Bonhoeffer on the Christian response to evil
For the past couple of weeks I've been reading Eric Metaxas' massive and excellent biography Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy about the German pastor and theologian who was ultimately executed for his collaboration in a plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer has fascinated me for a while. I count three of his works (The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together and Ethics) among my very favorite books and I've long pondered the complexity of a spiritual journey that leads someone from planning to visit Gandhi in India to learn about nonviolence to return instead to Germany to participate in an assassination plot.
All sorts of people want to claim Bonhoeffer as their own (and probably, neither Metaxas nor myself are exceptions) but what I love about Bonhoeffer is that even with all his complexity and seeming contradictions, he doesn't shy away from hard questions and answers about what it means to be faithful to Christ amidst the harsh realities of our world.
I'll leave you to chew on this paragraph from Ethics that I came across last summer, written during Hitler's rule but as timely a warning as ever for us today:
When evil becomes powerful in the world, it infects the Christian, too, with the poison of radicalism. It is Christ's gift to the Christian that he should be reconciled with the world as it is, but now this reconciliation is accounted a betrayal and denial of Christ. It is replaced by bitterness, suspicion and contempt for men and the world. In the place of the love that believes all, bears all and hopes all, in the place of the love which loves the world in its very wickedness with the love of God, there is now the pharisaical denial of love to evil, and the restriction of love to the closed circle of the devout. Instead of the open Church of Jesus Christ, which serves the world till the end, there is now some allegedly primitive Christian ideal of a Church, which in its turn confuses the reality of the living Jesus Christ with the realization of a Christian idea. Thus a world which has become evil succeeds in making the Christians become evil too.
Beyond bombs and bullets
Last night I watched one of the most gripping, thought-provoking and inspiring documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s called Little Town of Bethlehem and features three men - a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew - each committed to nonviolence as the way forward for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
While the complex history of the Israeli-Palestianian conflict can feel quite overwhelming and insurmountable, I left the theater at Messiah College feeling inspired. In a land where violence is by all accounts the norm, this story of nonviolence from articulate and thoughtful representatives of each of the region’s three different faiths is remarkable.
Like those featured in the documentary, I count King and Gandhi among my personal heroes, and over the past couple of years I’ve taken to studying their lives and words. While war and violent conflict are generally considered inevitable by those in power and many of the citizens who elect them, all of us would do well to pay more attention to the moments in history when courageous people committed to nonviolence have galvanized movements for peaceful social change. As we’re reminded in the film, bullets do not distinguish between Muslim, Jew or Christian, nor between black and white. It’s in the best interest of all of us to work toward alternatives.
Little Town of Bethlehem is currently screening on college campuses across North America.
A different sort of spooky
For the past four months, until last week, I was living in northeast Washington, D.C. in what was admittedly not the safest neighborhood. It’s the sort of neighborhood with a liquor store on every corner and bars on the windows of some homes. I eventually began venturing out at night on foot, but it was always a little spooky. I’d purposely empty my pockets of valuables and make it a point to pay attention to my surroundings. It was a matter of using common sense to mitigate the risks without being paralyzed by fear.
So now I’m here in rural Costa Rica, far from the dangers of the North American ghetto. As I mentioned before, I’m staying at ADE’s education center, a work-in-progress tucked into a valley in a little clearing in the rainforest. It’s really beautiful - in the daytime, at least - but I have to admit that the first couple of times hiking down there at night have been a bit spooky.
I walk with a flashlight which lets me see about two feet in front of me on account of the insanely thick fog, which feels like rain on pause. There’s a German shepherd that barks up a storm but has so far resisted its apparent urge to rip me to shreds. That’s been nice. But rumors of coyotes and vampire bats (seriously!) have warranted my complete vigilance and visions of acting quite unlike Gandhi should I encounter such beasts along the way.
On top of that, there have been a couple of close calls with cows - which, take my word for it, are much scarier under the aforementioned conditions than one might otherwise expect - and their many droppings interspersed along the trail of deep mud make me glad to be wearing crude rubber boots.
So this is life in San Rafael de Vara Blanca. Cows and mud and fog and breathtaking beauty and, perhaps, vampire bats. It’s really something else.
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