I was re-reading the account of “The Bubble Boy” in Our Daily Bread devotional book. It is about protecting life and reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings. He felt helpless to solve the evil in the world that was closing in on him. The clock was ticking for David Vetter, who died at age 12, after his parents made a valiant effort to prolong his life. This week my tv stopped working. I’m more in a bubble because there are not outside voices in my head. I am a quiet person who does not like quiet. I also heard from a retired missionary this week, who has done so much in hard places, that he turned his tv off fifty years ago and that is how his children grew up. He also credited his publications as a result of the time freed up when a tv is put down. I am not a good bubble girl. I sometimes like the company of stories when I am home alone. I’ve been hoping to organize ‘Ethics’, Dietrich’s book, compiled from some lectures, writing, and from pieces dug up in his garden. It is deep and others put it together as well as possible. I don’t think I can do better. Instead of organizing pages 30-74, I’m going to give you a collection of wise sayings that mean something to me. I will not give a reference nor explanation but what follows are quips from ‘Ethics’.
“This will of God is Jesus’ life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but by the will of God. There is only one will of God.
It is the word of Him who speaks by virtue of his unity with God, who came not to condemn but to save (John 3:17).
Knowing good and evil, man is essentially a judge. As a judge he is like God, except that every judgement he delivers falls back upon himself.
They say, and do not (Matt 23:3). It is not as though the Pharisees did nothing, or as though they were backward in the performance of good works. The opposite is the case. But their action is not genuine action;
The spirit of judgement brings forth particularly poisonous fruit when it springs from the soil of inward mendacity (untruthfulness),
the knowledge of the Pharisees was dead and barren, but the knowledge of Jesus and of those who are allied with Him is alive and fruitful;
The new knowledge of the reconciliation which is accomplished in Jesus, the knowledge of the voiding of the disunion, itself entirely voids Man’s own knowledge of his own goodness…and concealed from him.
The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason a man must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation and experience must all collaborate in this task.
The Christian cannot now indeed examine himself in any other way than on the basis of this possibility which is decisive for him, the possibility that Jesus Christ lives in him, and that Jesus Christ occupies within him exactly the space which was previously occupied by his own knowledge of good and evil.
It is evident that the only appropriate conduct of men before God is the doing of His will. The sermon on the mount is there for the purpose of being done (Matt 7:24).
it is therefore false doing, self-deception, or, as Jesus calls it, hypocrisy.
What is meant here becomes completely clear in that saying of Jesus to Mary and Martha…the hearer is right and not the doer.
I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity (Matt 7:23). That this is possible is a dark enigma which has its basis in the stolen likeness of man to God, but it is, nevertheless, a fact…
that is the point. Without this ‘love’ everything falls apart and everything is unacceptable, but in this love everything is united and everything is pleasing to God.
A love which embraces only the sphere of personal human relations and which capitulates before the objective and real can never be the love of the New Testament…God is love;…Love, then, is the revelation of God….God’s revelation is Jesus Christ, God’s revelation of His love, precedes all our love towards Him….Love is inseparably bound up with the name of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God….Man’s origin is given back to him.
‘If any man love God, the same is known of him’ (I Cor 8:3). ‘Known’ in the language of the Bible means ‘elected’ and ‘engendered’….there is no love which is free or independent from the love of God.
The children of the Church, who had become independent and gone their own ways, now in the hour of danger returned to their mother.
He (Jesus) is the center and the strength of the Bible, of the Church, and of theology, but also of humanity, of reason, of justice and of culture. Everything must return to Him;
It was not metaphysical speculation, it was not a theologumenon of the logos spermatikos, but it was the concrete suffering (Nazis) of injustice, of the organized lie, of hostility to mankind and of violence, it was the persecution of lawfulness, truth, humanity and freedom which impelled the men who held these values dear to seek the protection of Jesus Christ and therefore to become subject to His claim, and it was through this that the Church of Jesus Christ learnt of the wide extent of her responsibility.
It is not that a ‘Christian culture’ must make the name of Jesus Christ acceptable to the world; but the crucified Christ has become the refuge and the justification, the protection and the claim for the higher values and their defenders that have fallen victim to suffering (Dietrich under house protection – meaning house arrest from which he never returned)….because Christ was cast out from the world….He (Jesus) accepts responsibility for them, and He lays claim to them.
What is worst than doing evil is being evil….One is distressed by the failure of reasonable people to perceive either the depths of evil or the depths of the holy….Still more distressing is the utter failure of all reason…moral fanaticism…ethical fanaticism…conscience…duty…freedom (free responsibility)…and silent, private virtuousness…It is the best of men who go under in this way…
Yet our business now is to replace our rusty swords with sharp ones….They no longer oppress him. He belongs simply and solely to God and to the will of God.
It is not by overthrowing but by its reconciliation that the world is subdued.
Ecce homo! – Behold the God who has become man, the unfathomable mystery of the love of God for the world. God loves man. God loves the world. It is not an ideal man that He loves, but man as he is; not an ideal world but the real world….Jesus is not a man. He is man. Whatever happens to Him happens to man. It happens to all men, and therefore it happens also to us.
