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Jim's PERSPECTIVEOctober 7, 2013In 1941 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following in a circular letter to the ordinands of the “collective pastorates” (groups of young men from the illegal Finkenwalde seminary, which had been closed down and outlawed) when it was announced that three of his former students had been killed in the war.
To be sure, God shall call you, and us, only at the hour that God has chosen. Until that hour, which lies in God’s hand alone, we shall all be protected even in greatest danger; and from our gratitude for such protection ever new readiness surely arises for the final call. Who can comprehend how those whom God takes so early are chosen? Does not the early death of young Christians always appear to us as if God were plundering his own best instruments in a time in which they are most needed? Yet the Lord makes no mistakes. Might God need our brothers for some hidden service on our behalf in the heavenly world? We should put an end to our human thoughts, which always wish to know more than they can, and cling to that which is certain. Whomever God calls home is someone God has loved. “For their souls were pleasing to the Lord, therefore he took them quickly from the midst of wickedness” (Wisdom of Solomon 4). We know, of course, that God and the devil are engaged in battle in the world and that the devil also has a say in death. In the face of death we cannot simply speak in some fatalistic way, “God wills it”; but we must juxtapose it with the other reality, “God does not will it.” Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death. Here the sharp antithesis between “God wills it” and “God does not will it” comes to a head and also finds its resolution. God accedes to that which God does not will, and from now on death itself must therefore serve God. From now on, the “God wills it” encompasses even the “God does not will it.” God wills the conquering of death through the death of Jesus Christ. Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God’s power, and it must now serve God’s own aims. It is not some fatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died and rose for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death. In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without is confronted by death from within, one’s own death, the free death of daily dying with Jesus Christ. Those who live with Christ die daily to their own will. Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live within us. Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without. Christians received their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ. Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say, “It is finished.”
Bonhoeffer has put into words something that I have always believed as a Christian: that God’s will is ultimately done no matter what, and nothing—not even death—will prevent God’s will from being accomplished, even in the midst of circumstances that are not God’s will. I realize that some might think that this sounds too predestinarian, but I do believe that God is acting—although it is a mystery in terms of how or why—in the context of bad, or even evil, motives and decisions made by others, including ourselves. We often forget Paul’s reminder in Romans 8, while writing of the sufferings, tribulations, and distresses of this present age, that “we all are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” That may sound like a downer to many; nonetheless, that is the way it is. We live in a world of pain and torment, lies and deceit, injustice and violence, and death. But the promise of God to us is that “through him that loved us…neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Both the realities of this world, and the claims and promises of God in response to it, should make the things of the Lord Jesus Christ that much more necessary and desirable for us all. - Jim Radford |
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©2013 Jim Radford. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
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