So shall we content ourselves, he asked, with longing to be “the last of the knights”? “How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well? If religion is only the garb in which Christianity is clothed—and this garb has looked very different in different ages—what then is religionless Christianity?” How could one be a disciple, clothed not in the garb of tradition, but having, as Paul tells the Galatians, “put on Christ”?
Bonhoeffer’s answers revealed a faith chastened by history, mindful of its failures and misuses—imprisoned by consequence!—yet abidingly and hilariously confident that Christ has broken the chains of death. In the meantime, the Christian witness shall be limited to prayer and righteous action. “All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.” Until the time that people will once again be able to speak the word of God “with power,” the “Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one.”27 These are not post-theistic ruminations, the kind made popular by the Death of God theologians and their merry riffs on the prison texts; rather, they are a sober assessment of the gospel’s political captivity—and how to escape it.28
Though Hitler’s Germany had been filled with festivals and assemblies, songs and melodies, to say nothing of an abundance of religious cant, these sounds and sights were not what the Lord required. “Take away from me the noise of your congregations, you who have turned justice into poison,” fumed the Hebrew prophet Amos, also warning of a famine of the Word, a famine more devastating than a “famine of bread” or “thirsting for water”—a “famine … of hearing,” a famine “of the words of the Lord.”
They shall wander from sea to sea,
And from north to east;
They shall run to and fro, seeking the
Word of the Lord,
But they shall not find it.
No peace or solitude can be found in a nation that “abhors the one who speaks the truth.” Amid the clamor and self-congratulation of the chosen nation, it had become impossible to hear the Lion of Zion roar—in Israel as now in Germany. How could such idolatry be defeated? Bonhoeffer turned his attention to an ancient spiritual practice intended to guard the mysteries of faith, the so-called “arcane discipline.” He had first used the term arcanum in his lecture series “The Essence of the Church,” delivered in Berlin during the summer term of 1932. “Confession belongs in worship as arcanum,” he said. “The confession is not to be screamed loudly in a propagandistic manner, it must be preserved as the sacred good of the church-community.”29 In his Finkenwalde lectures on preaching, he described the arcane discipline in the early church (under Origen) as “closed assemblies” that received the sacraments, the confession of faith, and the Lord’s Prayer. In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer wrote specifically of the “discipline of the secret.” The Lord himself had taught, “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
It was a great mistake, Bonhoeffer said, to think of theology’s purpose as being the unveiling of the mystery, “to bring it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of experience and reason!” Theology should, rather, as its sole mission aim to “preserve God’s wonder as wonder, to understand, to defend, to glorify God’s mystery as mystery.” “In the arcanum,” he said, “Christ takes everyone who really encounters him by the shoulder, turning them around to face their fellow human beings and the world.”30 Theology’s task was to preserve the eternal mystery in a catastrophically demystified time.
By the way, I notice more and more how much I am thinking and perceiving things in line with the Old Testament,” Bonhoeffer had written to Bethge on December 5, 1943, the second Sunday of Advent. “In recent months I have been reading much more the Old than the New Testament.” And then comes a kind of litany of beatitudes for the post-religious Christian:
Only when one knows that the name of God may not be uttered may one sometimes speak the name of Jesus Christ.
Only when one loves life and the earth so much that with it everything seems to be lost and at its end may one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.
Only when one accepts the law of God as binding for oneself may one perhaps sometimes speak of grace.
And only when the wrath and vengeance of God against His enemies are allowed to stand can something of forgiveness and the love of enemies touch our hearts.…
Why do people in the Old Testament vigorously and often lie (I have now collected the citations), kill, betray, rob, divorce, even fornicate (cf. Jesus’s genealogy), doubt, and blaspheme and curse, to the glory of God, whereas in the New Testament there is none of this? “Preliminary stage” of religion? That is a very naïve explanation; after all, it is one and the same God.
Formed as a Christian in discipleship to Jesus, Bonhoeffer realized finally that genuine humanness would forever wander into abstraction if it were not anchored in the history, suffering, and religion of the Jews.
“Has not the individualistic question of saving personal souls almost faded away for most of us? Isn’t it our impression that there are really more important things than this question (—perhaps not more important than this matter, but certainly more important than the question!?)…Does the question of saving one’s soul even come up in the Old Testament? Isn’t God’s righteousness and kingdom on earth the center of everything? And isn’t Rom. 3:24ff. the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous, rather than an individualistic doctrine of salvation? What matters is not the beyond but this world, how it is created and preserved, is given laws, reconciled, and renewed.”
His faith had grown more at home in the Old Testament as he reached the extraordinary conclusion that “whoever wishes to be and perceive things too quickly and too directly in New Testament ways is to my mind no Christian.” And with a new sense of worldly habitation were unleashed certain desires and energies, long restrained.
He wrote to Bethge on May 30:
I’m sitting alone upstairs. Everything is quiet in this building; a few birds are singing outside, and I can even hear the cuckoo in the distance. I find these long, warm summer evenings, which I’m living through here for the second time, rather trying. I long to be outside, and if I were not “reasonable,” I might do something foolish. I wonder whether we have become too reasonable. When you’ve deliberately suppressed every desire for so long, it may have one of two bad results: either it burns you up inside, or it all gets so bottled up that one day there is a terrific explosion.… Perhaps you will say that one oughtn’t to suppress one’s desires, and I expect you would be right.
