Egregious Reader

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 s...

Lately, I have been thinking (when I have time to think about such things) about the church and how often it becomes very closed-off. Even in church settings where it is common to talk about how other churches are "circling the wagons" its still surprisingly easy to have insider/outsider mentality. Bonhoeffer talks in his last writings from prison about the world "come of age." This is an interesting phrase to describe the modern world, the world of the 21st century. Many would have pointed to the 18th century, the time of Enlightenment where people were saying that mankind would be free when the last king was strangled by the last priests intestines. But it really does seem that in this recent century something further changed in the Western world. With science and commerce, politics and military power, the Western church seemed to finally lose one of its primary images of itself. The world no longer needed, wanted or had to regard the church as its schoolmaster ...

These Bonhoeffer quotes resonate with me and my understanding of the world and the path I am on: It will be the task of our generation, not to 'seek great thing,' but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that this is the only thing we can carry as a 'prize' from the burning building ... We shall have to keep our lives rather than shape them, to hope rather than plan, to hold out rather than march forward ... It will not be difficult for us to renounce our privileges, recognizing the justice of history ... A quote like this seems understandable, though surprising from someone like Bonhoeffer. He was already a great theologian and now he was part of a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi party.  Could he be more on the cusp of "great things"? Yet, I think he knew all along that the odds were against them ... and even more deeply, that none of it was really up to them and their efforts anyway. I think its under...