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Dietrich Bonhoeffer: quotes. Category Dietrich Bonhoeffer - last sermon

Family and education

Memorial to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Wroclaw

Born into the Protestant family of neurologist Carl Bonhoeffer, in which he was the sixth of eight children. He graduated from high school (), studied theology at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin, a student of liberal theologians Adolf von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg; His views were significantly influenced by the theologian Karl Barth. He defended his thesis devoted to the philosophical and dogmatic study of the fundamental categories of church sociology (Sanktorum communio). Doctor of Theology (dissertation topic: “Act and Being. Transcendental philosophy and ontology in systematic theology”).

Pastor

Memory of Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich

Currently, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a symbol of Lutheran martyrdom in the 20th century. His statue, among the ten Christian martyrs of this time, is placed on the west façade of Westminster Abbey in London. A number of parish churches are named in his memory (Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche).

A postage stamp was issued in memory of Bonhoeffer in Germany. One of the works of Oscar Gottlieb Blarr () is dedicated to Bonhoeffer.

The centenary of Bonhoeffer's birth was widely celebrated. According to the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, Bishop Wolfgang Huber (one of the editors of Bonhoeffer's complete works), "he is a saint, in the Protestant sense of the word."

Notes

Bibliography

Sanctorum communio (1927)
Act and Being (Akt und Sein, 1930)
Walking Following (Nachfolge, 1934)
Living Together (Gemeinsames Leben, 1938)
Ethics (Ethik, 1949)
Resistance and Submission (Widerstand und Ergebung, 1951)

Bonhoeffer, D. Following Christ. - M: Buk Chamber International, 1992.
Bonhoeffer, D. Resistance and submission / Transl. with him. A. B. Grigorieva.; entry Art. E. V. Barabanova. - M.: Progress, 1994.
Bonhoeffer, D. Walking after / Transl. with him. G. M. Dashevsky. - M.: Ros. state humanitarian univ., 2002. - P. 226. ISBN 5-7281-0382-0
Bonhoeffer, D. Life in Christian fellowship / Trans. P. Lastochkina and G. Ivanova; ed. M. Kozlova
Bonhoeffer, D. The Psalter is a biblical prayer book; About counseling / Transl. with him. A. Leitsina, R. Shtubenitskaya. - M.: Narnia, 2006.
Bonhoeffer, D. Resistance and submission (Letters and notes from a prison cell) // Questions of Philosophy. - 1989. - No. 10. - P. 114-167. ; No. 11. - P. 90-162.
Bonhoeffer, D. Food for thought (Fragments from prison letters) // Common sense. - 2001. - No. 17.
Ugrinovich, D. M.“Religious Christianity” by D. Bonhoeffer and his successors // Questions of Philosophy. - 1968. - No. 2. - P. 94-102.
Barabanov, E. V. About letters from prison of Dietrich Bonhoeffer // Questions of Philosophy. - 1989. - No. 10. - P. 106-113.
Antropov, V.V. Ethics and religion in “Religious Christianity” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer // Bulletin of Moscow University. Series 7. Philosophy. - 2005. - No. 6. - P. 58-124.
Sedakova, Olga. Dietrich Bonhoeffer for us // Continent. - 2008. - No. 137.

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The main participants in the Conspiracy of July 20, 1944
Execution/murder
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Born in 1906
Born on February 4
Born in Wroclaw
Christian theologians
Theologians of the 20th century
Theologians of Germany
Lutheran theologians
Anglican saints
Conspiracy of July 20
Died in Bavaria
Deaths on April 9
Died in 1945
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Resistance movement in Germany
Secret service agents of the Third Reich
Memoirists of Germany
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, August 1939 Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German: Dietrich Bonhoeffer; February 4, 1906, Breslau, now Wroclaw April 9, 1945, Flossenburg, Bavaria) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, participant in the anti-Nazi conspiracy. Contents... Wikipedia

- (Bonhoeffer) (1906 1945), German Protestant theologian, one of the leaders of the Confessional Church, which opposed the Hitler regime and the ideology of National Socialism. Arrested (April 1943), was imprisoned; executed. * * *… … encyclopedic Dictionary

- (Bonhoffer) (4. 2. 1906, Breslau, now Wroclaw, 9. 4. 1945, Flossenbürg concentration camp), German Lutheran theologian and religious thinker, participant in the Resistance movement. Student of the prominent liberal theologian and Church historian A.... ... Encyclopedia of Cultural Studies

(39 years)

Family and education[ | ]

Pastor [ | ]

Imprisonment and execution[ | ]

Memory of Bonhoeffer[ | ]

A postage stamp was issued in memory of Bonhoeffer in Germany. One of the works of Oscar Gottlieb Blarr () is dedicated to Bonhoeffer.

In 2006, the centenary of Bonhoeffer's birth was widely celebrated. According to the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, Bishop (one of the editors of Bonhoeffer's complete works), "he is a saint, in the Protestant sense of the word."

Scientific works [ | ]

Notes [ | ]

BNF ID: Open Data Platform - 2011.
Encyclopædia Britannica
SNAC - 2010.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1906-1945), German theologian, executed Nazis in a concentration camp Flossenbürg. Born on February 4, 1906 in Breslau in the family of the famous doctor and university teacher Karl Bonhoeffer. He studied at the theological faculties of Tübingen (1923) and Berlin (1924), receiving a theological diploma in 1927. In 1930 he went to the USA, where he studied at the United Theological Seminary. Returning to his homeland, he began teaching at the theological faculty of the University of Berlin. In October 1933, when it became clear that Hitler intends to use the German church for his own purposes, Bonhoeffer left for London, becoming a member of the English parsonage. Refusing to recognize the public church, which had become an instrument of Hitler's policies, Bonhoeffer supported the creation of the Confessional Church and, having secured the support of many Anglican communities, returned to Germany to take part in the activities of the Confessional Church. He wrote a book in which he argued for the morality of fighting the Nazi regime and took part in a plot to overthrow Hitler. In 1938, Bonhoeffer came into contact with Major General Hans Oster, Abwehr Chief of Staff, Colonel General Ludwig Beck, just dismissed from the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces, and the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Bonhoeffer became a double agent for the Canaris counterintelligence service and a courier for communications with foreign organizations in Sweden and Switzerland. On 19 March 1939 he traveled to London to meet Bishop George Bell, Reinhold Niebuhr and Gerhard Leibholz, and the following month he headed to the USA. Visiting Sweden in 1942, he brought proposals from the conspirators for peace negotiations with the Allies. He helped seven Jews flee to Switzerland, which almost cost him his life. On January 17, 1943, his engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer was announced, but on April 5 he was arrested, sent to Tegel prison and charged with “undermining the armed forces.” After the failed July Plot of 1944, Bonhoeffer ended up in the cellars Gestapo on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. On February 7, 1945 he was sent to Buchenwald and then transferred to the Flossenbürg camp. All those who communicated with him these days were admired by his noble behavior and good spirits in inhuman conditions, in which he even managed to write poetry. According to the verdict of the military tribunal, Bonhoeffer was executed on April 9, 1945 in Flossenbürg, a few days before the end of hostilities in Europe. In church circles, Bonhoeffer's name became synonymous with martyrdom.

Material used from the website Third Reich - www.fact400.ru/mif/reich/titul.htm

Bonhoeffer Dietrich (1906-1945) - German Protestant theologian, evangelical pastor, supporter of irreligious Christianity. He graduated from the University of Berlin and taught theology there. Active participant in the ecumenical movement. After Hitler came to power, he opposed the subordination of the church to Nazi policies and condemned violence.

For participation in the Resistance movement he was arrested in 1943 and executed shortly before the end of the war. At the heart of Bonhoeffer's theological ideas is the assertion that Christ is present in the world in a concrete way as a church community. The transcendence of God does not lie in his inaccessibility to knowledge, but in his opposition as a person to other people. Based on the ideas of K. Barth, Bonhoeffer considered religion to be a historically transitory form of Christianity. The world, according to Bonhoeffer, has come of age; people no longer need either God as a “working hypothesis” or religion as a way of escaping reality. True Christianity is not a religion of salvation; only through concrete participation in the life of the world can a Christian gain “merited grace.” The essence of the Christian life is to exist for others, to selflessly and freely follow Christ. The Church must resist social orders that suppress human freedom and independence. Bonhoeffer's ideas had a great influence on Christian theology in the second half of the 20th century, especially secular theology, the theology of the "death of God", and liberation theology. Main works: “Common Life” (1938), “Ethics” (1949), “Resistance and Humility. Letters and notes from prison" (1951).

Protestantism. [Atheist's Dictionary]. Under general ed. L.N. Mitrokhina. M., 1990, p. 56.

