I was thrilled when I thought I had slept in until about 8:30 AM & then I lifted my head to see that it was actually 9:30. Hallelujah! I’ve have two good sleeps while recovering from a fourteen hour flight until last night when 3:00 AM felt like a decent time to rise. I grabbed the ETHICS book by Dietrich and picked up where I left off a while ago. My focus has been on studying prayer for my recent travel to an amazing destination with amazing people. I had been avoiding the Bonhoeffer film, ‘Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin’. On a fourteen hour flight one runs out of distractions so I watched it but already knew the ending. I don’t like sad stories but we all have them and know of others. I thought seeing an actor portray Dietrich would lesson my own version of his life and death. This film was released in 2024 but an earlier version from 1992 has the subtitle I prefer – The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler Within Germany. It is amazing that he wrote 34 volumes in his abbreviated life.
I had an idea of writing about my two trips to Berlin, 46 years apart, weaving in reflections on Dietrich’s writings. I knew I was unqualified but found the golden nugget I have been pursuing in last nights reading. In Chapter IV, The Last Things and the Things Before the Last, I landed on the brilliance that I understand. This writing may be long but the purpose is to put a period on this project for now because I am drawn to other things today. This section has the subtitle, Justification as the Last Word. The one process the Reformation called justification is of the sinner by grace alone. “The nature of the Christian life is disclosed not by what the man is in himself but by what he is in this event…this single final event.” We are all falling into an abyss until the word of God breaks in. “In the rescuing light man for the first time recognizes God and his neighbour. The labyrinth of the life he has so far led falls in ruin. Man is free for God and his brothers. He becomes aware aware that there is a God who loves him; that a brother is standing at his side, whom God loves as he loves him himself and that there is a future with the triune God, together with His Church…The whole of the past is comprised in the word forgiveness…The whole of the future is in safe keeping in the faithfulness of God”.
You can tell from this reading why He stood up for his Jewish neighbours. From the title of the film I would remove the handle assassin. Dietrich did participate in plotting to stop a mass murderer. If only the evil would have held off for two more stupid weeks his fiancé would have shared a future with brilliance. She was Maria von Wedemeyer – an American computer scientist (yes even then) and a close friend of the Bonhoeffer’s family – the granddaughter of a family friend. Their love story and the letters they exchanged while he was imprisoned became well-known as ‘Love Letters from Cell 92’. He was a hero mostly because he believed the hope in the Bible. He is my hero.
A few more quotes from this section: “…,the life of the man who experiences the presence of Christ is hence-forward no longer a lost life, but it has become a justified life, a life justified by grace alone….A life is not justified by love or by hope, but only by faith….Without this foundation a life is unjustified before God….Faith is a passive submission to an action, and in this submission alone it is itself an action;…Faith alone is certainty….everything that Christ is and has become my own property….he has already received Christ to himself; he possesses everything. He lives before God….He could not conceive of a life on a foundation other than himself, sustained by a power other than his own….We said at the beginning that the event of the justification of a sinner is something final”. AMEN
