World Come of Age Part 2

I do not think the church has really come to terms with this shift. I think it grew so used to being the worlds governess that it loses itself in "culture wars." Perhaps the church does offer a moralizing and softening voice in our culture, but there are no more direct lines of influence, certainly no more unilateral lines. The church must fall back and be reborn to other images and arguably more central ones. Jesus was an outcast and his mission was to the very ones who were his enemies and he was willing to suffer and called us to drink the same cup if we were to be his disciples.

When Bonhoeffer was in prison his best friend Eberhardt married and later had their first child, whom they named Dietrich Wihelm Rudiger Bethge (he is now a great violinist in London). Bonhoeffer couldn't attend the baptism, but wrote a sermon to be read at the ceremony. In this sermon Bonhoeffer was looking out into that desperate world come of age that he foresaw his godson living in. He says:

You are being baptized today as a Christian. All those great and ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be pronounced over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out, without your understanding any of it. But we too are being thrown back all the way to the beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love of one's enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us, we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it and express it. This is our own fault. Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action. By the time you grow up, the form of the church will have changed considerably. It is still being melted and remolded, and every attempt to help it develop prematurely into a powerful organization again will only delay its conversion and purification. It is not for us to predict the day--but the day will come--when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed ... Until then the Christian cause will be a quiet and a hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God's own time. May you be one of them ... 

There is good to come of being irrelevant for a time. We, of all people, should know that in death is the possibility of rebirth. "Our church has been fighting ... for its self-preservation as if that were an end in itself." But that is the very opposite of Christ and our call to be Christ's body. So if we are humbled, if our words "lose their power, be silenced" and we walk in prayer and "doing justice among human beings" (not pretending or whining and pining for the "good old days") then we can hope to be remolded and reborn. 

Bethge himself says it all very well towards the end of his biography on Bonhoeffer (882):

Hence the church will not simply jettison such great names and concepts as "creation," "fall," "reconciliation," "the last things," "penance," and "resurrection," but continue to live in them. But if it can no longer relate them to the world come of age in such a way that their essence and life become eloquent and effective within this present world, then the church should remain silent until there is again a call for them and the precious content of its words once more becomes compelling ... wherever propaganda is made for the Gospel, there the relationship between God's word and God's world is not evident. It cannot be established artificially. The invention of new words achieves nothing. This relationship is something Pentecostal. Banging on the recruiting drum destroys any Pentecostal beginnings. To force something on people is to abandon any hope of its really making a mark on them.

I think this is still where the world and the church is and I feel like his call to silent action and prayer is a necessary one, as with his prediction of our humiliation and purification.