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If the church's mission is to be defined that broadly, its ministers will obviously face some pitfalls. They may become involved in complicated situations they do not understand, and they may tarnish the spiritual aura of the church. The intellectual hero of many of the new activists is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran minister who was executed by the Nazis at the age of 39 for participating in an assassination plot against Hitler. He called for a new "worldly Christianity" to serve a civilization that had "come of age" and no longer needed to be pointed to a "beyond." The new church, he said, must stop talking about a transcendent God and concentrate on God as immanent—"the Divine in the midst of things." The question thus posed but left unanswered, is what in this scheme of things is to distinguish a Christian from any other humanistic do-gooder. The simplistic solution of some of the new activists seems to be to talk about Jesus as the original good Joe out to organize the underdogs into getting a decent shake from the Establishment.
In that view there is indeed danger of making the church too much of the world, too much an instrument of merely human designs. But that, the most enterprising of today's churchmen believe, is one risk among many others that they must take. Only thus, they feel, can the world relearn that no aspect of life or death—neither love nor money, neither government nor war—is beyond the reach of God's word and the Christian faith.