Bonhoeffer

Winter Quarter is over, been spending a few days in the warm Florida sun (West Palm Beach/Port St. Lucie) reading Eric Metaxas' great biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Go out and get this book, I'm halfway through (300+ pages of an almost 600 page book, but don't let that scare you!) and this book has rocked my world. There have been so many quotes Metaxas has provided of Bonhoeffer's that have touched me, but I felt compelled to post this one in particular. The context is Bonhoeffer's second trip to America, he writes in his diary:

The voice of Lutheranism is there in America, but it is one among others: it has never been able to confront the other denominations. There hardly ever seem to be "encounters" in this great country, in which the one can always avoid the other. But where there is no encounter, where liberty is the only unifying factor, one naturally knows nothing of the community which is created through encounter. The whole life together is completely different as a result. Community in our sense, whether cultural or ecclesiastical, cannot develop there. Is that true?

The year is 1939, and he's about ready to return to Germany to have an encounter with the anti-Christian German Christian Church and Hitler himself. What kind of encounters are we having in America? Lutherans especially...

Heavy