Meditating on the Word by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Author:Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Cowley Publications
Published: 2000-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

This sermon is dated July 11, 1937 in the collected works. 1937 was the year in which the Gestapo net tightened around the Confessing Church. “By the end of 1937, 804 members of the Confessing Church had been imprisoned for longer or shorter periods.” Pastor Martin Niemoeller was imprisoned by the Nazis on July 1, 1937. He would not return home for eight years. Bonhoeffer had gone to visit his colleague in the church resistance movement on the day of his arrest, not knowing what had transpired. The Gestapo found him there and placed him under house arrest, during which he witnessed the search of Niemoeller’s home. “In July 1937 the wave of persecution began to engulf former Finkenwaldians. Letters spoke of interrogations, house searches, confiscations and arrests.” A mother wrote to her son at the seminary in Finkenwalde after visiting one of his friends in prison: ‘ “Evangelical Pastor’ is written in large letters above the cell door. Every day they are allowed half an hour in the fresh air. . . . He is suffering.” On September 28, 1937 the Gestapo sealed the doors of the seminary at Finkenwalde. In a letter written at the end of this year, Bonhoeffer referred to these “increasingly impatient attacks by the forces of the Antichrist.”

The sermon on Psalm 58 arose in this context. It can be seen as an attempt to pronounce the judgment of God on the Nazi regime, while still holding Christians back from any direct role as agents of that judgment. Two more years would elapse before Bonhoeffer joined the underground resistance.26

Editorial notes: Verses 1 and 7b are presented as they appear in the German Bible text. Verses 7 and 8 are in the indicative in German and in the imperative in the prayer book, but I do not think the meaning is much affected.

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