do not eat\u2019, which offers his creatures a concrete way of responding to the divine address in obedient worship.
\nYet this religion of the original state in its primal na\u00efvet\u00e9 is no longer present among God\u2019s creatures after the fall. Religion, too, has now become a matter of what Bonhoeffer calls \u2018the natural\u2019 as distinct from \u2018creation\u2019. \u2018Through the fall, \u201ccreation\u201d became \u201cnature\u201d \u2026 The natural is that form of life preserved by God for the fallen world that is directed towards justification, salvation, and renewal through Christ.\u2019 In this sense, it is \u2018natural\u2019 for humans to be religious as a matter of corresponding to God\u2019s providential caring for his creatures. But the way in which religion is enacted in the concrete of the post-lapsarian state, precisely reveals the need for \u2018renewal\u2019. In his letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer captures this ambiguity in the image of \u2018religion as a garment of Christianity\u2019. A garment is a useful and healthy thing, as it warms and protects the skin of those who wear it. Yet, as the very image of \u2018covering\u2019 conveys, it contains a potentially dark side: a garment also covers up, conceals, and potentially deceives.<\/p>\n
b. Religion as \u2018try\u2019: domesticating God<\/p>\n
This dark side resides in the prefix of the word re-ligio: the \u2018re\u2019-ligare (binding oneself back onto something) becomes problematic when humans do not merely cry out to the divine in their need but make arrangements to secure the desired divine help, or even advise a distinct and \u2018safe\u2019 sphere to God (as in the temple principle), thus eventually rendering him a functionary of their interests and identity politics; seeking protection for the sake of self-enclosure, guidance for the sake of the constitution of a \u2018moral self\u2019, and so on. The perversion of the religion of the original state eventually amounts to the domestication of God. Bonhoeffer senses this when he compares religion to circumcision as a symbol of a self-assuring identity politics: \u2018Freedom from peritome is also freedom from religion.\u2019
\nIn the letters that surround the poem, Bonhoeffer identifies a number of problems that are typically associated with the homo religious, in particular the problems of religious inwardness, individualism, and metaphysics. In regards to the problem of individualism, Bonhoeffer refers to the \u2018soteriological egotism\u2019 of the religious person\u2014save my soul and may perish the world\u2014which he finds so refreshingly absent from the Old Testament in particular, where salvation is conceived as a social and communal event. Yet, there is more to this problem of individualism than the salvation egotism described. I\u2019d like to suggest an intermediary interpretative step that, although not explicitly taken by Bonhoeffer, allows us to see how two of his lines of thought are conceptually interwoven. Bonhoeffer\u2019s criticism of religious individualism is, as I will attempt to demonstrate, in an interesting way related to his persistent emphasis on undivided wholeness as the hallmark of the Christian calling for a life responsible to God.
\nTo understand how religious individualism and the failure to live an unsegregated life (as a di-psychos: a man with two souls in his chest) are connected is to understand the way in which the call to wholeness and perfection is mirrored by, and rooted in, God\u2019s own being: \u2018You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect\u2019 (Mt. 5:28). As Luther famously put it: man is a rational animal, who possesses a \u2018fabricating heart\u2019. Anticipating by centuries Feuerbach\u2019s idea of religion as \u2018projection\u2019, Luther\u2019s notion of the human heart as a fabrication plant of gods can be understood as a critical theological reading of the classical pantheon where the individual gods appear at first as simple names for human passions: Irene, Eris, Eros, and so forth. Religion is bound to serve human needs and affections, because the venerated gods arise from these in the first instance. Accordingly, the religious way of \u2018coming to God in hours of need\u2019, as Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem expresses it, comes with a natural (i.e. inherent) tendency to eventually reduce God to small capitals. Religion tends towards individualism precisely to the degree in which it treats God as a functionary, like any one god of the pantheon of gods that were all neatly assigned their respective and limited spheres of competence.
\nIn contrast to such an individualizing account, the Biblical God is characterized by an all-embracing perfection and singularity: God is a giver of daily bread, but not reducible to a bread-god; God is granting procreative blessing, but he is still not a fertility god; God may at times fight for Israel, but he is far from being a war-mongering god. The complexity, comprehensiveness, and perfection of the Biblical God is, then, mirrored in the calling of his people to be whole and perfect: tamim (Hebrew), teleios (Greek)\u2014a concept that Bonhoeffer never tired of stressing. The followers of the Biblical God are called to be \u2018perfect\u2019 in that they refuse to separate their lives into individual self-enclosed spheres\u2014as though they had to satisfy the demands of various deities who each rule over just one respective sphere with their own demand and autonomous rationality. \u2018The \u201creligious act\u201d is\u2019, as Bonhoeffer puts it, \u2018always something partial; \u201cfaith\u201d is something whole, involving the whole of one\u2019s life.\u2019 This wholeness of human life that comes as a gift of the gospel, restoring human beings to their created un-dividedness, at the same time rules out \u2018inwardness\u2019 as a special anthropological faculty or sphere in which religion is at home \u2018within\u2019 the human being. \u2018The Bible does not recognize our distinction between the outward and the inward \u2026 It is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man \u2026 The discovery of the so-called inner life dates from the Renaissance, probably from Petrarch. The \u2018heart\u2019 in the biblical sense is not the inner life, but the whole man in relation to God.\u2019
\nAs regards to the \u2018metaphysical\u2019 problem associated with religion, we are reminded of Bonhoeffer\u2019s distinction between a \u2018knowing of God\u2019 (\u2018Wissen um Gott\u2019) and \u2018knowing God\u2019 (\u2018Gott kennen\u2019). This he had borrowed from Luther\u2019s exegesis of a distinctive Hebrew term for knowing, yada, as an intimate form of loving-knowing that could even be used to describe the sexual act (Adam \u2018knew\u2019 his wife, Gen. 4:1). It is precisely because the former \u2018metaphysical\u2019 type of knowledge can never reach beyond the deus absconditus, the anonymous God whose presence is perceived as ambiguous\u2014where threat and promise are never disentangled, never certain, never clear\u2014that this type of knowledge yields religion as a means of constant and recurrent appeasement.
\nA third characteristic of the theological predicament of the religious person is that he or she notoriously misses out on God the question and interrogator, by stylizing him merely as answer and answerer. Here, Bonhoeffer speaks out against the existentialist credo that regards \u2018religion a precondition of faith\u2019, against the claim that the \u2018addressability\u2019 needs to precede the address, and that the question must be prior to the answer. In a move characteristic already of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer reverses the existentialist order. For him, Christ\u2019s calling is authoritative in that it generates the need, wish, and will to follow the command\u2014while at times explicitly rejecting the human need, wish and will to follow him as insufficient. Thus Christ becomes the one whose question becomes more determinative for his followers than the answers they receive from him to their own questions: \u2018Can you not stay and watch with me for one hour?\u2019
\nWe need not go far today to appreciate the force of this reversal in the light of the contemporary tendency of Western churches to sell themselves as \u2018experts in religion\u2019, quality providers of \u2018spirituality\u2019, and to organize and present themselves like service-agencies whose efficiency and quality depend on the prior analysis of the wants and needs of their clientele. We may find it easy to despise the sometimes outrageous forms the commodification of religion takes on today. But in order to resist it, we may need an understanding and practice of Christianity as deep and challenging as Bonhoeffer\u2019s.<\/p>\n
c. Religion as \u2018sigh\u2019: suffering with God<\/p>\n
Given Bonhoeffer\u2019s analysis of the temptations of any religious life in the domain of the \u2018natural\u2019, i.e. this side of the fall, we are well advised to pay attention to the fact that just like the first stanza of the poem, the second begins with \u2018men\u2019: \u2018Men go to God \u2026\u2019 Only in the last line are they then identified as \u2018Christians\u2019, but not so from the start. We are again reminded of a passage in Ethics, where Bonhoeffer stresses that what counts as Christian or worldly, cannot be decided in advance\u2014it is only ever revealed in the moment of a concrete situation and therefore bears the corresponding challenge to be faithful to the gospel in the unpredictable and underivable newness that characterizes the life of discipleship.
\nWhat is \u2018Christian\u2019 cannot be put in timelessly valid conceptual distinctions that can be known ex ante, but must emerge from responsible action in response to Christ\u2019s own life. Even if the determining of the genuinely Christian remains a matter of active recognition and actual judgement, rather than a matter of pre-stabilized knowledge, it is, on the other hand, far from being opaque and mysterious. In fact, the poem states it with unambiguous clarity: it is the \u2018standing by God in his suffering\u2019 that characterizes Christians over any other potential denominator.
\nIn a lost letter by Eberhard Bethge in which he commented on the poem, the friend must have questioned the notion of \u2018standing by\u2019 as potentially too static. Bonhoeffer\u2019s reply from 10 August alerts the friend to the following: \u2018 \u201cStand by God\u201d probably arose from thinking about the cross.\u2019 J\u00fcrgen Henkys points to the rich traditional background of this concept of \u2018standing by God\u2019 that must have triggered Bonhoeffer\u2019s imagination here: starting from the Johannine portrayal of the scene under the cross, by way of the medieval sequence stabat mater dolorosa iuxta crucem lacrimosa, up to the influence of Bonhoeffer\u2019s favourite hymn writer, Paul Gerhardt. The latter\u2019s work became ever the dearer to Bonhoeffer during his imprisonment, and whose passion hymn, \u2018O Sacred Head, now Wounded\u2019, refers to Mary and John under the cross in his passion. \u2018I wish to stand by you here, do not despise me\u2019 (\u2018Ich will hier bei dir stehen, verachte mich doch nicht\u2019).
\nIn his letter of 18 July, Bonhoeffer summarizes the uniqueness of the Christian life with the following definition: \u2018Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions: Man\u2019s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God\u2019s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.\u2019
\nIn directing the attention to the suffering God, the second stanza hints at a crisis. In their turning to God, people eventually find\u2014or shall we say, hit upon\u2014a God who suffers. In spite of the quiet tone suggested by the parallelism with the first stanza, \u2018Men go to God\u2019, crisis looms large here. The God they eventually face is strangely different from the one they sought in the first place, a mighty provider of bread, shelter, meaning, and redemption. Instead, women and men find God \u2018tormented by sin, weakness, and death\u2019. In contrast to the first stanza\u2019s emphasis on universality, \u2018all do so, all\u2019, this discovery must entail a discrimination; those among the multitude of religious beings reaching for the divine who are not put off by what they find in the suffering God and do not turn away, are eventually named \u2018Christians\u2019. These are marked as the ones who \u2018stand by\u2019 God in his hour of grieving. In characterizing Christians in this way, Bonhoeffer reveals his epistemological principle. \u2018It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life\u2019. What brings women and men to acknowledge the suffering God whom they encounter as their God is precisely their existential sharing in his very life, not finding a satisfactory answer to the philosophical question: can God suffer? Without the willingness to know the suffering God by sharing in his suffering, however, women and men are thrown back to an endlessly repetitive religious quest that never gets beyond the anonymous God that \u2018exists\u2019 rather than reveals himself.<\/p>\n
III. The commonality of forgiveness<\/p>\n
The most interesting move, however, is found at the end of the third stanza as the climax of the whole poem: \u2018\u2026 both alike forgiving\u2019. Just as in the German original, the English translation rhymes the last words of the respective stanzas\u2014\u2018unbelieving\u2019, \u2018grieving\u2019, and \u2018forgiving\u2019. However, in the German, the final rhyme is not with \u2018vergibt\u2019 (\u2018forgiving\u2019) but rather \u2018beiden\u2019 (\u2018alike\u2019), rhyming with \u2018Heiden\u2019 (\u2018heathen\u2019), and \u2018Leiden\u2019 (\u2018suffering\u2019). In this climactic ending, Bonhoeffer stresses both the need for and the reality of forgiveness as a further commonality between Christians and others. As others share the religious quest, so too are they united in receiving the divine gift of forgiveness. To end with a need for forgiveness that frames both previous stanzas indicates an understanding of forgiveness not exhausted by reference to the atoning effect of Christ\u2019s death for the individual. The striking and potentially perturbing point I believe Bonhoeffer is making here is this: Christians need to be forgiven not merely or primarily because of their involvement in human religion, but precisely as Christians, as those who are willing to suffer with God and perhaps do amazingly unselfish things along this way.
\nTo understand this point, we must briefly turn to Bonhoeffer\u2019s biography. Bonhoeffer could not help but find the poor, despised, and homeless God (according to Matthew 25) in the fate of the victims of an evil regime. He realized that for him, as a German Christian under Hitler, standing by God would have to mean sharing in God\u2019s suffering in and through the suffering of his covenantal people. As Bonhoeffer declared in 1935, following the propagation of the Nuremberg laws, \u2018Only those who shout for the Jews are permitted to sing Gregorian chants!\u2019 Bonhoeffer was keenly aware that \u2018shouting for the Jews\u2019 would eventually lead to his own suffering and he was willing to take this on. But he also came to realize that standing by the suffering God, and coming to the aid of those in whom God suffers, would inevitably lead to a further, more outrageous and demanding calling: the calling to \u2018take on guilt\u2019 on behalf of others.
