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DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AND THE ETHICS OF PARTICIPATION1 Sixty years ago—on July 21, 1944—Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following paragraph from his cell in the Tegel prison in Berlin to his former student and friend, Eberhart Bethge: I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith . . . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a [human being] and a Christian. I quoted this paragraph at the end of my discussion of Bonhoeffer in my book Remembed Voices; and then I brought that discussion to an end with the thought from which, today, I should like to begin this seminar:
It is this worldly discipleship of Jesus Christ that constitutes the final, mature statement of the thirty-nine-year-old martyr about the meaning of what Luther named theologia crucis. To be a disciple of the crucified one, to receive from the Spirit of the risen Christ the courage of Jesus’ kind of suffering love, is not to walk away from this world in search of a better, but precisely the opposite—to proceed more and more steadfastly into the very heart of the civitas terrena, like the fleeing Peter redirected to burning Rome by the One he met on the Appian Way. Worldly discipleship: These words of Bonhoeffer must not be forgotten; this discipleship can never be sufficiently learned; this legacy remains largely unclaimed by our floundering churches.
The thesis I want to develop here is already implicit in that comment but I shall restate it in a slightly different way simply for the purposes of clarity. It is necessary to see Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a 20th Century exemplar of what Luther called the
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By Douglas John Hall, Emeritus Professor of Christian Theology, McGill University; for a Seminar at the University of Calgary on March 8, 2004.