Identity - Lesson 16

Dr. James Houston

Identity

th731-16

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Identity—Expressed and Realized in Prayer

Lesson Transcript

We’re now at our last and, indeed, it’s our climactic address on Christian identity because we’re going to try and explore what is so complex and that is the identity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So the title that I’m giving it is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Identity—Expressed and Realised in Prayer. And so as we reflect on this at the beginning, it’s appropriate that we should sing a hymn by Paul Gerhardt, who was himself a German Pietist in the 17th century. He was born in 1607 and died in 1676. He was enthralled and taken up by his vision of Christ. And of course, as a German Pietist in his background, Bonhoeffer belongs to that wonderful tradition. So it’s not always in our hymn books that we have one of Paul Gerhardt’s, but what they all express is how he was enthralled and taken up by his vision of Christ, as Bonhoeffer was to be in his remarkable life.

As we start, let us begin with what’s going to be the pivot for this whole lecture and that is trying to answer the question that Bonhoeffer himself was asking and composed perhaps only a few days before his death in 1945. In his prison cell, he says:

‘Who am I? They often tell me I step from my cell’s confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country house.

Who am I? They often tell me I used to speak to my warders freely and friendly and clearly, as though it was mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me I bore the days of misfortune equably, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I myself know of myself?

Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness, tossing in expectations of great events, powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.

Who am I? This or the Other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptible, woebegone weakling?

Or is it something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!’

It’s the complexity of all the emotions and all the remarkable brilliance of intellect that Dietrich Bonhoeffer composes what is perhaps the poem of this century.

It’s simple to talk about his biography at a superficial level. He was born in 1906 and he died in 1945. He was born in Wroclaw in Poland. And he was brought up in a loving family. He had three brothers, Karl Friedrich, Walter and Klaus, and a beloved sister, Sabine. His father, Klaus, was an eminent psychiatrist in Berlin and a professor of neurosciences and incipient science in the University of Berlin. So he belonged to the upper class—privileged, bourgeois family background. His beloved mother, Paula von Hase, was herself of Prussian aristocracy. She was musical, where his father was scientific. She was gentle where he was stern. And so he was close to his mother because his three brothers all followed the trail of their father to be scientists, all, of course, seeking in their own way to get their father’s attention. And in many ways, Dietrich, as the youngest of the brothers, realised there was no way he could really get his father’s attention, so he did get his mother’s loving attention.

So that was the short biographical background of his family life. Of course, so privileged in such an eminent family, he was himself educated at the University of Berlin and he wanted to go into the Church. And so his professor was Harnack, who had followed in the lineage of the liberal idealist theologians, philosophers, of Germany, of Strauss and Bauer and [Reichel 00:07:43], of Hamman and, of course, all of them had proceeded Harnack, his own teacher. And of course, growing up in a liberal seminary, he was a liberal himself. He was imbued with their spirit of German idealism that was all the heir of what Hegel had been in the previous century. It was based on the concept of authenticity of the human nature as spirit. This rootedness of human nature in anthropology was not in theology.

And this background of German idealism was, of course, also the background of Immanuel Kant’s moral idealism. This romantic spirit of seeking to be authentic was itself a long lineage that had started in Venice. And in the history of ideas, if I may be allowed to go back to the beginning of it all, it was the Venetian merchants who discovered that there were better sands in the Lido of Venice than there were in the Arab sands of Syria, where glass making by the Arabs had begun. These much more refined sands of Venice then started the amazing glass industry of the Venetians. And it was this spread of this bright, clear mirror effect of the Venetian glass that raised the whole hubris of the French court and of its aristocracy. You visit any chateau or palace in France and you will find from floor to ceiling it’s glass—it’s Venetian glass. The French spent a fortune on this glass. They saw their faces for the first time clearly, brilliantly. It’s that mirror that enabled Louis XIV to say, ‘L’etat, c’est moi’—the state is me. And of course, it was that hubris that came to the downfall of the aristocracy in the French Revolution. It’s a long story.