\nFor example, \u2018Operation Seven\u2019, in which Bonhoeffer smuggled Jewish individuals out of Germany as an undercover agent of the Secret Service, would have been unthinkable without the willingness to fake documents, deceive and lie to frontier guards, and so forth. Belonging to Christ under Hitler pushed Bonhoeffer far beyond his comfort zone as a dutiful theologian and Christian. Yet he understood this was the only way in which he could actually remain a Christian, \u2018standing by God in his hour of grieving\u2019. Anything else would have been a flight from responsibility and eventually from God.
\nMy suggestion is that these observations help us understand the emphasis on God\u2019s forgiving mercy in the final line of the poem\u2014although this is not to imply that Bonhoeffer was simply organizing the poem according to his own personal experiences or longings. The weight given to the last line is wholly in keeping with his more principled considerations elsewhere. In his Ethics, for example, Bonhoeffer repeatedly notes how vital it is for Christians to leave all judgement to God and his mercy, instead of anticipating it by attempt to establish in advance that a particular course of action must be deemed sound, right, and justified. Christian existence is, therefore, marked by a distinctive risk, according to Bonhoeffer: not merely the risk of suffering, but also to need forgiveness in a more unsettling way than those who are primarily concerned about their own integrity, purity and untroubled identity.<\/p>\n
IV. Religious super-sessionism or theology of the cross?<\/p>\n
When I first approached this poem, admittedly, I thought Bonhoeffer had the order of the stanzas not quite right. At first sight, a reversed order of stanzas two and three would seem closer to theological common sense, resulting in a far more familiar argument:<\/p>\n
1. Humans are hopelessly religious, Christians and non-Christians alike. They naturally pray to God as creatures, but also as sinners who tend to manipulate God or even \u2018fabricate gods\u2019 according to their own desires and wishful imagination.
\n2. Hence the need for the great reversal: Instead of men-to-God, the movement must be from God to men\u2014as God\u2019s own response to the shortcoming of human religion. Christianity then, in acknowledging this reversal, is established as a thing beyond and above religion, if not as anti-religion.
\n3. From this would then neatly follow what the second stanza describes as a final climax: Those who have learned to overcome religion are thereby \u2018empowered\u2019 to aid God in helping to overcome the suffering in the world.<\/p>\n
If a reordering of stanzas two and three would seem to make theological common sense and would, in addition, lend itself nicely to a Trinitarian scheme of Creator, Redeemer, and Transformer of mankind, why does Bonhoeffer resist this obvious ordering? From the numerous corrections made to the draft version, we have ample evidence that he had been indeed tempted by a more conventional rationale at first, and that the final form of the poem was rather wrought from him. In the draft version, the last line of the second stanza read: \u2018Christians grasp their salvation in God\u2019s suffering\u2019\u2014much closer to the conventional account of \u2018accepting\u2019 the efficacy of Christ\u2019s atoning death for one\u2019s own individual salvation.
\nWhat led Bonhoeffer eventually to abandon the conventional scheme is, I believe, owed to his commitment to the theologia crucis tradition. The most obvious ordering of the poem\u2019s dramatic unfolding would have resulted in a triumphalist account of Christianity. Not only would it have exalted Christians over non-Christians, but also suggested Christianity\u2019s super-session of religion per se: on this reading, Christians may start out as religious beings, but having been converted through God\u2019s own initiative, they would eventually leave behind religion as a premature form of dealing with the divine.
\nIn this scheme, forgiveness, then, would be less a constant mark of the Christian life and more a way station, tied and confined to a shrunken moment of justification that is then \u2018put in effect\u2019 in practice to enable a noble self-sacrificial attitude. However, as Bonhoeffer understood, such a supersessionist account of religion would not only compromise the need for forgiveness or foster arrogance towards others who are deemed \u2018still\u2019 religious, it would also compromise what Bonhoeffer emphasized as the need to be faithful to the earth. The idea of a transcending religion as the elemental man-to-God movement eventually would compromise human creatureliness itself. It would make us forget that women and men are created nepheschim, throaty animals whose bodily and spiritual needs are not to be transcended in a quest towards autonomy and self-sustenance, but are precisely there to be satisfied by the Creator and Redeemer of all things. Creatures have no business in superseding the petition of the Lord\u2019s Prayer: \u2018Give us today our daily bread\u2019. Even the Eucharistic consummation of the bread of life remains, after all, a bodily, sensual, \u2018throaty\u2019 experience.<\/p>\n
V. Restored creatureliness: neither super-religion nor anti-religion<\/p>\n
To sum it up to this point: according to Bonhoeffer, we encounter religion in the ambiguity of being both a genuine reflection of our creatureliness and an expression of the human drive to secure one\u2019s own life. While the heathens are seen as religious in a total sense, \u2018lost in religion\u2019 as it were, in terms of a complete immersion into it, Christians are to take and are given to take a stand both inside and outside religion: when Bonhoeffer calls this stance outside religion \u2018metanoia\u2019\u2014away from the organizing of oneself as sinner, penitent or saint\u2014he is not speaking out against religion or proclaiming Christianity as anti-religion. The Christians\u2019 staying by God in his suffering is rather trans-religious: neither religious nor anti-religious; it is a form of existence sui generis that does not result from a criticism of religion or the abandoning of it, but from the listing to Christ\u2019s call to stay with him in the garden as something that is simply beyond anything a religious mind could possibly think up. Yet, for Bonhoeffer, the trans-religious standing by God opens up a renewed appreciation of the natural, earthly, this-worldly. It even opens up a new practice of religion\u2014a practice of religion that is incorporating the two other motions in its own life.
\nWe can take an illustration of this point from two of Bonhoeffer\u2019s other poems. In \u2018The Powers of Good\u2019, the third stanza reads: \u2018Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving \u2026 we will not falter, thankfully receiving all that is given by thy loving hand.\u2019 And the fourth stanza reads: \u2018But should it be thy will once more to release us to life\u2019s enjoyment and its good sunshine, that which we learned from sorrow shall increase us, and all our life be dedicated as thine.\u2019
\nWhile the third stanza envisions Bonhoeffer\u2019s own faithful \u2018standing by God\u2019, not shying away from partaking in God\u2019s suffering, the subsequent stanza is surprising as it speaks out in hope of a resumed enjoyable life, although not as a superseding of the former suffering, but as a ripe fruit of the former. \u2018All our life as thine\u2019\u2014this we may take a shortcut depiction of the new, restored, and converted religion of Christianity that does \u2018go to God\u2019 without rendering him \u2018one of the gods: as problem solver, sunshine maker, and health restorer. The line seems to envision a sort of converted religion in that it takes the creaturely goods that humans may and should desire, pray and hope for, not as occasions to eventually forget about God once these are received, but precisely as occasions to dedicate \u2018all our life as thine\u2019. To put the same idea in traditional Augustinian terms, the new, restored religion of the Christian faith alerts human beings to the beauty of the created goods whose using (uti) will be itself a matter of enjoying (frui) God\u2014the very same thing that the trans-religious act of staying by God in His suffering is teaching and instilling in those who partake in it.
\nA similar thrust can be observed in the poem that accompanied the same letter as \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019 on 8 July 1944: \u2018Who am I?\u2019 Read from the perspective of the homo religiosus, we would have expected the last line of the poem to offer a solution to the author\u2019s nagging question: when the God who truly knows us is to finally reveal to us our true identity. But, oddly, Bonhoeffer contents himself with a mere address of trust: \u2018Thou knowest, O God, I am thine\u2019. To know that God knows is enough. God-knowledge need not become self-knowledge in order to be validated in the here and now. It is enough to be \u2018in God\u2019, in his hands, embedded in his zachar, his divine remembering: there, humans can live in the midst of their unrest, nagging questions, and unresolved tensions.
\nSuch life means to assume the place assigned to us as creatures\u2014as it was symbolized in the religion of the original state of righteousness under the tree of knowledge. In this eon, though, we will have to bear in mind that genuine creatureliness is itself a miracle, a form of existence made possible in and through Christ as the one that restores the creaturely na\u00efvet\u00e9 to those who live a \u2018natural life\u2019. This is literally a second na\u00efvet\u00e9 that comes second in the order of reception\u2014it is adopted by our being adopted by Christ first\u2014but is also secondary in the sense of being a necessary corollary of the former. Without such christologically mediated this-worldliness, any appreciation of the natural love of the earth, and passion for the neighbour, would remain pagan, while the focus on Christ would remain Gnostic, oblivious of incarnation, cross, resurrection, and ascension.
\nWe see Bonhoeffer\u2019s diagnosis in his prison correspondence that we are heading towards a \u2018religion-less\u2019 age, and his commending of \u2018non-religious\u2019 modes of proclamation need to be carefully related to the threefold account of religion that we suggested. Within this threefold account, it is obvious that Bonhoeffer\u2019s critical emphasis targets the second mode: religion as strategy, and in particular the form it adopted in the history of Christianity since the time of the Renaissance. Only the deus ex machina as a working hypothesis has worn off, and only the domesticating form of religion is to be abandoned in a religion-less Christianity, while the first type of religion will remain a factor, as long as human beings are sojourners on this earth: crying for God\u2019s help in need is, of course, not alien even to those who have long abandoned God as a working hypothesis for their explaining the world.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s caveat for the Church in regards to its proclamation or pastoral strategies remains pressing in both cases: whether or not the religious a priori is in the process of withering or can, indeed, ever wither, it will be decisive for the Church not to rely on this religious a priori anyway: not to exploit an artificially nourished \u2018sense of ultimate dependency\u2019 or the weak hours that befall every human being, but rather to proclaim Christ as the one who confronts human pride, calls on whatever human gifts are there, and transforms them into the likeness of his image. The idea of a non-religious Christianity relates precisely to this strategic chastity that Bonhoeffer prescribes to the Church, and which our churches have found so hard to keep.
\nThe exciting turn in Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology of religion, as it is represented in our poem is, however, that trusting in Christ, living in Christ, and suffering with Christ will eventually also restore religion to us creatures, and us creatures to religion. It will initiate us into ways of crying for help without reducing God to a problem solver, into ways of asking for bread without succumbing to greed, and ways of observing the laws of nature and history without divinizing them, celebrating their autonomy or our own sensus historicus.<\/p>\n
VI. The paradigm of liturgy in a \u2018religion-less\u2019 world<\/p>\n
Indicative of this hopeful turn is the third stanza of the poem. We first notice how the grammatical subject changes: from men to God, who was part of the predicate in the first two stanzas. The third stanza relates the characterizing of God\u2019s activities to both previous stanzas and their respective domains: the God that \u2018goes to men in their distress\u2019 serves them with his atoning death at the cross and forgiveness, but he also \u2018feeds them\u2019 with bread. God is, in other words, not alien to the human needs that the homo religiosus articulates, when she \u2018prays for bread\u2019. Yet God chooses to answer this prayer by feeding the spirit alongside the body; he feeds the spirit, too, with his bread\u2014that is, with Jesus himself and his Word (Jn. 6:32\u201358). Feeding humans with his word, God does not merely respond to their spiritual need and hunger, but challenges them together with the articulation of their needs. In this sense, we can say that in responding to human religion, God is at the same time overcoming it. Yet he overcomes religion not in a way that legitimizes any sort of Christian supersessionism, but rather by laying bare religion\u2019s genuine domain: learning to live as creatures.
\nBy this, we are lead back to the first stanza which is to be read anew in the light of the third: by the power of the third stanza\u2014the power of the Holy Spirit\u2014religion as a \u2018cry\u2019 will be transformed into a restored creatureliness or a converted religion. This harks back to Luther\u2019s image of the primal church in and of the garden, where the giving of the law was meant to provide Adam with a means of concrete worship in obedience, and where he would gather with his family under the tree of knowledge to have their liturgy there. Just as Luther imagined liturgy as the core enactment of the (primal) religion in the state of original righteousness, so Bonhoeffer reckons with the practice of liturgy in a religion-less time: \u2018What do a church, a community, a sermon, a Christian life mean in a religion-less world?\u2019
\nIn fact, it is in liturgy that we can see the double-coded nature of \u2018religion\u2019 as through a prism: on the one hand, liturgy is religion, as it represents the organized, concrete, external, physical, social side of Christianity; on the other hand, it is also anti-religion, as the very content of the preaching of divine grace and its reception by the congregation depends on God\u2019s own activity. However, this latter fact does not demand the dissolution of the former either gradually or by revolutionary force (as the spiritualist movement in the Reformation era misunderstood). The very form of the liturgy, its rhythm, intervals, and so forth, we may call trans-religious as it goes beyond the sheer antinomy of pure religion and radical anti-religion. The very form of the liturgy, while in a sense being religious in itself (a \u2018made\u2019 ritual or \u2018organized\u2019 God encounter) takes the encounter eventually out of the hands of humans: a liturgical \u2018agenda\u2019 says what \u2018is to be done\u2019 as opposed to a pastor\u2019s or congregation\u2019s wilful fancy. This regularity and its shaping of time are structurally critical of human organizing and domesticating of the encounter with the divine. While we may think it is on us to \u2018schedule\u2019 worship, it is actually rather the liturgy that shapes our time\u2014literally in the praying of the hours, but also in terms of structuring the day, the week, and the church year.
