Expanding Horizons In Germany

by Charles Marsh, CoDirector

At the invitation of the International Bonhoeffer Society and the Bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany, I served as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Visiting Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin for the spring semester of 2007.  My family and I built relationships and friendships with European Christians and German scholars and writers, improved our language skills, introduced our children to new culture and worldviews, and, perhaps most importantly, expanded the work of Theological Horizons in that intense, complex, and yet surprisingly upbeat city. 

Historic Humboldt University is renowned for such great minds as Hegel, Einstein, Planck and 29 Nobel Prize winners.  Here I am embarking on a new project that promises to be the most demanding of my career.  I have begun a new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (also educated at Humboldt University), who is not only a martyr of the Christian church, but indeed a Christian exemplar for our times.  The biography will focus on Bonhoeffer’s early years in Berlin, London and America.  Its working title is Bonhoeffer in America: A Biography.  The book’s focus on these formative years illuminates the spiritual, intellectual and social motivations of his leadership in the Church struggle against Hitlerism, which led finally to his murder by the Gestapo in 1945. 

In 1930, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary in New York City.  He was a straight-arrow academic whose star was rising, a twenty-three year old professor at Berlin whose doctoral dissertation had been praised by the great Karl Barth as a “theological miracle”, his sights set on a lifetime of academic comforts and rewards.  When he left America a year later, he had laid aside his professional ambitions, determined to put his theology into action and to move from “phraseology to reality”, as he said.  By the end of April 1933, Bonhoeffer made his first public defense of the Jews and condemnation of the Aryan Clause when he told a group of Protestant theologians that in response to rising specter of German anti-Semitism the Christian church was compelled not simply to "bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam the spoke in the wheel itself."  “Something had happened,” his friend Bethge recalled.

My book will seek to tell the story of what happened.  That story holds great promise for us all. 

May God’s grace fill your hearts with joy and love.

Charles

See Marsh Family Photographs!

SINGING ACROSS TIME

by Karen Wright Marsh, CoDirector

To be in Berlin is to inhabit at once the past and in the future.  As we lived and worked in Berlin for the semester, my family and I were dazzled by the architectural landscape that is this city.  In the years after the Wall came down in 1989, cranes dominated the skyline of Berlin, the largest construction site in Europe. At the same time, between the soaring Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz and the Ferrari, Gucci and Prada storefronts, history lived all around us, in grand Prussian palaces and unexpected street corners.

Christians in Germany are celebrating the 400th birthday of their greatest hymn writer, Paul Gerhardt. This "sweet singer of Lutheranism" wrote in the vernacular of 17th century German. Living through the difficult period of the Thirty Years War, Gerhardt suffered the deaths of his wife and four of his five children and was embroiled in church conflicts. Despite Gerhardt's trials, through in his hymns we hear the voice of one reliant on God, convinced of God's goodness and rejoicing in God's gifts.

On a recent sunny morning, we sat in the medieval St. Marienkirche, amidst its 1484 wall painting commemorating the plague and the richly carved stone and wood.  As the worship service began, we were transported by Gerhardt's poetry with brass, choir, organ and even accordian, singing all together:  “Ich singe Dir mit Herz und Mund, Herr, meines Herzens Lust.” “I sing to you with heart and mouth, Lord, my heart’s Desire.”

The witness to God’s perfect gifts was gloriously clear in this unity of past and present.  Even after 400 years of wars and traumas, intellectual and cultural developments, and innumerable individual personal human histories, Paul Gerhardt’s faithful theological affirmations rang true, sung by a living congregation.

My work with Theological Horizons often brings me this deep experience of spirit felt truth.  My modern sensibility and fleeting temporal concerns come into perspective when I read the words of Karl Barth or Clare of Assisi, Augustine or Dorothy Day and so very many others in our rich tradition.  Their wisdom transcends generations, reminding me of the brothers and sisters of Christian faith standing by to encourage me in my own limited experience.   Theology is by no means a dusty discipline.  Rather, it is a grand conversation, even a hymn, across time, singing out faith with such great beauty that it carries me along.

Karen

Celebrating Bonhoeffer In Berlin 2006

In 2006, Horizons directors Charles and Karen Marsh traveled to Berlin, Germany, to participate in the special church services and celebrations remembering the powerful Christian witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  The fourth of February 2006 marked the centenary of the birth of this pastor, theologian and resister executed by the Nazis in 1945. One high point was a nationally televised service at which Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury preached.

            Charles Marsh & Archbishop Williams 

“So, to become a human being and a Christian, to use Bonhoeffer’s words…is not to separate ourselves and work to become holy in a space that is defined and protected by religious convention; nor is it to seek for perfection by ordinary social or political activism. It is to be present with Christ in the world. It is to be there in God’s name and God’s presence in both confusion and order alike, standing with Christ, standing in that place in the world where God has chosen to be. And this is not a place of power or influence; it changes the world not by force but by patient endurance, by making room for the truth of God’s alarming compassion to be there in the midst of everything."    --Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

From the English translation of a sermon delivered in German at St Matthäus Church, Berlin at a service marking the centenary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sunday 5th February 2006.  The entire sermon can be found online.