But look, this evening for example I couldn’t dare to give really full rein to my imagination and picture myself and Maria at your house, sitting in the garden by the water and talking together into the night etc. etc. That is simply self-torture, and gives one physical pain. So I take refuge in thinking, in writing letters, in delighting in your good fortune, and curb my desires as a measure of self-protection. However paradoxical it may sound, it would be more selfless if I didn’t need to be so afraid of my desires, and could give them free rein—but that is very difficult.31
He longed for an evening at Bethge’s house and for Maria’s company; he longed for desire’s complete course, the “etc. etc.” of sexual love, as he put it. Bonhoeffer felt open to those desires and to Bethge’s counsel, spoken years earlier, he recalled, that he stop “beating them back.”
On July 28, 1944, Bonhoeffer thanked Bethge for the humorous postcard from Italy—a photograph of a reluctant soldier reclining in the Umbrian countryside like the young Goethe. Bonhoeffer asked his friend if he might send a different image as well, an image that captured him—“all of you”—in a softer, more familiar pose, set against the Italian Alps, but natural and clear.
In January 1943, Bethge had been sent to the Italian front, “assigned to a small Military Intelligence unit of sixteen men in the Tenth Army under the command of
General Heinrich von Vietinghoff.” His unit was charged with supplying intelligence to the field marshal, although much of the time Bethge served as “chauffeur, secretary, and night watchman,” an assignment whose relative safety was a great comfort to Bonhoeffer, who also took delight in the notion that his friend was stationed in the same countryside where, just four summers ago, the two had taken a “magnificent holiday.” Having obtained a detailed map of the environs of Rome he imagined Bethge “driving around the now familiar roads, hearing the sounds of war not very far away, and looking down from the mountains to the sea.…
“I’m so glad you’re stationed far away from the highway and that you’ve got a north-facing room and the countryside is so beautiful where you are.…
“You think that the Bible does not say much about health, happiness, strength, and so on,” he continued. “I have thought that over again very carefully. I’m sure it is not true of the Old Testament in any case.” For in the Hebrew Bible, the “mediating theological concept” between God and happiness is “that of human blessing, as far as I can see.”
This mental picture of Bethge in Italy inspired Bonhoeffer to read the Song of Solomon. Over the years he had spent little time with these spiritual meditations on erotic love. Only once, during the vicariate in sunny Barcelona, had he taken up a passage from the Song in a sermon.32 On November 28, 1928, he preached on 8:6b, “Love is strong as death,” a sermon that has survived only as a fragment. The erotic element, while present, could not sustain the overpowering force of eternity, symbolized in the sermon by a man standing on the seashore, “as wave upon wave rolls in, breaks on the beach, and sinks away in the endless gray water; eternally one and ever another.” In that homily, the Song becomes a lesson in the fleeting, ephemeral nature of human existence: “life is but a moment before the ancient, primal sea;” a wave that passes away even as it forms, eternity compressed into sexual desire.
“And we are unable to turn our gaze away,” he said, “for hours on end we stare over the foamy crests, outward—to where?—we hardly know ourselves, but it draws our gaze into the endless distance, out to where the sun sinks into the sea, where the waves rise, and the soul stretches out, wants to know what the eyes cannot sense—wants to know about what is beyond the gray sea—or whether it just continues on eternally like this, without an end, without a beyond, a process of becoming and passing away with neither measure nor goal—and yet as intensively as it searches, it always sees the same drama … no hope … eternal hiddenness.”
The physicality of desire recedes into the endless distance, where it belongs and where it must remain. The “urge to be together” as God intended inspires one instead toward what is “most gentle, profound, pure, purifying” and offers safe harbor from the body’s startling contretemps.
In prison, by contrast, Bonhoeffer sang a song of earthly love—with no transcendent hiddenness or gazing into the endless distance. He said he did not share Diogenes’ opinion that the “absence of desire is the highest joy and an empty barrel the ideal vessel.” The Song of Solomon, the Hebrew Bible’s hymn to sensual love, Bonhoeffer was discovering now to his sudden delight, in fact consecrated the flesh: “you really can’t imagine a hotter, more sensual, and glowing love than the one spoken of here.” He read the book through a Christly lens but without making a reflexive leap to the symbolic, such as has often been used to mask Christian fears of the body. Excited by the Old Testament’s affirmation of “strong, erotic love,” he questioned anyone who would say that “the restraint of passion” denoted the disciple’s prerogative. “Why is there no such restraint in the Old Testament?” he wrote. “Israel is delivered out of Egypt so that it may live before God as God’s people on earth.”
Shut inside a Gestapo prison, Bonhoeffer could hardly do more for the Jews of Europe than to honor the story of Israel as a lesson for the Christian church. Precisely because he was a man formed in wholehearted discipleship to Jesus, he realized that thinking about God would forever lead into abstraction and idolatry if the thinking were not anchored in the history, suffering, and religion of the Jews.
