Reality and Faith: The Theological Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Inescapable Reality of Our Era

Heinrich Ott’s Reality and Faith: The Theological Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a book I picked up because of how oft-cited (favorably or not) I found it in the literature. I have just begun reading it and already found it to be insightful. Early on, Ott writes about Bonhoeffer’s confrontation with his own life and the era in which he lived with the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and awaiting its overthrow, expecting God to act:

“The reality of our life, the reality of our experiences, is inescapable. We cannot flee from it, we cannot flee from the era in which we are placed, from the convictions of this era or from its historical entanglements. On one thing Bonhoeffer was quite clear, that he must stand firm through a demonic age, but he found his place in this very age and did not hanker after living in any other…
“But if God lives and if Jesus Christ is his final word, then this might be as inescapable as life itself…. If God lives everywhere, Bonhoeffer deduced, he lives here” (19-20).

God lives with us even in our inescapable moments. Even as we know we are entangled with our own history and caught up in the convictions and shifting whims of our times. Even if we believe our own era has its great evils and may even be “demonic” in whatever way we believe. There God is and remains.

May we, too, find ourselves living such that we realize that even in our own time, in our inescapable reality, God is here.

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SDG.

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