In a letter to Eberhard Bethge written in July 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remembered a conversation with ‘a young French pastor’ (identified by the editor as Jean Lasserre):
He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast.
Bonhoeffer’s intuition is that intending ‘to become a saint’ is not the way to become one. Even though desiring the honour of heaven appears to be a way to surmount the lust for earthly glory, it is merely a displacement of the same desire.
Hmm: here's a problem then. What place does the heavenly prize have in the motivation of the holy to serve God? Does the offer of a heavenly reward or a martyr’s crown corrupt the pursuit of true sanctity? The question is most troublesome: the very idea of martyrdom threatens to collapse under its weight. Is the heavenly city merely the earthly city on a larger scale? Is the desire for a higher place in heaven, which Origen among others certainly believed would be bestowed on the martyrs, any better than a desire for earthly glory? Could we discover ourselves in an untenable situation of wanting that for which the desiring makes the having apparently impossible?
Help me out here...
2 comments:
Mike
it may be a tangent but you've made me think of Paul's wish that he be cursed if it would mean Israel's salvation (Rom 9.3). His attitude is of course, that of Christ's. Does this help or just make it worse if our motives aren't as selfless?
Keep up the good work
Michael K
Surely Lewis' 'Weight of Glory' is important here and the distinction between a mercenary and a proper reward. No time to draw this out now, I need to finish writing my paper on C.S.Lewis' eschatology...
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