It can be truly said that the pastoral task is so to minister to people who have lost the power of a right use of Christian language that this language can be restored to them with reality and with power.
Daniel Day Williams, The Minister and the Care of Souls, p. 49

I was supposed to teach a course on Dietrich Bonhoeffer this fall for my seminary alma mater, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, which is hoping to establish a satellite program of sorts in Duluth. This program has had some success, but not this time. My class was cancelled due to insufficient registration. One nice thing about this situation, I had an opportunity, in preparing for the class, to do some reading of and about Bonhoeffer.

I first encountered Dietrich Bonhoeffer early in my Christian life, at a time when my understanding of the Christian faith was different from what it is now, a time when I might have been theologically (though probably not politically) comfortable in some evangelical or Pentecostal congregations. I remember him from a book called Jesus Christ University (used copies are available through Amazon, and from what I can tell, the publisher, Logos has merged with another publisher or at least changed its name – I do some research for these musings!). That book quoted from Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship which I bought and read, a number of years ago now. In his book, Bonhoeffer contrasts cheap grace and costly grace – the latter requiring a change of life, a following of Jesus. I will never forget the simple quote from Bonhoeffer in Jesus Christ University – “discipleship means joy.” For Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship, discipleship means joy, but it also means taking seriously the Sermon on the Mount and looking to it for direction for Christian discipleship. It is interesting that Bonhoeffer finds his way into the more conservative corners of Christianity. When a friend of mine, the manager of the local Christian radio station found out I was teaching the Bonhoeffer class he sent me some information about a Bonhoeffer radio program that was produced by Focus on the Family. The Bonhoeffer of The Cost of Discipleship may fit more comfortably within a more theologically conservative Christianity than the Bonhoeffer who would later write “the world that has come of age is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age” (Letters and Papers From Prison).

But there are not two Bonhoeffers, only one, and what fascinated me in my most recent reading of Bonhoeffer and about his life (Renate Wind, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Spoke in the Wheel) are the circumstances under which he wrote The Cost of Discipleship. At this time, Bonhoeffer was already in opposed to the Hitler government and to the acquiescence of the German Lutheran Church to that government. By the time of the book’s publication, Bonhoeffer’s permission to teach in German universities had been revoked and the Preacher’s Seminary he had founded as a part of an “opposition church” had been closed down. Yet Bonhoeffer, to the best of my recollection, writes nothing about Germany, Hitler, the Gestapo, in The Cost of Discipleship. Instead he writes about grace, costly grace, and he writes an extended treatment of the Sermon on the Mount. True, Bonhoeffer later wondered about some of this book and saw limitations in it. In a letter from prison in July 1944, he would write about this book, “Today I can see the dangers of that book, though I still stand by what I wrote.”

Yes, Bonhoeffer would later write about the need for the Christian cause to be a “silent and hidden affair,” “that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith,” and wonder about the need for a “religionless Christianity.” Yes, he would be executed for being a part of a conspiracy against Hitler. But Bonhoeffer got to this place through a deep examination of the language of faith. He sought to restore to it its reality and power, even if he found that he could not resuscitate some of it.

The task is the same for our day and time. At least the task is there for me – diving deep into the Christian faith, digging deeply into its language and symbols and texts to see how they might be real and powerful for the twenty-first century – for a world at war, for a world filled with hunger and poverty and oppression, with clashing cultures and religious violence, with populations exploding and genuine concern for what the human is doing to the planet itself. It is my job as a pastor, but it is also my vocation as a human being who calls himself a Christian. So I am reading through the New Testament this year and writing about it for others and for myself. I am discovering resources there that I had not thought and felt before. But another amazing thing about Bonhoeffer’s deep plunge into the language of Christian faith is that it was not parochial. At the same time that he was writing The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer had hoped to travel to India to meet with Gandhi to learn about nonviolent resistance. One sometimes finds new depths in one’s own faith by engaging with others and with other faiths. My reading in Buddhism over the past year or so has been doing that for me too.

Maybe some of the traditional language of Christian will have to be set aside, or radically reinterpreted, if it is to have reality and power. But we should not give up so quickly, and only after we have grappled deeply with the language while engaging deeply with our world.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David