BONHOEFFER (Bonhoefer) Dietrich (1906-1945) - German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He studied theology at Tübingen and then at the University of Berlin (under the guidance of A. von Harnack), defended his doctoral dissertation (1927). C. Barth had a great influence on B.'s thinking. In 1928-1929, B. worked as an assistant pastor in the German evangelical community in Barcelona (Spain), and in 1930-1931 he interned at the United Theological Seminary (New York). In 1931, B. began teaching theology at the University of Berlin and in the same year became a Lutheran pastor.

Rejecting National Socialist ideology, B. for a certain time felt bound by the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, dividing the spheres of influence of church and state. In April 1933, the Nazi government banned persons of Jewish origin from holding official positions not only in the civil service, but also in the church. B. made a sharp protest. At the end of 1933, B. left for England, having previously taken part in the organization of the so-called. The Confessing Church, which resisted Nazi influence in the evangelical church. In 1935, B. returned to Germany, where he organized and headed one of the seminaries of the Confessing Church. In 1936, the Nazis deprived him of his right to teach, followed by bans on speaking and publishing. After a second short visit to New York (1939), B. became an active member of the underground anti-Hitler group. Arrested in 1943 for participating in a conspiracy against Hitler, executed on April 9, 1945. Main works: “Sanctorum communio” (1927), “Act and Being” (1930), “Life Together” (1938), “Ethics” (1949), etc. Letters from prison B. were published posthumously under the title “Resistance and submission" (1951).

The main idea of B.'s theological constructions was that this-worldly, “non-religious” Christianity can and should be considered authentic. According to B., in religion, God, imagined by man in the other world, acts as a “substitute” for man, compensating for his ignorance and weakness (“religious people talk about God when human knowledge ... has reached its limit, or when human strength gives in ; and this is always deux ex machina - they call on it either for an imaginary solution to insoluble problems, or as a force in the face of human powerlessness, i.e. always exploiting human weaknesses or being at the limit of human strength." The world, according to B., has reached “coming of age”; man does not need Divine care; Jesus Christ, who once entered the world and became a man, is no longer “an object of religion.” (“How can we talk about God - without religion, that is, without the time-conditioned prerequisites of metaphysics, the mental life of man, etc.? How can we talk - or maybe we can’t even “talk” about it as before - in “worldly” language about “God”, how can we be “secular and irreligious” Christians, how can we be an ecclesia, called out, not considering ourselves chosen in a religious sense, but relating ourselves entirely to the world? Then Christ is no longer an object? religion, but something else, really the Lord of the world.")

Real Christianity has replaced the latter; God no longer represents the highest transcendent being, acting as actual reality. (The “transcendence” of God is not the transcendence of our ability to know! Epistemological transcendence has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is transcendent in the midst of our lives. The Church does not stand where human possibilities end, not on the outskirts, but in the middle of the village [... ] Our task is to find God in what we know, and not in what we do not know; God wants to be comprehended by us not in unresolved questions, but in solved problems. "This is true for the relationship between God and scientific knowledge." thus, according to B., the basis of traditional faith changes - it is replaced by people accepting special obligations, “life in existence for others,” thus participating in the existence of Christ (“...God as a moral, political, natural-scientific working hypothesis has been abolished, overcome; just as in the sense of a philosophical and religious hypothesis (Feuerbach), intellectual honesty requires the rejection of this working hypothesis or its exclusion within the widest possible limits. Devout natural scientist, physician, etc. must be classified as bisexual beings... Man is called to participate in the suffering of God in a godless world... Being a Christian does not mean being religious in one way or another, pretending to be a sinner, a penitent or a saint according to some method; to be a Christian is to be human; Christ creates in us not some type of man, but Man. A Christian does not perform a religious act, but participates in the suffering of God in worldly life.") At the basis of “non-religious” Christianity, B. placed ethical standards that presuppose active service to man and resistance to everything inhuman. B. confirmed the point of view of the evangelical church and dialectical theology in the interpretation K. Barth, according to which the essence of Christianity is not what people can do for God, but what God has done for people. B. sharply opposed any attempts to combine Christianity with any other ideologies, be it Nazism or religious and. ethical theories of liberal theologians of the 19th century.

A.A. Gritsanov

The latest philosophical dictionary. Comp. Gritsanov A.A. Minsk, 1998.

BONHOEFFER (Bonhoeffer) Dietrich (February 4, 1906, Breslau - April 9, 1945, Flossenburg concentration camp) - Protestant theologian. He studied theology in Göttingen and Berlin, at the Theological Seminary in New York (1930). In 1931-33 he taught systematic theology at the University of Berlin. When Hitler came to power he was forced to stop teaching. In 1933-35 Bonhoeffer became the pastor of the German community in London, and from 1935-37 he led the seminar of preachers of the Confessing Church until its closure. In 1943 he was arrested as a member of the Resistance movement and executed in April 1945.

Bonhoeffer's main works: “Creation and the Fall” (1934), “Following Christ” (1934), “Life Together” (1939).

Developing the ideas of “dialectical theology,” Bonhoeffer, following K. Barth, considered central to theology “the Word of God addressed to man,” the Revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, which presupposes “faith” as a decision in response to this Word - a radical change in life, and not “religion”, the cultic objectification of God and his revelation characteristic of pagan consciousness. Bonhoeffer agreed with R. Bultmann: God, since he is not an object, cannot be spoken of in the form of general propositions or generally valid statements that are true without relation to the specific existential situation of the speaker. Only God Himself in His appeal to man through revelation and action is the object of faith, and not theological statements as such, not a cult, not abstract dogmatic constructions. But unlike Barth and Bultmann, Bonhoeffer argued that a believer realizes his Christian situation in this worldly life, which has become entirely secular, i.e. independent of God: man is accustomed to doing his affairs without God, as if God did not exist. Bonhoeffer was looking for an answer to the main question for him: what is Christianity in the secular world, what is Christ for a non-religious person, what does it mean to be a Christian today? He thought intensely about this in his notes and letters from prison, which he compiled in 1951 in the book “Resistance and Submission.” It was the ideas presented in it that had a huge impact on Christian thought in the 2nd half. 20th century, paving the way from dialectical theology to new directions of Protestant theology, primarily to the one that emerged in the 1960s. “theology of the death of God”, and in a broader sense - to the so-called. theologies of the genitive case (Genitivtheologie): theology of hope, theology of history, theology of revolution, etc. Bonhoeffer's theology is an understanding of the experience of secularization in the conditions of the crisis of modernist consciousness. She states that over the past seven centuries, humanity has become increasingly independent from God: God has been steadily pushed out of science, art, even ethics; education and politics were freed from church control. The world has come of age. In this development, Bonhoeffer saw not a “falling away from God,” but the possibility of purifying faith from all demonism, including the demonism of religious interpretation: a person who has realized himself as an adult stands before the Word of God without an intermediary - “religion,” which is nothing more than human ideas. Apart from the one Word of God, no other images; truths, events cannot be recognized as a revelation of God - these are all only human concepts, words presented as given by God, be it nationality, idealism, empire, class, race, leader or humanism and positivist scientificism. This is the essence of “religionless Christianity,” as Bonhoeffer understands it. “Religious Christianity” is a response to the threat to Christian existence from totalitarianism. For Bonhoeffer, these are specifically those “German Christians” who in the 1930s. affirmed the God-given order in the person of the Nation, Race and Leader. However, such a substitution of faith is only one manifestation of the interpretation of Christianity on the basis of “natural theology” and metaphysics, which must be overcome as a whole. Religion understands the transcendence of God from the standpoint of metaphysics, which makes Him abstract and distant. Bonhoeffer interprets God's transcendence differently: He is transcendental, but he exists at the center of human life, not beyond it. This is why a Christian must learn to live a Christian life in the world and talk about Christianity in a secular way. The Word of God calls man not to turn with hope and prayer to the other world and turn away from life, but, on the contrary, to turn his face to the world in which he lives, namely by living a secular life, “to participate in the sufferings of God " Following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ means being “a man for other people.” And therefore, a secular interpretation of Christianity is justified and necessary.

Metaphysics, according to Bonhoeffer, is also associated with the individualism and particularism of the “religious” version of Christianity. If a person is most concerned about his personal spirituality, if Christianity is isolated in one area of life, which is increasingly narrowed in the course of secularization, then the church appears as a group of individualists, most concerned with personal salvation; Christian life becomes a life in a kind of ghetto, divorced from the problems of the real world. The true church should not be concerned with its own religious problems, but should be concerned with serving the world. A person who has become an adult does not need to invent “hypotheses about God” in a way accessible to him, doubling the world into this and other worlds, or cultivate suffering to substantiate the idea of personal salvation. Salvation occurs on this side of the border of death: “A Christian, unlike those who believe in salvation myths, does not have the last loophole into eternity for deliverance from earthly affairs and difficulties, but, like Christ, he must fully drink the cup of earthly life... Peace this one cannot be removed before the deadline... Salvation myths are born from borderline experiences. Christ does not overtake a person at the center of his life” (Resistance and Submission, letter dated June 26, 1944).

