Seeking and hoping” “

“Hope and witness”: these are, in the view of Archbishop ENRICO MASSERONI o f Vercelli (Italy), the two crucial aspects of the legacy left by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian killed by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945. “The Church today – said Archbishop Masseroni – also has a need to recover a sense of hope founded, as testified by Bonhoeffer, on the centrality of Christ, in the logic of the seed that must first die in order to bear fruit”. The international conference “Bonhoeffer, Christian heritage and modernity”, held at Turin and Vercelli from 9 to 11 February, was an opportunity to commemorate and examine the thought of the great Lutheran theologian. TENSION BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH. “What importance has the permanency of the Christian message for the fugitive time in which we have to live today?”: UGO PERONE, professor of philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont and promoter of the international conference on Bonhoeffer, re-posed the question at the origin of the reflection of the Lutheran theologian. Bonhoeffer, he said, posed “questions that since then do not seem irrelevant for philosophy”. “People have glided over this sentence – commented Perone – as if it expressed merely the need for actualization, for modernization”. In actual fact: “The present day is not any kind of actualisation, but this actuality, which due to its contents – the caesura introduced by secularization – is such as to place in renewed discussion the relation between today and the perennial legacy. And yet that does not eliminate the need to vindicate Christianity as permanent legacy for the present day, which is conflictual, because secularized”. Bonhoeffer, according to Perone, “is modern because he assumed modernity as caesura and turned this interrupted condition into the very condition of theological thought and, we might add, of thinking tout court“. “Bonhoeffer’s claim – concluded Perone – revives the question and leaves to posterity an enormous and fruitful tension, a legacy both for believers and non-believers, a way of thinking that is equal to modernity, because it is not totally encapsulated in it: How can man – wrote Bonhoeffer – cope with earthly tensions, if he knows nothing of the tension between heaven and earth?”. DOCTOR COMMUNIS. “Protestantism and Catholicism formed, in Bonhoeffer’s time, two spiritual and theological worlds with scant communication between each other, both characterised by a strong sense of self-sufficiency”: that’s the premise from which FULVIO FERRARIO, of the Waldensian faculty of theology in Rome, started out in his address to the conference on “Bonhoeffer and Catholicism”. According to Ferrario, “it cannot be said that, in such a situation, Bonhoeffer traced the coordinates of a new and different paradigm. In contrast to European Protestantism and Evangelical theology, however, he allowed himself to be interrogated by Catholicism”. “The decisive contribution of Bonhoeffer – continued Ferrario – to the ecumenical dialogue between Protestantism and Catholicism would only be made after his death”. His stature, in fact “is such as to resist any confessional hoarding; research on him would be conducted with equal passion and investment of skills on both fronts”. “The new words – concluded Ferrario – to express faith, which Bonhoeffer sought, in many respects don’t yet seem to have been found. Not least for this reason the Churches are grateful to the Lord for this doctor communis who teaches them to persevere in seeking and hoping”. A DIFFERENT OPTIMISM. “What turns a man into a good resister – commented JEAN GREISCH, of the Institut Catholique in Paris, in a written text sent to the conference, referring to the collection of Bonhoeffer’s writings Widerstand und Ergebung (Resistance and Surrender) – is a particular kind of optimism, which is not be confused with the superficial and ingenuous conviction that things will sooner or later sort themselves out”. Bonhoeffer urges “a different type of optimism whose resource is the hope of all those who dare to believe that the future belongs to them, even if this future will only be revealed after their death. Such an optimism does not fear death, because it knows very well that death is not the worst of ills”. It is at this point that: “The two terms, resistance and surrender, cease to be antithetical. Surrender is no longer a synonym for submission to a blind destiny that destroys us, but in the German term derives from the word giving, which consists in consenting to, dedicating ourselves to, the task given to us, even if this seems to outstrip our powers”. A better translation of the book’s title, according to Greisch, would be: “Remain firm and consent. As Bonhoeffer saw it, those most likely to be good resisters are not sophisticated geniuses, cynics, misanthropes and strategists, but only the humble custodians of the humanism of the other person, those that the Jewish tradition calls the just“.