On a hot summer afternoon, he sat in his cell in Tegel wearing a pair of gym shorts and a dress shirt—both items he had bought for Bethge in Stockholm. Bonhoeffer was spending another day mulling over his “non-religious interpretation” of the Bible, but the “concrete bodily experience of heat” was overpowering, so he paused to write to Bethge. The heat had awakened his “animal existence,” “his corporeal being,” with a singular urgency—“not just to see the sun and sip at it a little, but to experience it bodily.” He longed “to feel again the potencies of the sun,” he said, and his memory ranged languorously over summers past: with Klaus in Rome and Libya in 1923; the first trip with Bethge to Naples in 1936, to the colors of the sun hitting the Mediterranean, as observed on the ferry to Majorca; Christmas 1931 in Cuba. He pondered “the romantic enthusiasm for the sun,” the cult of the sun-gods. “Does it make Goethe or Napoleon a sinner to say that they weren’t always faithful husbands?” Bonhoeffer asked abruptly.
Apropos of the “potencies of the sun” and the Berlin heat wave, he made a pitch for “strong sins” and “sins of strength”—sins dared for the sake of the other, for the purpose of “nurturing intimacy with others.” Bonhoeffer happily bade farewell to a caution mistaken for sanctity and conversely the “perverse satisfaction in knowing that every person has failings and weak spots.” He thanked Bethge for his long-suffering patience with his friend’s many moods. He did not deserve such patience, but he was grateful for it. “I have learned from you to see so many things in a new way,” he said. He might have said, more precisely, “owing to you” rather than “from you,” but that would not have changed the ultimate consequence of their association, which was this: finally, at the age of thirty-eight and with nothing left to lose, he felt free from the yoke of scrupulous introspection. The Word of God does not ally itself with the rebellion of mistrust, he said triumphantly, but reigns in the strangest of glories.
On June 3, 1944, despite having no official guest privileges, Bethge visited Bonhoeffer in prison. Bethge had tried in vain to gain permission from the minister of corrections, but it took a bribe to a prison guard to win access on that June day—a favor which would likely have involved a case, if not a carton, of cigarettes and a bottle of schnapps.33 Terms of the favor—which likely included a portion of meat, peaches, a wool scarf, and cash tucked into the pages of a book—were reached, and Bethge entered Tegel under the radar of standard protocol.34
Bethge was pleased to find his friend in good spirits. In the earshot of a noncommissioned prison official, the two mainly avoided talking about the conspiracy. Bonhoeffer was eager to discuss his recent theological sketches, although there were a few mundane concerns on his mind as well. He was slightly vexed that the slacks his sister Ursula had sent were not the ones he requested. “What I need are the light brown summer trousers,” he said. Bethge should convey the urgency to his sister, since the only pair he had with him for the warm days was “ripping every which way.” Then the two men broached a subject that had long been looming beneath the surface: namely, how to start wrapping up “the logistical loose-ends” of their long relationship, which proved exceedingly difficult in written correspondence. These included “the technical details of living together,” “their shared bank account,” and “other legal arrangements.”35 “If it would make things easier for Renate,” Bonhoeffer had earlier told Bethge, “please don’t hesitate to help yourself to my money!”
Bonhoeffer had long presumed responsibility for shaping his friend’s future. And with this responsibility had often arisen doubts that what he was doing was best for Bethge. But now, in prison, when suddenly “almost all our possibilities to be involved” were cut off, there was “somewhere the awareness, behind all our fears for the other, that his life has now been placed wholly in better and stronger hands.”
Now for a few more thoughts on our topic,” Bonhoeffer wrot
e the next week, as if all that had been expressed centered on the new determinant. “Finally, the philosophical closing line: on one hand, the deism of Descartes: the world is a mechanism that keeps running by itself without God’s intervention; on the other hand, Spinoza’s pantheism: God is nature. Kant is basically a deist; Fichte and Hegel are pantheists. In every case the autonomy of human beings and the world is the goal of thought.… As a working hypothesis for morality, politics, and the natural sciences, God has been overcome and done away with, but also as a working hypothesis for philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!). It is a matter of intellectual integrity to drop this working hypothesis, or eliminate it as far as possible.” Bonhoeffer hoped that people would seek God in what they know, rather than in what they do not know.
Is there any room left for God? Ask those who are anxious, Bonhoeffer replied, and since they don’t have an answer, condemn the entire development of intellectual history that has led to this decisive question.
He had spoken with Bethge of the myriad ways to escape the narrow spaces of modernity: the notion of God as a working hypothesis, a deus ex machina that spares each protagonist the fate of hard questions.
There is, of course, no way back from a conceptual dead end, he reasoned. The only way forward was through Matthew 18:3—“through repentance, through ultimate honesty!”—a reborn seeking of God.
“We have rather to recognize that we have to live in the world—etsi deus non daretur,” as if there were no God. And this is precisely what we do recognize—before God! “Living as if there were no God, before God”—this was the discipline of being in two worlds, with equal intensity. No more complicated than living in-the-world-but-not-of-the-world, no simpler than faith itself—indeed an art more difficult could not be conceived!
Strange Glory Page 49