Religion, in Bonhoeffer's understanding, is a historically transitory phenomenon - “we are moving towards a completely non-religious time.” But the end of religion is not equivalent to the end of Christianity if it overcomes the cardinal error of “religion” and does not take the “penultimate” for the “last”, if it turns its face to the secular world and actively participates in the historical drama of the affirmation of humanity, human relations between people. “There is hardly a feeling that gives more joy than the feeling that you can bring some benefit to people... In the end, human relationships are the most important thing in life” (letter 08/14/1944).

V. I. Garadzha

New philosophical encyclopedia. In four volumes. / Institute of Philosophy RAS. Scientific ed. advice: V.S. Stepin, A.A. Guseinov, G.Yu. Semigin. M., Mysl, 2010, vol. I, A - D, p. 299-301.

Read further:

Philosophers, lovers of wisdom (biographical reference book of CHRONOS).

Historical figures of Germany (biographical index).

Germany in the 20th century (chronological table).

Essays:

Communio sanctorum. V., 1927; Akt und Sein. V., 1931; Nachfolge. V., 1937;

Gemeinsames Leben. V., 1938; Ethik. V., 1949: Widerstandund Ergebung. V., 1951;

GesammelteWerke, Bd. I-IV. V., 1958-61; in Russian trans.: Resistance and submission, trans. A. Grigorieva. M., 1994.

Literature:

Barabanov E.V. About letters from prison of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Resistance and submission. M., 1994, p. 3 - 24;

Garadzha V.I. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: resistance and submission. - In the book: From Luther to Weizsäcker. Great Protestant thinkers of Germany. M., 1994;

Bethge E. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Theologe-Christ-Zeitgenosse. Kaiser, 1967.

Dietrich BONHOFFER was born into the Protestant family of neurologist Carl Bonhoeffer, in which he was the sixth of eight children. He graduated from high school (1923), studied theology at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin, a student of the liberal theologians Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg; The theologian Karl Barth had a significant influence on his views. In 1927 he defended his thesis devoted to the philosophical and dogmatic study of the fundamental categories of church sociology.

Pastor

In 1928-1929 - assistant pastor in the German evangelical community in Barcelona (Spain), in 1930-1931 he trained at the United Theological Seminary (New York). Then he became a pastor at the Zionskirche in Berlin and a teacher of systematic theology at the University of Berlin. In 1933 he protested against the racial policies of the Nazis and participated with Pastor Martin Niemöller in the creation of the Confessing Church, which opposed the NSDAP's attempts to subjugate the Lutheran Church through the creation of the pro-Nazi "Evangelical Church of the German Nation". From the end of 1933 to 1935 he lived in England. In 1935 he returned to Germany and became the organizer and director of the seminary of the Confessing Church. In 1936 he was banned from teaching, and then he was also banned from public speaking and publishing. In 1937 the seminary he created was closed.

Conspirator against Hitler

Since 1938, he was associated with participants in the anti-Nazi conspiracy - Abwehr employees, the most active of whom was Hans Oster. In 1939 he visited London and then New York, where he was asked to take up teaching. However, despite the outbreak of World War II, he rejected this offer and returned to his homeland. This is how he motivated his position: “I must survive this difficult period of our national history together with Christians in Germany. I will not have the right to participate in the revival of Christian life after the war if I do not share with my people the trials of this time.”

His sister's husband Hans von Dohnanyi, a participant in the conspiracy, "recruited" Bonhoeffer as an Abwehr agent in 1941 to ensure that he could travel abroad. In 1942, Bonhoeffer traveled to Sweden through the Abwehr; during this mission, he conveyed peace proposals from members of the anti-Nazi Resistance addressed to representatives of Great Britain and the United States. At the same time, he continued to engage in theological research and worked on the book “Ethics,” in which he argued that a Christian has the right to participate in political resistance to dictatorship. In his opinion, the actions committed during this struggle (lies, murder, etc.), despite the high motives of the participants in the Resistance, remain sins, which, however, can be forgiven by Christ. Believed that trying to remove Hitler, even if it meant killing the tyrant, would be essentially a matter of religious obedience; new methods of oppression by the Nazis justify new methods of disobedience... If we claim to be Christians, there is no point in discussing expediency. Hitler is the Antichrist.

Using his work in the Abwehr, he helped seven Jews escape to Switzerland. In April 1943 he was arrested, accused of “undermining the armed forces” and placed in Tegel prison. In conclusion, he worked on the notes that made up the book “Resistance and Submission”, published posthumously in 1951. After the failure of the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, he was transferred to the Gestapo prison on Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin, in February 1945 to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and in early April he was transferred to Flossenbürg. During this period, he was able to preserve several of his favorite books - the Bible, the works of Goethe and Plutarch. In prisons and camps he maintained presence of mind and courage, not only reflected on theological issues, but also wrote poetry. On April 8, I was able to hold the last divine service in my life.

Death

April 9, 1945 executed by hanging in the Flossenbürg concentration camp (Bavaria). Admiral Canaris and General Oster, as well as some other participants in the conspiracy, died with him. On the eve of his execution, Bonhoeffer said: “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.”

A doctor at the Flossenbürg concentration camp recalled:

Through the half-open door of the barracks building... I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer kneeling in secret prayer before the Lord God. The selfless and heartfelt nature of this very nice man's prayer greatly shocked me. And at the place of the execution itself, having said a short prayer, he courageously climbed the stairs to the gallows... In all my almost 50 years of medical practice, I have never seen a person die in greater devotion to God.

In April 1945, Bonhoeffer's relatives who participated in the conspiracy - brother Klaus and sister's husband Hans von Dohnanyi, both lawyers by profession - were also executed.

“HE BECAME A COMMUNAL WITH THE APOSTLE PAUL”

Father John, in your pastoral ministry you often turn to the legacy of Bonhoeffer. How do you think his word would be received today if he were our contemporary?
- And he is our contemporary! Lidia Korneevna Chukovskaya once wrote: “In essence, every writer takes up his pen with a hidden thirst to find brothers. All our books are letters to an unknown friend. And when a friend responds, then that means I’m alive, we’re alive.”

Bonhoeffer wrote his books with the blood of his heart. All his books are letters to a friend, to his brothers. They have enormous power and find their readers themselves. Over the past three years, the number of readers has increased significantly.

- What is this connected with?
- With the sobering of some people. Hopes for the revival of Russia did not come true.

During the twenty years of perestroika, we destroyed and drowned half of the country in cynicism. Lies have eaten through all areas of life. Against this background, people such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lydia Chukovskaya, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Olga Sedakova, and priest Georgy Kochetkov become especially noticeable. They show by their fate the possibility of life in accordance with the highest Truth. And they address it very personally - from heart to heart.

Bonhoeffer is radical in his fidelity to Christ and the Gospel, making no compromises. This does not mean that there were no compromises in his life. Of course there were. But still, living according to the Gospel became Bonhoeffer’s main principle. And he was faithful to this principle to death.

Today, the condition of many people in our country resembles a severe hangover, after which some want to drink more, while others say - enough is enough, we want at least some kind of life, but a different one. It seems to me that through Bonhoeffer the direct and simple word of Christ reaches us. We have longed for such words.

- What is the most important thing in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s appeal to you personally and to the Church of Christ, to today’s Christians?
- The fact is that until recently I read Bonhoeffer very little, since little was translated. The first book that came into my hands was called “Resistance and Submission.” This is a serious and important book. Many people remember her first. I can’t say that it was she who became the most important for me. I already knew Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on irreligious Christianity from the books of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh and Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann. But where I cannot find an equal figure to him is in two books about communal life - “Living Together” and “Walking Following”. They are written from the experience of teaching in an underground seminary under Nazi conditions. This is perhaps the grandest, most significant thing in the heritage.

- Why this particular experience?
- Because he has enormous persuasive power. Bonhoeffer clearly shows that the Church is a Community, but entry into this Community is possible ONLY through Jesus Christ and ONLY for the sake of Jesus Christ.

I remember reading this book in 2003. She hit me pretty hard. Made me think through a lot of things again. Since then, I have read and reread the book “Living Together,” especially its first part, which is called “Christian Community,” about 30 times. When you read, you see everything very clearly, but when you close the book, you immediately fall out of this reality.

Bonhoeffer returns our attention to Christ, to Christocentricity. To the fact that only Christ can be at the center of Christian life. To the fact that the Christian life is nothing other than the life of Christ in us. Christ, who appears in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God. It was important for me to see how Bonhoeffer subtly encouraged me to continually relate my entire life to Christ and the Gospel. The authenticity of this process for me is verified by several things. First of all, the voluntariness of these actions. I myself don’t notice how I get involved in this process of spirit and thought. Secondly, there is no feeling of “scrolling” or idling. There is always a feeling of work, a small load. As the Apostle Paul said, “a work of faith and a labor of love” is accomplished within us.

