To Realize His Presence

I love to read the writings, sermons & letters of the old theologians & pastors such as Charles Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther, Augustine & others. One of my favorite theologians of all time is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His testimony has influenced my life in so many ways. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian. Though I do not hold to all of his theological positions, he was a devout student & teacher of God's Word. He founded a seminary for the Confessing Church, which which was made up of a group of 5,000 Christians who refused to be a part of Hitler's pro-Nazi denomination & they pledged total obedience to God's Word. Even after most of the Confessing Church succumbed under Nazi pressure & pledged allegiance to Hitler, Bonhoeffer was one of the few Christian voices who protested Hitler's massacres & atrocities against the Jews. This should serve as an example to us as we fight the good fight and defend the sanctity of all human life. After getting himself entangled in a plot to overthrow Hitler & smuggling Jews out of Germany, Bonhoeffer was arrested & later thrown into a concentration camp. On the Sunday after Easter, 1945, he preached a short sermon to his fellow prisoners, which was his last. Just four months before Hitler was defeated & the Allied Forces were victorious, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hung. He was 39 years old. Below, is one of his writings that he wrote from prison, which I have pondered & has truly challenged me. May you ponder it & be challenged as well:

To Realize His Presence
How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize His presence, not in unsolved problems, but in those that are solved.

Here again, God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized at the center of life, not when we are the end of our resources; it is His will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigor, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin.

The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He is the center of life, and He certainly didn't 'come' to answer our unsolved problems.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer