The heart of Bonhoeffer's spiritual legacy to us is not to be found in his words, his books, but in the way he spent his time on this earth, in his decision to live as if the Lord were a neighbor and friend, a constant source of courage and inspiration, a presence amid travail and joy alike, a reminder of love's obligations and affirmations and also of death's decisive meaning (how we die as a measure of how we have lived, of who we are). Bonhoeffer abandoned cleverness with language, brilliance at abstract formulation; he forsook denominational argument, oaths and pledges and avowals. In the end he reached out to all of us who crave, in hunger and in thirst, God's grace. And, one believes, unwittingly (how can it be otherwise?), unselfconsciously, he became its witness, its recipient. His spiritual gift to us, especially, is his life. The principles he avowed and discussed in his writings gain their authority from the manner in which he conducted that life.
The witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in all its near storybook drama, reminds us that if evil can be, as Hannah Arendt observed, "banal" in its everyday enactment, then good can be surprising in its occurrence, tenacious in its vitality, no matter the overwhelming odds against its survival. In the end, Hitler showed us a "heart of darkness," beating all too horribly fast, not in the distant jungle but right in our very midst, in our living rooms and our classrooms and, alas, even our churches and seminaries. It is just such a near-at-hand truth that Dietrich Bonhoeffer grasped right away, when others closed their eyes or calculated cravenly their immediate prospects. But he went that one further step; he remembered Jesus not intellectually or theologically or historically, but as our intimate teacher he meant himself to be, the one who holds us to a certain moral and spiritual mark, and won't let go of us -- if, that is, we are truly prepared, at whatever risk, to stay engaged with him, to follow in his footsteps.From "Dietrich Bonhoeffer" in THE DEATH OF ADAM by Marilynne Robinson (Houghton Mifflin, 1998):
Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga. It is written for those who know the tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its retelling with a special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and they on it. Theology is also close to the spoken voice. It evokes sermon, sacrament, and liturgy, legend and prayer. It earns its authority by winning assent and recognition, in the manner of poetry but with the difference that the assent seems to be to ultimate truth, however oblique or fragmentary the suggestion of it. Theology is written for the small community of those who would think of reading it. So it need not define freighted words like "faith" or "grace" but may instead reveal what they contain. To the degree that it does them any justice, its community of readers will say yes, enjoying the insight as their own and affirming it in that way.
Theology may proceed in the manner of a philosophical treatise or a piece of textual criticism, but it always begins by assuming major terms. And all of them, being imbedded in Scripture and tradition, behave together differently from discursive language. To compound the problem, Christian thinkers since Jesus have valued paradox as if it were resolution. So theology is never finally anything but theology, words about God, proceeding from the assumptions that God exists and that we know about him in a way that allows us to speak about him. Bonhoeffer calls these truths of the church "a word of recognition among friends." He invokes this language of recognition and identification in attempting to make the church real and aware of itself with all that implied when he wrote. For him, word is act. And, for him, it was. ...
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