Next, Bonhoeffer disciplines the work of the heart and mind. He clearly and consistently teaches that any Christian communication, any Christian community is justified only by the extent to which it reveals the presence of Christ in our lives. This is the first point.

The second point is this: it seems to me that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s genius also lies in the fact that sometimes he becomes an interlocutor with the Apostle Paul. Not an interpreter of the Apostle Paul, but one who picks up the thought of the Apostle Paul and finishes it to the end.

- Can you explain what we are talking about here?
- We all know such words of Holy Scripture as “there is only one Mediator between God and man - the Lord Jesus Christ.” Bonhoeffer picks up this idea and finishes: “Christ is the only Mediator not only between me and God, but between me and my brother, between me and the world around me, between me today and the present me.” After all, I cannot come to my real self without passing through Christ. Only by coming to Christ can I find my true life, my true calling. Of course, the Apostle Paul had all this in mind, but Bonhoeffer made it clear to us, without in the least distorting either the direction or level of the Apostle Paul’s thought.

The topic of Christ's mediation between different members of the Church seems to me very important. We often forget about this in our church and even in our community and fraternal life. Having experienced the blessed uplift of the birth of a community, we calm down. It seems to us that this is already enough. But this is not so. What is important is constant, continuous care to ensure that Christ is always among us. When Bonhoeffer poses the question this way, he shows that the reality of community-brotherly life is not a static reality, but a dynamic one.

Another Bonhoeffer theme that is very important to me is that Christianity is not an ideal, but a reality given from Above.

- Quite an Orthodox patristic thought.
- Yes. And this is not the first time that a Westerner has helped us better understand our own Orthodox roots. Bonhoeffer distinguishes two concepts - “ideal” and “perfection”. Taking aside the conversation about ideality, he talks about perfection. And perfection is an evangelical category. Christ says in the Gospel: “Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” He does not say: “Be perfect, just as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”

Perfection is not only the will of the Heavenly Father, but also the Holy Spirit placed in our heart as a gift. In the sacrament of Enlightenment, the Holy Spirit penetrates us - the Source of our perfection. Thus, perfection is already within our hearts. We already received it. Our task is only to constantly deepen and expand the boundaries of its action. The perfect life of the Holy Spirit, the perfect life of Jesus Christ, is given to us freely. It becomes our property.

The practical significance of this thought is to correctly choose the point of application of our forces. The Christian life is accomplished not by human strength, not by overexerting our natural powers, not even by God’s help. Christian life is accomplished in us by the Holy Spirit, Christ Himself, acting from within us. What is required from us is enormous activity of the spirit, a huge demand for the life of Christ to become my life, for His victory over evil and death to become my victory over evil and death.

That is, it is precisely in maintaining spiritual passionarity that the will of God will be fulfilled? Will this be obedience to the Father?
- Yes, this is how perfect obedience can be manifested. Here, by the way, there is a difference with the Old Testament experience of obedience. The perfection of the divine-human nature is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is within us. Therefore, we can pray to Heavenly Father that Christ’s presence in us will strengthen and strengthen its position. Perfect obedience to Heavenly Father, revealed in Christ, becomes my perfect obedience to Heavenly Father to the extent of my participation in Christ. Christ is coming into my life from the depths. Gradually embraces my life and conveys His perfect obedience to me.

Following Christ is a separate theme of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If I may say so, he gives certain recommendations on how to do this. Did you feel like the bar was too high? 50 years have passed, and now it is incredibly difficult for a modern person to give up everything, himself, in order to take up the cross.
- When we talk about the need to take up the cross, we often focus on the fact that we need to leave something, hate someone, commit some kind of heroic act of violence against ourselves... And Bonhoeffer constantly turns our gaze to Christ. To follow Christ, you have to give up something, but the emphasis can be placed in different ways. The point is not what I will leave, but will I follow Christ? It seems to me that the internal logic of following Christ should itself suggest what and when to leave. In any case, this is a positive task, not a negative one.

- A positive task is sometimes more difficult to perceive.
- Bonhoeffer constantly sets a positive task, constantly returns our attention to Christ.

For many years I have been preaching on the topics of following Christ, taking up the cross, and all the time my attention shifts to the fact that I need to leave something, jump into some kind of abyss. It often turns out that we preach not Christ, but some difficulties in following Christ, abysses through which we must jump along the path of this following.

To some extent this is true. In following Christ, sometimes you have to jump over abysses, sometimes you have to walk on a smooth road, sometimes you have to walk on water, sometimes you have to walk through the air. But still, a person following Christ cannot pay so much attention to the road he is walking on. This is all becoming clear along the way. The traveler himself may not see this, but other people can. If a Christian thinks too much about difficulties, he may lose sight of Christ.

- What other themes in Bonhoeffer’s work seem especially important to you?
- There is a theme that is barely outlined in the book “Living Together”: no one promised the Christian community that it would always live together.

Community life is something of a miracle. From time to time the Lord takes His communities, breaks them and scatters His people in different directions. Christians fly to different lands like grains. The important question is: have these grains ripened? Do they carry the life of Christ within them? Are they capable of giving birth to church communities and brotherhoods in the new land?

The last thing that struck me concerns the Psalter. The fact is that for many years of my life I read the Psalter in Russian and all the time I could not answer the question of what all this has to do with me, to whom all these curses, blessings, and so on relate. And Bonhoeffer gave the answer for me. He honestly said: this has nothing to do with me and my life. The Psalter is the prayers of Jesus Christ. Christ, being in the bowels of His forefather David, prays to the Heavenly Father. This is His prayer for Himself and for us. And we are allowed to join His prayer, He takes us into His prayer. This central position of Christ in the Psalter, the biblical prayer book, was a complete surprise to me.

O. John, what, in your opinion, is the least understood in Bonhoeffer’s words today? What does Christ tell us through him that we do not hear?
“I think we don’t hear that Christ is the only true reality.” In Christ we see true God, true man and true peace. Everything else is illusory. Not in the sense that there is nothing outside of Christ, but in the sense that life outside of Christ is half life, half sleep.

- If you had a chance to meet Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, what would you tell him or ask him?
- I think that to some extent I have already met him. I hope that one day we will see him face to face. I’ll probably thank him and ask permission to stand next to him.

Olga Sedakova: DIETRICH BONHOFFER FOR US
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer - one of the most significant and widely discussed Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, a pastor, a participant in the anti-Hitler resistance, was executed on April 9, 1945, a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany. He spent the last two years of his life in prison, from where he wrote his letters to friends and family, which are now translated into many languages and discussed around the world. The choice of the confessional path follows from Bonhoeffer’s very theological thought; on the other hand, such experience feeds his “new theology.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906 in Breslau (now Wroclaw) in the family of Professor Karl Bonhoeffer, a famous psychiatrist. He was the sixth child in the family, after him two more were born. On the maternal side, the family was connected with the famous painters von Kalkreuth (the great “Requiem” by R. M. Rilke is dedicated to the death of one of the counts von Kalkreuth). Family tradition preserved the memory of some distant connection with Goethe. Music (in letters from prison Bonhoeffer cites from memory musical quotations from Beethoven and Schutz), literature, painting, natural sciences - Bonhoeffer owes all this rich composition of his mental life to his home inheritance. His close friends grew up in the same atmosphere. Creative humanitarian culture was for them a space of communication no less than theological topics themselves. Cultivated humanity naturally takes the form of classical friendship. Bonhoeffer never ceases to reflect on the Christian value of friendship - and the Christian value of free culture - in prison: “Marriage, work, the state and the Church have specific divine mandates, but what about culture and education? .. They do not belong to the sphere of obedience , but to the area of freedom... Someone who is ignorant of this area of freedom can be a good father, citizen and worker, perhaps also a Christian, but will he be a full-fledged person (and thereby a Christian in the full extent of this concepts), is doubtful. ... Maybe, as it seems to me today, it is the concept of the Church that makes it possible to come to an awareness of the sphere of freedom (art, education, friendship, play)?”

Bonhoeffer valued family tradition and even planned (in prison) to write something like “the rehabilitation of the burghers from the position of Christianity.” He wanted to pay tribute to the class of “citizens”, “citizens”, people of professional, family and moral honor, a class devoted to culture, believing in the power of reason and classical humanistic education (it is characteristic that in conclusion Bonhoeffer did not part with Plutarch’s Lives), who respects a person’s talent, work and personal independence, who sees personal life in the perspective of civil service and historical responsibility. In our country, this image of the burghers (overshadowed by the much more well-known image of the “bourgeois,” a predatory parvenu in the spirit of Balzac’s heroes) is familiar only to readers of German prose of the century before last - or to those who imagine to what extent such figures as Goethe (whose volume, together with the Bible, accompanied Bonhoeffer until the day of his execution) or Albert Schweitzer - sons of his class. Bonhoeffer saw that the burghers dear to him were already leaving, as they say, from the historical stage (as the aristocracy had left before) along with its golden age - the nineteenth, which Bonhoeffer also wanted to “rehabilitate”. S.S. Averintsev (and he can be called, in a sense, the heir to this spirit of European burgherism, just like the entire Russian “professorial” environment, which Andrei Bely and Tsvetaeva, who grew up in it, recall:

Yours - the essence and article
And respect for the mind, -

Pasternak, who we still have somehow not distinguished from the “Russian intelligentsia” in general, a phenomenon of a different nature), called modern “mass society” capitalism without the burghers, in other words, without the leading cultural class.