And it’s no coincidence that that age of the use and spread of French glass was the age of high drama, of Shakespeare, of Calderon. It’s the age that you when you look at your faith, you can say well, I’m sincere. It’s the age when Shakespeare in one of his plays is urging Laertes on his journey, ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow as night the day, thou shalt not then be false to any man.’ The 18th century was the age of the cult of sincerity. Everybody wanted to be sincere. And it’s significant that, previous to this, already the Puritan John Owen had said there’s no sincerity that’s worthwhile when you realise the deception of sin. And so it’s John Owen who’s writing an indictment against the cult that was to develop of sincerity. Of course, the cult of sincerity, which is a long story that we haven’t time today to talk about, is the cult that then led to authenticity, and you’re then authentic to yourself.

And it was German idealism that in fact derived its authenticity from this whole background.

Well, that’s a long story in itself. But that’s the background to German idealism. And so it’s now based on the authenticity of human nature and human nature is part of the spirit of nature in the scenes around. So all of this is part of the romanticism which ultimately led to the so-called romanticism of the Nazi era. One of my colleagues at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin, decided as a young man coming from a Jewish background in Russia that he would devote his whole life to the history of Romanticism. And he found it a fascinating subject until the end story of Romanticism was the Holocaust. He was looking into a hell hole and he shuddered and never finished his work. That’s the end of the story of idealism because it was also an abstraction that had nothing to do with being human at all.

And so one of the significant influences that later Bonhoeffer was to receive was from Karl Barth, who was totally antagonistic to all this romantic idealism and said that human nature should be considered in terms of theo-anthropology, not human anthropology. And so he became attracted, did Bonhoeffer, to Barth’s teaching. He saw there that certainty was not anchored in man but in God in all His majesty. And he saw, critically, that the transcendent theology of Barth was drawing him away into a different world altogether. But we’ll say more about that.

Well, as a young man at university, Bonhoeffer was subject to all of this kind of teaching. So when he went to New York to do further training, now under the Niebuhrs, Richard and Reinhold,—at the New York Theological Seminary at Morningside, which is up on the hill above Harlem. I vividly spent a summer in summer school teaching at Colombia University and I remember my dread alienation of living there and seeing what a different world it was with all its abstraction of scholarship from the humble and the vital Christianity of the blacks worshipping in Harlem. He himself had his metanoia when he realised real Christianity is not in the seminary at all, real Christianity is actually in the Baptists’ black church where he came to faith in 1931. We know very little about that because it’s not documented. It was a very private relationship that totally cut him off from all that he was associating with in his academic life.

And we should say that what was happening at the seminary in the teaching of the two Niebuhrs was it’s almost as if it’s been a classic for many students to read: Christ and Culture by Reinhold Niebuhr. What kind of Christ are you for? Are you with Christ in culture? Are you against Christ in culture? Are you for Christ in culture? And he gives us all these five different variants as if with all the hubris you could choose which you want to have. And of course, another thing that was so blinding to these liberal theologians in New York was that they were all caught up with what they considered to be pastoral theology. And what the pastoral theology, of course, was about was because we were now in a therapeutic culture. It was the rise of psychotherapy. It was the influence that Freud had had at the end of the 19th century that was now burning bright in a new direction. And so one of the tragedies that even many evangelicals in North America have suffered from is they got hijacked by a therapeutic culture that the healing of the soul becomes more important than the saving of the soul. And the Niebuhrs were up to their necks in this kind of teaching.

When he left New York, for a very short time he had also been a vicar in Barcelona. So he had already had a Spanish experience of Catalan culture. So he was very rich in the heritage that he had. But now with the threat of the Nazis taking over and knowing that perhaps he was going back to his death, to the astonishment of the Niebuhrs, who were trying to give him a position in New York, he turned his back on all the prospects of saving his life and goes back to Germany. He knows already with premonition he’s going to meet his death. So he collects a small group of disciples and on the Pomeranian coast of the Baltic they shack down in a small house community and it’s there where he first writes one of his wonderful classics Life Together. It’s how in friendship we share together the life of Christ. Of course, the Nazis soon intervened and scattered them and so for the sake of their own lives they had to flee in all directions. And it’s then that he returns to Berlin to face what may lie ahead.

We don’t know in that process when he got involved with the conspirators, but his entry to that conspiratorial life was through his beloved sister, Sabine, who had married one of the official bureaucrats of the government, but who was already himself plotting for the assassination of Hitler. I’ve only learnt more recently that there was not one, but perhaps half a dozen different attempts to destroy Hitler and it was just bad luck all the time. There would be a bomb loaded on a plane that was going to fly Hitler to the Russian front and the last minute he decided not to go. And so the plane blew up. And there were other abortive attempts, so it’s reckoned that perhaps there were six different efforts. And of course, there was the bungled attempt that really destroyed his life when the suitcase under the desk was, unfortunately, placed in the wrong position under the desk. It was against the wooden beam that took the blast and not Hitler’s legs. And so again Hitler escaped. He seemed like the devil in his evasiveness of death. And then of course, there was this huge manhunt that stirred up Germany and destroyed the lives of some of the top Prussian generals, including, of course, Bonhoeffer’s own brother-in-law and then himself. And it is one of the ironies of history that his death was only just a few weeks before the deliverance when the Allied troops reached Berlin and could, of course, have stopped any of the executions, but they’d already been taken.

You’re privileged when you’re old like I am to have all sorts of contacts and live through all sorts of vicissitudes. And just as an aside, I had a very intriguing one last year when someone said to me I know somebody who is very skilled and she actually has created one of the municipal boards of trade and done it very successfully, but she’s concerned about spending more time as a single mother with her teenage daughter, so she’s looking for a part-time job. Will you employ her? Well of course, she was way over any need of my clearing of my documenting my library, but I, in compassion, employed her and discovered that her name was Diane Gering. Oh, I said, Gering? And you say you come from Germany?

And then she looked at me as if to say you’re on the trail, aren’t you? She said I spell my name G-E-R-I-N-G. And then she said but some of my relatives spell it G-E-H-R-I-N-G and there are some who still spell it G-O-E. Oh, I said, are you related to Hermann Goering? That was in this plot to kill both Hitler and Goering as the head of the Luftwaffe. Oh, she said, he was my great great-uncle and it was my great great-grandfather who, as a young man, resisted joining the Nazis and he had to flee to Saskatchewan and he had to live in a hovel in the Northern Pioneer zone, where the ground is frozen for so much of the winter, and he had only a haystack or a hovel to live in. She said we’ve had to pull ourselves up from there. So it’s very interesting the interconnections that you have in the course of life.

Well, to return to what happened to Bonhoeffer. What Bonhoeffer was blessed was to be, first of all, liberated from liberalism by his encounter with Karl Barth. And Karl Barth, who, of course, had himself had to struggle in his liberal education which he also had with Harnack in Berlin, he had to think things through for himself. And so it’s this struggle that Barth had that helped Bonhoeffer to see what he should be. What he realised was that his own conversion change was when as a young man he studied the Epistle to the Romans and his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, of course, where he had a complete turnaround. There, he was faced by a very different world and the reality of God communicating His Word through His son. Now, he has what we can only call an incarnational revelation and in that incarnational revelation he was discovering a very different world. I’ll say more about that, about Karl Barth’s own prayer life in another lecture. But it arrested Bonhoeffer as he’d never been arrested in his life before. And at the same time, as we’ll see, he then later was able to move forward into an almost much more complex understanding than he had had even with Barth.

As Karl Barth had encountered in the Epistle to the Romans that Jesus Christ became incarnate in the likeness of sinful flesh, this struck him as an uncompromising incarnational theology, which he now calls theo-anthropology. And at the same time, what he was aware of was that Christ had fundamentally penetrated into the world. And so in the first volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Bonhoeffer discovered that truly we have to recognise that the whole of this emphasis is that the whole nation needs a political theology that truly is dogmatic. And so the great contribution that Barth was to make in Germany was the contribution of a new political theology. And of course, what was happening was that the German Lutheran pastors were succumbing as a state church to a Nazified interpretation of the state church. And here at the Barmen Declaration in 1933 is when Barth has said nein, no. Of course, it was very easy for him to say it because he could safely retreat as a Swiss to Basel, but his brave associates like Niemoller were imprisoned and many met their death, as Bonhoeffer was to meet his death as well. And we will have to leave what other influence Barth had on Bonhoeffer to reflection near the end of this lecture.

Now before we go any further with Barth, we now need to turn to how we ourselves as we face at the beginning of a new millennium this great tidal tsunami of secularism in our culture. It’s one thing to say I’m a Christian, and you say it sympathetically in your church even though the church itself may have a distorted idea of what it is to have a Christian identity, but then you don’t have any argument. It’s all complacent. And if you were to go into the court under the judiciary and face a judge and he was judging you for being a Christian, like those in the 2nd century, you have to have a much more sophisticated defence of what it is to be a Christian. As we’ve seen, that was the defence that Clement of Alexandria and others had to face in the courts. But the complexity that you and I face, like Bonhoeffer faced, is that you have to understand where has identity gone today.

Identity was, of course, all the rage after Freud, when he said one’s identity is threefold. It lies in the tension between the Id and the Ego and the Superego. And for that generation, conscience was just simply having the echo of what your forebears or perhaps your parents was in a kind of authoritative voice of moralism. And this was very popular with the rise of the individual in American society at the end of the 19th century. But the first person to break the spell of Freudian psychoanalysis was Erich Fromm. He got disenchanted with the Freudian approach and so in the mid-6os he wrote a book called [The Young Calvin 00:33:45],which was a reaction to Freudian psychoanalysis and it’s the beginning of the portraiture of more modern understandings of identity. But it didn’t go very far. It was simply a reaction. And so what has happened is that other deeper philosophers have been able to guide us more deeply into ‘Who am I?’—the question that Bonhoeffer is haunted with and was haunted with all his life.

One of the victims, but mercifully who escaped the death camp when he was delivered at the end of the war, was a secular Jew called Emmanuel Levinas. And he said I discovered in the death camp that the reason for my survival is I was not living for myself, I was living for my wife. So he escaped the despair with which so many victims just gave up with typhus and other diseases. And miraculously, he was released. This of course, shook him to the core. And now he began to speak of alterity. ‘Alter’ is the Latin for vthe other’—I live for the other. And he wrote a philosophical book called Otherwise than Being. Tragically, he remained secular and so the vI’ that he’s speaking about and the ‘other’ that he’s speaking about are simply dialogical within oneself. The ‘other’ is not God. The ‘other’ is not even his wife. It’s an abstraction of what she might be.

And yes, it’s true, he was seeking to live for her sake. And yes, he was orientating himself to the other. But he wasn’t receiving anything from the other, other than what was in myself. And so he behaved in the concentration camp with his wife outside, but with a kind of a ghostly ‘I’ and a ghostly ‘other’. In other words, it was all his own self-capacity that was determining his survival. He was trying to save himself. And so he argues that the self cannot act dogmatically, but only critically in assessing one’s capacity for doing so day by day. And so instead of calling upon God, he was really speaking to himself. All of this was coming out of his own self-sufficiency. He was claiming I received nothing in the ‘other’, but what is already in me. There was no face-to-face relationship with the ‘other’. After all, he was in a prison cell and he couldn’t see his wife. So it was a proximate relationship, an idealistic relationship, not a real relationship of face-to-face.

So we too as Christians, when we idealise the commandment to love our neighbour as ourself, are thinking of this much more moralistically or philosophically, but it’s not really ethical in the true sense that really I am for the other. And so one of the things that Bonhoeffer was to help to clear us later was always to make a huge distinction between morality and ethics. Moralism, which goes back to Immanuel Kant in his moral universe is simply an abstraction of behaviour. Ethical behaviour is personal behaviour. It’s what I actually do. And so the whole realm of identity for Levinas is in moralism.

