Mitch Lewis

I first read Dietrich Bohnoeffer's writings when I was a high school student 38 years ago. My worn-out copy of Life Together (Gemeinsames Leben)  dates to 1978, my first year in seminary. Its words were foreign and almost incomprehensible to my Baptist ears, but even then I thought "wow." My appreciation of Bonhoeffer's words grows deeper every time I read this beautiful little text. Bonhoeffer's first chapter on "Community" starts with standard Reformation language regarding our righteousness in Christ. He proceeds to draw out from that, however, an understanding of the Christian life that turned my understanding of Christian piety upside down. The later chapters of Life Together describe what we might call spiritual disciplines that belong to Christian discipleship. You'll never understand what Bonhoeffer says about things like prayer, confession, communion, work and service, however, unless you first grasp the foundation that he lays in his chapter on community.

I revisited Bonhoeffer's chapter on "Community" in Life Together after writing this week's post on "Ordinary Christianity." It was obvious to me how much this little book has come to color not only my understanding of Christian community, but of Christian holiness as well.

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Matthew 6:1-6, Matthew 6:16-18

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. (Matthew 6:2)

If you're not Bill Gates or Bono or Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, nobody gives a fig how much money you give to charity. You could sound the trumpet all day long to announce your generosity and no one walking down the street would be impressed. They'd think you were a nut. Even if you used modern methods to publicize your kindness - a news release, a press conference, an advertisement or the like - no one would sing your praises. If your announcement garnered any public attention, it would probably be something of this sort: 'What a jerk! Does he think he's better than the rest of us?'

What is true of charity is even truer of prayer and fasting, the other two components of Jesus' trilogy of righteous deeds. Someone praying loudly on the street corner? A kook! Someone covered in dirt and wailing a dirge? An even bigger kook!

Jesus' words in Matthew 6 have lost some of their power in the public sphere, but they still carry a good bit of weight in at least two other arenas.

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Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5:19-20

How to Pray as a Christian

How can I learn to pray? Like many other evangelicals, I've given this advice: just pray whatever is on your mind. There is no right or wrong in prayer. We don't please God or earn his favor by saying the right formula (or feeling the right emotion or having the right spiritual experience) and God is certainly tough enough to handle our honesty in prayer. That's all true enough, but by itself this advice is somewhat misleading and unlikely to help one grow much in Christian prayer.

Christians pray with words. They may pray in other ways as well, but Christian prayer is basically verbal. For the most part, prayer in the Bible has to do with words and ideas. While there are instances of non-verbal prayer in the scriptures (e.g., glossolalia in 1 Corinthians 14:14-15), the passages which might refer to non-verbal practices in prayer are few and far between.

So when it comes time to pray, what do you say? The problem is not that we have too much wrong stuff to say to God; it's that we don't have much to say at all. In extemporaneous prayer, one can become lost in one's own emptiness and crushed by one's own shallowness.

Praying the scriptures is one antidote to the lack of direction in prayer. And within the scriptures, one section is stands out as the "prayer book of the Bible" - the book of Psalms. The Psalms are prayers. The proper response to the word of God in the Psalms is not just "what should I believe" but "what should I pray?"

What should I say, then, when I pray? The words of the Psalms are one answer to that question. Yet, when most Christians begin to pray the Psalms, they quickly come to Psalms that they know they cannot pray. It's easy to pray Psalm 23. It's much harder to pray the Psalms that claim innocence before God, that ask for the destruction of one's enemies, that cry out to God from a place of unparalleled suffering and so forth.

The secret to praying the Psalms is that you do not pray them alone. Only one man in all of history has been worthy to pray the Psalms. He lives and reigns at God's right hand and dwells in his people by the power of the Holy Spirit. When we pray the Psalms, we pray them with Jesus Christ.

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The United Methodist News Service reports that delegates to the 2008 General Conference voted Dietrich Bonhoeffer to be "the first martyr officially recognized by The United Methodist Church." I wish they hadn't.

It's not that I have anything against Bonhoeffer. I think he was one of the most significant Christians of the 20th century. Some of his writings among the most profound ever produced by the Christian church. Charles Sigman, the Arkansan pastor who authored the resolution, said, "During a time of grave darkness in Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer shined the light of Christ all the way to a hangman's noose." Indeed he did. That's not the problem.

Rather, I fear that we have just created another category of things about which to argue. The category of "officially recognized martyr" has all the earmarks of yet another political football. "I hope it will start a precedent," Sigman said. I'm afraid that it will.

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Andy at Think Christian recently posted about the International Day of Non-Violence. In his post, he referenced this 2004 article by Ronald Osborne of the Adventist Peace Fellowship on Bonhoeffer's Pacifism.

Osborne's article addresses the disconnect between Bonhoeffer's pacifism in the 1930's and his active participation in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in the 1940's. There are many who would like to retain Bonhoeffer in the canon of pacifist martyrs but struggle to explain his part in an act of intentional, lethal (and in my opinion, justified) violence.

I am certainly not a Bonhoeffer scholar. I've only read the major works available to English speaking audiences - in English, I should add. Perhaps others have access to his private thoughts or unpublished writings. I'll venture, however, to address Mr. Osborne's arguments and wrestle a bit with Bonhoeffer's own writings.

Combatant Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer's role in the plot against Hitler must be something of an embarrassment to those who published his works. I read The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison while still in high school. The forwards and introductory sections of those books make scant mention of exactly why Bonhoeffer was arrested and subsequently executed. It was much later that I learned the full extent of Bonhoeffer's involvement in the German resistance movement.

To avoid being drafted into the regular Army, Bonhoeffer took a position with German military intelligence (Abwehr). In this role, Bonhoeffer was able to travel outside Germany, ostensibly to gather intelligence for the Nazis. Instead, he provided the Allies with information about the activities of the German resistance. In spy novels, that's known as being a "double agent." If being a spy and helping combatants prosecute a war is "non-violent resistance" then that term has no meaning at all. Spies are combatants (but, interestingly, they are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.) Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazis in April 1943 after it was discovered that he used his government position to help a number of Jews to escape to Switzerland.

Bonhoeffer was also a part of the resistance circle that attempted to assassinate Hitler and take over the German government by force. The conspiracy came to a head on July 20, 1944 when German Army officer Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in Hitler's staff meeting. The bomb failed to kill Hitler, but it did kill or injure nine others.

Bonhoeffer was already in jail when the bombing took place, but the coup had been in planning for years. Bonhoeffer's role in the plot was eventually discovered, leading to Bonhoeffer's execution by hanging at Flossenburg in April 1945.

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May they all be one, as You, Father, are in Me and I am in You. May they also be one in Us, so the world may believe You sent Me. John 17:21

The World Council of Churches in Geneva and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in Rome have jointly declared that January 18-25 is the Week for Prayer for Christian Unity.

In principle, there is a small but valid role for the sort of bureaucratic ecumenism attempted by the World Council, even if that organization is tragically flawed in its current form. For anyone interested in Christian Unity, however, I would point them not to Geneva, but to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together (Gemeinsames Leben).

UPDATE: To read excerpts from the first chapter of Bonhoeffer' Life Together, see the related post, Bonhoeffer on Community.  Chapter one of Life Together should be required reading for every seminarian.