An online friend offers quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer “Letters and Papers from Prison” (SCM:1953)

… my suspicion and horror of religiosity are greater than ever. p. 44

By the way it is remarkable how little I miss going to church. I wonder why. p. 54

I am sure that in view of all the misery prevalent here it is not use giving them pretty-pretty, sentimental reminders of Christmas. p. 59

Ironically, Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; one of them turned to him. p. 67

I am going through another spell of finding it difficult to read the Bible. p. 82

You would be surprised and perhaps disturbed if you knew how my ideas on theology are taking shape. … The thing that keeps on coming back to me is, what IS Christianity, and indeed what IS Christ, for us today? The time when men could be told everything by means of words, whethyer theological of simply pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience, which to say the time of religion as such. We are proceeding to a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. … It means that the linchpin is removed from the whole structure of our Christianity to date …. Are we to fall upon one or two unhappy people in their weakest moment and force upon them a sort of religious coercion? If we do not want to do this, if we had finally to put down the western pattern of Christianity as a mere preliminary stage to doing without religion altogether, what situation would result for us, for the Church? How can Christ become the Lord even of those with no religion? If religion is no more than the garmnent of Christianity – and even the garment had very different aspevts at different periods – then what is a religionless Christianity? … What is the significance of Church (church, parish, preaching, Christian life) in a religionless world? How do we speak of God without religion, i.e. witghout temporally influenced presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on?How do we speak (but perhaps we are nio longer capable of speaking of such things as we used to) in secular fashion of God? … in what way are we the Ekklesia … not conceiving ourselves religiously as specially favoured, but as wholly belonging to the world? Then Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, indeed and in truth the lord of the world. Yet what does that signify? What is the place of worship and prayer in an entire absence of religion? …. whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from circumcision is at the same time freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently drwas me more to the religionless tyhan to the religious, by which i mean not with any intention of evangelising them, but rather, I might almost say, in “brotherhood”. pp. 90 – 92

Belief in the Resurrection is not the solution of the problem of death. p. 93

I expect you remember Bultmann’s paper on demthologising of the New Testament? My view of it today would be not that he went too far, as most people seem to think, but that he did not go far enough. It is not only the mythical conceptions, such as the miracles, the ascension and the like … that are problematic, but the “religious” conceptions themselves. … you do have to be able to interpret and proclaim both of them in a “non-religious” sense. p. 94

Song of Songs … It is a good thing that that book is included in the Bible as a protest against those who believe that Christianity stands for the restraint of passion. p. 100

… how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. For the frontiers of knowledge are inevitably being pushed back further and further, which means that you only think of God as a stop-gap. p. 103

It just isn’t true to say that Christianity alone has the answers. In fact the Christian answers are no more conclusive or compelling than any of the others. p.104

Song of Songs … I prefer to read it as an ordinary love poem, which is probably the best christological exposition too. p. 105

The attack by Christian apologetic upon the adulthood of the world I consider to be in the first place pointless, in the secon ignoble, and in the third un-Christian. Pointless, because it looks to me like an attempt to put a grown-uop man back into adolescence, i.e. to make him dependent upon things on which he is not dependent any more, thrusting him back in the midst of problems which are in fact not problems for him any more. Ignoble, because this amounts to an effort to exploit the weakness of man for purposes alien to him and not freely subscribed to by him. Un Christian, becuse for Christ himself is being substituteed one particular stage in the religiousness of man, i.e. a human law. p. 108

Greek Gods … “this world of faith, which sprang from the wealth and depth of human experience, rather than from its cares and longings” … I find these gods – horrible dictu – less offensive when treated like this than certain brands of Christianity! I believe I could pretty nearly claim these gods for Christ. p. 111

Salvation means salvation from cares and need, from fears and longing, from sin and death into a better world beyond the grave. But is this really the distinctive feature of Christianity as proclaimed in the Gospels and St Paul? I am sure it is not. p. 112

… futile rear-guard actions against Darwinism. p. 114

… the “priestly” snuffing around the sins of men in order to catch them out. p. 115

There is no longer any need for God as a working hypothesis, whether in morals, politics or science. Nor is there any need for such a God in religion of philosophy (Feuerbach). In the name of intellectual honesty these working hypotheses should be dropped or dispensed with as far as possible. A scientist or physician who seeks tom provide edification is a hybrid. At this point nervous souls start asking what room there is left for God now. …. “It’s a long way back to the land of childhood, But only if I knew the way!” There isn’t any such way, at any rate not at the cost of deliberately abandoning our intellectual sincerity. The only way is that of Matthew 18:3, i.e. through repentance, through ultimate honesty. p. 121

Jesus does not call men to a new religion, but to life! pp. 123-124.

The Church must get out of her stagnation. We must move out again into the open air of intellectual discussion with the world, and risk shocking people if we are to cut any ice. I feel obliged to tackle this question myself as one who, though a “modern” theologian, is still aware of the debt we owe to liberal theology. p. 128