“Mark and Bev Tindall” <> wrote

What is Christ for us today? Bonhoeffer asked that.

from Dietrich Bonhoeffer “Letters & Papers From Prison” (Collins, Fontana, SCM; London: 1953)

p. 44 – Why is it that the Old Testament never punishes a man by depriving him of his liberty?

p. 90-91 – You would be surprised and perhaps disturbed if you knew how my ideas on theology are taking shape. …The thing that keeps on coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and what is Christ for us today? The time when men could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or simply pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience, which is to say the time of religion as such. We are proceeding to a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. …if we reach the stage of being radically without religion … what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means the lynchpin is removed from the whole structure of our Christianity to date … How can Christ become the Lord even of those with no religion? If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity – and even that garment has had very different

aspects at different periods – then what is a religionless Christianity?

p. 92 – Then Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, indeed and in truth, the Lord of the world. …the question whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from circumcision is at the same time freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently draws me more to the religionless than to the religious, by which I mean not with the intention of evangelising them, but rather, I might almost say, in “brotherhood.”

p. 94 – I expect you remember Bultmann’s paper on the demythologizing of the New Testament? My view of it today would not be that he went too far, as most people seem to think, but that he did not go far enough. …Is there any concern in the Old Testament about saving one’s soul at all? Is not righteousness and the kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and is not Romans 3:14ff, too, the culmination of the view that in God alone is righteousness, and not in

an individualistic doctrine of salvation?

p. 103-104 – It was brought home to me how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. For the frontiers

of knowledge are inevitably being pushed back further and further, which means that you only think of God as a stop-gap. … It just isn’t true to say that Christianity alone has the answers. In fact the Christian answers are no more conclusive or compelling than any of

the others. …[God] must be found at the centre of life …The ground

for this lies in the revelation of God in Christ. Christ is the centre of life, and in no sense did he come to answer our unsolved problems.

p. 118 – The Bible does not recognise our distinctions of outer and inner. …It is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man

….The “heart” in the Biblical sense is not the inward life, but the whole man in relation to God.

p. 123 – To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent or a saint) but to be a man. It is not some religious act that makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world. This is metanoia. …allowing oneself to be caught up in the way of Christ, into the Messianic event, and thus fulfilling Isaiah 53. … [this] takes a variety of forms ..in Jesus table fellowship with sinners …The centurion of Capernaum (who does not make any confession of sin) is held up by Jesus as a model of faith (cf Jairus) …All that is common

between them is their participation in the suffering of God in Christ.

That is their faith. There is nothing of religious asceticism here. … faith is always something whole, an act of the whole life. Jesus does not call men to a new religion, but to life.

p. 124 – The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus was a man.

p. 125 – …it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe … This is what I mean by worldliness – talking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. … That is faith, that is metanoia, and that is what makes a man a Christian (cf Jeremiah).

p. 128 – The Church must get out of her stagnation. We must move out again into the open air of intellectual discussion with the world, and

risk shocking people if we are to cut any ice. I feel obliged to tackle this question myself as one who, though a “modern theologian”, is still aware of the debt we owe to liberal theology. … You are quite right, intellectual discovery is one of the joys of life.

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