I shall reach seventy in April. It feels like another coming-of-age threshold, this arrival of the decade in which I shall have to learn to grow old - gracefully, I'd like to think - and face the indisputable fact of my mortality. Quite possibly it will be my last full decade of human life (if I'm spared that long). Yes, I know that Thomas Ken and Jeremy Taylor tell us always to live each day as if it were our last. But somehow it's feeling all the more real as I approach the biblical three score years and ten.
The same month will also mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer's execution by the Nazis on 9 April. It was just a month before the end of the war in Europe. Bonhoeffer doesn't need any introduction from me. He was - is - one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. His return home in 1939 from the safety of the USA to face the dangers of life under the Third Reich was a decision to live in solidarity with his church in its protest against tyranny. The question with which he wrestles in those extraordinary letters from Tegel Prison, "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" represents a theology that was finely wrought in the place where all the best thinking is done, at the edge of human experience. It was to be an unfinished symphony. But how rich are the movements he bequeathed us!
One of Bonhoeffer's most fertile ideas was that of "a world come of age". It was a phrase much bandied about in the 1960s along with "religionless Christianity" and "the Man for others". I remember as a chorister half-listening (on good days) to sermons about Honest to God and hearing the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer linked to John Robinson, Paul Tillich and what was coming to be called "secular theology". Looking back, I can't help admiring the heroism of that project, its intellectual and spiritual courage in questioning inherited language and ideas. What Bonhoeffer himself would have made of it is an intriguing question.
What is coming of age? Entering my majority 50 years ago wasn't the same as acquiring particular rights closed to me earlier in life such as voting, driving a car, drinking alcohol and so on. Some of these coincided with attaining adulthood but many didn't. What it meant was that my parents no longer held legal responsibility for me. I was now responsible for myself. Which in a moral and spiritual sense means becoming aware of who and what I am, recognising the truth about myself, taking responsibility for what I think and say and do. And if my adulthood reflects attaining any kind of personal maturity, it means grasping how responsibility is never self-serving, but is part of a collaborative, communitarian project that extends to all others in the world where I learn that human existence means "life together".
I think this is what Bonhoeffer is getting at when he links humanity's "coming of age" with shedding infantile notions of dependency. Like St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, becoming an adult means "putting an end to childish ways" in which others hold responsibility for us. So faith that has come of age honours the proper autonomy and self-determination that belongs to adulthood. Bonhoeffer said that this means living etsi deus non daretur, no longer resorting to the divine as the answer to every unsolved problem or dilemma. This is much more than merely invoking a "god of the gaps" to explain what we don't yet know intellectually. It means learning what's altogether more exacting spiritually, that in the modern world God is no longer a presumption, a given part of our daily experience of cause and effect. In such a world, I have to learn to think for myself, take responsibility for my values, decisions and behaviours, and make the most intelligent response I can to the challenges of living authentically as an adult of my own century.
There is a paradox here that Bonhoeffer loved to point out. It's the answer to those who were tempted to see him as a liberal protestant with a strongly agnostic, not to say humanistic, streak. He said that it was precisely as humanity learned to live in this way that startling insights about God began to be revealed. "Before God and with God we live without God." It’s an arresting rhetorical saying that it’s tempting to regard as metaphorical. But I think Bonhoeffer was putting words to a genuine spiritual experience of simultaneous absence and presence. The naked exposure that feels like abandonment means not the renunciation of faith but entering into its most profound meaning at the very place where the truth about God and humanity is finally disclosed: at Golgotha, where God is crucified in the Jesus who cries out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” In another memorable saying, Bonhoeffer suggests that "God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross".
One of the implications of this way of reading the cross is that at Golgotha, religion itself is put to death, for it belongs to the old self that needs to die if the new self is to be born. Bonhoeffer’s "religionless Christianity" doesn't mean in any way denying faith, but letting go of the childish dependency that flees to the bolt-hole of religious practice as an escape from living in the real world. Only this can put true faith back in the centre where it belongs. For "religion-as-refuge" can never do the work that only an adult response to God can do. What this entails can only be learned by taking in all that the cross symbolises: how God reaches out to embrace and love humanity unconditionally, how he invites us into a relationship of gratitude and trust and mutual self-giving. We could call this "faith seeking understanding" in Anselm's great phrase.
I want to learn late in life what grown-up faith means. I won't deny that it's tough to figure it out in an environment where I try in vain, or so it seems, to trace shapes and patterns amid the baffling complexity of events, whether it's the twists and turns of history or the ever shifting light-and-shadow of my own path through life.
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Which brings me back to the times we find ourselves living in as 2020 dawns. The year has not begun well. On this feast of the Epiphany we celebrate the light that radiates from the Holy Infant whom the magi travelled from distant lands to worship. But while Christmas songs of peace and good will were still echoing in our ears, the US President ordered the assassination of an Iranian general who was visiting Iraq. And at once we are plunged into uncertainty, worry and fear on account of consequences we cannot even guess at. We are destined to watch a relentless game of tit-for-tat being played out by powerfully armed nations with the suffering of innocent people almost inevitable. Far from having come of age with the emotional intelligence that goes with it, humanity is regressing into infantile patterns of behaviour that pose frightening possibilities for destructiveness. If there are world leaders with influence who are capable of behaving as adults, now is the time we need them.
How do we have faith, how do we say our prayers in such grave times? Bonhoeffer, prisoner of the Nazis, who lived through even darker events than we do, knew there was no point in praying to some deus ex machina that would intervene and rescue him. He knew that the only meaning to be found in his own suffering and death, one more victim out of so many, would have to come from within. It would flow out of what he had learned by contemplating the crucified Jesus and seeing in the cross the universal victim of man's inhumanity to man. At Golgotha we know that there is a solidarity in prayer shaped by the cross as a sign not only of victimhood but supremely, of love. And this solidarity brings the strength to go on loving in the midst of suffering and to bear witness to its transforming power. The capacity to love in every circumstance, to love my neighbour and love my enemy, to love as an act of the will because it is required of me as a matter of Christian obedience, this is the ultimate test of how far I have come of age.
In this year that we celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary of VE Day, we should remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr of the twentieth century. Martyria means "witness". We need to do what he did, discover how best to live today as adult Christian citizens not only of our own country but of the world. And to embrace our vocation to be citizens not of past ages, however nostalgically we are tempted to feel about them, but of our own century with all its contradictions, possibilities and pain. And how to bear witness in our time to the grace and truth we have seen in the glory of God's incarnate Word this Christmas.