However, there is nothing more absurd than to imagine Bonhoeffer as a conservative, nostalgic for lost foundations or “roots.” Bonhoeffer accepts new times (the radical newness of which he felt so strongly precisely because of his hereditary rootedness in history) with their “groundlessness,” “irreligion,” “rebellion of mediocrity” and other frightening features as a new era of world history, which he always understood in no other way as a sacred story, that is, the revelation of the will of God, a kind of Apocalypse unfolded in time (naturally, with an emphasis on revelation, and not on the “end of the world” as the final catastrophe, as sectarian consciousness is accustomed to understand). We find the same idea of “native history,” unfolding as Revelation and begun with the Nativity of Christ, in Pasternak (in the novel “Doctor Zhivago” it is developed by the hero’s uncle, the philosopher Vedenyapin). In this era of “adult humanity” he sees a new task for Christianity and a new historical era of the Church.

We will not discuss here whether the current state of humanity can really be understood as “adult” and “irreligious” in Bonhoeffer’s sense. Bonhoeffer himself was surprised to observe in prison how much “religiosity” there was in his fellow sufferers, how much completely archaic belief in magic and the intervention of otherworldly forces according to the principle of Deus ex machina. Probably, the thesis about the immanent religiosity of man, with which Bonhoeffer argued, is still fair: “religiosity” belongs not to the “childhood of humanity,” but to man in general - as a being, whose very nature includes the intuition of “another world” and the urgent need to connect with him. The only question is what kind of connection is assumed in each case - and in what relation this natural religiosity consists of the Christian faith. From various modern movements such as the New Age, we see that “religiosity” does not leave a person even in the age of high technology and seemingly triumphant materialism; it only takes on more and more primitive and degenerate forms, devoid of ancient poetry and deep symbolism known to traditional religions. But what is even more significant is that these new forms of “religiosity” in a cultural sense usually give rise only to blatant kitsch, aesthetic and intellectual, something else. And this other thing explains their cultural mediocrity. The fact is that these forms of “religiosity” completely eliminate the practice of thanksgiving, sacrifice, and service, without which all ancient religions are unimaginable - and creative culture is unimaginable. Essentially, theology is also gone as a work of special (prayerful, contemplative) learning about the divine, mental communion with it. In the “supernatural” with which the newest “religiosity” deals, there is nothing to contemplate and know; what is important is something else: how to effectively deal with it. This “religiosity” ultimately boils down to the crudest utilitarianism, to an open desire to use the “supernatural” (sometimes also to the search for magical and parascientific techniques to master its “power”), rather than to love it and serve it. In this sense, we can understand Bonhoeffer when he says that the position of an “adult,” “irreligious” person is nobler and essentially closer to Christianity. In this sense, he says that Christ frees a person from “religiosity”: from a slavish, low and evil relationship with an unknown “other world”, with some unclear Power and Authority, from the search for earthly well-being by any means. Generally speaking, from idolatry - that is, from what is presented as the most vile sin of man already in the Old Testament (the first of the Ten Commandments) and even more so in the New. For refusal to commit this sin, the blood of the martyrs of the first centuries of Christianity was shed. Bonhoeffer ultimately gave his life for the same thing: for refusing to worship the idol of the “superior German race” and its Leader, which was required of every loyal citizen of the Reich. No one, as usual, demanded that a sacrifice be made to the idol (“divine” emperor - that is, to the state embodied in his person, as in Rome, or to the “purity of the race” and to the divine Leader - that is, again to the deified state, for this once national, and not imperial, as in Germany, or the Party, to which the Soviet citizen had to be “selflessly devoted”), so that this sacrifice would be made sincerely, with all the soul: it was enough to observe external decency, “formal conventions.” But not to do this, that is, not to sin by idolatry or not to enter into a mutually beneficial conspiracy with evil and lies, meant for Bonhoeffer to save his soul. He did not think about another, otherworldly salvation of his soul.

I’ll remember S.S. Averintsev again. Commenting on the last phrase from the First Council Epistle of the Apostle John: “Children, keep yourselves from the demands of idols” - “Little children, beware of serving idols!” (1 John 5:21), Averintsev asked: why does this great message end with such an exhortation? Yes, because, he answered, every idol requires human sacrifices. Anyone who worships an idol sacrifices the blood of other, innocent people to it. The point is not that by making a sacrifice to an idol we will become worse (the usual individualistic understanding of sin and defilement), but that by doing this we betray someone else: someone else will pay with their lives for our cowardice . This is a spiritual law similar to the physical law of conservation of energy. Sometimes such human sacrifice to an idol occurs indirectly and hidden, so that the person making the compromise does not see for the time being (like the high school student in Leo Tolstoy’s “False Coupon”) or will never see its consequences in the destinies of others during his lifetime. But in eras such as German Nazism or Stalin’s “Great Terror,” the sacrifice of millions to idols is carried out with complete clarity. This is what Bonhoeffer’s Christian conscience does not agree to. “It is not so much his own bitter experience that calls a Christian to action and co-suffering (sharing of suffering) as the ordeal of the brothers for whom Christ suffered.” “Acquiring a particle of the heartfelt breadth of Christ”, “life for others” is the driving motive of his actions and his thoughts. The nobility of Christians, the “royal priesthood” is one of his constant themes. The revival of nobility, the revival of “quality” is one of those new tasks of the Church that Bonhoeffer sees in the coming era. The soul is saved by saving its freedom and nobility. By sacrificing truth and dignity, they are saving something else: they are saving their own skin, as the Russian language vividly portrays this. A terrible way of existence in empty “saved skins” is the path of those who chose historical irresponsibility, the real “victims of history,” as I. Brodsky called them in his Nobel speech.

Let's return to Bonhoeffer's biography. Immediately after graduating from high school, choosing theology, Bonhoeffer received an excellent theological education in Germany and Rome, at the age of 23 he became a doctor of theology and a year later - a pastor. After several years spent in Spain, England and America, he taught systematic theology at the University of Berlin (until the ban in 1936), wrote and published a number of theological works (one of them, “Nachfolge”, 1934, was translated into Russian). - “Walking after”, which can also be translated “Following Him”: the title of the book is based on the Gospel words: “Leave everything and follow Me”). His central theme, probably, remains the church as a communion of saints (“Sanctorum Communio” from the Apostles’ Creed, the theme of his first diploma essay) and its connection with the Old Testament faith (“Prayer Book of the Bible” - “Das Gebetbuch der Bibel”, 1940) .

The years after National Socialism came to power gave these themes a special urgency. The Evangelical Church in Germany finds itself in an unprecedented situation. The relationship between the Church and earthly power (state) in historical Christianity was not initially conceived as a struggle - according to the well-known gospel covenant: “To God the things that are God, and to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (as we remember, we were talking about the payment of taxes), - according to the apostolic teaching that that “all authority is from God,” and in accordance with the constant exhortations of the apostles to maintain civil loyalty, since the state is justified by the fact that its purpose is to protect good people from evildoers. But what to do in the case when the government itself directly asserts that it is against God, and demands that we give it not what is Caesar’s, but what is God’s, and at the same time protects not good people from villains, but itself and its own right to any villainy from their subjects (as the communist government did in our country)? Or if she does not say that she is against God in general, but only demands that God be different: say, German? This proposal was accepted by the “brown” intra-church movement of “German Christians”. Having won the church elections of 1933, this movement proclaimed itself the “Evangelical Church of the German Nation,” which would reveal to the world the “German Christ of the de-Judaized Church.” “De-Judaization” was by no means reduced to the “Aryan paragraph”. It meant the acceptance of a special, definitely anti-Christian mythology, in which the Decalogue, the Beatitudes, and all the Gospel meanings were absolutely inappropriate. The Christian Church (even if only the “German nation”) was required to approve the state cult of force and violence, hatred and mercilessness towards others, self-exaltation and contempt for the rule of law, the will to power on a planetary scale, complete spiritual and mental enslavement of subordinates, “true Germans” , “true patriots.” “Believe, obey, win” - this is what this Caesar, unprecedented until the twentieth century, wanted from a person. Need I say that now, when we hear about the “Russian Christ”, we are offered a very similar, although not in all features coinciding with the “Nordic”, but no less anti-Christian mythology? What Bonhoeffer calls “religiosity” may well be reconciled with the injection of such a myth into his humble piety, but what Bonhoeffer opposes to “religiosity” is faith, otherwise: life according to the “truth of God,” the life of a “recreated man,” never will not accept this.

