COMMENTARY: Light amidst the darkness

c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) I recently hosted a show featuring Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poems written from his prison cell during World War II. I was particularly taken by a comment made by Sandy, a busy mom enjoying a rare night out. Reading Bonhoeffer had put her life and circumstances in perspective, she said. Whenever […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I recently hosted a show featuring Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poems written from his prison cell during World War II.

I was particularly taken by a comment made by Sandy, a busy mom enjoying a rare night out. Reading Bonhoeffer had put her life and circumstances in perspective, she said. Whenever you think times are getting too dark, reading a little of Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison” might be a useful antidote.


By the late 1930’s, the stock of this young German theologian was already on the rise. His “Cost of Discipleship” and “Life Together” had been published and he was lecturing at New York’s Union Theological Seminary.

When war broke out, this Lutheran pastor of reflective mind and sensitive heart left the safety of America and returned to Germany to take his stand with the Confessing Church movement against the threats of Hitler’s Nazi ascendancy.

Active in the German resistance movement, he was involved in plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler. (The attempted assassination story is told in Tom Cruise new film, “Valkyrie,” scheduled for release this month, but Bonhoeffer is not included in the film’s storyline.)

Bonhoeffer’s actions resulted in his imprisonment, in 1943, and execution by hanging in Flossenburg on April 9, 1945, just days before the war ended.

Many of Bonhoeffer’s letters and poems were written during the two Advent seasons he spent in prison, and his recurrent note of hopefulness illuminates a path for those of us who aren’t feeling very hopeful this Christmas season.

Bonhoeffer’s hope was set against the backdrop of grim reality. What Bonhoeffer believed about his era could equally be said of ours. “Surely there has never been a generation in the course of human history with so little ground under its feet as our own.”

Bonhoeffer saw that the moral relativism of his age, the abandonment of divine law, a loss of conscience, a blind allegiance to reason, government and education as the path to societal improvement _ all these had lulled the German population into the moral complacency that Hitler exploited.


Because he believed society’s unraveling is born of spiritual rebellion, Bonhoeffer’s hope for societal transformation required restoring personal moral character. He believed with the Apostle Paul that “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance character; and character, hope.”

Bonhoeffer’s advocacy of costly discipleship left him no choice but to stand on principal. “The responsible man,” he wrote, “seeks to make his whole life a response to the question and call of God.” His faith shaped his character, and his character shaped his destiny.

Bonhoeffer’s hope was rooted in the Christmas story. In prison, Bonhoeffer came to the realization that imprisonment was a useful metaphor for understanding Advent, where “one waits and hopes and potters about, but in the end what we do is of little consequence, for the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside.” In the Christmas story, God came to earth to unlock the door of our spiritual imprisonment from the outside.

Bonhoeffer’s hope was ultimately in the eternal God. A fellow prisoner, English officer Payne Best, once called Bonhoeffer “one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God was real and close to him.” His last moments in this life were spent serving Communion in prison. When the executioners called out “come with us,” he comforted Best with these words: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.”

What does Bonhoeffer’s source of hope have to do with our current national crisis?

Perhaps he would remind us that our collective undoing is in part the consequence of our failure of character and abandonment of basic moral values. America’s ethic of hard work, honesty, thrift and the pursuit of the common good have slowly been replaced by a self-interest, special-interest, greed-is-good, easy-credit, buy-now-pay-later (if ever) culture.

As we turn to the brightest and best in politics and business to help us find our way back to greatness, Bonhoeffer would encourage us to pursue excellence, but would surely point out that excellence begins with individuals who return to God and the good and who make their whole life a response to the question and call of God.


(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

A photo of Dick Staub is available via https://religionnews.com

DEA KRE END STAUB

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