The Lifted Burden

"When we become a burden to ourselves, when we don't want to keep on going, when we are afraid of the mountain lying in front of us, when guilt feelings weigh down heavily on our mind, when we feel we have been lied to and victimized by the world, then we need only one thing - we need a person whom we can fully trust without reservation, a person who understands everything, hears everything, a person who bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, forgives all things. We need a person to whom we can say: 'You are rest, you are gentle peace, you are the longing and the one who stills it' (Ruckert). We need a person under whose eyes our suffering disappears and out heart opens up in silent love, a person who gently takes our burden from us and frees us from our fits of rage and from all our fears. In so doing, this person delivers our soul from the world... Now the greatest of all miracles is that every individual has and can find this person because this person calls each of us to himself on his own initiative, offers himself, invites us. This person who is our rest, our peace, our refreshment, and our deliverance, is Jesus Christ alone. He alone is truly human. And in this true humanity he is God."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, 235-36

Peace Between Individuals :: Peace Between Nations

"We Christians are above all addressed by the command of love to the point that we ourselves must live in peace with every person, just like Christ when he preached peace to the community, exemplified in peace with one's brother and sister, with one's neighbor, with the Samaritan. Unless we have this peace, we cannot preach peace to people.

Most who are annoyed at the world of peace among peoples, moreover, are already calling in question the love of enemies over against personal enemy. When we wish to speak about the conditions for peace, therefore, we would do well always to keep before our eyes the fact that relationships between two nations bear close analogy to relationships between two individuals. 

The conditions that are opposed to peace are in the one as in the other relationship: lust for power, pride, inordinate desire for glory and honor, arrogance, feelings of inferiority, and strife over more living space and over one's 'bread' or life.

What is sin for an individual is never virtue for an entire people or nation. What is proclaimed as the gospel to the church, the congregation, and, thereby, the individual Christian, is spoken to the world as a judgment. When a people refuses to hear this command, then Christians are called forth from that people to give witness to peace. 

Let us take care, however, that we proclaim peace from a spirit of love and not from any zeal for security or from any mere political aim."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, 95

Enslaved by Freedom

As I have written before, the American obsession with "freedom" bothers me. Here's some more food for thought for those who think freedom can somehow be 'secured' or 'possessed.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 

"In the language of the Bible, freedom is not something persons have for themselves, but something they have for others. No one enjoys freedom 'in itself,' that is, in a vacuum, the same way that one may be musical, intelligent, or blind as such. Freedom is not a quality of the human person. Nor is it an ability, a disposition, a kind of being that somehow deeply germinates in a person. Whoever scrutinizes the human to discover freedom will find nothing of it. Why? Because freedom is not a quality that can be discovered. It is not a possession, a presence, or an object. Nor is it a pattern for existence. 

Rather, it is a relationship; otherwise, it is nothing. Indeed, it is a relationship between two persons. Being free means 'being free for the other,' because the other has bound me to himself or herself.  Only in relationship with the other am I free.

No substantial or individualistic concept of freedom has the ability to encompass freedom. Freedom is something over which I have no control as a possession. It is simply the event, the experience, that happens to me through the other. If we ask how we know this, or whatever this is, not just another speculation about the beginning that results from being in the middle, we can answer that it is the message of the gospel itself, that God's freedom has bound us to the divine self, that God's free grace becomes real only in this relationship with us, and that God does not will to be free for the divine self but for man and woman. Because God in Christ is free for us humans, because God does not hoard freedom for the divine self we can envision freedom only as a 'being free for.' For us who live in the middle through Christ and know our humanity in his resurrection, that God is free means nothing more than that we are free for God." (from A Testament to Freedom, 106-107)

G.K. Chesterton: 

"We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style, the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself." (Orthodoxy, 114)

As Though There Were No God

"We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this is just what we do recognize - before God! God himself [sic.] compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as people who manage our lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets the divine self be pushed out of the world onto the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us. Matthew 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, 508