The direction taken by the General Synod aroused decisive resistance from some of the best theologians and pastors, who united in 1934 into the “authorized German Evangelical Church,” which went down in history under the name of the “Confessing Church.” The dispute was understood not simply as political and moral, but as theological and doctrinal (Karl Barth). D. Bonhoeffer was associated with this movement from the very beginning. From that time until his arrest in the spring of 1943, he actively participated in the church resistance, which was going deeper and deeper underground and leading more and more surely to the inevitable denouement. “We do not at all paint death in heroic tones; life is too significant and dear to us for that,” Bonhoeffer thinks about this denouement (which was two years away). And he concludes: “Not external circumstances, but we ourselves will make of death what it can be - death by voluntary consent.” We have already spoken about the motives for his choice - compassion and historical responsibility.

Bonhoeffer described the experience of living under the new regime and what this regime does to the human personality in a short text written for friends for Christmas 1943 - “Ten Years Later.” This essay, I think, is one of the most significant pieces of evidence of the last century. It was written by a participant in the events, but a participant who has an amazing opportunity to see everything more accurately than future historians and analysts, since he is much more interested in the truth than they are. This testimony should be especially important for us. When in late Soviet times (no less than sixty, or even seventy “years later”) I read this amazing Bonhoeffer analysis of the decay of society and man (what is the chapter “Stupidity” worth, revealing not the intellectual, but the moral and political nature of this widespread the stupidity of the sub-regime population!), I couldn’t help but think: everything is about us! And it still saddens me that in our country no one has tried to make a similar effort to understand what is happening in its most general and deepest, not social, but spiritual and human dimension. Without such an understanding, as we have already become fully convinced, both the individual and society cannot get out of this state. By the way, about the exit. And now, reading the last chapter, “Are we still needed?”, I think: this is about us and for us:

“We have been mute witnesses to evil deeds, we have gone through thick and thin, we have studied Aesopian language and mastered the art of pretending, our own experience has made us distrustful of people, and we have deprived them of the truth and free speech many times, we are broken by unbearable conflicts, and maybe , we just became cynics - are we still needed? We will need not geniuses, not cynics, not misanthropes, not refined schemers, but simple, artless, straightforward people.”

These words, I think, have the relevance of a leaflet in our current situation. The need for real simplicity - not the kind that is worse than theft - the simplicity of an integral being, endowed with the ability to distinguish between good and bad and make unambiguous choices for itself.

It is precisely because of the urgency of Bonhoeffer's experience for us that I, not being in the least connoisseur of his work and especially of Protestant theology of the twentieth century, accepted the invitation to speak about this at the International Bonhoeffer Congress, which took place in Prague in July of this year. The text of my report is published below.
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The twentieth century, which is remembered by everything but this, was the great century of Christianity. It was the age of confessors; in their experience it became, one might say, the epiphany of Christianity, a manifestation of what is Christian in Christianity (not Gnostic, not Stoic, not tamed and transformed pagan, not unconsciously Old Testament, not everyday ritual, not clerical). Their testimonies preserve for us a trace of this experience: the experience of encountering something completely new and unprecedented. “In the words and ritual that have come down to us (here we mean the rite of baptism - O.S.) we guess something completely new, transforming everything...” Witnesses of this experience belonging to different Christian denominations (as well as those remaining outside of church Christianity, like Simone Weil), they talk about the experience of something that has not been felt with such force, probably since the catacomb times: about the appearance of Christianity as an incredible newness, next to which everything else looks hopelessly decrepit, about its appearance as a beginning, as the future. About the appearance of Christianity as a gift of life, next to which everything else seems lifeless, dying, mortifying. About how the Beloved Disciple begins his Gospel and First Epistle: “about the Word of Life: and Life was revealed, and we see and testify...” (1 John 1:1-4).

In a speech on the occasion of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus' (and this was the beginning of the official rehabilitation of Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union), S. S. Averintsev said - on behalf of those who turned to faith during the times of militant atheism: “We saw Christianity not as one of the religions, not as a moral system, a path to personal righteousness, not as a “holy tradition”, “the faith of the fathers”, not as many other things that are usually associated with the life-sense of a church person - we saw it simply as life; there was no other life around. We heard the words of Christ: “I came that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), not as a promise, but as a direct statement of fact.” Averintsev, the great cultural historian, ended this speech with a sober warning: “And this time will pass. Times of eschatological approach are being replaced by others. But let us remember that we knew this more firmly than anything: that Christianity is life. And then, when they think differently about Christianity again, we will not forget this.”

He guessed right. We can say that now in Russia - in general - they think differently about Christianity, about Orthodoxy, about the church. But we remember: all this appeared to us as life. And that is why Bonhoeffer is so clear to us.

It was not about that “eternal life,” which is usually understood as some kind of “second, other life” (otherworldly, posthumous or “internal”), but about life here and now, about deliverance from death, which operates here and now ( and not about the one that awaits us somewhere at the end of earthly days). “There was no life in anything else,” Averintsev said of the late Soviet years. “All the available alternatives to modernity seemed (to us) equally unbearable, alien to life, meaningless,” Bonhoeffer wrote in 1943 about a world of another triumphant totalitarianism. So, not “life after life,” not “righteous life,” but simply and uniquely: life. Air. Space. In the other there is nothing to breathe. Another thing is cramped space. Wed. from Bonhoeffer: “Faith is something integral, a vital act. Jesus calls not for a new religion, but for life.” And - to life in this world, as it became “ten years later” (in Germany, and in Russia - all seventy years later) after the coming to power of inhuman evil, as if unleashed from the chain.

The intolerance of the “world” and the “worldly” is not news for the Christian soul of different eras. Discerning and discerning souls have always known this. Auschwitz and Gulags are redundant for such knowledge. It is impossible to love God’s truth and at the same time accept (or even excuse) the ways of “this world.” But the usual solution here is known - this is religious renunciation, withdrawal from the world (in various forms, including into the “inner life”). And above all, a departure from the most mundane in the world: from sociality, from participation in political life, understood as a game of worldly passions, the field of action of the “prince of this world.” But this means: moving away from history - or, more precisely, opposing its course. The predominantly restraining, protective position of the Church for centuries seemed completely natural, but this Christianity once set in motion the entire movement of the era, which is called “our era” and dates back to “the Nativity of Christ.”

In the catastrophes of the twentieth century, something else is remembered with extraordinary clarity: Christianity does not take you out of the world, but brings you into the world. “What is not of this world strives in the Gospel to become something for this world; and I understand this not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystical, pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense, revealed in the creation of the world and the incarnation, in the death on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

We are talking “simply” about life (and not about a special “religious” kind of life), but this means about all life, and not just about its “religious section”: about life in science and creativity, in marriage and friendship, about life external and internal, intellectual and civil, intimate and public; about life, as Bonhoeffer says, not only in weakness and ignorance (when they usually remember God), but also in strength and knowledge; not only beyond the mind, but within its hardest work; not only at the edges of life, but at its very center.

To this discovery of “simply life” Bonhoeffer adds one more important clarification. Moreover, we are talking “simply” about a person (and not about a pious, righteous person, etc.): “Christ creates in us not some type of person, but simply a person.” “Just a person,” a completely animated and living person, is not available to us. It needs to be created. And when this actually happens, something extraordinary arises: something that can be called a person. And this, as in the case of “just life,” presupposes: we are talking about the whole person.

So, in the Soviet years, we had the opportunity to see how believers looked among those around them - exactly justifying the ancient words: like people come to life among statues. They differed from others not when they observed prayer rules and fasts and attended divine services (others, as a rule, did not see this; this was often done secretly and from their family): they differed in every movement and look. They were completely alive. They had a different measure of things. They were freer - and therefore incomparably smarter than others: they were not captured by that epidemic stupidity that Bonhoeffer wonderfully analyzed. They did not have thousands of biases and fears that determined the existence of others (exactly the opposite of what was usual: after all, it was “religious” people for a man of a living mind, such as Goethe, who seemed - and, alas, rightly - the very embodiment of bias, incomplete sincerity and narrowness). Finally, they had strength. For millennia, reflecting and reminding man of his weakness and frailty, Christian culture too rarely remembered Christianity as a strength. Trial times reminded us of this. Systems like Stalin's or Hitler's took control of man not through his anger, but through his weakness. Through his weakness, a new anonymous power takes possession of man - the power of civilization, which is called consumer power. “Christ makes people not only “good,” but also strong,” says Bonhoeffer.