\nThis dialectic finds an echo in the Lord\u2019s Prayer, where the petitions are not only framed and preceded by the plea for the coming of the kingdom, but are prescribed, in a sense, independently of the actual state of affairs: a Christian is required and used to pray for bread, even when not hungry, and perhaps fitted with a full storage room at home; she is used to pray for forgiveness even when not currently haunted by guilt or not even being aware of any recent trespasses; the petition on temptation does not have to be validated through a particular occasion on hand that might turn into a temptation. The Lord\u2019s Prayer as the grammar of any Christian addressing and approaching of God contains religious petitions, but it is not a religious prayer. The individual petitions address individual human needs and predicaments, but they are united in their overall service to the coming of God\u2019s Kingdom that is not a religious idea. The Lord\u2019s Prayer trains disciples of the one who told them to pray like this in the second na\u00efvet\u00e9 of a \u2018converted\u2019 religion or christologically mediated creatureliness.<\/p>\n
VII. Nothing more and nothing less<\/p>\n
The position and content of the third stanza reminds us again that what the second stanza emphasizes as distinctively Christian is not an achievement, although it is certainly a form of action; it is no claim to superiority, although certainly responsive to a calling from on high. The notion of \u2018standing by God\u2019 is itself indicative here. There is, as Bonhoeffer stresses, a certain passive aspect to it: \u2018to let oneself be drawn into Jesus\u2019 way\u2019. \u2018To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man\u2014not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.\u2019
\nParticipating in the sufferings of God in the world, however, does not make one a bystander. It is active persevering in the face of potentially infinite impulses to flee. What Bonhoeffer recalls as having had in mind when composing this line, is the fraught abiding of Mary, the women, and John as recounted in Jn. 19:24f, who are described as \u2018standing by the cross\u2019. At one point in Bonhoeffer\u2019s life, \u2018standing by God\u2019 actually took the shape of an action that he explicitly contrasted to fleeing: when his American friends invited him back to New York in 1939 for an extended lecture visit in order to protect him from likely threats in Germany, Bonhoeffer, after wrestling with himself for days, eventually came to a decision to return. In a farewell letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, he etched his thoughts: \u2018I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.\u2019
\nWhile the twists and turns of his own life helped Bonhoeffer understand that \u2018standing by God in his trials\u2019 can be daringly active, resulting perhaps in the most difficult, demanding, or even heroic deeds on behalf of \u2018the least of these brothers and sisters of his\u2019 (Matthew 25), his theological insights also compelled him to emphasize the same claim the other way round: no matter how outrageous, heroic, and praiseworthy the deeds that emerge from the Christian calling, their very essence is no more than simply standing by Christ, sharing in his life, his suffering, and the trials of his people. If this is the understanding of the Christian life, then there is nothing in it that claims merit or honour or favour with God or at least in one\u2019s self-estimation. Nor is there anything to suggest that the idea of \u2018making the world a better place\u2019 could ever be the driving force of Christian action in the world.
\nSuch an idea would, for example, have rendered Operation Seven a futile if not ridiculous undertaking, as some of Bonhoeffer\u2019s secular friends in the resistance movement actually saw it: why risk your life and potentially the future success of the attempts to end the nightmare for the sake of only a handful of Jewish lives? Bonhoeffer knew very well that the 14 people he managed to smuggle over the Swiss border would appear as nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of Jews tortured and killed in the concentration camps. Yet, it needed to be done, as fleeing their request for help would have meant fleeing from Christ\u2019s suffering and hence from his own identity as a Christian. For it is not by success, or any other scale that the Christian is measured: no more and no less is asked from a Christian than standing by God in his suffering\u2014which is Bonhoeffer\u2019s version of \u2018faith active in love\u2019 (Gal. 5:6).
\n\u2018I discovered later and I\u2019m still discovering right up to this moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith \u2026 By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life\u2019s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely in the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world\u2014watching with Christ in Gethsemane.\u2019 As this was what he regarded the only \u2018prerogative\u2019 of Christians, Bonhoeffer understood that to want Christianity to be more, whether a \u2018superior\u2019 religion or an \u2018anti-religion\u2019, would, in effect, be less.<\/p>\n
10<\/p>\n
\u2018Jonah\u2019<\/p>\n
Guilt and Promise<\/p>\n
Stephen Plant<\/p>\n
\u2018Jona\u2019<\/p>\n
Sie schrieen vor dem Tod, und ihre Leiber krallten
\nsich an den nassen, sturmgepeitschten Tauen,
\nund irre Blicke schauten voller Grauen
\ndas Meer im Aufruhr j\u00e4h entfesselter Gewalten.<\/p>\n
\u2018Ihr ewigen, ihr guten, ihr erz\u00fcrnten G\u00f6tter,
\nhelft oder gebt ein Zeichen, das uns k\u00fcnde
\nden, der Euch kr\u00e4nkte mit geheimer S\u00fcnde,
\nden M\u00f6rder oder Eidvergess\u2019nen oder Sp\u00f6tter,<\/p>\n
der uns zum Unheil seine Missetat verbirgt
\num seines Stolzes \u00e4rmlichen Gewinnes!\u2019
\nSo flehten sie. Und Jona sprach: \u2018Ich bin es!
\nIch s\u00fcndigte vor Gott. Mein Leben ist verwirkt.<\/p>\n
Tut mich von Euch! Mein ist die Schuld. Gott z\u00fcrnt mir sehr.
\nDer Fromme soll nicht mit dem S\u00fcnder enden!\u2019
\nSie zitterten. Doch dann mit starken H\u00e4nden
\nverstie\u00dfen sie den Schuldigen. Da stand das Meer.<\/p>\n
\u2018Jonah\u2019<\/p>\n
In fear of death they cried aloud and, clinging fast
\nto wet ropes straining on the battered deck,
\nthey gazed in stricken terror at the sea
\nthat now, unchained in sudden fury, lashed the ship.<\/p>\n
\u2018O gods eternal, excellent, provoked to anger,
\nhelp us, or give a sign, that we may know
\nwho has offended you by secret sin,
\nby breach of oath, or heedless blasphemy, or murder,<\/p>\n
who brings us to disaster by misdeed still hidden,
\nto make a paltry profit for his pride.\u2019
\nThus they besought. And Jonah said, \u2018Behold,
\nI sinned before the Lord of hosts. My life is forfeit.<\/p>\n
Cast me away! My guilt must bear the wrath of God;
\nthe righteous shall not perish with the sinner!\u2019
\nThey trembled. But with hands that knew no weakness
\nthey cast the offender from their midst. The sea stood still.<\/p>\n
(Translation: John Bowden)<\/p>\n
I. Introduction<\/p>\n
b. Megillah 31a\u2014On the Day of Atonement we read \u2018After the death\u2019 [Lev. 16] and for haftarah, \u2018For thus said the high and lofty one\u2019 [Isa. 57:15]. At minchah we read the section of forbidden marriages [Lev. 18] and for haftarah the book of Jonah.<\/p>\n
(Directions in the Talmud for texts to be read at Yom Kippur).<\/p>\n
Guilt and promise are at odds: guilt pulls life into the past, promise pushes life into the future. Guilt draws a life back to things that have been and that cannot be changed; promise directs a life forward to things that are not, but which can yet be. Yet though guilt and promise appear opposing forces, in God they are eventually reconciled. In the atonement effected by Jesus Christ, God leads human beings from sin to the promise of new life; in Him, guilt is transformed into promise.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019 is a poem in which the transformation of guilt into promise is transfixed in a moment of its happening; a moment in which a life configured by Jonah\u2019s past sin is reconfigured towards its future by God\u2019s promise. Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019 imagines a crisis in which a past act which cannot be changed is placed humbly into the hands of God, who alone stills storms and calms seas. In confessing his guilt, Jonah confesses God. In this poetic renarration of an episode in the biblical book of Jonah\u2014at a point in time when Bonhoeffer himself was about to be cast into the malevolent sea of fin de r\u00e8gne Germany under National-Socialist tyranny\u2014we sense Bonhoeffer entrusting his life to the judgement and promise of God.
\nIt is tempting, in reading Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019, to be drawn into a quest for meaning; but whose quest, and which meaning? The quest and the meaning of the author\/s of the biblical book of Jonah?\u2026 Bonhoeffer\u2019s quest for meaning in the biblical book of Jonah?\u2026 Or our quest for meaning in Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem? These are seductive questions: but if Bonhoeffer is to be believed, all quests for meaning\u2014existential and hermeneutical\u2014need to be understood in the light of what in the scriptures is called promise. Writing not long before he wrote \u2018Jonah\u2019, Bonhoeffer warned Bethge:<\/p>\n
In these turbulent times we repeatedly lose sight of what really makes life worth living. We think that, because this or that person is living, it really makes sense [Sinn] for us to live too. But the truth is that if this earth was good enough for the man Jesus Christ, if such a man as Jesus lived, then, and only then, has life a meaning [Sinn] for us \u2026 The unbiblical idea of \u2018meaning\u2019 [Sinnes] is indeed only a translation of what the Bible calls \u2018promise\u2019 [Verhei\u00dfung].<\/p>\n
The search for meaning and the hearing of promise are related but not identical events. The point is amplified by Heinz Eduard T\u00f6dt, who explains that for Bonhoeffer, the term promise \u2018points out that something, brought from God by the gospel, comes to meet the human being, whereas meaning is something that the human being looks for in human life and its surroundings, in the past, the present, and the future\u2014often enough in vain.\u2019 A promise, then, is something given and received, while meaning is something one searches for oneself. Accepting this, we may decide that in reading Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019, a distinction needs to be drawn between seeking meaning and being receptive to promise. Good textual exegetes come in many forms and may hold many convictions; but promise is something one only prepares for in a mind-frame of what Simone Weil called attente de Dieu. It is this sense of waiting on God that Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem conveys, and which commentary on the poem should pray, if dimly, to reflect.
\nThe essay that follows proceeds in three stages. In the first stage, I want to turn attention away from Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem towards the biblical book of Jonah. My intention here is to situate Bonhoeffer in a community of interpretation and to probe the question of why this particular book was the one that proved fit for purpose at this decisive moment in his life. Turning back to Bonhoeffer, I next want to situate the poem in time and place before, thirdly, reading the poem in light of the themes of guilt and promise adumbrated above\u2014themes brought into focus through Bonhoeffer\u2019s understanding of vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung). These are not the only interesting or possibly fruitful directions one might take in reading the poem, but they are, I hope, ones that arise naturally from the text of the poem itself.<\/p>\n
II. The Book of Jonah: a whistle-stop tour<\/p>\n
Why Jonah? Of all the passages in all the books in all the Bible, Bonhoeffer walks in to this one: why? We can readily understand why a \u2018profoundly biblical theologian\u2019, at a key moment in his life, might use a biblical passage or a biblical book as a still to condense thoughts and feelings to their essence; but what was it about this book that drew Bonhoeffer to it? In early December 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote that for some months \u2018[my] thoughts and feelings seem to be getting more and more like those of the Old Testament, and in recent months I have been reading the Old Testament much more than the New\u2019. And yet there is no indication that Bonhoeffer had the book of Jonah in mind. Prior to writing the poem, Jonah\u2019s story left scarcely any trace on Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology. Bonhoeffer neither underlined nor made marginal notes on the text of Jonah in his \u2018Lutherbibel\u2019; he mentions Jonah in an undergraduate essay in connection with repentance; in 1937 he again mentions Jonah, this time as God\u2019s witness, in a circular letter to the Finkenwalde brethren; and a year later we once again find a passing mention in a lecture on theology in the Confessing Church. But compared to his engagement with the book of Genesis, or with the Psalms, or with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, or in his sermons with other Major and Minor Prophets, Bonhoeffer\u2019s engagement with the book of Jonah prior to writing the poem appears, on the basis of what he wrote, to have been slight. At least once Bonhoeffer had unflatteringly been likened to Jonah\u2014when Karl Barth instructed Bonhoeffer in London to stop \u2018playing Elijah under the juniper tree or Jonah under the gourd\u2019 and to return to Germany \u2018with all guns blazing\u2019\u2014but this was more than a decade before the poem was written and refers to quite a different episode in the story of Jonah to that taken up by Bonhoeffer in 1944. Which still leaves the question \u2018why Jonah?\u2019
\nThe biblical book of Jonah has several unusual features. The eponymous prophetic books of the Bible generally contain three elements, though typically not in equal proportions: they contain direct and indirect words given by God through the prophet to the people; words addressed by the prophet to God (for example in prayer or in lament); and material relating to the biographical experiences of the prophet. The book of Jonah has all three, but material detailing the biography of Jonah is proportionately its main focus. This makes it\u2014by comparison with the other prophetic books\u2014the only prophetic book to be primarily about the prophet. In his Ethics Bonhoeffer had argued that, for Christians, what matters is not to pattern one\u2019s life on some biblical character\u2014such as Abraham or Peter\u2014but to be conformed to the \u2018Gestalt\u2019\u2014the form or character\u2014of Jesus Christ. Does Bonhoeffer now identify himself with a moment in Jonah\u2019s story, an aspect of his experience or a feature of his character?
\nA second unusual feature of Jonah is that it is the only prophetic book in which the prophet is sent to proclaim his message in a foreign land. When Bonhoeffer arrived in America in 1939 it immediately became clear to him that he had made a mistake. One of the reasons he gave to Reinhold Niebuhr for his decision to return to Germany was that he felt the necessity of living through \u2018this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany\u2019. Is it possible that Bonhoeffer should see himself in the story of a prophet whose calling was to a nation other than his own?
