One Man's Salty Example

It has been so long ago–yet I still remember promising to post more on my favorite historical Theologian, one who best portrays that a Christian is in fact "Salt of the Earth." I give you herein some information on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’m sure the information I give you can find, and more, without much trouble, but I hope my inadequate summary makes it easy and still presents what it means to be salt of the earth. As I indicated in my last post, I do not attribute to him any grandiose type of sainthood; I do say he took James’ advice and showed us his faith by the things he did. He wrote with a rare depth of thought, he taught brilliantly, he lived and died loyal to his Lord. I’ll repeat one of his phrases that seems to be the keynote of his life: "The call of Christ makes those who respond to it the salt of the earth in their total existence."

Bonhoeffer, born in Germany in 1906, was one of seven children, His father was a noted physician and became the first to occupy a university chair in psychiatry in Germany. Bonhoeffer wrote that from his father he learned an insistent, demanding realism:

"...a ‘turning away from the phraseological to the real.’ For him [Dietrich] Christianity could never be merely intellectual theory, doctrine divorced from life, or mystical emotion, but always it must be responsible, obedient action, the discipleship of Christ in every situation of concrete everyday life, personal and public."

He was a student of several of the great German scholars of the time. Friends he grew up with went on to be recognized in their fields of study. Bonhoeffer’s interest from the age of sixteen was Theology. At age twenty-one he presented his doctor’s thesis and became a Theology faculty member at age twenty-four. He was at Union Theological Seminary in New York for a year in 1930 and spoke of it as "a place of free discussion, made possible by the civic courage peculiar to Americans and the lack of any sort of officialism in personal relations." Though he was a skilled pianist he was fascinated by Negro spirituals, took them back to Germany and taught them to his Christian brethren before the songs became commonly known by radio, etc. To be sure, his interest in spirituals sprang out of his empathetic feelings with the struggle of the Negro for equality. This was 1930, long before the 1960's civil rights movements.

Back in Germany, in 1933, Bonhoeffer delivered a radio lecture critical of the public for their willing acceptance of a strong leader who became the "misleader," Adolf Hitler. The broadcast was cut off before its finish. Bonhoeffer refused to be a part of the German Christian Church compromise with the Nazis, so he accepted the call of two German speaking congregations in London. Within a couple of years and against the urging of others, he went back to Germany out of duty to his Lord and fellow Christians and became a leader of the illegal and clandestine Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer saw a Germany being built based on the strength of man, without considering God.

I have never ran across this idea, but when I peruse the work of an earlier German atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) I think Bonhoeffer was well aware of one of Nietzsche’s main thoughts: Modern man and science has eliminated the need for God, to-wit: ‘God is dead’. Nietzsche despised religion, yet knew and wrote of the Christian supported morality that pervaded society, at least in that age–a morality that held civilization together. He despised religion, yet he could foresee that without Godly influences humans were doomed to become socially degenerate and disintegrate into destruction and chaos. Nietzsche’s solution was to propose the necessity of an earthly human ‘superman’ (No, this was long before the cartoon character.) to rule, to forcibly grab the populations and impose order for a strong super-society. By the way, Nietzsche hated Jesus’ "Sermon on the Mount" because His teachings would be helping preserve the weak.

We know Hitler was very fond of Nietzsche, even gave Mussolini a copy of Nietzsche’s book. Hitler surely must have envisioned himself as a Nietzschean superman. The historians do say that Nietzsche’s dogma influenced the 20th century ego-maniacs Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. I propose that Bonhoeffer recognized the monster Nietzsche had created, that Hitler would not be restrained by common or traditional decency, that in building his super-race he would destroy the weak.

At a time when the world could easily conceive of Hitler’s ultimate victory, Bonhoeffer became active in the resistance in Germany, was even one of those involved in the conspiracy that resulted in the attempted assassination of Hitler, and Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment. One of his friends wrote of Bonhoeffer, "The man who felt all the force of the pacifist position and weighed the ‘cost of discipleship’ concluded in the depths of his soul that to withdraw from those who were participating in the political and military resistance would be irresponsible cowardice and flight from reality."

Bonhoeffer did not believe that everyone had to act as he did, but pacifism was not for him, nor was there any possibility of his retreat into some righteous, pious refuge. He could see all around him respectable people in sinful flight from responsibility. He was a German. The sins of his fellow Germans were falling upon him and he took his stand.

In 1943, Bonhoeffer, his sister and her husband were imprisoned. First in a military prison, "the guards were friendly to this strong pastor and secretly took him to the cells of despairing prisoners to minister to them. They preserved his papers, essays, and poems and even established a complete courier service to the family and friends outside."

Then later in 1943 he was moved into the infamous Gestapo prisons and contact with the outside world was lost. One of his fellow prisoners was an English officer who wrote:

"Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. ...He was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near. ...On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, the thoughts and the resolutions it had brought us. He had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, "Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us." ...We said goodbye to him. He took me aside: ‘This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.’ The next day he was hanged...."

Bonhoeffer died April 9, 1945, within a very few days of the end of the war.

Numerous essays, articles, and books were written by Bonhoeffer. It is tempting to present many worthy quotations from these works, yet it would beyond my capability to fairly present the "salt" of his writings in summary fashion. I’ll stay with the facts displayed--that Bonhoeffer’s thoughts were more than a Theologian’s lofty words; they are reflections from the heart of a man who heard and understood Jesus’ call, and lived for Him. He was indeed salt of the earth in his "total existence".

We know that salt was associated with the sacrifices. Hopefully, we gain from one man’s example of what it means to pick up our cross and follow him, to be salt of the earth. I submit that Christianity is under strong attack in our day, only a bit more subtle than in Bonhoeffer's day. The sly devil has used clever men and who continue to teach attractive ideologies to distort the faith of foolish man, not to mention his use of the intellectually lazy and not so clever men and women who profess to lead the Church. For us as pew sitting individual Christians, too, in our daily job and socially we often conform. Our mantra seems to be: fit in and never offend.

"Salt of the Earth"–Yes, there may be various metaphorical meanings worthy of thought–nevertheless, if we just sit quietly and think about it and the usages of "salt" in the Word, we might miss seeing that in our obedience to God and our Lord Jesus Christ we cannot be silent and avoid the battles, hide behind church doors or remain indistinguishable from the unbelieving secular world.