Life Together, Bonhoeffer’s book about Finkenwalde as a model of Christian community, came out two years later. Again, the appeal is to experience, an intuition of how life might be, based on the kind of visionary memory that becomes more important in Bonhoeffer’s writing as his life becomes more isolated and tenuous. The church — the eternal, present, felt being of Christ in the world which had always been at the center of his faith and his religious imagination — was or could be seen or apprehended in Finkenwalde or its like: “We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we really do have one another. We have one another completely and for all eternity.” The Gestapo, of course, had closed the seminary. His account of it is like mysticism barely concealed or restrained, though all that is being described is a community of the faithful. Visionary memory and anticipation are increasingly the “world” he will cling to until his death. To see divine immanence in the world is an act of faith, not a matter to be interpreted in other than its own terms, if one grants the reasonableness of the perceiver. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought and believed his way to a surpassing reasonableness.
In 1939, Bonhoeffer traveled to New York. He had studied there for a year, at Union Theological Seminary, as a young man of twenty-four. He contacted Reinhold Niebuhr, his former teacher, who was then in England, and asked him to arrange an invitation for him to return to the United States. He was at risk of being drafted into Hitler’s army. The invitation was made, and he was offered a teaching post, but he returned to Germany after a month out of homesickness and a feeling that he would lose the right to influence Germany in the period after the war if he stayed in America. He was no longer allowed to teach in Berlin, and he would soon be prohibited from speaking in public and required to report regularly to the police. But his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi was an officer in the Abwehr, the military intelligence, which was a center of covert resistance and which became the nucleus of the Officers’ Plot. Dohnanyi took him on as an agent, an arrangement which kept him unmolested and allowed him to travel to Switzerland and Sweden in behalf of the resistance. In Switzerland he spoke with representatives of the Vatican and in Sweden he described to the English bishop George Bell a plan for simultaneous coups in Berlin and throughout occupied Europe, with support from unions, the military, and the Protestant and Catholic churches. This plan seems to have found no encouragement. During much of this time he lived as a guest in a Benedictine abbey near Munich and worked on the unfinished Ethics.
A few months before his arrest in April of 1943, Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, with whom, in keeping with the starchy customs of their class, and then with the conditions of his imprisonment, he was never to spend a single moment alone. He was thirty-seven and she was nineteen. Her family disapproved, and only announced the engagement when he was arrested, as a gesture of support. He wrote to her, as well as to Eberhard Bethge, imagining a sweetly ordinary domestic life even as bombs crashed into the prison buildings. His letters to her have long theological passages, too, gentler and more lyrical than those written to Bethge.
The fact that he wrote theology in these circumstances, in letters to dearly loved friends which he could not anticipate would ever be published, illuminates all his earlier work. These letters, too, are meant to actualize the sacred, that is, the relationship of love, the ground of shared understanding. Two ideas are essential to Bonhoeffer’s thinking: first, that the sacred can be inferred from the world in the experience of goodness, beauty, and love; and second, that these things, and, more generally, the immanence of God, are a real presence, not a symbol or a foreshadowing. They are fulfillment as well as promise, like the sacrament, or the church. The mystery of the world for Bonhoeffer comes with the belief that immanence is pervasive, no less so where it cannot be discovered. The achieved rescue of creation brings the whole of it under grace. So moments that are manifestly sacred do not judge or shame the indifference of the world, or its misery or its wickedness. Instead, they imply a presence and an embrace sufficient to it all, without distinction. Bonhoeffer is certainly never more orthodox than in seeing the revealed nature of Christ as depending, one might say, on his making precisely this overreaching claim on recalcitrant humankind.
In The Cost of Discipleship he wrote: “Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them they will not despitefully use and persecute us. They certainly will. But not even that can hurt or overcome us, so long as we pray for them. For if we pray for them, we are taking their distress and poverty, their guilt and perdition, upon ourselves, and pleading to God for them. We are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do for themselves. Every insult they utter only serves to bind us more closely to God and them. Their persecution of us only serves to bring them nearer to reconciliation with God and to further the triumphs of love.” This is the power of Christ that is the weakness of Christ. He is present even where he is forgotten and efficacious even where he is despised. Such things could not be known about him except in a world like this one. So the secular and the “religionless” are an intrinsic part of divine self-revelation. As, in fact, they were central to the role of Jesus while he lived.
Watching with Christ in Gethsemane, Bonhoeffer worked at loving the world. In a letter to Bethge he wrote: “It is only when one loves life and the world so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in the resurrection and a new world. It is only when one submits to the law that one can speak of grace, and only when one sees the anger and the wrath of God hanging like grim realities over the head of one’s enemies that one can know something of what it means to love them and forgive them.” But these exertions of forgiveness did not change his world. Bonhoeffer was in the hands of the SS. This cannot have been irrelevant to the drift of his thoughts about the future of Christendom, nor can the awareness of atrocities he must have had through Hans von Dohnanyi and others. When he says “the time of inwardness and conscience, which is to say the time of religion” is over, and “we are proceeding towards a time of no religion at alclass="underline" men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more,” it seems to me fatuous to imagine that he is simply postulating a cultural trend that is to be absorbed like others.
He might well have concluded that there is one thing worse than hypocrisy. Yet clearly he is using “religion” in his usual, Barthian sense, albeit with a certain nostalgia. He suggests that the conception of God among the generality of people, the “religious premise,” might have been historical and temporary. Insofar as it was, he himself would never have hesitated to call it false. The God of revelation, of Barth and Bonhoeffer, is neither an “a priori” nor a creation of culture. These are the humanist views of God they both explicitly reject. But “the church” has always lived within religion, usually indistinguishable from it: “If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity — and even that garment has had very different aspects at different times — then what is a religionless Christianity?” In the course of the paragraph Bonhoeffer works his way back to his most characteristic assertion, that Christ is autonomously present, dependent on no human intention or belief or institution. He cannot answer his own question, but he can say, “God is the ‘beyond’ in the midst of our lives. The Church stands not where human powers give out, on the borders, but in the center of the village.” That “religion” has made inappropriate claims, that God and “the church” should stand in opposition to it, is not a new idea for Bonhoeffer. Surely what is to be noted in all this is Bonhoeffer’s steadfast refusal to condemn the “religionless” world, and his visionary certainty that it is comprehended in the divine presence.