Hi Friends,
Here is our latest conversation with our friend (Bishop) Chris Green, in which I asked him to discuss the practice of preaching in light of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the will of God as both knowable and doable— this in tension with the distinction between Law and Gospel and Luther’s treatise the Bondage of the Will.
Thanks to the hundred or so of you who joined us live!
Here are some of the excerpts from Bonhoeffer I tagged for Chris’ attention:
Bonhoeffer on the Will of God
First, we need to unlearn completely saying: “I want,” before God teaches us through the Holy Spirit to say it new and correctly. Precisely in matters of piety, this “I want” can have disastrous effects—“I want to be pious, I want to be sanctified, I want to keep the commandments”—first, we must understand thoroughly that in this matter, too, it is not our will but God’s will alone that counts. We must also renounce our pious ego so that God can do his work with us. Otherwise, the consequence of our “I want” is certainly bankruptcy. But when through God’s grace we have stopped saying, “I want,” when through God’s new beginning with us in Jesus Christ we have been brought onto his path—despite all our “I want” and “I do not want”—then the Holy Spirit begins to speak within us, and we will say “I want” in a quite new and quite different way. “As soon as the Holy Spirit has begun his work of rebirth and renewal in us through the Word and the holy sacraments, it is certain that on the basis of his power we can and should be cooperating with him, though still in great weakness” (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration II, 65). As the blessed ones, as those who call upon God’s help, who praise God and thank him, we may now say: “I want.” Yes, I want to keep your statutes, I am not compelled to do it, but you have freed me so that I can want what I had hated. You have bound my will to your statutes. It is God, the Holy Spirit himself, who makes for me the reality of what was true for Jesus Christ alone: my will is your word.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940 (DBW 15; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), pp. 509–510.
“Do not hide your commandments from me.” This is the prayer of the pilgrim in a foreign land… There is no doubt: God has given his commandments for us to know and we have no excuse, as if we did not know the will of God. God does not allow us to live in irresolvable conflicts; he does not turn our lives into ethical tragedies; rather, he lets us know his will, demands its fulfillment, and punishes disobedience. Things here are much easier than we like. Our distress is not that we do not know God’s commandments but that we don’t do them—and that as a result of such disobedience, we are gradually unable to recognize them. It is said here not that God hides his commandments but: God is beseeched for the grace not to hide his commandments. It is within God’s freedom and wisdom to deny us the grace of his commandment; then, however, there is for us not resignation but far more the urgent and persistent prayer: “Do not hide your commandments from me.”
— Bonhoeffer, Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940, pp. 523-524.
Amid thunderclaps, lightning, thick clouds, mountains shaking, and powerful trumpet blasts, God proclaims the Ten Commandments to his servant Moses on Mount Sinai. They are not the result of extended reflection on human life and its orders by astute and experienced men; rather, they are God’s word of revelation, beneath which the earth shakes and the elements are thrown into turmoil. The Ten Commandments come into the world not as general worldly wisdom offered to any thinking person, but instead as a holy event that even the people of God under threat of death dare not approach, as God’s revelation in the isolation of a smoking volcanic peak. It is not Moses but God who gives them; it is not Moses but God who writes them with his finger on stone tables, as the Bible emphatically and repeatedly makes clear. “And [God] added no more” (Deut. 5:22), meaning that these were the only words that God himself wrote; in them the entire will of God is contained. This distinguishing of the Ten Commandments from all the other words of God is shown most clearly by the preservation of the two tables in the ark of the covenant within the Holy of Holies. The Ten Commandments belong in the sanctuary; here, in the place of God’s gracious presence in the world, one must seek them and from here they continually go forth into the world (Isa. 2:3).
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940–1945, (DBW 16; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 633.
Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God. But to partake in this is possible only because of the fact that even I myself am already included in the fulfillment of the will of God in Christ, which means that I have been reconciled to God… The will of God is nothing other than the realization of the Christ-reality among us and in our world… The will of God is therefore not an idea that demands to be realized; it is itself already reality in the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ… The will of God, as it was revealed and fulfilled in Jesus Christ, embraces the whole of reality.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (DBW 6; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 74.
Just as specifically as God spoke to Abraham and Jacob and Moses, and just as specifically as God spoke in Jesus Christ to the disciples, and to the congregations through the apostles, so God speaks just as specifically to us, or God does not speak at all.
— Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 379.