\nA third unusual aspect concerns what genre Jonah belongs to. The book can be broken down into several episodes: Jonah\u2019s call and decision to run from it; the sea voyage and its stormy outcome; the fish that swallows Jonah and his prayer in the fish\u2019s belly; Jonah\u2019s prophesy to the Ninevites and their repentance; Jonah\u2019s anger with God\u2019s mercy; God\u2019s dialogue with Jonah seated beneath a miraculous bush. But what sort of book is it? If it contains too much biographical material and too little oracular text to fit neatly with the other Minor Prophets, is it best classified as history, or legend, didactic story, parable or allegory? Or is it a \u2018chowder\u2019 of several genres? One intriguing possibility is that it takes the form\u2014very loosely speaking\u2014of a \u2018midrash\u2019 either on the miraculous exchanges between God and Elijah in the book of Kings or more likely, on Exod. 34:6\u20137a, cited in Jon. 4:2b as a summation of the book\u2019s message: \u2018The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin\u2019. The body of biblical commentary termed \u2018midrash\u2019 arose, properly speaking, in the Rabbinic schools in the early centuries of the Christian era. They varied in form and content, but tended to be characterized by use of story to convey meaning and by the use of questions that, by interrogating characters in the story, serve as a literary device to put the hearer in the place of the character questioned. Is this method foreshadowed in Jonah? There are fourteen questions in the book of Jonah: seven addressed to Jonah, and seven addressed by Jonah to God\u2014a symmetry that can hardly be unintended. This suggests that the book was developed as an interactive story to be spoken and heard with a view to instructing listeners willing to participate in its narrative twists and turns.
\nFinally, the book of Jonah is unusual because of the extent of uncertainty about its setting. Other prophetic books, to be sure, lack an explicit social and political context, but their contents usually lead commentators to agree about their likely Sitz im Leben. The text of Jonah, however, leads to no such consensus about when, where or why it was written. Though it is clear from Jon. 1:1, and from the reference to Jonah the prophet in 2 Kgs 14:23\u20137 that it is intended to be set in the 8th century BCE, the book itself is adrift from a historical context. It is likely to have been written towards the end or soon after the end of the exile. But\u2014even for the shrewdest commentator\u2014fixing its date can only be a matter of guesswork. Which leaves us still with the question why did this book draw Bonhoeffer in?<\/p>\n
III. Jonah: a biblical text and its afterlives<\/p>\n
if Bonhoeffer himself won\u2019t give us a direct answer to that question, perhaps an answer is suggested by the history of the book\u2019s interpretation. Fortuitously, just such a history exists: in colourful imagery invited by the fabulous qualities of the book of Jonah itself, Sherwood\u2019s A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture gives us a glimpse \u2018into the Taylor\u2019s shop and gourmet restaurant that is the interpretive history of the book of Jonah\u2019. Sherwood\u2019s analysis helps us to see Bonhoeffer within the community of readers stretching from the Patriarchs, through Rabbis and Reformers, and on into the 19th century, when the plausibility or implausibility of a sea creature that could swallow a man became a battleground for those slugging out the factual truth of the biblical record. What is often true in the history of biblical interpretation is particularly true in the case of Jonah: \u2018knowledge and meaning are agglutinative \u2026 new products can be made by bringing together existing traditions and recombining them\u2019. Readers of Jonah, even new readers interpreting the story in new situations, stand on the shoulders of readers before them.
\nFor the Patriarchs, Jonah and Jesus were typological twins. This was not only because, as Augustine observed, \u2018[t]o the healthy and pure internal eye [Christ] is everywhere\u2019, but also because the gospels themselves warranted typological comparisons between Jonah and Jesus. For Luke the correlation has to do with judgement and repentance: \u2018just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation\u2019 (Lk. 11:30). Matthew shares with Luke an emphasis on judgement but adds, \u2018just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth\u2019 (Mt. 12:40), drawing an analogy between Jonah in the whale and Jesus in the tomb. From the loam of these typologies, elaborate analogies bloomed for both Patriarchs and Rabbis in which ship, sailors, waves, and fish became symbolically employed: the ship became the Church, humanity, or the synagogue; the sailors became the apostles, Romans, or Jews opposed to Christ; the storm became humankind\u2019s affliction, the storms that shipwrecked Peter or Paul, or the work of the devil; the fish came to symbolize the devil, its jaws representing the jaws of hell, or even the concept of time, consuming all things; the Ninevites then represented either the gentiles or (for Bede) the splendid Church. However, above all, Jonah proved a wonderfully malleable symbol. For most of the Patriarchs, Jonah represented Christ (the exception was Augustine, who saw in him both Christ and fleshly Israel); for some Rabbis, and for later Christian interpreters, Jonah was the Torahbound Jew, a personification of cruel law, clinging to the letter while God goads him with mercy. For Jerome he was a nationalist, defending Israel against the widening of God\u2019s mercy to mere gentiles; while for Luther, struck by the animistic reference of his Hebrew name, Jonah was the dove who pointed towards the Holy Spirit.
\nIt matters little how much or, as seems more likely, how little of this history of interpretation Bonhoeffer was conscious of or influenced by in his own appropriation of Jonah. What matters are the possible interpretations that this history invites. Sherwood\u2019s conclusion is that:<\/p>\n
[m]eme-like, the book seems to cue in a whole range of survivals\/mutations: with its chowder-like mixtures of death wishes and aqua-psalms and shivering ships, the book spawns comic riffs on prophets \u2018snoring slobberingly\u2019 and serious meditations on the alienation and powerlessness of the human protagonist; and by anticipating the alliterative, cartoonish, paranomastic, and associative linguistic effects through which the rabbis, Auster and the Gawain-poet will go on prolonging and stretching the life of the \u2018Word\u2019, it seems to inaugurate and legitimate an expansive approach to interpretation.<\/p>\n
Jonah is a questioning and non-conformist book that delights in questioning and non-conformist readings, a story begging to be remade and retold, a book richly empathetic to human beings and \u2018lacking in reassurance of the comfort of the divine\u2019. Why did Bonhoeffer fix his eye on the book of Jonah? Might the answer simply be that it presents an especially suitable surface for a palimpsest on which Bonhoeffer could enscribe his own meaning? That is part of the answer, but I do not think it is the whole answer. For that, we need to return to where we began, to the themes of guilt and promise in this episode in the book of Jonah and their resonance with Bonhoeffer\u2019s own situation.<\/p>\n
IV. Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019 in its Sitz im Leben<\/p>\n
The catastrophic failure of the 20 July bomb plot set the scene for the events leading up to the composition of \u2018Jonah\u2019. Many whose involvement was immediately clear were unhesitatingly executed; others lasted only as long as their interrogation. The plotters were intelligent calculators of risk, and it was clear that it was only a matter of time before nooses tightened around all their necks. The Allied landings in Normandy and the inexorable advance of the Soviet army, however, meant that there was always a chance that the war would end before their execution. Bonhoeffer, aware of all the ramifications, worked on determinedly with his prison theology and waited to see what events would unfold.
\nThe answer came on 22 September 1944, when the Gestapo discovered records of the Abwehr conspiracy, which General Beck\u2014against the advice of Hans von Dohnanyi that they should be destroyed\u2014had ordered to be held in a branch of the Military Intelligence in Zossen. Probably acting on information yielded in the files, on 1 October the Gestapo arrested Bonhoeffer\u2019s brother Klaus. A day later Corporal Knobloch, the guard with whom Bonhoeffer had planned to escape Tegel prison, called at the Schleicher home to say that Dietrich had called off escape plans to avoid making matters worse for Klaus and of placing his fianc\u00e9e and family in further danger. The arrest of Dietrich\u2019s brother in law, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, followed on 4 October and of his Confessing Church colleague Friedrich Justus Perels on 5 October. This was the date on which he wrote \u2018Jonah\u2019. Eberhard Bethge was arrested a few days later. Unaware that the snare was closing on Bethge himself, Bonhoeffer passed the poem to Maria von Wedemeyer with the instruction: \u2018please type out the poem and send it to Eberhard. He\u2019ll know who it\u2019s from without being told\u2019, adding \u2018You may find it a trifle incomprehensible. Or will you?\u2019 On 8 October, as he had been expecting, Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Gestapo prison in the cellar of the Reich Central Security Headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Stra\u00dfe. He was able to send only one more poem beyond this before communication with his family ceased. The poem \u2018Jonah\u2019 can be placed, then, very precisely at the moment at which Bonhoeffer gave up his plans for escape and accepted the likelihood of death. It was written in the days in which he finally accepted what must for some weeks have been increasingly obvious, that his survival could only come about at the cost of unacceptable risk to others. But the urgency of this immediate context should not replace, but complement wider contextual cues. Bonhoeffer\u2019s sense of responsibility extended beyond his immediate family and friends\u2014to the conspiracy, to the Church, and to Germany. The essay for co-conspirators, \u2018After Ten Years\u2019\u2014which contained insights Bonhoeffer found important enough to incorporate into his Ethics\u2014wrestled with the moral impact on the conspirators of a decade of secret opposition and dissimulation. And the Church, too, had failed, leading Bonhoeffer to draft a post-war confession of guilt. The likelihood of death acted as a lens focusing reflections on guilt and promise that had kept Bonhoeffer company since the early thirties.<\/p>\n
V. Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Jonah\u2019<\/p>\n
The poem is short\u2014after \u2018Christians and Pagans\u2019, it is the next shortest of the prison poems. Its four stanzas, each of four lines, follow a disciplined ABBA rhyming pattern. Both the brevity of the poem and the tightness of its form help convey the tense mood of the poem\u2019s subject matter, a tension emphasized by the staccato effect of some of the poem\u2019s short phrases and sentences, e.g. in the last line of the third stanza, \u2018Ich s\u00fcndigte vor Gott. Mein Leben ist verwirkt\u2019 (\u2018I sinned against God. My life is forfeit\u2019). This is especially effective in the last line of the poem, in which Bonhoeffer uses a direct citation from the Lutherbibel: \u2018Da stand das Meer\u2019\u2014\u2018the sea was still\u2019. At key moments, such as the final line and in the preceding stanza when Jonah owns up to his responsibility for God\u2019s anger saying \u2018Ich bin es\u2019\u2014\u2018I am the one\u2019\u2014, Bonhoeffer pares his language down to words of one syllable. If indeed Bonhoeffer is identifying with Jonah at this point, what is he guilty of? What is the sin to which Bonhoeffer owns up? In popular reception of the book (in medieval as well as modern times) Jonah and the whale have been as inseparable as Laurel and Hardy: the medieval scribes and modern children\u2019s book illustrators had a whale of a time picturing one in particular of the book\u2019s episodes. It is therefore striking that Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem renarrates what is effectively seen in two of the drama-scenes of Jonah (Jon. 1:4\u201316), and concludes at the instant before the great fish rears its head. Possibly, in its title and leading character, Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem evokes the whole drama of the book, but its focus is very narrowly on one aspect of Jonah\u2019s story and its cut-off point\u2014the storm stilled as Jonah sinks beneath the waves (v. 15)\u2014seems quite deliberate in ignoring the book\u2019s voracious co-star. Yet though Bonhoeffer decided to focus the action of the poem on vv. 4\u201315, it then follows the biblical account very faithfully. The biblical story is beautifully crafted in a symmetrical pattern:<\/p>\n
A. The Lord hurls a storm
\nB. The sailors pray
\nC. The sailors act
\nD. The sailors question Jonah
\nE. Jonah speaks
\nD. The sailors question Jonah
\nE. Jonah speaks
\nC. The sailors act
\nA. The storm ceases<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer reduces the elements of the story somewhat, but retains the essential symmetry of the pericope:<\/p>\n
A. The storm breaks
\nB. The sailors pray
\nC. Jonah speaks
\nB. the sailors act
\nA. The storm ceases<\/p>\n
The first stanza describes, in compelling physical detail, a fearful storm that beats the ship in which Jonah is travelling. The second and the first two lines of the third stanzas are in direct speech reporting the prayer of the sailors asking that the guilty one be identified. In the following six lines, Jonah answers, first acknowledging his guilt, and then instructing the sailors to cast him overboard, since the pious shall not share the sinner\u2019s fate. In the closing lines, trembling, the sailors cast Jonah overboard, and the sea is stilled. Bonhoeffer\u2019s decision to end the poem before the prophet is saved from drowning focuses attention on Jonah\u2019s willingness to sacrifice himself for his fellow travellers. The theme, in other words, is not so much Jonah\u2019s salvation, but his willingness to die for the salvation of others, even though they are not fellow countrymen (since they have no knowledge of Yahweh until Jonah names Him). A natural supposition is that Bonhoeffer senses here an intimation of the conspirators\u2019 willingness to sacrifice themselves for the German people. The fact that he cuts off the poem at v. 15 heightens the sense that this is what he intends to convey, since it means he does not attend to the sailors\u2019 assertion of the sovereignty of Yahweh above all other gods in v. 16. Neither is this the only key theme excluded by the poem\u2019s narrow focus: the narrator seems to draw everything towards the \u2018punch-line\u2019 in Jon. 4:2, which sums up the story with the mercy of Yahweh who may change his mind about punishing the sinful where there is true repentance. for Bonhoeffer, the penultimate note of guilt in the last line is followed not by the ultimate affirmation of God\u2019s mercy, but with the more open end \u2018the sea was still\u2019. This is Jonah in close-up, with all attention focused on God\u2019s judgement, a judgement expressed in the powerful imagery of the stilled sea. But the judgement Bonhoeffer is concerned with is not simply an event in which God and Jonah alone are involved: it is a judgement that impacts upon the sailors\u2019 lives too. Jonah\u2019s acknowledgement of guilt and his instruction to cast him overboard suggests both acknowledgement of guilt and a taking of responsibility for the lives of others. Described in this way, does Jonah appear to be an archetypal Stellvertreter\u2014one who stands in place of others? Is Jonah\u2019s action in telling the sailors to cast him overboard, an instance of Stellvertretung, of vicarious representative action?<\/p>\n
VI. Guilt, promise and \u2018the structure of responsible life\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Vicarious representative action\u2019 was one of Bonhoeffer\u2019s longest standing and most cherished theological and ethical ideas\u2014one that he had been thinking through since writing Sanctorum Communio. The fullest expression of the theme, however, unfolds in the fragment \u2018History and Good\u2019 in Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics. There, vicarious representative action is described as a form of responsible life, that is, of a life \u2018lived in answer to the life of Jesus Christ\u2019. Less complete forms of responsibility exist in other ethics, to be sure, but in the strict sense Bonhoeffer\u2019s unfolding of \u2018responsibility\u2019 \u2018denotes the complete wholeness and unity of the answer to the reality that is given to us in Jesus Christ\u2019. Such responsibility is accountable not to criteria such as usefulness, or adherence to a principle (such as honour), or to an abstract ideal such as patriotism. It is accountable only to Jesus Christ in his \u2018Yes and No to our life\u2019. There are two aspects to this \u2018representivity\u2019. The first is that the vicarious representative represents Jesus Christ. This is because the Stellvertreter gives up any attempt to justify himself; \u2018[r]ather\u2019, continues Bonhoeffer, \u2018I take responsibility and answer for Jesus Christ, and with that I naturally also take responsibility for the commission I have been charged with by him.\u2019 Yet, secondly, the vicarious representative also represents other people. Taking up responsibility is always something embedded in social structures\u2014such as the family, government, or work place; responsibility is always responsibility for another person.
