God and Suffering

A Christian understanding of God’s relationship to suffering is not that God is simply a compassionate spectator looking down on the strange and bitter world that God holds in being. As a Christian, I believe that God is participating in the suffering of the world, that God is truly a fellow sufferer. The Christian God is the crucified God. 
--Sir John Polkinghorne, quoted in Socrates in the City: Conversations on "Life, God and Other Small Topics." Edited by Eric Metaxas.

Bonhoeffer on a true leader

The following is an excerpt from twenty-six year old theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's radio address, delivered on February 1, 1933, two days after Adolph Hitler had been elected Chancellor of Germany:

If he understands his function in any other way than as it is rooted in fact, if he does not continually tell his followers quite clearly of the nature of his task and of their own responsibility, if he allows himself to surrender to the wishes of his followers, who would always make him their idol--then the image of the Leader will pass over into the image of the mis-leader, and he will be acting in a criminal way not only towards those he leads, but also towards himself. The true Leader must always be able to disillusion. It is just this that is his responsibility and his real object. He must lead his following away from the authority of his person to the recognition of the real authority of orders and offices.... He must radically refuse to become the appeal, the idol, i.e. the ultimate authority of those whom he leads.... He serves the order of the state, of the community, and his service can be of incomparable value. But only so long as he keeps strictly in his place.... [H]e has to lead the individual into his own maturity.... Now a feature of man's maturity is responsibility towards other people, towards existing orders. He must let himself be controlled, ordered, restricted.

Of course, Adolph Hitler had no intention of allowing himself to be "controlled, ordered, restricted." Yet in reading this, I am reminded of a current leader, one who had allowed himself to become "the idol," and who seems to have little fascination with leading people away from his authority back to the authority of the Constitution [Bonhoeffer's orders] and the people. Thankfully, I do not fear for one second this current leader will kill millions. But his bald attempts to build a "thousand year reign" of entitlements and debt may end up with the nation impoverished and defeated. Again, from the same address:

Only when a man sees that office is a penultimate authority in the face of an ultimate, indescribable authority, in the face of the authority of God, has the real situation been reached.... And this solitude of man's position before God, this subjection to an ultimate authority, is destroyed when the the authority of the Leader or of the office is seen as ultimate authority.... Alone before God, man becomes what he is, free and committed to responsibility at the same time.

The current leader professes to be a follower of Christ, yet not in an orthodox, Biblical way. It is interesting that, the same day as Bonhoeffer's address, Chancellor Hitler also took to the airwaves, offering this appeal "to the God he did not believe in":

May God Almighty take our work into his grace, give true form to our will, bless our insight, and endow us with the trust of our Volk!

--Wayne S.

(All quotations are from the book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas.)

Bonhoeffer on seeing people as they are

Every day I am getting to know people, at any rate their circumstances, and sometimes one is able to see through their stories into themselves—and at the same time one thing continues to impress me: here I meet people as they are, far from the masquerade of "the Christian world", people with passions, criminal types, small people with small aims, small wages and small sins—all in all they are people who feel homeless in both senses, and who begin to thaw when one speaks to them with kindness—real people; I can only say that I have gained the impression that it is just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world that is more under wrath than grace.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

Bonhoeffer on vanity and grace

On Sunday afternoon I attended an extremely festive high mass in Sacré Couer. The people in the church were almost exclusively from Montmartre; prostitutes and their men went to mass, submitted to all the ceremonies; it was an enormously impressive picture, and once again one could see quite clearly how close, precisely through their fate and guilt, these most heavily burdened people are to the heart of the gospel. I have long thought the Tauentzienstrasse [Berlin's red-light district] would be an extremely fruitful field for church work. It's much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas