Beyond a One Dimensional Life

For Holy Week, this series jumps into the 20th and 21st centuries.

Today’s Christian writer was involuntarily removed from the world when he was arrested by the Nazis in 1942. His name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, now considered one of the 20th century’s most important theologians. Bonhoeffer was a Protestant pastor and seminary teacher who refused to co-operate with the Nazis when most German churches gave in. Before he was arrested, Bonhoeffer had written several books about how Christianity must be active in the world now, with people who are suffering. He argued that ours should be a faith of helping others, not one that calls for private spiritual transcendence. ( In this, he was quite different from many of the other Christians we have met in this series). Today’s quote is from a letter he wrote in prison on the 29th of May, 1944, a week after Pentecost. He reflects on how his fellow prisoners react when air raid sirens start to blare, and bombers fly over head.

“I notice repeatedly here how few people there are who can harbour conflicting emotions at the same time. When bombers come, they are all fear; when there is something nice to eat, they are all greed; when they are disappointed, they are all despair; when they are successful, they can think of nothing else. They miss the fullness of life and the wholeness of an independent existence; everything objective and subjective is dissolved for them into fragments. 

By contrast, Christianity puts us into many different dimensions of life at the same time; we make room in ourselves, to some extent, for God and the whole world. We rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep; we are anxious (– I was again interrupted just then by the [ air raid ] alert, and I'm now sitting outdoors enjoying the sun –) about our life, but at the same time we must think about things much more important to us than life itself. When the alert goes, for instance: as soon as we turn our minds from worrying about our own safety to the task of helping other people to keep calm, the situation is completely changed; life isn't pushed back into a single dimension, but is kept multi-dimensional and polyphonous. What a deliverance it is to be able to think, and thereby remain multidimensional.

I've almost made it a rule here, simply to tell people who are trembling under an air raid that it would be much worse for a small town. We have to get people out of their one track mind; that is a kind of "preparation" for faith, or something that makes faith possible, although really it's only faith itself they can make possible a multi-dimensional life, and so enabled us to keep this Whitsuntide [ Pentecost] , too, in spite of the alarms.”

Bonhoeffer believed that human beings suffer from moral corruption due to the fall, but this can be at least partially cured by acting in a more Christ-like way through helping others each day. His books on ethics and discipleship are still taught in seminaries, and a movie came out this year about him, to mixed reviews. He was executed on April 9th, 1945, shortly before the Allies conquered Germany. 

-Rev. Stephen Milton, Lawrence Park Community Church, Toronto

Source: Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison: New Greatly Enlarged Edition, ( NY, 1997), p.310-1.

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