"Whoever is wise..."

Oh give thanks to the Lord,
                    for he is good,
                    for his steadfast love endures for ever!
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so,
                whom he has redeemed from trouble
        and                         gathered in from the lands,
                                                          from the east and from the west,
                                                          from the north and from the south.

He turns rivers into a desert,
              springs of water into thirsty ground,
           a fruitful land into a salty waste,
                    because of the evil of its inhabitants.
He turns a desert into pools of water,
               a parched land into springs of water.
And there he lets the hungry dwell,
and           they establish a city to live in;
                 they sow fields and plant vineyards
           and        get a fruitful yield.
        By his blessing they multiply greatly,
and                            he does not let their livestock diminish.

When they are diminished and brought low
        through oppression,
                      evil,
and                sorrow,
        he pours contempt on princes
and       makes them wander in trackless wastes;
but   he raises up the needy out of affliction
and       makes their families like flocks.
The upright see it
             and are glad,
             and all wickedness shuts its mouth.

Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things;
                             let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord.

Psalm 107:1-3, 33-43

Bonhoeffer Thinking about Friendship

I finished reading Letters and Papers From Prison the other day, and thought before I put it away I would write another couple of thoughts down.

I am much impressed by your remarks about friendship in this connection. As compared with marriage and the ties of kindred, friendship has no generally recognised rights, and is therefore wholly dependent on its own inherent quality. It is by no means easy to classify friendship sociologically.
Perhaps it is a subheading of culture and education, and brotherhood a subheading of the Church, and comradeship a subheading of labour and politics. Marriage, labour, the state and the Church all exist by divine decree. But what of culture and education? I don't think that can be classified under labour, tempting though that may be from many points of view. They belong not to the sphere of obedience, but to that of freedom, which surrounds all three spheres of the divine decrees. The man who is ignorant of this sphere of freedom can be a good father, citizen and worker, and even a Christian, but hardly a complete man and therefore hardly a good Christian in the widest sense of the term.
Our Protestant (not Lutheran) Prussian world has been so dominated by the divine decrees, that it has allowed this sphere of freedom to be pushed into the background. It almost looks today as though the Church alone offers any prospect for the recovery of the sphere of freedom (art, education, friendship and play, 'æsthetic existence' as Kierkegaard called it). I am convinced of the truth of this, and it would help us to a new understanding of the Middle Ages.
What man is there among us who can give himself with an easy conscience to the cultivation of music, friendship, games and happiness? Surely not ethical man, but only the Christian. Just because friendship belongs to this sphere of freedom (the freedom of the Christian man?!) it must be confidently defended against the disapproving frowns of moralism, though without claiming for it the necessitas of a divine decree, but only the necessitas of freedom! I believe that within the sphere of this freedom friendship is by far the rarest and most priceless treasure, for where else does it survive in this world of ours, dominated as it is by the three other decrees?
It cannot be compared with the blessings of the decrees, for it is sui generis [irreducible]; its relation to them is that of the cornflower to the cornfield.

Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, January 23rd 1944

The 70th Anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Execution

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's death at the hands of the Nazi government. Here is something he wrote that I am enjoying thinking about today.

I was reading some Lessing the other day and came across this: "I am too proud to consider myself unlucky. Just grind your teeth and let your canoe sail where the wind and the waves take it. Enough that I have no intention of upsetting it myself." Is such an attitude to be forbidden to the Christian? Is it, for example, better for him to be soft-hearted and to surrender prematurely? Is there not a kind of self-possession which proudly grinds its teeth, but is quite different from a dour, rigid, lifeless and unthinking submission to the inevitable? I am sure we honour God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behaviour and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive to the blessings of life and therefore equally insensitive towards pain. Job's word, "The Lord hath given...", etc., includes that rather than excludes it, as can be seen from the speeches he makes with so much gnashing of teeth, and from their justification by God (Chapter 42:7ff.) in the face of the false, premature, pious submission of his friends.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, January 23rd 1944