DAY
TWENTY-THREE
Monday of our last week in Nova
Scotia---chore day, the need to wash clothes has come again so we are preparing
for a trip to Digby to go to the Laundromat.
While we are there we plan to browse their lineup of gift shops and see
what they may have that we have not seen while here. We seem to have a need to find some reminders
of our time here, maybe something nautical in nature since that is the theme of
this area. I am finding boats of all
kinds to be of interest and would like to find something to bring home that
would remind me of Parker’s Cove and the fishing industry that is of great
importance here.
I have almost finished reading my
fifth book, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Charles
Marsh. It is a new biography of the
German theologian that has just come out in print. I have known a small amount about Bonhoeffer
dating back to my days in seminary but have not known a great deal about him so
I wanted to read more and this new biography has been receiving good reviews.
Bonhoeffer is a complex person. Reared in an affluent German family, his
father a successful psychiatrist and his mother a socialite, with servants to
care for the needs of all family members, he enjoyed an upbringing with all the
advantages of the upper echelon of German society of the early part of the 20th
century. Neither of his parents was
extremely religious and church attendance was rare for him but he somehow
developed an interest in spirituality at an early age and declared at the age
of 15 that he wanted to become a theologian.
His parents neither encouraged or discouraged his decision and sent him
to an excellent school in preparation for this career decision.
He completed his advanced
educational training with high marks and moved on to seminary, which was a very
complex and complicated undertaking in his time. Before he had finished his seminary
education, he had written two doctoral dissertations and had received his PhD
in theology and had set his sights on a professorship at the University of
Berlin.
In order to fulfill the requirements
for being licensed as a pastor in addition to receiving his degree, he had to
work in a church setting for a year. He
chose to work in a lower socioeconomic neighborhood in Berlin with youth who
had little religious training. At first
he found this difficult but then he began to teach them Bible stories that they
had never heard and to incorporate music and drama into his work and won them
over to wanting to know more about the Christian life.
This experience opened the door to
the desire in his life to be a pastor and, instead of immediately pursuing a
professorship at the university, Bonhoeffer served as assistant to a pastor at
a German Lutheran Church in Barcelona, Spain where many expatriates lived. He enjoyed being in Spain and found the time
to travel to Italy and the Middle East while there. He had a great love for travel and took every
opportunity to go places about which he had read as a youth.
The time he spent in Barcelona sparked
his interest in the Roman Catholic faith especially after his trip to Rome and
his worship experiences at some of the great cathedrals in Rome, including St.
Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
Bonhoeffer developed a great love for the monastic way of life which
would become the basis for the way the Confessing Movement would be structured
later in his life.
As Germany began to change with the
imposition of Nazi rule under Adolph Hitler, Bonhoeffer became aware that he
could no longer function as a pastor in the German Lutheran Church and he began
a dissident church called the Confessing Church. At first it was tolerated by the Nazis but
soon they began to order more and more restrictions on religious freedoms for
Germans and all they ruled in the Third Reich.
Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Church was outlawed and anyone who participated
in it could be charged with treason and arrested. Hitler declared himself the new Messiah and
demanded worship for him and his rule.
Friends that Bonhoeffer had made in
the United States during a visit to Union Theological Seminary in New York in
the early 1930s encouraged him to move to America to avoid being arrested and
he did make a visit to New York in 1939 but felt so homesick that he could not
stay so he returned to Germany to face whatever would happen there alongside
his German friends who were being forced to serve in the military.
Bonhoeffer joined the underground
movement and became a double spy, working for an agency where he was supposed
to report on what was going on in England and the United States but at the same
time he was reporting to the underground what he would learn about the Nazi
plans during the war. Soon, he was
caught up in a plan to assassinate Hitler and that would eventually lead to his
arrest and execution just before the war ended.
Bonhoeffer is widely known as the
author of the book The Cost of Discipleship which came about as a result
of his experiences and suffering. He
examined the biblical texts with Jesus’ words to “take up your cross, and
follow me” and tried to explain what that means in our daily lives. He was very critical of Americans when he visited
the US twice and declared that they had never experienced a Reformation such as
Germany had with Luther. He thought of
Americans as enjoying an individualism in religious thought and life that did
not connect with his idea of community which he had written about in his
doctoral dissertation. As life became
harder and harder for him in his native Germany, he made the decision to know
the sufferings of his fellow Germans in a personal way rather than to run away to
the US and avoid it all. That decision
cost him his life but his years in prison before his death left a legacy of
writings that ask the modern reader to reflect upon what the cost of
discipleship is for us in our world. Is
our religious or Christian experience one that is very individualistic or do we
feel connected to the worldwide Christian community and its sufferings? What does it mean to consider a “cost” to
Christian discipleship today or is there a cost at all to modern American
Christians? What do Jesus’ words from
Mark mean to us today as we consider them?
“If
any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their
cross and follow me. For those who want
to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and
for the sake of the gospel will save it.”
(Mark 7:34-35)
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