Bonhoeffer

My wife gave me a great gift this year for Father's Day, Eric Metaxas' new biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I recently have been very interested in Bonhoeffer's life for several reasons, but for me, it is mostly interest in his theology, and specifically in how his theology really affected how he lived, and eventually gave, his life. If you've never heard of him, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian who was martyred in a Nazi Concetration camp for his part in an assassination plot against Hitler. One of his more famous works is "The Cost of Discipleship", which he really understood. I'm into chapter four, and Metaxas does a great job showing how Bonhoeffer interacted with the two competing sides of theology in his time: the historical-critical liberals and neo-orthodox Barthians. Towards the beginning of the chapter, he makes a statement about Bonhoeffer that jumped off the page at me. It seems like something maybe we should emulate in Bonhoeffer!

"As a result of his intellectual openness, Bonhoeffer learned how to think like a fox (historical-critical liberal) and respect the way foxes thought, even though he was in the camp of the hedgehogs (Barthian neo-orthodoxy). He could appreciate the value in something, even if he ultimately rejected that something - and he could see the errors and flaws in something, even if he ultimately accepted that something." (p. 61)

Something I have noticed in the circles that I am in, and even in myself, is a tendency to label and dismiss other opinions while putting the views I hold up on a pedestal. But is this really the way to true confidence and rock solid conviction in what you believe? One of the threads that I've seen so far in Bonhoeffer's life is that he was confident, and many times even accused of arrogance. Perhaps his confidence in what he believed came from a willingness to think critically about everything? Maybe if more Christians would be like this, we would have more true disciples, like Bonhoeffer, and less people playing games. More Christians would know what they really believed, and not what they think they should.