Another one of the “first things” of Christianity appeared in all its simplicity: freedom. Christ, coming, according to the words of the Prophets, “to free the captives from their shackles and lead the prisoners out of prison,” as was always sung in Christmas carols - but was usually understood in a spiritualized sense: after all, the surrounding life could only be seen in a figurative, “spiritual” sense like a prison. But here the prison was completely material, and the liberation that was required was not metaphorical. Freedom was experienced in its original connection with the soul (and in biblical language soul means life) and salvation. Thinking about his own life and calling, Bonhoeffer more than once recalls the amazing words of the prophet Jeremiah: “You ask yourself great things: do not ask; For behold, I will bring disaster on all flesh, says the Lord, but for you instead of spoil I will leave your life in all places wherever you go” (Jer 45:4-5). The salvation of a free soul (life), the preservation of the heart (“Keep your heart above all else, for from it comes life” [Proverbs 4:23]) - in this alone he sees the spiritual task of his generation. This is what I think those who refused to collude with evil in Soviet Russia could say about their lives. This kind of soul salvation often cost life and always social well-being. Other, great things, when “a new language will sound, perhaps not at all religious, but it will have a liberating and saving power, like the language of Jesus ... the language of a new righteousness and a new truth,” Bonhoeffer leaves to future generations.

All these things in their radical newness, in their transformation by Christ - life, man, freedom, strength, intelligence, nobility, history, citizenship - were overshadowed in Christian history by completely different themes of reflection and practice. It is absurd to deny their depth, significance and richness, but in times of trials this was not the only thing needed. Bonhoeffer’s departure from the analysis of the “psychic depths”, the “secrets of the soul” of a person, from introspection is remarkable. He notes: “The “heart” in the biblical understanding is not the “depth of the soul,” but the whole person, the way he stands before God.” In this non-psychological - in his words, “worldly” - turn, he wants to comprehend the most important categories of Christianity: sin, repentance, conversion, asceticism. For the “new simplicity,” the simplicity of a straightforward and integral desire to “follow,” a person needs not to understand himself, but to forget about himself completely, says Bonhoeffer. As in general, this is required to perform any task, at least washing dishes.

For this first simplicity of Christianity to be revealed, many things had to happen. A historical catastrophe was about to occur. The Christian tradition was removed from the “order of things” to which it apparently belonged in Europe for a millennium and a half - in such a way that it inspired the idea of “Christian roots of Europe”, reliable, lasting roots, of the uninterrupted inheritance of faith from fathers to children. And now one and a half millennia of the prosperous existence of churches in the “Christian world”, among “Christian peoples” and “Christian states”, came to an end, and the end turned out to be scandalous. For the first time after the baptism of nations, the Church found itself persecuted on its own “canonical territory” (in Russia). The role of persecutors was played by “our own people,” the heirs of the same tradition. The mass scale and cruelty of these persecutions surpassed Roman times. According to preliminary estimates (data from the Commission for the Canonization of Russian New Martyrs), the number of people exterminated in the USSR on religious grounds from 1918 to 1939 was about a million people. Many times a greater number of people directly or indirectly participated on the side of the persecutors.

Bonhoeffer, like later Pope John Paul II, like many persecuted priests and bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church (I will refer at least to Father Sergius Savelyev), like the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, wanted to see the responsibility of the church itself for everything that happened. In the final analysis, he saw it in the fact that “the church, which fought only for its own self-preservation (as if it were an end in itself), is not able to be the bearer of a healing and saving word for people and the world.” This is the same diagnosis for the above-mentioned witnesses of the 20th century.

But not only the church as an institution and faith as part of the church tradition could be persecuted (as was the case in communist Russia). What was actually Christian was persecuted - and where the relationship between the worldly authorities and the local church developed not as a struggle for extermination, but as a compromise or concordance (as was the case in Germany). The foundations of the humane and lived-in world, its ethical and rational foundations, were crumbling before the eyes of eyewitnesses. Description of the differences between the “former”, humane world, where, in the words of Pasternak, “it was easier to love than to hate,” and the new, “extraordinary” world, in which open Evil reigns, and violence, betrayal, lies, general distrust of each other and suspicion (a kind of presumption of guilt, a characteristic property of social pariahs, according to Bonhoeffer’s observation) entered into the order of things, surprisingly coincides with Bonhoeffer and Pasternak. Both of them knew these two worlds from experience: in the first they grew and developed and carried it within themselves forever - but they were called to act in the second. For those who were born in Germany and Russia later than them, the “former world” could only be known from legends - and, moreover, forbidden ones (the official myth of the “past” was completely different). Reviewing the incalculable losses, groundlessness, inhumanity, “irreligion” of the new world, Bonhoeffer does not call for “rooting,” but in a sense blesses these times: “I can say that I would not want to live in any other time.” Why? “Never before have we felt the wrathful God so close, and this is a blessing,” he writes in November 1943; in May 1944: “More clearly than at any other time, we know that the world is in the wrathful and merciful hands of God.” The words of the Psalms and Prophets come to his mind in connection with what is happening as the most accurate descriptions of the topicality. Poems about anger and destruction followed by reconciliation and comfort. He feels himself inside Sacred History (after all, this means “to be in the hands of God”). This catastrophic present was full of future. “After all, the non-biblical concept of “meaning” is only a translation of what the Bible calls “promise.”

So far, I remembered only two Russian names next to Bonhoeffer - S. Averintsev and B. Pasternak. But there are many documents from the times of persecution (letters, memoirs, diaries), where we will meet thoughts and insights of Orthodox confessors, clergy and laity close to Bonhoeffer. We have not yet collected and thought about this experience.

And here we are - at least chronologically - in that time, which for Bonhoeffer - and for our martyrs - was the future. Orthodoxy in Russia is decisively entering the order of life (restoring that state of affairs, the end of which we have already spoken about). Does it accept the legacy of the catastrophic, eschatological Christian age? Does the “language of new righteousness and new truth” they expect sound? Or is this experience valid only in its place, where the world collapses and a person sees things face to face as they are? And he can ask, like Bonhoeffer: “Are we still needed?” And answer as he did: “Will we have enough internal strength to counteract what is being imposed on us, will we remain mercilessly frank about ourselves - that’s what determines whether we will again find the path to simplicity and straightforwardness.”

What is being imposed on us, one may ask? What is always: a world with “usuality”, with “necessity”, with “nothing can be done!” - with resignation to death, in one word: death in the form of complexity and crookedness. But there is no other way - other than the simple and direct one - to becoming “the person Christ is creating in us.” This is constantly spoken about by perhaps the only widely heard voice in our country that corresponds to the experience of confessors of the twentieth century - the voice of the great Orthodox preacher of the post-catastrophe years, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh.

1. I quote all quotes from one publication - the book by D. Bonhoeffer. Resistance and Submission. M.: “Progress”, 1994, including letters from prison posthumously published by Bonhoeffer’s friends, in an excellent translation by A. B. Grigoriev. The introductory article by E. V. Barabanov will allow the reader to see Bonhoeffer’s theological thought in the broad context of Protestant theology of the twentieth century.
2. This coincidence does not seem accidental. Russian religious thought (and Pasternak's hero was conceived as its representative) had a great influence on Bonhoeffer's older contemporaries and teachers, the German theologians of “dialectical theology.”
3. With admiration, Bonhoeffer reads in prison W. F. Otto’s study “The Gods of Greece,” where classical Greek paganism is understood as “a world whose faith emerged from the richness and depth of life, and not from its worries and melancholy.”
4. This wonderful word of our relevance acquired its final definition when the Stalinist mass extermination of the population began to be called “effective management”. Effective means produced beyond good and evil.
5. Quoting from: Barabanov E. About letters from prison of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. - In the book: Bonhoeffer D. Uk. ed.
6. The slogan of the Italian fascists: “Credere, obbedire, vincere.”
7. “He who does not allow any events to deprive him of his participation in responsibility for the course of history (for he knows that it is entrusted to him by God), will take a fruitful position in relation to historical events - on the other side of fruitless criticism and no less fruitless opportunism "
8. “Thoughts on the baptism of D.V.R.”.
9. These two themes - the amazingness, unprecedentedness of Christianity and the Johannine theme of life - form the leitmotif of the conversations of Patriarch Athenagoras, recorded by Olivier Clément (Olivier Clément. Conversations with Patriarch Athenagoras. Translated from French by Vladimir Zelinsky. Brussels, 1993). Wed. Bonhoeffer: “Christianity does not consist of prohibitions: it is life, fire, creation, illumination.” Athenagoras, who lived a long and outwardly prosperous life, was not one of the persecuted and martyrs of the twentieth century; his experience is that of monastic prayerful contemplation. The “discovery” of Christianity in the past century took place under different circumstances.
10. I quote S. S. Averintsev’s speech at the opening of the Hall of Religious Literature in the Library of Foreign Literature (Moscow, 1989) based on my own diary entry.
11. “Ten Years Later”
12. “Letters to a friend.”
13. “Thoughts on the baptism of D.V.R.”.
14. “Letters to a Friend.”
15. Ibid.
16. “Thoughts on the baptism of D.V.R.”
17. “Letters to a friend.”
18. As a wonderful Moscow priest unexpectedly remarked: “But Europe has no Christian roots! Its roots are pagan. Christianity does not take root. It grew from a biblical root and was grafted into the nations like wild olive trees.”
19. “But what have we made of Christianity? A religion of law and self-righteousness!” - Olivier Clément.
20. “Thoughts on the baptism of D.V.R.”.
21. “It was customary to trust the voice of reason. What conscience dictated was considered natural and necessary. The death of a person at the hands of another was a rarity, an out of the ordinary phenomenon, etc. - Boris Pasternak. Doctor Zhivago.
Wed. Bonhoeffer: “We have constantly overestimated the importance of reason and justice in the course of history…. In our life, the “enemy” was not essentially some kind of reality” (“Thoughts on the Baptism of D.V.R.”). Elsewhere: “The figure of Judas, so incomprehensible before, is no longer alien to us. Yes, all the air we breathe is poisoned by mistrust” (“Ten Years Later”).
22. “Letters to a Friend.” Letter dated 11/27/43.
23. Ibid.
24. “Somehow the truth of the words of the Psalms will become apparent - to anyone who is able to see at all; and we will have to repeat the words of Jeremiah (45:5) day after day.”
25. “Letters to a Friend.”
26. “Ten years later.”

