15.01.06 Michael Samuel, Nathaniel and
Bonhoeffer’s ‘Arcane Discipline’
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born 100 years ago on 4th February 1906. Born into an aristocratic Prussian household he decided at an early age to study theology and serve as a Lutheran pastor and became one of the twentieth century’s outstanding theologians. He was a natural born leader born and at the time of the emergency of the Third Reich he became involved in the Church resistance to Hitler as one of the founders of the Confessing Church. But he also was to become a martyr. He decided to take part in a plot against Hitler which made many attempts to kill Hitler, and others in his entourage, all of which failed, sometimes by only a hair’s breadth. On one occasion a hidden machine gun was set up beside the road where Hitler’s motorcade would pass and at the last minute Hitler ordered a change of route only one block away from the hidden gunner. Though a minister and theologian, he joined the Abwehr, or military intelligence, where he used his position secretly to build contacts and friendships in the churches in Sweden, Britain, and elsewhere, including his well known friendship with Bishop Bell of Chichester who was such an outspoken critic of the mass bombing and slaughter of Germans and Japanese citizens initiated by Churchill and Roosevelt.
When I was in my early teens a book came out – Honest to God – which claimed to represent and speak of Bonhoeffer’s theology. It quoted him 22 times while suggesting that the old God that Christians had believed in him was dead and the new religionless age in which the world had come of age no longer needed a transcendent God – instead we need a God who is ‘the ground of our being’, though this was actually Paul Tillich’s phrase. Similarly Jesus was no longer the Son of God who literally rose from the dead but a moral figure, an exemplary human being, a humanist messiah who John Robinson dubbed ‘the man for others’. The sixties was a time of great cultural and theological ferment. Some blame that era for many of the ills of the present day – selfism, licentiousness, sexual liberation, material consumption, rock music, lack of respect for elders and so on. At any rate there are synergies between the cultural era and the new theology of Honest to God. But somehow I doubt that Bonhoeffer would have admired this book are agreed with its message.
I was at a conference in Oxford last week which focused on the prison poems of Bonhoeffer. He went to prison on suspicion of his involvement in the plot, and was ultimately executed not because of suspicion but because one of the general’s involved in the plot had, against the agreement of all the conspirators, foolishly kept all his paper records of the various attempts on Hitler’s life and of the group’s plans to provide an alternative government for Germany. The general kept the records because he wanted to justify and vindicate his own involvement in the plot after the event. Bonhoeffer on the other hand sought no such justification – the only one he offered was that in doing what he believed was right he was following the divine mandate to pursue the truth wherever it led, and even if it seemed to be in conflict with the fourth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’.
But how did Bonhoeffer know the truth of God? How did he know what was right?
Bonhoeffer’s background as a member of one of the leading families in Germany was clearly partly responsible for his involvement in the plot. Other members of his family were also involved in the resistance. But his background is not sufficient to explain his involvement. The irony was that for Bonhoeffer the command not to kill was paramount in his reading of the Christian moral tradition. It needed more than a worldly authority to overturn such a divine command. The question is whence this authority for him came.
Against those who read him as prescribing a religionless Christianity for a post-ecclesial age, he was actually a very traditional Christian in his manner of life and prayer. He led the seminary at Finkenwald of the Confessing Church which was established as an alternative to the German Lutheran Church which was co-opted by Hitler and in all of whose churches you would see the Nazi Swastika and the German flag in the sanctuary alongside the cross of Christ. At Finkenwald Bonhoeffer instituted traditional ‘Catholic’ practices of Psalm singing, mutual confession, and he trained his seminarians in meditation and private prayer. Meditation was the key spiritual discipline for Bonhoeffer – he would meditate on a short passage of scripture, sometimes the same one for a week, and as he dwelt on its words quietly in prayer he would listen for the voice of God and hear what God was uniquely saying to him in that passage. Although he nowhere seeks to justify his involvement in the plot with reference to God’s call, nonetheless it was presumably as he listened to the voice of God speaking to him through his meditation on the scriptures that he heard the call of God to engage in the plot to resist Hitler and seek to rescue Germany, and the world from a terrible war.
We find an analogy in this touching and famous story of God’s call of the child Samuel. Most of the religious of Eli’s day had, like the German Church, become unfaithful and turned from true worship, including even Eli’s own sons. As a result the voice of God had gone quiet and there were few visions or prophecies in Eli’s day. But God does still speak and Eli teaches the child Samuel that he is to listen, for it becomes clear to Eli that God is speaking to Samuel. He teaches him a prayer – speak lord for your servant is listening. But Samuel does not hear so much words which tell him what to do - rather he hears who he is to be, and not to be. The words of prophecy he receives are not so much forthtelling – they do not presibe a course of action – they are not what evangelicals sometimes call ‘guidance’. They tell of what God will do, of his judgement of sin and of his plan for restoration. The words of calling to Samuel are formative – shaping – so that he becomes known as one who is called of God in all Israel.
