Resurrection and Responsibility

Essays on Theology, Scripture, and Ethics in Honor of Thorwald Lorenzen

Dyer, Neville

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498274715
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This collection of studies by friends, colleagues, students, and associates of Thorwald Lorenzen centers on his pivotal research interests--the theological and ethical implications of a relational understanding of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In two major works on the resurrection, Lorenzen demonstrated the radical ramifications for Christian discipleship of affirming a relational perspective on the resurrection, especially with regard to social justice, human rights, ecumenical dialogue, and holistic spirituality. The purpose of this book is to honor the theological work of Thorwald Lorenzen by examining anew and pressing ahead with certain aspects of his own research interests, whether in historical and systematic theology, biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, or social ethics and spirituality.

Part One

Theological Explorations

1

Friendship, Faith, and Theology

Graeme Garrett

“I believe that within the sphere of . . . freedom friendship is by far the rarest and most priceless treasure.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer1

On the facing page of Karl Barth’s Die Kirchliche Dogmatik I/1 are the words “meinem Freund Rudolf Pestalozzi” (“to my friend Rudolf Pestalozzi”). The attribution is not incidental for the theology that follows, as the story of this friendship shows.2 Theology takes place through engagement with a long-standing tradition reaching back to the words of scripture. The defining figures in this tradition loom large in every generation’s development of its theological ideas. But the appropriation and re-interpretation of the tradition rarely takes place apart from a living conversation with particular friends. This is true in my own experience. God, it seems, is best found in life shared with others similarly devoted to listening for God, and speaking to God and about God. Thorwald Lorenzen has been such a friend on my journey. I am not alone in that. In tribute to his capacity for friendship and what it has contributed to the lives of many, I want to reflect on friendship as a theme in theology and on the place friends hold in our human dealings with God.

The remarkable friendship between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge is an illuminating narrative through which to conduct the investigation. This friendship changed the landscape of world theology. Here is compelling evidence of how friendship contributes directly to theological thought and faithful discipleship.

A Rare and Priceless Treasure

Bonhoeffer was twenty-nine and Bethge twenty-six years old when they met on the shores of the Baltic Sea near Zingst at the end of April 1935. Bethge was with a group of twenty-three candidates in training for ministry at one of the illegal seminaries established by the Old Prussian Union Church to replace those closed down by the Reich Church government. On the face of it, they appeared an unlikely pair. Bonhoeffer was Director of the seminary. He hailed from the intellectual aristocracy of Berlin and was confident, erudite, authoritative, and well connected. Bethge was of country origin, son of a Lutheran pastor, born in the little village of Warchau in the district of Magdeburg near Brandenburg, without, as he says, any preparation or ambition “beyond that of an honest community country pastor.”3 Ten years later, at the time of Bonhoeffer’s execution on April 9, 1945, the two were firm friends whose intimate thoughts, expressed in the now famous Letters and Papers from Prison, were set to become the most transformative theological texts of the post-war period.

The full story of this friendship is yet to be told.4 But one thing is clear. More than sixty years after his death, Bonhoeffer’s thought remains a seemingly inexhaustible source of renewal for Christian life and thought across the world. A major reason for this is Eberhard Bethge. Without Bethge’s devotion to the preservation, editing, publication, and continuous re-interpretation of his friend’s writings, without his superb biography,5 “we would not know or understand Bonhoeffer in the way we do today.”6 Friendship is the medium through which the voice of Bonhoeffer continues to speak.

Bethge can mediate Bonhoeffer’s theology in death because he was an integral part of the conversation that formed the theology in life. The nature of the conversation between the friends is plain for all to see in the letters they exchanged during the time of Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment. Nothing is off limits—nothing too trivial to be of interest, nothing too weighty to be a burden. Family, love, gifts, books, ideas, emotions, weather, war, daily life, fear, hope, death, friendship itself—nothing is left unexplored, un-talked-about. The correspondence reveals the unique character of this friendship and the harrowing circumstances in which it was played out. But part of its enduring fascination is that all of us can recognize here the twists, stops, starts, and repetitions of our own talk with close friends. If we wish to see how friendship shapes life and thought, there is no substitute for studying the concrete details of the correspondence itself. But Bonhoeffer sums up its general import in a striking passage from a letter to Bethge dated Christmas Day 1943.

The mind’s hunger for discussion is much more tormenting than the body’s hunger for food, and there is no one but you with whom I can talk about some things and in one way. A few pregnant remarks are enough to touch on a wide range of questions and clear them up. This ability to keep on the same wavelength, to play to each other, took years to cultivate, not always without friction, and we must never lose it.7

For Bonhoeffer, constructive theological thought and enduring Christian discipleship arise from, or at least are enhanced by, talk with a specific person. Of course Bonhoeffer had many friends. But this friendship had particular characteristics won through a long period, not without struggle. Central to it was the capacity to facilitate imaginative thinking through a mutual, almost playful, exchange of ideas. All the classic Bonhoeffer themes—discipleship, community, religionless Christianity, world come of age, God at the center, not the margins, of life—are sifted through the give and take of talk. Bonhoeffer is clearly the primary force of articulation. But Bethge is not just an ear. He is an independent voice (“on the same wavelength”). As such, he is a catalyst that stimulates theological creativity.

Not only did Bethge’s friendship contribute essentially to the formulation of Bonhoeffer’s theological ideas and then to their dissemination to a wider world. The relationship also gave rise to Bonhoeffer’s late and remarkable reflections on the nature of friendship—this “rarest and most priceless treasure”—and its theological significance.

A Necessary Freedom

Friendship is at best a minor theme in Bonhoeffer’s early writings. Of course, he deals with personal relationships in Sanctorum Communio, Life Together, and Ethics,8 but the focus at that time was mainly on the “brotherhood” [sic] of fellow believers in the church or on marriage and family ties. Where they rate a mention at all, friends tend to be discussed along with issues connected with family relations and obligations. Only in the late writings, especially the letters from prison after 1943, does friendship become a clear theme in its own right. This is no accident. At a time of threat, separated from family and loved ones, Bonhoeffer’s relationship with friends, and particularly with Eberhard Bethge, became crucial for his sense of identity and well being. Bonhoeffer never had the opportunity to write an extended treatise on friendship in the classic style of an Aristotle, Cicero or Montaigne, although the influence of that tradition echoes in his thinking. His reflections tumble out in fragments, with tantalizing brevity and often in the midst of other matters of pressing concern. Yet, like so much of Bonhoeffer’s later thought, taken together these unfinished jottings are deeply moving and ring true to that human togetherness that goes by the name of friendship.9

What Friendship Is Not (Quite)

“It is by no means easy to classify friendship sociologically,” Bon-hoeffer remarks.10 There are close relationships between human beings in various spheres of life that have friend-like characteristics but which, in his judgment, do not finally merit the name, for example, kinship (marriage and the family), brother-/sisterhood (shared faith in the life of the sanctorum communio), and comradeship (collegial connections in work or politics). These three kinds of relationship may well display elements that overlap with friendship proper—affection, loyalty, support and so on. However, “Marriage, work, state, and church all have their definite, divine mandate,” he ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Christian Spirituality of a Baptist Theologian
• Part One: Theological Explorations
• Part Two: Scriptural Expositions
• Part Three: Ethical Engagements
• Bibliography
• Contributors