The other person that is very important for us to read today on understanding the nature of our identity is Paul Ricoeur. He was a Huguenot Christian that survived all the secular existentialism of Paris with a brilliant mind. He had a dual professorship, both in Chicago University and also in the Sorbonne and I think he usually escaped to Chicago to get a much less hostile environment that what he was facing in the Sorbonne. And so the intensity of his fighting for understanding a Christian identity we have his climactic essays written shortly before he died, The Gifford Lectures: Oneself as Another, which was published in 1992. I tell you, I don’t think I’ve ever read a more complex book in my life. And I still nibble at it and still nibble at it, but I’ve never really comprehended it, to be honest. But what his intent was as a Christian was to deny the Cartesian self as self-founding—self-founding as the cognitive self that thinks, but cannot relate. So I think therefore I am has, of course, been a plight on our Western thinking ever since.

It needed my little daughter Penny when she was five years old to cross the road in our cul-de-sac where there was a kindly husband and wife who had no children, but he was a famous professor of philosophy at Oxford called Dr Robinson. So she looks with her blue eyes and pigtails up at his face and says Dr Robinson, what do you do for a living? Well Penny, I think and I write about thinking and I teach about thinking. She looked at him with scorn. Is that all you do? That’s what the Cartesian self does: it evades living in the world altogether, as so many Oxford dons as logical positivists were doing. And this was, of course, what C.S. Lewis was fighting mad against the reductionism of logical positivism. And, of course, this is what it means to be postmodern. We react against this idealism of cognition to say but our emotions matter too.

So now we have an explosion of understanding the emotional life that has gone totally contradictory to the Cartesian self. Now we can understand that to have emotional intelligence and even spiritual intelligence is a whole new reaction of our culture. But of course, what Ricoeur was therefore indicating is that as a model of truth, he was devising another model that human knowledge does not rest on certainties. The certainty that I doubt or the certainty that I’m a mathematician were the certainties of the rationalism of Descartes. But it’s Sir John Polkinghorne, who has been a brilliant quantum physicist as well as an evangelical chaplain in his college at Cambridge, he says the Christian, his knowledge is on well-motivated beliefs which are never self-evident, but rest on reasonable evidence within an intelligible, interpretive framework. And so yes, Ricoeur advocates that I don’t hold the truth, but I attest to the truth. It’s attestation. It’s the kind of attestation the judge makes in the courts of law. It’s based on evidence as an attorney is making his case. And so Ricoeur says attestation is the speech of one giving testimony that one believes. And attestation can phrase truth of a complexity that scientific reason can never portray.

So instead of propositional verification, attestation aims at veracity rather than measureable truth. The question ‘Who am I?’ can only be answered by way of attestation, as was offered by Ricoeur and was also offered by Bonhoeffer in the sense of self-knowledge—this is what I know of myself. And so his first important insight that Ricoeur gives to us is that identity consists of two interconnected aspects. And here he uses two Latin words: ipse, which is I, or what the French would say c’est moi, it’s me, ipse; and there’s idem, which means sameness, the same as. Ipse means that it will vary with time and place. It’s fluid. I’m this in this context. I’m that in that context. Idem describes permanence. I’m a human being. I’ve a body. I still have the same body. I still have the same temperament. And probably although my personality is developing, it’s basically also the same. And when I say I’ve got character, yes, morally I want to have consistency in the semi-permanence of character, but character changes too. We grow richer, deeper, in our character.

And so the anxiety that Bonhoeffer is having in his poem, he’s afraid of losing his identity. In other words, he’s afraid of losing that sameness because it’s changed. The circumstances have changed. It’s the philosophers who’ve tried to maintain a self-permanence. But instead of the category of permanence, it should be considered the category of personal. That’s why the philosophers can only speak in moralistic and not ethical language. They can only answer the question ‘What are you?’. They can describe that. But they can’t answer the question ‘Who are you?’ And so for Ricoeur, true selfhood rests on a self-constancy beyond the sameness of character or other trait that we may have. Yes, I’m accountable for my actions, but that’s a dynamic interpretation of the self when I’m being a self for the other. And as we’ve been using the word ‘person’, the person is the one who loves his neighbour as himself. It goes back to the triune God where the Father is for the Son and the Son is for the Father and the Holy Spirit is for the Father and the Son. That’s the mystery of being a person.

Now, another contribution that Ricoeur has given to us in our generation more than any other philosopher as a Christian is that identity is so bound up with narrative. If Bonhoeffer was asking ‘Who am I?’ of course, when we ask the same question, we’re describing the narrative of our lives. And so in an earlier work that moves in this direction is Time and Narrative, in which he argues that personal history requires events of narrative. Who did this? Why did you do this? And so we could go on. That’s the narrative life. But it’s narrative that unifies events and character to become in a coherent story I am who I am because if you have the time to listen, I will tell you my narrative. That’s why one of the tragedies of old people with dementia is that they’re asking ‘Who am I?’ And now they can’t tell you because they’ve lost their narrative. And unless you remember their narrative for them, they’ve lost that identity. So it’s a very relevant question for today for old people in an old people’s home not to be able to express who they are.

So Ricoeur lists all the features of what it is to be the same, idem. The self is flesh. It’s body. It’s the sensing, enduring, suffering self that relates to others. And so embodiment is really what idem is all about. And this was a crucial element for the Early Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa. Secondly, idem means that it limits my ego when other people stand in the way, when I compete with them or they suppress me, as a child is often suppressed by an authoritarian figure. And then thirdly, idem is also the otherness that one associates with conscience, that the self is being addressed by a transcendent authority that we call conscience. Now, as we’ve seen, Freud uses simply the superego to define what is conscience.

And Nietzsche went much further to suspect that all ideas of conscience were manmade. And Heidegger was to intensify Nietzsche by saying that conscience is really something that has to be demoralised, has to be totally destroyed, but we haven’t time to talk about the influence of Nietzsche on Heidegger and the Nazis. But the story about Nietzsche is that as a small boy he was suppressed by his strong older sister and a strong mother and the only attention he could get was to be the good boy, the good little boy that was meek and mild. And the tragedy was that he couldn’t get any affection or attention from his father, whom he dearly loved, because his father had a brain tumour and therefore was not aware of his son at all. So the poor child was totally isolated. He was emotionally orphaned from birth. No wonder he went in such hysterical rage and went insane at the end of his life. ‘Who then am I?’ is a huge question.

When we come back now to asking Bonhoeffer ‘Who are you?’ of course, we all begin by saying I am my family heritage. And Bonhoeffer was able to say I had to compete with my strong scientific brothers to get my father’s attention and ‘Who am I?’ is really my mother’s son. She loved me. And she loved music and so I love music too. And so he grew up with a strong sense of the love of friendship and a passionate love of having a social responsibility. So when he was recruited for the conspiracy, it was all because he loved his sister. And yet, the tragedy that collapsed him when you get to that ultimate Grenzfall, as he calls it, of the point where he’s now facing death as a conspirator, he had no longer freedom to explain his actions to anyone. He can’t tell his beloved fiancée because he doesn’t want to implicate her. His first kiss in romance with her, Maria, was under the scrutiny of the Nazis. He was always facing their gaze under their surveillance. And so he had to shield Maria from any possible suspicion by pretending to have a false image. It was for her sake he was doing it. So yes, he says, Maria considers me a paragon of virtue and a model of Christian accountability, but I can’t tell her who I am. And so he cracks under all these pressures.

But at the same time, Bonhoeffer goes beyond the betrayal of identity that Ricoeur, brilliant as he is, gives to us. Because Ricoeur doesn’t tell us. Bonhoeffer expresses it. That his identity is no longer anchored in himself at all. It’s in God alone. Ultimately, Bonhoeffer is telling us that we cannot know who we are, only God knows. In other words, it’s more important to be known than to know. It’s this being known by someone greater than ourselves which means losing ourselves in order to have a Christian identity of being in Christ. Bonhoeffer does not use the Pauline language that we’ve been stressing throughout this course, but it’s clearly implicit in all of his reflections. It is also Augustinian: you know me, O God. He’s reciting that as if he was Augustine himself. But self-renunciation is the essential basis that we have to lose ourselves in order to have ourselves.

