Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And Jennifer, this is so cool.

I learned later because I still in the back of my mind, I had this thought is like, does this really count? And come to find out, that's what Dietrich Bonhoeffer encouraged his seminarians to do is to like, stop focusing on quantity and settle into like just one verse and repeat it over and over and cause that one to become part of your soul and part of your being and i mean he was talking to people that had all the time in the world and yet slowing down like that was still something really important and it's been interesting in the past year i read have you read domestic monastery yet i was about ready to quote it Yes.

And so like motherhood and monastery, like the premise of the book is motherhood and monastery life look similarly.

In monastic life, there are bells that call you away from whatever you were doing and make you focus on something else.

including by yourself.

I love how Dietrich Bonhoeffer kind of engages with this and he says, you know, at some point you're going to experience disillusionment with other Christians and ideally also recognising yourself.

That's actually the most important thing to realise how disappointing you are as you engage in community.

So we're not This side of eternity, this side of Jesus' return, if you're a Christian, we're not looking to build a perfect community.

So much of that model that churches feel the need to replicate is because of this empire-shaped concept of understanding unity as uniformity, right? When unity, the gospel's way, Jesus' way is uniformity.

bringing our full selves every knee every tribe every tongue every nation that's that's ethnic groups um not nationalities as we understand it the modern day and and it's being united in our diversity um not in uniformity the way the roman empire would like to enforce it and modern empires do as well so the third point is the justice of jesus is expensive dietrich bonhoeffer talks about the cost of discipleship and I make it the cost of just discipleship.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about cheap grace.

I evolved that concept into cheap justice.

And so many of us in the Western church and the global church are content with a form of justice that's performative, but ultimately costs us nothing.

hey there guys thanks for joining me for another holy shed it's always great to have you around and this is part two in our exciting series about the fascinating german theologian and martyr dietrich bonhoeffer oh by the way thanks so much for all your encouraging comments about our first session i thrive on feedback i starve on the lack of it you know it's hard for a gregarious soul like me to sit in a shed on his own talking to his laptop So please keep letting me know what you think.

And, you know, feel free to send in your questions too.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is such an interesting figure, raising so many questions for our present time.

So I know there are things that will come into your mind to ask.

And I'm always glad to hear from you.

I mean, you know, it claims in principle to uphold the First Amendment rights of all people, regardless of their faith tradition or whatever.

But in practice, it focuses now almost entirely on the narrow agenda and priorities of conservative evangelicals.

The Religious Liberty Commission, which Paula White-Kane helps to guide, God help us, consists overwhelmingly of Christians, including people like Franklin Graham and Eric Metaxas, who I mentioned last week, who has written a biography of Bonhoeffer, with only one conservative Orthodox rabbi in the mix.

All the information is at Socrates in the city.

Um, And I want to mention to you finally, and I'll be mentioning this a lot, the Bonhoeffer film is being relaunched in theaters January 24th to 27th.

We were going to do it in October.

We couldn't for many reasons.

The idea is to get a church to reach out so that the local theaters will carry the film.

This is a huge evangelistic opportunity, a huge opportunity on many, many levels.

Please go to the website, bonhoffermovie.com, not O-R-G. BonhoefferMovie.com, BonhoefferMovie.com. Have I mentioned BonhoefferMovie.com? Please go to BonhoefferMovie.com.

We need your help.

Come on now.

Then we saw Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We went to the place.

We went to the actual room where they planned together to conspire to take out Hitler.

still alive.

Sin is still alive.

Went to the actual prison Bonhoeffer was arrested in before he died and was shipped off.

He was at the concentration camp that we went, but he was on the outside of it at the SS headquarters.

And I was deeply troubled, and my Christian upbringing led me to ask over and over, where was the church? What were they saying? What did they do to try to stop this atrocity? And of course, later I discovered that the church in Germany and Europe, around the world, was not simply missing, but was complicit in the Holocaust.

Let me remind you of, read you a quote of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who talked about standing on behalf of the weak, and to him it's not merely part of the mission of the church, it is the criteria by which Christianity stands or falls.

Bonhoeffer says, and I quote, Christianity stands or falls by its revolutionary protest against violence, by the arbitrariness and pride of power, and by its apology for the weak.

I feel that Christianity is doing too little in making these points rather than doing too much.

So grace isn't the problem.

Bonhoeffer talks about cheap grace.

It's the grace that is free.

Grace that comes into our lives freely.

So, like, I've translated a little bit of Rilke now, a little bit of Buber.

I'm working on some Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

And Martin Schleske is a little bit like one of these people that he writes in a very poetic, a deep way that the language is deep.

has a music and a rhythm to it and a beauty to it that needs to come through in a different language where people think and act differently.