Metaxas E. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Righteous Among the Nations against the Third Reich. M.: Eksmo, 2012.

Rubenstein, Richard L. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pope Pius XII. // Audio recording of The Century of Genocide Selected Papers from the 30th Anniversary Conference of the Annual Scholars" Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. Merion Station, Penn.: Merion Westfield Press International, 2005. Pp. 193-218.

Christians and pagans

People come to God when they are in trouble
begging for help, asking for happiness and bread,
deliverance from illness, guilt and death.
And everyone does this, everyone - Christians and pagans.

People come to God when He is in trouble,
they find Him in poverty, shame, without shelter and bread,
they see him subject to sin, powerlessness and death.
Christians are with God in His suffering.

God comes to all people when they are in trouble,
satisfies flesh and soul with his bread,
dies on the Cross for Christians and pagans,
and forgives both.

This poem was written on July 21, 1944, after the author learned of the failure of Admiral Canaris' July 20 plot. By that time, Dietrich had been in prison for more than a year for his anti-fascist activities.

About him:

Extracts from the book. "Live together" . R. 02/04/1906, Breslau. Umi. 04/09/1945, Flossenburg. There are 7 children in the family, the father is a psychiatrist. I adopted (believed) realism from my father. He grew up in a Berlin suburb, played with the children of neighbors Harnack and the historian Hans Delbruck. In 1928 he was a vicar in Barcelona, in 1929 he returned to Berlin, trained for a year in New York, fell in love with American blacks and US freedom. Germany, then in 1933 his program about Hitler was interrupted, moved to London, in 1935 he went to head a secret seminary in Pomerania (Finkenwald) - life here is described in the book “Living Together,” 1938. In 1939 he was in the USA, they tried to persuade him to stay, but he returned on one of the last ships.

From the "Bibliological Dictionary"
priest Alexander Men
(Men finished work on the text by 1985; dictionary op. in three volumes by the Men Foundation (St. Petersburg, 2002))

To the dossier of Me

BONHOEFFER (Bonhoeffer) Dietrich (1906-45), German. Lutheran theologian. Genus. in Breslau in the family of a professor of psychiatry. Despite the religion family indifference, decided early to become a pastor. He studied theology in the high fur boots of Tübingen and Berlin. Was influenced by *Barth's ideas. After receiving his degree, he taught at the New York School of Music (1930-31), after which he was a pastor in educational institutions in Berlin and London. He was engaged in ecumenical studies. activities. When Hitler came to power, B., a man of deep faith, strong will, imbued with living morals. feeling, he could not remain inactive and joined the anti-Nazi “Confessional Church” (which included *Bornkam, *Rad and other theologians). He created Christ. groups that practiced new forms of spiritual communication, gave sermons and reports. Soon the authorities deprived him of his academic degrees, banned him from preaching, publishing, and finally expelled him from Berlin. Despite the invitation of American friends, B. remained in Germany and took an active part in anti-Nazi activities. underground. In 1943 he was arrested along with members of the Canaris conspiracy and hanged a month before the end of the war.

In 1933, his book “Creation and Fall” (“Sch"pfung und Fall”) was published in Munich, subsequently republished and translated into English (“Creation and Fall. A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1-3”, L., 1959), in which B. revealed the semantic structure of the first three chapters of the book of Genesis. Christ" (“Nachfolge”, MЃnch., 1937).

One of the most important works of Protestant thought of the 20th century. B.'s letters from prison became posthumously published. They reflected the experience of a theologian who found himself among people, many of whom did not share his faith. Rapprochement with them led B. to the conclusion that Christians had lost a language understandable to modern times. to the world. According to B., *Bultmann, who proposed *the demythologization of the NT in 1941, “did not go far enough,” because all traditional churchliness (in this case, Protestant), or, in B.’s words, “religiosity,” ceased to satisfy the “matured” world , ready to do without religion. B. posed the question: how to proclaim Christ under such conditions? It seemed to him that he found the answer in the Bible, which reveals God in the concrete reality of life. B. believed that the reality of life is far from metaphysics and is not limited to personal religiosity. “We need to find God in the heart of our lives,” wrote B., “in life, and not just in death, in strength and joy, and not just in suffering, in our deeds, and not just in sin.”

*The narrative parts of the OT, which depict man in all the contradictions of his ups, downs and passions, point to this worldly life as the arena of God’s actions. God does not act in some autonomous sphere; therefore it is impossible to limit Christ. *soteriology within the framework of “religion”. B. looked for confirmation of this thesis from Ap. Pavel. “I think,” he wrote, “that Paul’s question whether circumcision is necessary for justification has become today the question about the necessity of religion for salvation. Freedom from circumcision is freedom from religion." In his letters, B. outlined only the contours of this “religious Christianity”, without having time to develop his thoughts to the end. In any case, he sincerely believed that witness to Christ should be manifested in following His way of the cross, in the inclusion of Christ. ideals into the very midst of “worldly” activities. At the same time, B. said, “we must always live in closeness to God, because this is the newness of life; then nothing will be impossible, for with God all things are possible; no earthly force can touch us without His will, and danger only brings us closer to Him. We cannot ask for anything for ourselves, but we can pray for everyone. Our joy is hidden in suffering, our life is hidden in death. But we are always supported by a wonderful brotherhood. All this God has blessed in Jesus, and this is the solid foundation on which we stand.”

B.'s ideas had a great influence on many theologians, mainly Protestant (*Tillich, *Ebeling, *John Robinson, etc.). However, it has been noted that it raised rather than resolved questions about the reinterpretation of the Bible and Christianity. His idea of “non-religious Christianity,” contrary to his intention, was fraught with the rejection of the most important dogmas, teachings and *symbols of the Church, the dissolution of Christ. self-awareness in the general flow of life and thought. B. passed by the complex dialectic of “secular” and “sacred”, which is characteristic of Scripture. His concept of a “matured” world is also controversial. Ironically, it was proposed by him during the years of tyranny and morality. savagery, political idolatry and madness.

u Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.1-4, MЃnch., 1958-61; Auf dem Wege zur Freiheit, B., 19606 (English translation: The Way to Freedom, N.Y., 1966); in Russian Transl.: Resistance and submission. Letters from a Prison Cell, VF, 1989, No. 10/11;

l B a r a b a n o v E.V., About letters from Dietrich B.’s prison, VF, 1989, No. 10/11; D o b r e n k o v V.I., Sovrem. Protestant theological modernism in the USA, M., 1980; L e in J., Dietrich Bonkheffer. Pray among people, in his book: Great Teachers of Prayer, Brussels, 1986; L i l i e n f e l d F. von, Samples of the Evangelical. piety in the twentieth century, BT, Sat. 10, 1973; *B r o w n R., After Bultmann, What?, СBQ, 1969, No. 26; G o d s e y J.D., The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Phil., 1960; M a r l ‚ R., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, P., 1967; ODCC, p.186; P e r r i n N., What is Redaction Criticism? Phil., 1982; RGG, Bd.7, S.29.

Comparison of translations:

"Following Christ"

"Walking Following"

In times of renewal of the Church, it is discovered that Holy Scripture becomes richer for us. Behind the inevitable slogans of the day, the slogans of church disputes, searches and questions are revealed - about the One about whom only we are talking - about Christ. What did Christ want to tell us? What does He want to tell us now? How will He help us to be faithful Christians now? It is not important what this or that church person wants, but what Christ wants, that’s what we want to know. We want to hear His Word Himself when we go to preach.

In times of church renewal, we discover new riches in the Holy Scriptures. Behind the topical and militant slogans of church disputes, one can hear how the craving for the One who is the only one that matters is growing: for Jesus himself. What did Jesus want to tell us? What does He want from us today? How does He help us be faithful Christians today? In the end, it doesn’t matter to us what this or that churchman wants; what Jesus wants is what we want to know. When we go to preach, we want to hear His own word.