Well, what is important in a study of Bonhoeffer’s identity is then to explore his Christian ethics, which was a sequence to his book The Cost of Discipleship under the Nazis. That too is a wonderful classic. But Christian ethics goes beyond the cost of discipleship because now it’s not simply the cost to me, but it’s the lived response to Christ’s call to live in one’s embodiment of myself the reconciliation of God and the world in every sphere of life, even if it means to be a conspirator. And so we will then as he had demonstrated, we have to live different identities in very different spheres of life, even being a conspirator.

And this is where many Christians find it very difficult to understand what he means by his looking to the future as the future of religion-less Christianity. This is man come of age. What he means by this is that the religious self is a reductionistic self. It’s a moralistic self. And this worldly is penetrating the world as the Incarnation has penetrated the world. It’s nothing to do with worldliness, but it has to do that the Christian has, in Christ, penetrated the whole structure of reality. The Christian is not homoreligiosis, but he is now one who has penetrated. And this is what he means by being this worldly. It means living unreservedly in all life’s duties and problems and successes and failures and experiences and perplexities. It’s throwing ourselves completely into the arms of God, [taking seriously God not even our sufferings 01:01:09] and watching with Christ, he says, in Gethsemane. Now, this is a strange phrase for many of us today. He says you cannot be a Christian without the desire to be worldly. Can you imagine how fundamentalists stand on their heads to hear Bonhoeffer saying this?

What he’s saying is there are not two realms. There’s only one realm and that’s the reality of Christ. It’s the reality of God and the reality of the world, which are united in God. They’re not competing realms standing by side, battling over the borderline as if the question of boundaries was always the decisive one. It’s the reality that the Incarnation has penetrated the whole of the world.

Well, you can read about that in Ethics, page 98. But the result of this amazing exploration that I’ve so tentatively given to you is very much better expressed by one of my colleagues, Jens Zimmerman, who, in our book on sources of Christian identity has written this work on him. Well, it’s important for us to realise that this is a wonderful age of biographies of Bonhoeffer and films about Bonhoeffer. So there’s already one popular documentary on him and there’s another one that is about to be developed and circulated this next year that will be a real blockbuster by Metaxas and his associates. The gripping understanding of the Christian identity will be wonderfully portrayed in our cinemas as a result. What glory to Christ we can give as a result of what is happening in the film industry.

But we think too of the wonderful biographies that have already and are continuing, one after the other. Eberhard Bethge, who was his close friend, has given us an early biography. Metaxas has given us another one. There are still others, one after the other. And Jens Zimmerman himself has given us several different studies that he’s making it his life’s work. And so we can thank God for the future of the pioneering of Christian identity. But it means, my brothers and sisters, that we can’t give a simple response to a secular world about ‘Who am I?’ We have to penetrate all these structures of previous philosophies that our secular world has inherited and we have to disinherit.

So we may ask what do you want to discuss concerning this extraordinary wealth and complexity about the identity of Bonhoeffer. I think the first, very practical question that you can discuss together is it’s so easy for me to describe who I am as a Christian in a Christian community, but it’s so complex to know where to begin to talk about my identity when I’m speaking in the secular culture. How do you think Bonhoeffer and the people that have critiqued contemporary identity help you to be able to do that with your own non-Christian friends?

The second question that we can also ask you to consider for discussion is that it’s so easy for us to have a church or church-y identify, being religious, as it were, and yet, to realise that Bonhoeffer is shocking us that we have to be this worldly. How do you think you can interpret the complexity of his thinking, which is such a paradigm shift in our own minds, in dealing with the question that we should be this worldly? What does that mean?

And so the third question that we should ask is how does Bonhoeffer help me when I feel confused about who I am, because of the circumstances and the pressures and even sometimes the intense suffering that I’m going through, help me to navigate to have a stability of what it is that my identity is in Christ?