Reflections on the Search for a Very Healthy Center
[November 2003 journal entry]
It would be accurate to describe my approach to interpreting Dietrich’s prison correspondence as ‘non-religious’ (in clear distinction from the ‘religious’ approaches to his prison correspondence common within academic and ‘religious’ circles). My ‘non-religious’ approach recognizes that Dietrich, in much of the prison correspondence, remained very ‘religious’ even as he began to see/consider the contours of a radically different (i.e., ‘non-religious’) path ahead.
Posted by
Douglas Brown, PhD
at
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Labels: Bonhoeffer
"It remains an experience of unparalleled (incomparable) value that we have learned to see for once the great events of world history from below – through the perspective of the barred (put out, cut out, blocked), the suspects, the badly treated, the powerless, the oppressed (restrained), the scoffed (derided, mocked), in short the perspective of those who suffer. (It is) only in this time when neither bitterness nor envy (jealousy) has cauterized (corroded, gnawed away) the heart that we see with new eyes great and small, fortunate and unfortunate, strong and weak; that our view of greatness, humaneness, justice, and compassion has become clearer, more free, more incorruptible (not subject to bribes); indeed, (that we see) that personal suffering is a more suitable (qualified) key (code, cipher), a more fruitful principle, than is personal good fortune for exploring the world by observation and action. It follows that this perspective from below will not be the partisan claim of those forever discontent, but that we are just in all life’s dimensions out of a higher contentment that is grounded properly beyond ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. And so it is affirmed." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Ten Years Later"
