The highly acclaimed 2010 biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich, by Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson), has received both plaudits and punches. Has the hero been seasoned for evangelical tastebuds? Or freed from being held hostage for decades by those wanting a post-WWII German theological survivor? (For your encouragement and as an indication of how accessible and reader-friendly the 608-page book really is, consider that my 85-year old mom read the copy she borrowed from her church’s library. Go for it!)
As with any great thinker, so with Bonhoeffer, I suppose: you can extract from him precisely what your colored glasses let you see. Having read him for both undergraduate and graduate study, I’ve always found his thought stimulating, occasionally opaque, warmed by the heat of the crucible of twentieth-century events that shaped world history. My Dutch-immigrant dad enjoyed reading Bonhoeffer, and when I had become more of an adult, we enjoyed discussing important life lessons gleaned from Bonhoeffer’s masterpiece, Cost of Discipleship.
A colleague and friend sent me this paragraph from the Metaxas biography. It contains one of those life lessons my dad and his generation nurtured in their offspring:
All his life, Bonhoeffer had applied the same logic to theological issues that his father applied to scientific issues. There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it or none. A major theme for Bonheoffer was that every Christian must be “fully human” by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some “spiritual” realm. To be an ethereal figure who merely talked about God, but somehow refused to get his hands dirty in the real world in which God had placed him, was bad theology. Through Christ, God had shown that he meant us to be in this world and to obey him with our actions in this world. So Bonheoffer would get his hands dirty, not because he had grown impatient, but because God was speaking to him about further steps of obedience.
That entire paragraph and especially the underlined sentence capture the heart of the Christ-centered-gospel-for-this-world driven life.
It’s Saturday today. Only because I’d like you to ponder the double entendre contained in the blog title, ponder this question en route to tomorrow: Whose dirty hands?
Have a blessed Lord’s Day. Tomorrow. And then Monday.
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