I need the reminders of Bonhoeffer’s life. I’ve read The Cost of Discipleship several times. I am grateful for Charles Marsh’s biography on Bonhoeffer to stir my thinking again. The newest Bonhoeffer movie was fraught with land mines because it somehow got associated with a certain biographer who has turned Bonhoeffer into the symbol of Christian Nationalism, but I had to see it and I am glad I did. It was deeply moving.

I am also engaging his little book Life Together. While short, it takes me days to process several paragraphs because he causes me to pause and think through what life means in the Body of Christ and in the context of this world.

I ran across a column by Charles Marsh on Bonhoeffer and am reminded again of the importance of learning from Bonhoeffer. This is a time to take up his work and seriously implement his thinking today.

We want Bonhoeffer neatly packaged. He is the symbol of Christian Nationalism! NO! He is the symbol of progressive Christianity and activism! (And back and forth we go.)

Bonhoeffer wasn’t categorized in his own day. He sounded like he actually thought more and refused to slide into neat categories. It used to be that way in the world. Somehow we’ve tried to make it “simple” so we can accept or reject people more easily. God forgive us.

We are reminded:

Perhaps what makes it so difficult to understand Bonhoeffer is that we do not often see Christians combine social idealism, pro-life ethics and fervent devotion to Jesus Christ. But these dissidents, dreamers and peacemakers who cut against the grain of the principalities and powers are out there. 

All of these things are very real and it has constantly baffled me over my decades of following Jesus how we constantly refuse to understand the combination of these thoughts and activities and ideals.

HERE IS A KEY THOUGHT FROM MARSH:

Bonhoeffer prayed there would arise a generation of “responsible thinking people” with the strength to stand fast, exemplify civil courage and cleave to honesty. He asked whether the “time of words is over,” whether religious language has been so thoroughly profaned that the only way forward is through “prayer and righteous action.”

And this:

Bonhoeffer matters because he reminds us that Christian behavior and attitudes are more than calculations for a partisan edge. He understood that a true disciple is “clothed not in the adornments of nationhood and race,” but in the excellences of Christ. Faith ought never divide the self into two halves, he said. “For it is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world.”

This is why I am paying more attention to Bonhoeffer these days. I need complicated commitment to Christ. Enough with “easy.” Enough with “predictable.”

Follow Christ.