I discovered later and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw oursleves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian....[Letters and Papers, p. 370]
Quietism of a kind? Well yes, except quietism without the elitism of the Catholic strain of it - the expectation of the 'higher' spiritual life (we've had plenty of that nonsense in Protestantism too).
1 comment:
At the risk of destroying evangelical consensus...
Could Bonhoeffer have given us a Wallaby meditation for tonight?
One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw oursleves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings
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