BradTaylor

Bonhoeffer: Chapter 5

Again, if you’re wondering why all these posts on this book, you can read about why I’m doing it here. Please feel free to chime into the discussion on this biography of this fascinating and inspiring individual.

Dietrich spent 1928 in Barcelona, Spain, as vicar (assistant pastor) to a German congregation there. In the summer, when many of the Germans left Barcelona to return to Germany, the church’s attendance usually suffered a precipitous drop. In 1928, however, when the pastor was away and Dietrich did the preaching during the summer, the numbers increased. Dietrich had a battle with his pride on this issue, which he shared in a letter to a friend:

…should one not rejoice at a full church, or that people are coming who had not come for years, and on the other hand, who dare analyse this pleasure, and be quite certain that it is free from the seeds of darkness?

In his first venture away from everything familiar, we see the beginnings of the theological identity that would develop Bonhoeffer into one of the great theologians of his time. For example, he says: “Whenever there was a dilemma, I just left it in abeyance and—without really consciously dealing with it intensively—let it grow toward the clarity of a decision.” He was essentially saying that he was comfortable (or was at least becoming comfortable) with God’s direction in his life, what he would later call being “grasped” by God. Bonhoeffer would write of this very theme, which was in its infant stages in Barcelona, from his final prison cell.

In this chapter are recorded two great observations Bonhoeffer makes about the church. (More than two, but two that stood out to me.) In reflecting on his farewell party in Berlin, before he left for Barcelona, Dietrich was moved by the prayers that were shared for him: “Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is, there is never loneliness.” And while reflecting on his time in Barcelona, during which he encountered “bums, vagabonds, criminals…murderers,” he said of these folks:

I can only say that I have gained the impression that it is just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world which is more under wrath than grace.