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Our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation face to face with God." The nonbelieving brave men he met in the anti-Nazi underground, the stark realities of prison life, and his disappointment in the professional churchmen of Germany, all may have influenced Bonhoeffer to see real Christianity as "nonreligious" and "worldly." The opposition between sacred and secular, supernatural and natural, seemed unreal to him—the apparent opposites are united in Jesus Christ.
In the Arms of God. Pastor-Editor (Christian Century) Martin E. Marty suggests that the secret of Bonhoeffer's appeal for today's young seminarians is their disillusion with "religiousness," which often is merely a veneer, a "comfortable buffer between man and God." An equally strong appeal may lie in Bonhoeffer's opposition to the despair and pessimism of the age. For despair, he wrote, can be a temptation just as much as security or love of the flesh. When man despairs of God, he is driven "either into the sin of blasphemy or into self-destruction, like Saul and Judas"; or he may turn to a kind of sterile and secular attempt at saintliness—"self-annihilating asceticism and works or even magic. In ingratitude, in disobedience, and in hopelessness, man hardens himself against the grace of God."
Not a trace of hopelessness or ingratitude can be found in Bonhoeffer's remarkable letters from prison. "During the last year or so I have come to appreciate the 'worldliness' of Christianity as never before," he wrote. "The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus was man ... It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman, a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one.
"This is what I mean by worldliness—taking life in one's stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves utterly in the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia [repentance] and that is what makes a man and a Christian. How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this world?"
* The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Westminster; $6) by Methodist John D. Godsey, assistant professor of systematic theology at Drew University's Theological School.