\nTowards the end of the fragment, Bonhoeffer sums up his attempt to grasp the \u2018structure of responsible life\u2019 under the rubrics of \u2018vicarious representative action, accordance with reality, [and] taking on guilt\u2019. Taking on guilt (\u2018Schuld\u00fcbernahme\u2019) rolls together a free acceptance of one\u2019s own guilt and a taking on of the guilt of others (e.g., of church, or of nation). Bonhoeffer writes:<\/p>\n
Those who in acting responsibly take on guilt\u2014which is inescapable for any responsible person\u2014place this guilt on themselves, not on someone else; they stand up for it and take responsibility for it. They do so not out of a sacrilegious and reckless belief in their own power, but in the knowledge of being forced into this freedom and of their dependence on grace in its exercise.<\/p>\n
The poem \u2018Jonah\u2019 distils Bonhoeffer\u2019s sense of what is involved in vicarious, representative action. In doing so, something of the flavour of Bonhoeffer\u2019s action in taking responsibility transfers to his representation of Jonah, as an Islay malt whisky takes on the flavour of the sea beside which it is distilled and aged.
\nIf this is indeed what is going on in Bonhoeffer\u2019s poem, then we have here a reading of the Jonah story in perfect harmony with the centuries-old Jewish tradition, prescribed by the Talmud, of reading Jonah on the festival of atonement.<\/p>\n
11<\/p>\n
\u2018The Death of Moses\u2019<\/p>\n
Why Moses?<\/p>\n
Craig J. Slane<\/p>\n
\u2018Der Tod des Mose\u2019<\/p>\n
Auf dem Gipfel des Gebirges steht
\nMose, der Mann Gottes und Prophet.<\/p>\n
Seine Augen blicken unverwandt
\nin das heilige, gelobte Land.<\/p>\n
Da\u00df er auf das Sterben ihn bereite,
\ntritt der Herr dem alten Knecht zur Seite,<\/p>\n
will auf H\u00f6hen, wo die Menschen schweigen
\nselber ihm verhei\u00df\u2019ne Zukunft zeigen,<\/p>\n
breitet zu des Wandrers m\u00fcden F\u00fc\u00dfen
\nseine Heimat aus, ihn still zu gr\u00fc\u00dfen,<\/p>\n
sie im letzten Atemzug zu segnen
\nund dem Tod in Frieden zu begegnen.<\/p>\n
\u2018Aus der Ferne sollst das Heil du sehen,
\ndoch dein Fu\u00df soll nicht hin\u00fcbergehen!\u2019<\/p>\n
Und die alten Augen schauen, schauen
\nferne Dinge wie im Morgengrauen.<\/p>\n
Staub von Gottes m\u00e4cht\u2019ger Hand geknetet
\nIhm zur Opferschale\u2014Mose betet.<\/p>\n
\u2018So erf\u00fcllst Du, Herr, was Du versprochen,
\nniemals hast Du mir Dein Wort gebrochen.<\/p>\n
Ob es Deine Gnaden oder Strafen
\nwaren; immer kamen sie und trafen.<\/p>\n
Aus dem Frondienst hast Du uns gerettet,
\nuns in Deinen Armen sanft gebettet,<\/p>\n
bist durch W\u00fcste und durch Meereswogen
\nwunderbar vor uns einhergezogen,<\/p>\n
hast des Volkes Murren, Schrein und Klagen
\n\u00fcberlange in Geduld getragen.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Death of Moses\u2019<\/p>\n
On the summit of the mountain stands
\nMoses, the prophet, in God\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n
His eyes are steady and his vision clear,
\nto see the holy, promised land appear.<\/p>\n
That he might for his death be ready,
\nGod held his aged servant steady.<\/p>\n
On the heights where no one goes,
\nto him, the promised land God shows.<\/p>\n
Spread beneath the wanderer\u2019s tired feet,
\nlies the home he longs to greet,<\/p>\n
blessing it with his last breath,
\nhe is prepared in peace for death.<\/p>\n
\u2018From afar, you see the saving work of my hand,
\nbut shall not enter, nor tread upon, the promised land.\u2019<\/p>\n
And the old eyes gazed upon the distant sight,
\nappearing dimly in the morning light.<\/p>\n
Clay, moulded by God\u2019s mighty hand, he was made
\na sacrificial vessel. Moses prayed:<\/p>\n
\u2018Thus you fulfil what you have spoken,
\nyour word to me was never broken.<\/p>\n
Whether your grace or punishment was set,
\nit always came and must be met.<\/p>\n
Out of the house of bondage have you set us free
\nthat we your belov\u00e9d children might be.<\/p>\n
Through raging waters and desert land
\nwonderfully have you led us by the hand;<\/p>\n
the people\u2019s grumbles, complaints and scorn,
\nwith patience you have graciously borne.<\/p>\n
Nicht durch G\u00fcte lie\u00dfen sie sich leiten
\nzu des Glaubensweges Herrlichkeiten,<\/p>\n
lie\u00dfen Gier und G\u00f6tzendienst gew\u00e4hren
\nstatt vom Brot der Gnade sich zu n\u00e4hren,<\/p>\n
bis Dein Zorn mit Pest und Schlangenbissen
\ntiefe L\u00fccken in Dein Volk gerissen.<\/p>\n
Des verhei\u00df\u2019nen Landes k\u00fcnft\u2019ge Erben
\nfielen als Emp\u00f6rer ins Verderben.<\/p>\n
In der Mitte ihrer Wanderschaft
\nhast Du sie im Grimm hinweggerafft.<\/p>\n
Wolltest eins nur an den Deinen schauen
\nZuversicht und gl\u00e4ubiges Vertrauen.<\/p>\n
Aber alle, die Dir Treue schwuren,
\ndie am Schilfmeer Deine Macht erfuhren,<\/p>\n
von Dir haben sie ihr Herz gewandt;
\nihre Leiber deckt der W\u00fcstensand.<\/p>\n
Die zu ihrem Heile Du gef\u00fchrt
\nhaben Aufruhr gegen Dich gesch\u00fcrt.<\/p>\n
Von dem einst begnadeten Geschlecht
\nblieb Dir auch nicht einer treu und recht.<\/p>\n
Als die V\u00e4ter Du dahingenommen,
\nals ein neu Geschlecht heraufgekommen,<\/p>\n
und als nun die Jungen wie die Alten
\nDeine Worte h\u00f6hnten und Dich schalten,<\/p>\n
Herr, Du wei\u00dft, da ist in hohen Jahren
\nmir ein Wort des Unmuts j\u00e4h entfahren.<\/p>\n
Ungeduld und zweifelnde Gedanken,
\nmeinen Glauben brachten sie ins Wanken.<\/p>\n
Not by kindness only have they learnt in those days
\nthe stubborn paths of faith and triumphant praise,<\/p>\n
when they lusted after idols to your face,
\ninstead of feeding upon the bread of your grace,<\/p>\n
until your anger with plague and deadly snake
\ngreat gaps among your people make.<\/p>\n
The future heirs of the promised land
\nfell like outcast rebels in the sand.<\/p>\n
In the midst of their wandering way,
\nin your fury, you cast them away.<\/p>\n
You sought for one the multitude through;
\none that was faithful and true,<\/p>\n
but all those who swore to be true
\nwhen the sea of reeds your power knew,<\/p>\n
departed from you in their hearts
\nand left their bodies in desert parts.<\/p>\n
Those you led to their salvation
\nhave risen against you, a rebel nation.<\/p>\n
Of this generation, once your delight,
\nnot one remained true to you and right.<\/p>\n
When you rejected the elders with scorn,
\nwhen a new generation was born,<\/p>\n
and now when the young like the old in their day
\nscoff at your word and from you turn away,<\/p>\n
Lord you know, in the course of the years,
\na careless word from me reached your ears.<\/p>\n
Doubting and impatient thought
\nalmost brought my faith to nought.<\/p>\n
Du vergabst; doch ist\u2019s ein brennend Feuer,
\nvor der Treue stehn als Ungetreuer.<\/p>\n
Deine N\u00e4he und Dein Angesicht
\nsind dem Reuigen ein schmerzend Licht.<\/p>\n
Deine Trauer und Dein gro\u00dfer Zorn
\ngr\u00e4bt sich in mein Fleisch als Todesdorn.<\/p>\n
Vor dem heil\u2019gen Wort\u2014von Dir entflammt,
\nda\u00df ich\u2019s predige\u2014bin ich verdammt.<\/p>\n
Wer des Zweifels schale Frucht genossen,
\nbleibt vom Tische Gottes ausgeschlossen.<\/p>\n
Von des heil\u2019gen Landes voller Traube
\ntrinkt allein der unversehrte Glaube.<\/p>\n
Du l\u00e4\u00dft mich, Herr, der Strafe nicht entrinnen,
\ndoch g\u00f6nnst Du mir den Tod auf hohen Zinnen,<\/p>\n
Du einst auf bebendem Vulkan Erschauter,
\nich war ja Dein Erw\u00e4hlter, nah Vertrauter,<\/p>\n
Dein Mund, die Quelle aller Heiligkeit,
\nDein Auge f\u00fcr der \u00c4rmsten Qual und Leid,<\/p>\n
Dein Ohr f\u00fcr Deines Volkes Schrein und Schmach,
\nDein Arm, an dem der Feinde Macht zerbrach,<\/p>\n
der R\u00fccken, der die Schwachgewordnen trug,
\nund den der Zorn von Freund und Feinden schlug,<\/p>\n
der Mittler Deines Volkes im Gebet,
\nDein Werkzeug, Herr, Dein Freund und Dein Prophet.<\/p>\n
Drum schenkst Du mir den Tod auf steilem Berge,
\nnicht in der Niederung der Menschenzwerge,<\/p>\n
Den Tod des freien Blickes in die Weite,
\ndes Feldherrn, der sein Volk gef\u00fchrt im Streite,<\/p>\n
You forgive; but \u2019tis a blazing fire
\nto stand before the Truth, a liar.<\/p>\n
Your nearness and of your face the sight
\nare to the penitent, a wounding light.<\/p>\n
Your sadness and your great scorn
\nbury into my flesh, a deadly thorn.<\/p>\n
Before your holy word, which you inflamed,
\nthat which I preached, I am ashamed.<\/p>\n
He who has tasted the fruit of doubt,
\nfrom God\u2019s table is shut out.<\/p>\n
From the holy land\u2019s fruitful vine,
\nuntarnished faith alone can drink the wine.<\/p>\n
You allow me no escape Lord, from your punishment,
\nbut favour me with death on this high battlement.<\/p>\n
Once you did in trembling fire ascend.
\nI was then your chosen and your friend.<\/p>\n
Your mouth the source of holiness,
\nyour eyes to see the poorest in lowliness,<\/p>\n
Your ear to hear your people\u2019s cry and plight,
\nyour arm to break the enemy\u2019s might,<\/p>\n
the back, carrying the weak who could no further go,
\nand destroying the anger of friend and foe,<\/p>\n
the mediator of your people as their prayers ascend
\nI was your instrument, Lord, your prophet and your friend.<\/p>\n
Therefore you send me death on this steep mountain side,
\nnot in the depths where lesser men have died,<\/p>\n
the death with clear vision and distant sight,
\nof the commander, who led his people in the fight,<\/p>\n
das Sterben, \u00fcber dessen ernsten Grenzen
\nschon die Fanale neuer Zeiten gl\u00e4nzen.<\/p>\n
Wenn mich die Nacht des Todes nun umh\u00fcllt,
\nseh\u2019 ich von ferne doch Dein Heil erf\u00fcllt.<\/p>\n
Heil\u2019ges Land, ich habe dich geschaut,
\nsch\u00f6n und herrlich als geschm\u00fcckte Braut,<\/p>\n
jungfr\u00e4ulich im lichten Hochzeitskleide,
\nteure Gnade ist dein Brautgeschmeide.<\/p>\n
La\u00df\u2019 die alten, vielentt\u00e4uschten Augen
\nDeine Lieblichkeit und S\u00fc\u00dfe saugen,<\/p>\n
la\u00df\u2019 dies Leben, eh\u2019 die Kr\u00e4fte sinken,
\nach, noch einmal Freudenstr\u00f6me trinken.<\/p>\n
Gottes Land, vor Deinen weiten Toren
\nsteh\u2019n wir selig wie im Traum verloren.<\/p>\n
Schon weht uns der frommen V\u00e4ter Segen
\nkr\u00e4ftig und verhei\u00dfungsvoll entgegen.<\/p>\n
Gottes Weinberg, frisch vom Tau befeuchtet,
\nschwere Trauben, sonnenglanzumleuchtet,<\/p>\n
Gottes Garten, Deine Fr\u00fcchte schwellen,
\nklares Wasser sprudeln Deine Quellen.<\/p>\n
Gottes Gnade \u00fcber freier Erde,
\nda\u00df ein heilig neues Volk hier werde.<\/p>\n
Gottes Recht bei Starken und bei Schwachen
\nwird vor Willk\u00fcr und Gewalt bewachen.<\/p>\n
Gottes Wahrheit wird von Menschenlehren
\nein verirrtes Volk zum Glauben kehren.<\/p>\n
Gottes Friede wird gleich starken T\u00fcrmen
\nHerzen, H\u00e4user, St\u00e4dte treu beschirmen.<\/p>\n
beyond the gloomy limits of the dying
\nalready the signs of new times espying.<\/p>\n
When now the shades of death o\u2019ercome me
\nyour salvation fulfilled from afar I see.<\/p>\n
Holy Land, to me you have appeared,
\nlike a bejewelled bride, lovely and endeared,<\/p>\n
the bridal dress lights up your virgin face,
\nyour bridal jewels are of costly grace.<\/p>\n
Let these old eyes so oft betrayed,
\ndrink in your sweet loveliness displayed.<\/p>\n
Let this life, before its powers shrink,
\nonce more from the streams of joy drink.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Land, before your doors open wide
\nwe stand, lost in a dream, no joy denied.<\/p>\n
The blessing of the patriarchs we feel already
\nblowing towards us, full of promise and steady.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s vineyard, moistened by the dew in the early hour,
\nbunches of grapes, nourished and cradled by the sun\u2019s power,<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Garden, where your fruits swell
\nand clear water gushes from your well,<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Grace, flowing over a free earth,
\nto a holy and new people will give birth.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Law will protect both strong and weak
\nfrom those who by tyranny and force the mastery seek.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Truth will guide from human learning
\nan erring people, to faith returning.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Peace will, like strong towers,
\nhearts, houses, cities protect with its powers.<\/p>\n
Gottes Ruhe wird auf alle Frommen
\nals ein gro\u00dfer Feierabend kommen.<\/p>\n
Und stilles Volk in einfachem Gen\u00fcgen
\nwird Reben pflanzen und den Acker pfl\u00fcgen,<\/p>\n
und einer wird den andern Bruder nennen,
\nnicht Stolz noch Neid wird in den Herzen brennen,<\/p>\n
und V\u00e4ter werden ihre Knaben lehren
\ndas Alter achten und das Heil\u2019ge ehren,<\/p>\n
und M\u00e4dchen werden, sch\u00f6n und fromm und rein,
\ndes Volkes Gl\u00fcck und Zier und Ehre sein.<\/p>\n
Die selber einst das Brot der Fremde a\u00dfen,
\nden Fremdling werden sie nicht darben lassen.<\/p>\n
Der Waisen und der Witwen und der Armen
\nwird der Gerechte willig sich erbarmen.<\/p>\n
Gott, der Du wohntest unter unsern V\u00e4tern,
\nla\u00df unsre S\u00f6hne sein ein Volk von Betern.<\/p>\n
In hohen Festen soll zu Deinem Ruhme
\ndas Volk hinaufziehn zu dem Heiligtume.<\/p>\n
Dir werden sie sich, Herr, zum Opfer bringen
\nund Dir die Lieder der Erl\u00f6sten singen.<\/p>\n
In Dank und Jauchzen tut mit einem Mund
\nDein Volk den V\u00f6lkern Deinen Namen kund.<\/p>\n
Gro\u00df ist die Welt; es weitet sich der Himmel,
\nschaut auf der Menschen t\u00e4tiges Get\u00fcmmel.<\/p>\n
In Deinen Worten, die du uns gegeben,
\nzeigst allen V\u00f6lkern Du den Weg zum Leben.<\/p>\n
Stets wird die Welt in ihren schweren Tagen
\nnach Deinen heil\u2019gen zehn Geboten fragen.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s Rest will on his faithful people fall
\nlike a great celebration at his call.<\/p>\n
And a peaceful people on simple lines
\nwill plough the earth and plant the vines,<\/p>\n
and each will call the other brother,
\nproud hearts burn not with envy of another,<\/p>\n
and boys by their fathers will be told
\nto honour the sacred and respect the old,<\/p>\n
and girls will be beautiful and dutiful and pure,
\nthe people\u2019s joy and honour and adornment to endure.<\/p>\n
Those who once ate the strangers\u2019 bread
\nwill not therefore leave the stranger dead.<\/p>\n
On the orphan, the poor and the widow,
\nthe righteous man will freely his care bestow.<\/p>\n
God who dwelt among our fathers in the past,
\nlet our sons be prayerful people to the last!<\/p>\n
In high festival, may this to thy glory
\nlead the people up to holiness by sacred story.<\/p>\n
To you, Lord, we will the offering bring,
\nand to you the songs of salvation sing.<\/p>\n
In thanks and rejoicing with one voice,
\nmay your people proclaim they are your choice.<\/p>\n
The world is great; it stretches to the sky,
\npeople behold, as they in deep confusion lie.<\/p>\n
In your Word, which you to us make known,
\nto all peoples you have the way to life now shown.<\/p>\n
Always, the world will in days of heavy task,
\nof your holy ten commandments ask.<\/p>\n
Stets wird ein Volk, wie schuldig es gewesen,
\nallein an Deinem Heiligtum genesen.<\/p>\n
So zieh denn hin, mein Volk, es lockt und ruft
\ndie freie Erde und die freie Luft.<\/p>\n
Nehmt in Besitz die Berge und die Fluren,
\ngesegnet von der frommen V\u00e4ter Spuren.<\/p>\n
Wischt von der Stirn den hei\u00dfen W\u00fcstensand
\nund atmet Freiheit im gelobten Land.<\/p>\n
Wacht auf, greift zu, es ist nicht Traum noch Wahn,
\nGott hat den m\u00fcden Herzen wohlgetan.<\/p>\n
Schaut des gelobten Landes Herrlichkeit,
\nalles ist euer und ihr seid befreit!\u2019<\/p>\n
Auf dem Gipfel des Gebirges steht
\nMose, der Mann Gottes und Prophet.<\/p>\n
Seine Augen schauen unverwandt
\nin das heilige gelobte Land.<\/p>\n
\u2018So erf\u00fcllst Du, Herr, was Du versprochen,
\nniemals hast Du mir Dein Wort gebrochen.<\/p>\n
Deine Gnade rettet und erl\u00f6st
\nund Dein Z\u00fcrnen z\u00fcchtigt und verst\u00f6\u00dft.<\/p>\n
Treuer Herr, Dein ungetreuer Knecht
\nwei\u00df es wohl: Du bist allzeit gerecht.<\/p>\n
So vollstrecke heute Deine Strafe,
\nnimm mich hin zum langen Todesschlafe.<\/p>\n
Von des heil\u2019gen Landes voller Traube
\ntrinkt allein der unversehrte Glaube.<\/p>\n
Reich\u2019 dem Zweifler drum den bittern Trank,
\nund der Glaube sagt Dir Lob und Dank.<\/p>\n
Always, a people, however guilty they be,
\nalone in your holiness will healing see.<\/p>\n
And thus my people are called with attractions fair,
\nto the free land and the free air.<\/p>\n
Possess the mountains and the fertile lands,
\nblessed by your fathers\u2019 godly hands,<\/p>\n
wipe from their brows the hot desert sand
\nand breathe freedom in the promised land.<\/p>\n
Awake, take hold, it is no mirage you have dreamed,
\nGod has the tired hearts redeemed.<\/p>\n
Look at the glory of the promised land and see
\nall is yours and you are set free.\u2019<\/p>\n
On the summit of the mountain stands
\nMoses, the prophet, in God\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n
His eyes are steady and his vision clear
\nto see the holy, promised land appear.<\/p>\n
\u2018Thus you fulfil what you have spoken,
\nyour word to me you have never broken.<\/p>\n
Your grace saves and delights,
\nbut your anger disowns and smites.<\/p>\n
Faithful Lord, your servant faithless in distrust,
\nbut knowing well: you are forever just.<\/p>\n
So enforce your punishment today,
\ntake me in the long sleep of death away.<\/p>\n
Of the holy land\u2019s fruitful vine,
\nuntarnished faith alone may drink the wine.<\/p>\n
Pour for the doubter the bitter draft of his ways,
\nand let faith alone speak thanks and praise.<\/p>\n
Wunderbar hast Du an mir gehandelt,
\nBitterkeit in S\u00fc\u00dfe mir verwandelt,<\/p>\n
L\u00e4\u00dft mich durch des Todes Schleier sehn
\ndies, mein Volk, zur h\u00f6chsten Feier gehn.<\/p>\n
Sinkend, Gott, in Deine Ewigkeiten
\nseh\u2019 mein Volk ich in die Freiheit schreiten.<\/p>\n
Der die S\u00fcnde straft und gern vergibt,
\nGott,\u2014ich habe dieses Volk geliebt<\/p>\n
Da\u00df ich seine Schmach und Lasten trug
\nund sein Heil geschaut\u2014das ist genug.<\/p>\n
Halte, fasse mich! mir sinkt der Stab,
\ntreuer Gott, bereite mir mein Grab.\u2019<\/p>\n
Wonderfully have you dealt with me,
\nblends of bitterness and sweet to see,<\/p>\n
let me through the veil of death behold,
\nmy people at their festival bold.<\/p>\n
God, into your eternities going,
\nI see my people march with freedom glowing.<\/p>\n
You who punish sin and forgive readily,
\nGod, you know I have loved this people steadily.<\/p>\n
That I have borne their shame and sacrifice
\nand seen their salvation\u2014will suffice.<\/p>\n
Hold, support me, I lose my stave,
\nfaithful God, prepare me for my grave.\u2019<\/p>\n
(Translation: Edwin Robertson)<\/p>\n
I. Introduction<\/p>\n
\u2018Tell all the truth, but tell it slant\u2019, said the American poet Emily Dickinson. As I was contemplating the writing of this essay, one of my colleagues in the English department reminded me that poetry is a genre of the soul. In poetry, the soul finds freedom in the dialectic of concealment and revelation. It is hardly surprising that a theologian attracted to dialecticians such as Martin Luther and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard would express himself in poetry, especially in the prison period when he began to catch in waves the scent of his own death. It will be remembered that this theologian was also an aesthete, a musician, who could on occasion lose himself improvising at the piano. His aesthetic sense was intensified in the confines of a prison cell and served to distinguish his final year as one of heightened creativity and personal expression.
\nIn this essay, I will explore the meaning of Bonhoeffer\u2019s self-identification with the biblical prophet Moses. It will become apparent that the theologian-poet did not make his choice of Moses on a whim. To the contrary, it was a choice clearly anticipated in career-long reflections on theological motifs which Bonhoeffer found Moses to exhibit, and motifs which Bonhoeffer thought himself to embody in important ways\u2014important enough, at least, to warrant joining his voice with that of the ancient prophet. I will not deal directly with the poem. Nor will I be able to ignore it completely. It hovers just above my reflections. My intent is to assist the reader by enriching the context in which the poem is read and interpreted.
\nTo help guide my exploration, I will argue the following proposition: \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 (\u2018Der Tod des Mose\u2019) is a literary testament to Bonhoeffer\u2019s protracted quest to understand theologically and to live personally the so-called responsible life. As such, it is a fitting d\u00e9nouement to a set of ideas that occupied him beginning with Sanctorum Communio and continuing all the way through the prison period. Among the most important of these concepts are vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung) and taking on guilt (Schuld\u00fcbernahme), each of which appears strikingly in the poem. Since the tension-filled concept of penultimate-ultimate is in Bonhoeffer\u2019s theology an important design element in the contemplation of responsible life, unsurprisingly it too plays an important role in our discussion.