My own first true prayer was just such a prayer – speak Lord, if you are there. I am listening. And God Spoke on the corner of the high street in a town called Cranbrook where I was living in a boarding school. I still remember looking up to the church tower of St Dunstan’s from across the street at the moment when God spoke to me. I don’t think I have ever doubted God exists since then nor that he intends that I should serve him, however fallibly, in what I do in my life.
But the passages before us do not only speak of God speaking and people hearing- they also speak of blasphemy, hypocrisy, lies and untruthfulness.
The sons of Eli blaspheme against the Lord but Samuel is called to a new standard of holiness. Analogously Bonhoeffer sought to lead the true Church – the Confessing Church – out of its complicity with the Third Reich by attending to the truth of God, and to nothing else.
Today the Revised Common Lectionary joins this passage from 1 Samuel to the call of the disciples. By so doing we are reminded of the meaning and significance of their call for Nathaniel stands for Israel, but he is not like the Israel that has gone astray, and is full of deceit. Nathaniel ‘has no guile’, he is not deceitful, he says what he thinks and of Jesus of Nazareth – it is like someone from Morningside talking about someone from Cowdenbeath. But Jesus far from being offended by this comment admires the man it reveals for it shows him as an honest man, he does not hide his opinions, he speaks as he thinks – consistency, absence of hypocrisy, truthfulness – these speak of the character God would have among those who follow him – of such are those who are called to witness to the call of God in Jesus.
We too live in a time when there are few visions and the word of the lord is rare, and in a time also when public life is full of what Jonathan Swift a long time ago called political lying.
But how are we to hear the voice of God in the night?
The prayer we should utter in our situation is the same as the prayer Eli tells Samuel to utter – ‘speak lord for your servant is listening’. God does speak to his faithful ones however much there is unfaithfulness all around. He addresses them in the first person. He has a word for each one of us and every day that word can be newly formed if we will allow it.
We should like Bonhoeffer seek to meditate on a passage each week from God’s word, setting aside a time when we can do this crucial inner work.
It is so ironic in our society that when people want to turn to a body or spiritual discipline they turn to Tai Chi or yoga or Transcendental Meditation. We need to teach one another and our own young people about the spiritual disciplines and practices that there are within our Christian tradition. We do not have to go outside of the church to find those inner disciplines which enable us to live more truthful, more consistent lives – lives where our outer behaviour and our inner lives are more closely connected.
The way ultimately that this connection is remade is of course through the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – Nathaniel acknowledges Jesus as Messiah when he shows some insight into Nathaniel’s character but Jesus says this is nothing, you will see far greater – the angels ascending and descending to and fro from the Son of Man. The point is – and John makes this point again and again in his gospel – Jesus is the One. He can restore the relationship between heaven and earth, he can reunite the public face and the private face, the inward and the outward, religious ritual and the prayer of the heart. Towards him both angels and humans are drawn into a new bond of love towards God, one another and the cosmos.
In a sermon on this passage Charles Spurgeon speaks of it as an exemplar of the conversion of children. I have been speaking much more of the call of God to adults. But what about the conversion of children? Spurgeon tells the story of a mother who prayed consistently and earnestly for the conversion of her own children.
“I beseech you, the teachers of the Sunday-school-though I scarcely need to do so, for I know how zealous you are in this matter- as soon as ever you see the first peep of day in your children, encourage their young desires. Believe in the conversion of children, as children; believe that the Lord can call them by his grace, can renew their hearts, can give them a part and a lot among his people long before they reach the prime of life. Oh! that the Lord may give us to see many Samuels added to this Church, as we have seen them in days gone by. You that are little ones, when the Lord speaks to you, cry to him, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth;” and when in the class, or here in the Tabernacle, the Word of God is preached to sinners, remember it is preached to you quite as much as to the men who are six feet high; and do lift up your little hearts to God with the desire that while we are preaching God would speak to you. Do, dear children, expect the Lord to meet with you. Boys and girls have been saved.”
We are a church which welcomes children – and sets them at the heart of our worship and life. Let us also bear in mind Spurgeon’s words – God intends that they, like Samuel, should listen to him. For them there is no need of the discipline of meditation – a simple honest prayer to God in their own words should suffice. Speak Lord for I am listening. For us too it would be better than no prayer at all on the busiest day and indeed is that not our whole problem. The voice of the Lord is rarely heard in our day because of the soft totalitarianism of consumerism and technology, mobile phones, email, television and the internet. Promising to connect they keep us from making true connections with true truth. For us the call of God may not be to some momentous act – as it was for Bonhoeffer – nor even to some momentous calling – as it was for Samuel. It may be however that we still need, like both of them, to learn to resist. And the words ‘speak Lord for I am listening’ might surely be the beginning of such resistance.