Gracious God, the Beyond in the midst of our life, who gavest grace to thy servant Dietrich Bonhoeffer to know and teach the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, and to bear the cost of following him: Grant that we, strengthened by his teaching and example, may receive thy word and embrace its call with an undivided heart; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
–One of the prayers appointed for his feast day today
Could someone possibly define the “Beyond in the midst of our life”? Is is the dwelling of the Ground of Being? The Cosmic Hum? The PreIncarnate Reincarnate? The God and Father of Richard Gere?
Today, April 9, 2008, by Presidential Proclamation, is Prisoner of War Remembrance Day. I had the honor to participate in the local ceremonies at one of the local high schools. Capt. Plumb (sp?), USN, Ret. spoke. He had been a prisoner in Viet Nam for six years. He emphasized the need to believe. He was fairly non-specific in front of the high school students, but nevertheless he said that he needed to believe in something greater than himself to survive. This is an extremely pleasant cooincidence.
Dan (#1), I understand your reaction, as if this Collect might be the product of some gnostic musings carried on in an office in some turret at 815. When I read it, I supposed that the phrase “the Beyond in the midst of life” could have been lifted out of something Bonhoeffer himself wrote. And in fact, something like it is in a letter from Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge dated April 26, 1944.
Who knows what the author of the Collect intended? But see whether the phrase in context makes more sense to you. (I’m looking at the 1997 Touchstone paperback edition of LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON, pp. 281-282)
I have to read every sentence at least twice, and I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of his points. Nevertheless…
Bonhoeffer’s been writing on the theme of “religionless Christianity.” Some prophetic passages, I think, in light of what we now call secularism and postmodernism. He’s writing about a Christianity shed of outmoded cultural clothing.
He says he’s “reluctant to mention God by name to religious people” because in that setting the name doesn’t “ring true”; he feels dishonest. The name is reduced to religious jargon. “Religious people speak of God when human knowledge… comes to an end” (the God of the gaps)– a valid observation about Christians whose minds have not learned to think “christianly,” but are formed by modernist assumptions. They try to push God farther and farther out to the “boundaries” of their lives. He writes,
“God’s ‘beyond’ is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond [not the Beyond– CB] in the midst of life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something I’m thinking about a great deal…”
Dan, do you have Jewish friends who are reluctant to mention the “name” of God aloud? I think Bonhoeffer is saying it would be better for Christians to have the same reticence, than that they should reduce God’s name to empty religious jargon. Think of the Israelites crossing the Sinai, with the Lord (transcendent– beyond) in the midst of the camp, represented by the pillar of cloud and the pillar of flame. Emmanuel.
Pax Christi,
Chuck Bradshaw