\nThe poem\u2019s meaning ranges beyond these themes just as surely as Bonhoeffer\u2019s self-understanding ranges beyond Moses. But one fact the interpreters of this poem can never evade is its uncanny timing. On 20 or 22 September 1944, Gestapo commissar Sonderegger discovered files in the Abwehr bunker in Zossen, which fully exposed Bonhoeffer as a conspirator. This irrefutable evidence prompted the Bonhoeffer family to devise an escape plan. But when his brother Klaus and brother-in-law R\u00fcdiger Schleicher were arrested, Bonhoeffer resolutely abandoned the plan for fear of reprisals on his family and friends. At this moment, Bonhoeffer\u2019s hopes of surviving the war\u2014and with it the hope that he might survive to share in a new German order\u2014dimmed considerably. Under stress, pressed by thoughts of impending death, theological instinct drew him to Moses. I surmise that Bonhoeffer located in Moses\u2019 final ordeal atop Mount Nebo a meaningful representation of his life and theological work. He had for a long time been fascinated by Moses\u2019 solidarity with his people. Not knowing how his life would unfold, however, I suspect he continued to think of himself as a possible participant in post-war Germany and, therefore, did not until this pivotal moment join himself existentially with Moses. And when he finally did so, the interpretive prospects were so explosive, compelling, and revealing, that he chose to veil them in poetry.<\/p>\n
II. Bonhoeffer and Moses<\/p>\n
At the end of his life, Moses was caught between grace and judgement. He was a man of faith who saw the bright future of his people in the land of God\u2019s promise, but he would not experience that future on account of his own sin. Aged and tired, Moses climbed Mount Nebo. And in a single bittersweet episode he absorbed both the fulfilment of the patriarchs\u2019 dream for a homeland and God\u2019s severe wound.
\nThe Italian reserve officer Gaetano Latmiral recalled a conversation with Bonhoeffer during their incarceration at Tegel prison.<\/p>\n
He explained to me that he was writing a poem on the death of Moses, when Moses climbed Mount Nebo and God showed him, before he died, the land that would one day belong to his people, but that he would never enter. He loved this theme \u2026<\/p>\n
O\ufb03cer Latmiral likely didn\u2019t know how steadfastly Bonhoe\ufb00er had occupied himself with the theme of Moses\u2019 death. In Sanctorum Communio (1927) Bonhoeffer tried to articulate the possible lengths to which the intercession of one person for others could go. In reference to Exod. 32:32, Bonhoeffer described Moses as one \u2018who wants to be blotted out from the book of life together with his people\u2019. Moses is adduced as one of two biblical examples of \u2018the love that voluntarily seeks to submit itself to God\u2019s wrath on behalf of the other members of the community, which wishes God\u2019s wrath for itself in order that they may have community with God, which takes their place, as Christ took our place.\u2019 Moses is further described as \u2018heroic\u2019, for he asks God either to accept or condemn him together with his people. In this brief but important early reference, we catch already the prevailing wind that blows through \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019, that is, the cost of the bond forged between Moses and those for whom he had become responsible.
\nDuring his Stipendiat at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer made a trip to Havana (Cuba) along with his friend Erwin Sutz. There he preached to a German-speaking congregation on Deut. 32:48\u201352. It was the final Sunday of Advent, 1930. In this sermon, we find him further exploring the analogy between Moses and Christ: as God judges Moses in death while on the very precipice of the promise, so Advent in its classic meaning thrusts us into penitence in view of the arriving promise. Why Bonhoeffer preached from this text at Christmas is often considered something of a riddle. Bethge indicates that Bonhoeffer, after an interval of not preaching, selected it himself rather than had it assigned to him. Shortly before leaving for Cuba, Bonhoeffer communicated to Helmut R\u00f6ssler that he was finding it difficult to capture Christmas rightly since everything in the world seemed so depressing to him. Bonhoeffer seemed to be caught in something of a personal crisis at this time, though I suspect it was a crisis quite connected to desperate conditions for many human beings around the world. We should also remember that this was precisely the time when Bonhoeffer earnestly read black writers, met black leaders, and experienced first hand the ugly realities of segregation. As we know, the spiritual Go Down, Moses had became a personal favourite to him, and one wonders whether his text selection might have related to some new reflections on the significance of Moses for oppressed peoples. Whether inspired by the spiritual or not, he nevertheless took its climactic stanza as if his own by following Moses onward to Christ as the one who generates hope for those who must live day-to-day in the harsh terrain just shy of the promise-made-good. Towards the end of the sermon (the actual end has been lost), he mentioned the unemployed we see all around us, the millions of children who live in hunger and misery throughout the world, those starving in China, those being oppressed in India, and that despairing helplessness seen in so many people in countries across the world. For them, Christ, the saviour, is born. Bethge includes in his biography an important line supposedly delivered by Bonhoeffer just after his mention of oppression throughout the world: \u2018Who with all this in mind would want to enter the promised land, unsuspecting and unbiased?\u2019
\nEarlier in the sermon, Bonhoeffer had stressed that Moses was a man whose entire life was oriented toward God\u2019s promise to the patriarchs. Moses was the instrument of God whereby God\u2019s people would move from slavery to freedom. From his experience of God\u2019s mystery and glory while protected in the cleft of the rock, to his descent from Sinai with the tablets, through all kinds of troubles and setbacks, God was deepening Moses\u2019 hunger for the promise until at last he became completely seasoned in hope. Just then, only one step away from fulfilment, God led him up the mountain by his word to an abrupt end. Why does Moses have to die precisely at this point, asks Bonhoeffer, when the promise is so near? He answers: because as a sinner, Moses belongs to his people. The sinner dies before the promise is fulfilled.
\nOn 28 May 1933, struggling to adjust in the difficult first months of Hitler\u2019s government, Bonhoeffer again turned to Moses, this time as the prophet standing over and against Aaron, the priest. From the pulpit of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, Bonhoeffer said that while the prophet waits for and receives God\u2019s Word atop Mount Sinai, the priest below grows impatient and succumbs to idolatry in the face of national pressure. Moses represents the church that remains close to God while Aaron represents the church that drifts toward nationalism. In the context of the church struggle, Bonhoeffer\u2019s skilful work with Moses and Aaron is a rather remarkable achievement. It so captivates our attention, in fact, that we, as readers, are prone to stop short of its conclusion. \u2018The rupture [between the church of the word and the church of the world] is not the end\u2019, says Bonhoeffer. Moses\u2019 work is not finished. In a heroic and vicarious act, he shoulders responsibility for Aaron and the people as once again he trudges up the mountain to plead their case before God. As a harbinger of his own fate, Bonhoeffer renders Moses\u2019 prayer with these provocative words: \u2018Reject me with my people, for we are still one. Lord, I love my brother.\u2019 Glancing at the Exodus text, it becomes clear that Bonhoeffer made a decision here to emphasize not the prospect of God\u2019s forgiveness, but rather\u2014anticipating a major theme of our poem\u2014the special bond between Moses and his people. This implies in turn a kind of solidarity between the faithful and the faithless and suggests the possibility that the one might stand before God under the burden of the other\u2019s guilt. Consistent with Bonhoeffer\u2019s treatment of Moses in Sanctorum Communio, the earlier Havana sermon, and even the lines from Go Down, Moses, the Berlin sermon once more pulls the Christological dimension to the foreground. Bonhoeffer proclaims Christ as that prophet and priest who will make of faithful and faithless a single people through his cross.
\nCuriously, Eberhard Bethge cautioned readers of this poem against Christological interpretations of two key stanzas, insisting that \u2018its shame\u2019 did not refer to Christ and \u2018this people\u2019 must refer to Germany, not the church.<\/p>\n
You who punish sin and forgive readily,
\nGod, you know I have loved this people steadily.<\/p>\n
That I have borne their shame and sacrifice
\nand seen their salvation\u2014will suffice.<\/p>\n
Bethge may be correct to put us on the trail of Bonhoeffer\u2019s patriotism at this particular point, though I certainly do not think we should extend Bethge\u2019s caution to the entire ninety stanzas of the poem, at least not in rigorous fashion. First, it is somewhat awkward in light of prevailing interpretations of Bonhoeffer as an advocate for Jews to throw all the weight back upon the German Volk. If these lines also belong credibly to Moses, which I think they do, then Jewish victims may also be included in \u2018this people\u2019. Second, in light of obvious Christological connections in the two sermons we have been considering, it would be strange to preclude Christological interpretations. Granted, Bonhoeffer\u2019s well-publicized attraction to the earthly significance of the Old Testament in the prison period may indicate that he is less willing openly to construe biblical figures as types of Christ, which would provide justification for Bethge\u2019s caution. But Bonhoeffer never surrenders his conviction that Christ is present in the world\u2019s ontology. It is reasonable to suppose that throughout the poem Christ forms a subtext for interpreting Moses, and by implication, Bonhoeffer. We should note that the author of Hebrews explicitly links Moses\u2019 suffering to Christ, saying rather audaciously that Moses suffered for Christ. Furthermore, we ought to remain open to Christological dimensions especially if we harbour sympathies with Bonhoeffer as a Christian martyr (as opposed to merely a political resistor), for the poem anticipates the death of a theologian who forged his bonds with the world on a reasoned Christological foundation. The themes of representative action and accepting guilt cannot finally be rendered as Christian themes without linking them to Christ\u2019s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.
\nWhen Eberhard Bethge received the poem by post on 29 September 1944, he wrote back quickly to his friend,<\/p>\n
Many thanks for Moses. I got it yesterday evening before going on guard and read it afterwards. It moved me very much, but I\u2019m not sure what to make of it. The language is fine, but with the fetters of the rhyme it didn\u2019t seem quite like your other things \u2026 I find your thoughts about the future bold and perhaps even comforting.<\/p>\n
Bethge\u2019s first impression obviously betrays his interpretive uncertainty. Perhaps his exclusion of this poem from the original publication of LPP under the German title Widerstand und Ergebung testifies to his conviction that it would require a special and delicate interpretation, as J\u00fcrgen Henkys suggests. I do not pretend to know confidently why Bonhoeffer returned to Moses for a final time in late 1944. The poet\u2019s choices belong to the poet in a special sense. To be fair, we must acknowledge that he was in those days thinking of other biblical figures, too, as the soon-to-follow poem \u2018Jonah\u2019 reveals. It would be both worthwhile and useful to try to read \u2018Jonah\u2019 alongside \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 to see what that exercise might evince concerning what I have called Bonhoeffer\u2019s search for a biblical pericope, though that would take me beyond my assignment. But in support of my thesis, I will offer four plausible reasons why Bonhoeffer may have continued to think about himself in relation to Moses to the very end. Each of these reasons touches upon the narrative flow of Bonhoeffer\u2019s life in important ways, and adheres structurally to his theology, especially in its most mature form as represented in the Ethics.<\/p>\n
a. \u2018Your eyes to see the poorest in lowliness \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
First, as intimated in our discussion so far, Bonhoeffer found in Moses a theme that proved crucial to his developing theology: Moses learned to see the events of history from below and suffered with his people. Though living in the privilege of Pharaoh\u2019s court, Moses devoted himself to his people, at first in their slavery and oppression and later in their circuitous wanderings en route to a new land and identity. That identification cost Moses a great deal. He became a target of his people\u2019s complaints. He shouldered their sin and died under its burden. But he could not finally decouple himself from the community of those in need. Hebrews portrays Moses as one who suffered in solidarity with Israel for the sake of Christ. Moses \u2018refused to be called a son of Pharaoh\u2019s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God \u2026 He considered abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than all of Egypt\u2019 (Heb. 11:24\u201326). Though born into privilege, Bonhoeffer grew somewhat uncomfortable in his bourgeois status because it represented security and safety instead of authentic discipleship as he had come to understand it. Standing with Jewish and German victims against the brutalities of Nazism, Bonhoeffer\u2019s life can be read as a descent from power and privilege and a deepening attachment to those who suffer. Unlike Moses, there was no old man in Bonhoeffer. But his death by hanging at Flossenb\u00fcrg epitomizes the human being who chose to stand with a suffering generation, rather than exercise the freedoms of his social class.<\/p>\n
b. \u2018Your arm to break the enemy\u2019s might \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
Second, Moses stood against the oppressor. As a young man, Moses witnessed first-hand the abuse of his people. Observing an Egyptian guard abusing one of the Jewish slaves, Moses became angry, killed the guard, and then attempted to hide his crime by burying the body in the sand (Exodus 2). Though his actions were rash, the concrete experience of injustice against his kin moved Moses to action. After fleeing to Midian for refuge, God called him to return to the oppressor\u2019s land, despite his inadequacies, and immerse himself in the excruciating work of confronting earthly powers with God\u2019s message of justice and liberation. Bonhoeffer fled to America in the summer of 1939 as Germany hovered on the brink of war. But as the victims\u2019 cries arose from Egypt, so the plight of Hitler\u2019s victims (Jews and Germans) weighed upon him in his Bible reading and meditation, driving him to the conclusion that remaining in a place of refuge while his country needed him was a mistake. God was calling him to return to a dangerous situation. The eighty-seventh stanza of the poem reveals Bonhoeffer\u2019s sacrificial identification with the German people and all those victimized by Nazism in the words \u2018God you know I have loved this people\u2019.<\/p>\n
c. \u2018He who tasted the fruit of doubt, from God\u2019s table is shut out \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
Third, under the stress of fulfilling his responsibility to others, Moses sinned. Caught without water in the wilderness of Zin, Moses\u2019 followers began to turn against him and against the word of God\u2019s promise. In response, God told Moses to speak to a rock in full view of the congregation. In this way, God would provide water for people and livestock. Moses\u2019 anger got the best of him, however. After assembling the people, he twice slammed the rock with his staff. God provided the water, but Moses\u2019 lack of trust in God\u2019s word became an offence for which he would be excluded from the company of those who would enter the land (Num. 20:12). Rather than express his confidence in the word of God, he took matters into his own hand. Bonhoeffer\u2019s conspiratorial activities were very difficult for him to reconcile inwardly, and at the end he understood himself as a sinner in need of grace. So he found comfort in the fact that Moses\u2019 doubt, though judged, could neither remove him from God\u2019s grace nor subvert faith. Faith could sustain a break and yet survive, for God transacts grace even in judgement. When Bonhoeffer examined the death of Moses, he saw grace in the fact that God had arranged for him a special end on the heights of the mountain instead of the valley below where others had died: \u2018You allow me no escape, Lord, from your punishment\/but favor me with death here on this high battlement.\u2019<\/p>\n
d. \u2018Clay, moulded by God\u2019s mighty hand \u2026 a sacrificial vessel\u2019<\/p>\n
Fourth, in the hands of God, Moses\u2019 death could be construed as a vicarious though guilty sacrifice. As we have said, Moses stood in solidarity with his people and against the oppressor as a sinner before God. But Moses\u2019 sin is not the extraordinary thing here. In itself it shows only the human predicament as such before God. The extraordinary thing is that Moses, the aged prophet who has outlived the faithless ones of his generation, will now die as a representative of that entire generation and bear its guilt collectively by his own death. His death will become the sacrificial altar on which God enacts his gracious promise to others. This ancient Eucharistic prototype of Christ\u2014though we must preserve the uniqueness of Christ\u2019s guilt as a condition resting on the foundation of his personal innocence\u2014establishes the most convincing bond between Bonhoeffer, Moses, and Christ. For whatever asymmetries may be present between them in respect to guilt, in each case guilt is tangled up with the choice to immerse oneself in the plight of others. In sum, Moses lived within the structure of responsible life as Bonhoeffer understood it. He devoted himself to others, got tangled up in their problems, absorbed their guilt, represented them in life and in death, and held them in the delicate tension of God\u2019s judgement and grace.
