Bonhoeffer Still Relevant
I have been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison this week. I have appended some thoughts that might interest.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a modern church martyr. The protestant theologian hung by the Nazis in 1945 has reached near iconic status with the popularity of his book, “The Cost of Discipleship,” and to a lesser extent, his last work, “Ethics.” His concept of cheap grace has been a challenge for at least three generations of churchgoers while contemporary society knows of him only as the pastor who supported the plot to murder Hitler. I have long noted that many of the Christians I respect: Alan Jacobs, Father John Neuhaus, John Piper and D.A. Carson often reference his, “Letters & Papers from Prison,” usually concerning matters of Christian practice. As a writer, I was interested in the literary “form” of Bonhoeffer’s letters, was it up to the task of “shaping” an engaging literary work.
Current books in the discipline of creative non-fiction often push writers toward the more literary aspects of prose; diaries, journals, and collections of letters are frequently ignored. Difficulty in sustaining a narrative arc; the often cluttered nature and variety of topics; and the radical modern shift, or perhaps more accurately, flight from all practice of effective prose skills may explain this avoidance of these most personal of the “occasional prose” genres. However, Bonhoeffer’s letters are a powerful example of what can be accomplished in spite of the inherent limitations of the “letters” form.
I found the letters, placed in chronological order, allowed me to hear closely, as if I shared his cell, the thoughts of a very mature Christian enduring nearly two years of prison. Isolated and alone, the honesty of his feelings and prose, like a modern day reading of the psalms, gave the work an authority not possible in any other form. As a Christian, I was relieved to find not an icon but a fellow human: to be sure, a great thinker and martyr who was also intermittently a scared and lonely man, aware of his foibles and sin, trying to be honest before God. At times, like reading Ecclesiastes or Job, the words become ugly and distinctly “unspiritual.” But, through the letters you see grace. Not grace like a cosmic genie, but a grace coming yolked in tandem with a struggling sinful man, a grace remaining faithful as his world disintegrates, a grace that is the steady and faithful love of Almighty God, a constant gardener of his soul.
The details did not clutter the narrative. The multiple topics and mundane matters: missed weddings, food deprivations, broken windows, physical ailments were suffused with Bonhoeffer’s compulsion to bring every moment of his life under God’s control—including his failures. His sufferings, large and small and never minimized, were the form of his life, the agonizing struggle to hope became the visible sign of God’s shaping His loved creation. When the more formal “papers” were included, chronological discussions of how we should think about God or act as His faithful creations, I was able to see a context that made the theology exceedingly credible.
As a writer, this book caused a thoughtful consideration of details. Not just descriptive details, the sights and smells that place readers into a scene, but the details of life, seemingly mundane actions and thoughts that are perhaps nothing in and of themselves, but in toto suggest the way someone is, or more accurately, who they are. Artists often speak of “negative space.” That is, the visual description of the “figure,” the main object of a picture, by the “ground” that surrounds the figure: the object is not drawn or painted but is known by what it is not. In one way, the letters in this book describe the ground around the theology—the prose “figure.” When you read the more formal aspects of these letters, you already sense or “know” what these truths are, the formal description of a fact that seems self-evident—perhaps like the communion chalice informs the communicant, tacit knowledge, that more than wine is present.
To be sure, these letters have been edited and by admission, some things are left out. But the editor has not beautified by omission. This is an important lesson for writers: while editing for clarity may be necessary, the subject should not be conformed to pre-conceived ideas of fitness; we the readers must determine character. I must trust the reader to see with charity and recognize that editing “in” a one sided or “to good to be true” persona is an act of “un-charity.”
I doubt the letters “form” would be up to the task of a more sustained theological argument like, “The Cost of Discipleship.” But in the end, as he faced the likelihood of his death, he was painfully brought to the hard truth that the wonderful goods of life, his thoughts and writings, his family and dear friends, were not a sufficient basis for hope; they were of no account compared to the riches of knowing Christ. It was the hope of this grace that sustained him. It is currently out of fashion in western culture to hold out past lives as exemplars for others to emulate. Demanding cynical critique, claiming absolute personal autonomy, and a complete avoidance of sentimentality, we abandon our children and all human’s on life’s journey to “reinvent themselves” or “discover truth” in a moral vacuum. I dread the prospect of following in Bonhoeffer’s shoes; but if that is what is given to me, I hope I may, by God’s grace, leave such clear prose fingerprints of Almighty God, that I might come to know God so intimately, and that I might be as faithful.
Soli Deo gloria