Upsoaring wings: All people

In addition to co-founding (with Martin Niemoeller and Karl Barth) the German Confessing Church, pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a passionate anti-Nazi, who worked tirelessly against the Hitler regime from its ascension to power in 1933 until his execution in April 1945. His protests against the euthanasia program and against antisemitism as state policy provoked the Nazis to ban his church, and he basically went underground to operate “seminaries on the run”, training the ministers of the future; he believed wholeheartedly that the post-war world would need Christians to rebuild.

Even after he was arrested in 1943 for his work helping Jews escape, Bonhoeffer continued his ministry in prison. He was linked to the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler and was moved to Buchenwald and then Flossenbürg to be executed by hanging.

Here are a few things Bonhoeffer believed, which I’m pretty sure will not be echoed in evangelical churches these days:

“Silence in the face of evil is evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

“The first service one owes in a community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s word, the beginning of love for others is listening to them…We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them.”

Today being Easter, my National Poetry Month entry is Bonhoeffer’s “Christians and Pagans”, which he wrote in July 1944, when he’d been in prison for more than a year. Its point—that God serves all, not just those calling themselves Christians—is also not something you’ll hear in evangelical churches these days.

“Christians and Pagans”

People turn to God when they’re in need,

plead for help, contentment, and for bread,

for rescue from their sickness, guilt, and death.

They all do so, both Christian and pagan.

People turn to God in God’s own need,

and find God poor, degraded, without roof or bread,

see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.

Christians stand with God to share God’s pain.

God turns to all people in their need,

nourishes body and soul with God’s own bread,

takes up the cross for Christians and pagans, both,

and in forgiving both, is slain.