\nWe cannot fail to note here the martyrological implications of this threefold bond. It is a thin tradition that renders Moses as a martyr, and it would overstep good sense to suggest that in \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 Bonhoeffer is pleading for personal consideration as a Christian martyr. True, Bonhoeffer had predicted that his age would require guilty martyrs, and he thereby cut a channel for such an interpretation. Martyrs do not exercise control over their cases, which eventually must pass to the communities that survive them. Bonhoeffer would have understood this point very well. Yet it does not overstep good sense to suggest that Bonhoeffer is struggling at this time to understand his death along the lines of guilt-bearing and representation by associating with Moses, who opaquely \u2018suffers for Christ\u2019. By linking himself to Christ precisely by way of a third party\u2014whose sin had become a salient feature in the circumstances of his death\u2014Bonhoeffer cordons off a complex literary-theological space in which his problematic status as a martyr can be deliberated free of manipulation and coercion. At the very least, I think Bonhoeffer wants us to be generous enough to consider those ways in which his controversial path of discipleship nevertheless adds up to a life of faith which, like Moses\u2019, points to Christ. The indirectness of poetry here creates the condition necessary for a true relation. For the responsible human being is the one devoted to others, not the one who perseverates about his posthumous reputation. By pointing to Moses, Bonhoeffer can indirectly raise interesting prospects for interpreting his own life at the same time that he deflects attention to God and his word.<\/p>\n
III. Moses as exhibitor of penultimate care<\/p>\n
To those acquainted with Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics, it will be apparent that in the foregoing section, I have been speaking generally in the language of \u2018responsible life\u2019. In this final section, I will continue with the provocative language of the Ethics by situating what has been said so far within the tension of ultimate and penultimate things (Die letzten und die vorletzten Dinge). I hope to show how Moses became (albeit anachronistically) a skilful exhibitor of this tension\u2014a tension which, as Bonhoeffer saw it, characterizes Christian existence as such and the skilful navigation of which is a vital matter in a \u2018world come of age\u2019.
\nBonhoeffer begins his description of ultimate and penultimate things by linking it to the Reformation teaching on justification, that determination of God wherein by faith alone, the self is grounded extra se in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this event, God\u2019s gracious decision regarding a human being is considered ultimate and supersedes all human calculation. By linking the ultimate with justification, Bonhoeffer asserts the primacy of God\u2019s reality over and against the reality of the world. As sinners, our access to the ultimate\u2014in our attempts at self-justification, naturally, but also in our self-understanding and personal agendas\u2014is limited and condemned. Just as justification never passes into the hands of human beings but remains a free act of God, so the ultimate word of God never yields itself completely to human beings.
\nIn this sense justification entails a qualitative ultimacy. God\u2019s word cannot be superseded, and it thereby lends to every other word a penultimate status. But justification also means temporal ultimacy. God\u2019s word arrives as the final word in time, the last in a sequence that configures every other word as something that precedes it. Of this dimension Bonhoeffer says, \u2018The only thing that can be justified is something that has already come under indictment in time. Justification presupposes that the creature became guilty.\u2019 Bonhoeffer\u2019s elaboration cannot be improved upon, so I will simply cite it:<\/p>\n
In order to hear the ultimate word, Luther had to go through the monastery; Paul had to go through his piety toward the law; even the thief \u2018had to\u2019 go through the conviction and the cross. They had to travel a road, to walk the full length of the way through penultimate things; they had to sink their knees under the burden of these things \u2026 We must travel a road, even though there is no road to this goal, and we must travel this road to the end, that is, the place where God puts an end to it. The penultimate remains in existence, even though it is completely superseded by the ultimate and is no longer in force.<\/p>\n
Clearly, the ultimate is for human beings. It meets us as a gracious, redeeming, and liberating word. But God does not immediately fulfil his promises. God remains patient\u2014often painfully so\u2014and thus holds open a space that allows human history to unfold in its own integrity. For this reason, people of faith cannot live solely in the ultimate. Instead, they must navigate through the time of God\u2019s patience with fear and trembling, with suffering and pleading, and with hoping and longing. The difficulty for people of faith can be described as follows: on the one hand, since it is God\u2019s word, the ultimate requires that significant adjustments be made in the realm of the world, and thus it places God\u2019s followers in a place of sober responsibility. On the other hand, the realm of the world is stubbornly penultimate and offers resistance to God\u2019s ultimate word. Such is the predicament for one who wishes to live a responsible life. To shun the penultimate for the sake of the ultimate amounts to a hatred of the world (Bonhoeffer\u2019s so-called radical solution) and a desire for its destruction; to flee the ultimate for the sake of penultimate amounts to a hatred of God\u2019s word (the so-called compromise solution). So how does one navigate?
\nLike Moses the prophet, one prepares the way. Moses\u2014the man who hears God speak from the bush aflame, who becomes the very presence of God to Pharaoh (Exod. 7:1) and his own people, who later stands face to face with God on Sinai, countenance glowing\u2014has heard the word of God once given to the patriarchs and now becomes the instrument by which it can ripen towards fulfilment. But the way from Egypt to shal\u00f4m is challenging to say the least. Though he functions as God to Pharaoh and to Israel, he is emphatically not God. His humility towards and very incapacity for the ultimate, necessary preconditions for faithful representation of it, will in the course of time drive him deep into the conditions of penultimacy. Moses tended to the ultimate by becoming a willing participant in God\u2019s work of justice for an oppressed people and caring for that people along the way of the penultimate. Bonhoeffer reminds us that certain conditions make it quite impossible for God\u2019s ultimate word to be heard. That is why \u2018[t]he hungry person needs bread, and the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom.\u2019 It is precisely by tending to the penultimate needs of his people that Moses prepares the way for the ultimate.
\nAll along, of course, it is God who is preparing the way, as it always must be. In his relationship to Israel, it is the weighty responsibility of Moses to make clear the difference between the ultimate and the penultimate, between God\u2019s word and human words. For it is all too easy to co-opt the ultimate for the sake of human agendas. Moses\u2019 sin can be seen as the refusal to allow the ultimate its place. Striking the rock was a capitulation to the penultimate, a way of managing by means other than God\u2019s word.
\nMoses\u2019 death symbolizes his complete immersion in the penultimate realm by putting the spotlight on his temporal location\u2014\u2018almost there\u2019\u2014at the very edge of the ultimate. Standing so near the promise, Moses\u2019 experience of exclusion intensifies together with his faith in God\u2019s future. At the moment of death, then, the ultimate comes into view as that which truly lies outside the reaches of human power, but has all along been exerting a pressure upon the penultimate. And the penultimate is revealed as the realm of human life and work which had all along received its meaning from the ultimate. By tending to God\u2019s people and sticking with them through the thick and thin of the penultimate, Moses was tending to the ultimate and preparing the way. In a certain sense, Moses was the way, his death the necessary occasion upon which shal\u00f4m would have a chance.<\/p>\n
IV. Conclusion<\/p>\n
Drawing to a close, I would like to direct our attention to an interesting observation made about Bonhoeffer as a young pianist by his twin sister Sabine.<\/p>\n
Dietrich was a most sensitive accompanist, and here, too, his good character showed\u2014he was always eager to cover the mistakes of the other players and save them any embarrassment. He was most patient and often kept up his accompaniment for hours, so that sometimes he did not have enough time for his own piano practice.<\/p>\n
Though Bonhoeffer went to the trouble and expense of shipping his Bechstein to his London parsonage, Julius Rieger remembered that \u2018he never used his abilities as a pianist to give recitals to others.\u2019 These memories and many more like them hit upon a certain theme: Bonhoeffer did not promote himself, but attended splendidly to the activities of others. \u2018Sensitive accompanist\u2019 strikes me as a fitting epigram for this piece on Moses. Certainly we are not dealing with a recital here. In this artistic rendition, Bonhoeffer does not jump to centre stage and clamour for our attention. Using his skills as an accompanist, he plays behind the figure of Moses and allows Moses\u2019 voice to dominate. But like any accompanist, Bonhoeffer can be heard. And his choice to accompany Moses is among the clearest and most vulnerable self-disclosures Bonhoeffer ever made.
\nTo summarize, in the Moses narrative Bonhoeffer found his own life and thought illuminated. But as we have seen, that is surely in part because the Moses narrative had already done its work on Bonhoeffer\u2019s thinking and living. He found the theme of solidarity with others most compelling, and in \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 he finally risked the suggestion that he himself lived out the complexities of Christian discipleship in the topography of the Moses narrative. This may seem like an odd conclusion. One might ask why Bonhoeffer wouldn\u2019t make Christ more obvious in this poem, especially since he had already set a precedent of dealing with Moses and Christ together in the two sermons we examined. In those writings, the momentum of the Moses narrative was pushing Bonhoeffer toward Christ. We remember an earlier time when Bonhoeffer, the theologian, was drawn to Jesus\u2019 Sermon on the Mount and \u2018became a Christian\u2019. Here, Bonhoeffer\u2019s personal narrative pushed him towards Christ. But much transpired between the early 1930s and 1944 in the life and thought of Bonhoeffer. He had gradually become fastened to the world, to creation, to the Old Testament, and to the penultimate. Now in a striking reversal of momentum, he is drawn back to the Hebrew prophet. The Christ narrative now pushes Bonhoeffer toward Moses. This is not a departure from Christ, but rather an ever-deepening awareness that Christ binds himself to Moses and all those who act responsibly in view of the ultimate. Christ is the bond between Bonhoeffer and Moses, such that when they become guilty and falter at faith in the messiness of responsible living they are not abandoned. Christ carries them even while they carry others.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s reflections on responsible life and the ultimate\u2014penultimate provided him the necessary structure for a more comprehensive theological interpretation of Moses. Outside the poem there is, so far as I am aware, not a shred of evidence that he actually carried out such an interpretation. Certainly, the poem does not constitute evidence in the ordinary sense. Nevertheless, I think it stands as cryptic indication that Bonhoeffer had theologized the Moses narrative along these lines. At the very least, Ethics theologically undergirds his choice for Moses and renders it more intelligible.<\/p>\n
@book{Wannenwetsch_2009,
\nplace={London; New York},
\ntitle={Who Am I?: Bonhoeffer\u2019s Theology through His Poetry},
\npublisher={T&T Clark},
\nyear={2009}}<\/p>\n
Exportiert aus Verbum, 19:46 5. M\u00e4rz 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
5 \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019 Bonhoeffer\u2019s Last Poem: Texts and Contexts Nancy Lukens and Renate Bethge \u2018Von Guten M\u00e4chten\u2019 1. Von guten M\u00e4chten treu und still umgeben, beh\u00fctet und getr\u00f6stet wunderbar,\u2014 so will ich diese Tage mit euch leben und mit euch gehen in ein neues Jahr. 2. Noch will das alte unsre Herzen qu\u00e4len, … <\/p>\n