Bonhoeffer On: Making Babies
What do new humans, and the forces that create them, tell us about being human?
Last week, our church was able to hold an infant dedication ceremony for the first time in over a year, something like infant (paedo) baptism but without the water, presumably as a kind of nod toward the position that God initiates relationship with people, especially in community, before they may even become aware of it, and that communities matter in the formation of Christian children, without going full infant baptism and maintaining a commitment to adult (credo) or believer’s baptism. We had our one-year-old son, Theo, dedicated, and some family and friends showed up in support. The infant-vs-adult baptism debate isn’t especially important to me; that’s not really how I spend my theological time these days. But it was one more reminder of the importance of the beginning of life, and whether or not a baby has a community that is dedicated to helping raise and form her according to shared values and beliefs.
Over the past few weeks, as things have opened up more and more, especially in a city like Nashville, I’ve sensed a building energy as people continue to emerge from their forced year-long hibernation. People are out, and about, and happy to be mingling and bumping into friends and even strangers. Live music performances, restaurants, bars, parks, events-there’s a buzz in the air. And at more than one moment over the past month or so, when I’ve felt this energy and pulse, I’ve turned to a friend or family member and said “Man, there’s gonna be a lot of babies born next year.”
You may have felt this same thing; some people have predicted that we are entering the next “Roaring 20s” post-COVID, that this might be some kind of “summer of love” all over again, that people are going to throw caution to the wind and live it up, because of what we all just went through and the fact that now we know it might happen again some day, though we hope it never does. It just seems like the near future, full of energy and life and eros and creative explosions, is now upon us. There is a hopefulness to it, almost a sense of adventure. It’s not universal, and we’re not fully out of the darkness of the season we’re trying to escape, but it’s out there.
In May of 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a season of darkness, in a prison cell in Berlin, in the midst of a beautiful spring and also intense bombing raids, not knowing what the future would hold for him. He was able to, on occasion, see people that he loved, and to write to them most days, particularly his best friend Eberhard Bethge and members of the Bonhoeffer family, including Eberhard’s wife, Dietrich’s niece, Renate. Renate and Eberhard had been married a year when Eberhard was able to come back home to Berlin from the front in Italy to see his wife and family, and to meet and baptize his son, Dietrich. Two of Dietrich’s letters from that time speak to the importance of babies, of baptizing them and welcoming them into communities, even in the midst of a world war, and of the importance of the kind of love that results in those babies coming into the world.
On May 20, 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote Bethge a letter responding to an earlier conversation detailing Bethge’s constant preoccupation with thoughts of his wife Renate while away at the front. The Bethges had just visited Bonhoeffer in prison briefly during their brief reunion corresponding to their first wedding anniversary. This romantic passion seemed to have overshadowed others, like Bethge’s passion for the mission of the church. Bonhoeffer responded with a “brotherly attempt to help,” invoking the metaphor of music:
…there is a danger, in any passionate erotic love, that through it you may lose what I’d like to call the polyphony of life. What I mean is that God, the Eternal, wants to be loved with our whole heart, not to the detriment of earthly love or to diminish it, but as a sort of cantus firmus to which the other voices of life resound in counterpoint.
Bonhoeffer goes on to write of the “full independence” of “contrapuntal themes” such as earthly or romantic love. “Where the cantus firmus is clear and distinct,” he writes, “a counterpoint can develop as mightily as it wants.” He cites the Biblical and Christian affirmation of hot, sensual, passionate, erotic love. However, he wants Eberhard to experience the polyphony of life, which for Bonhoeffer must always be built upon the firm foundation of one’s relationship to and love of God, in order that life’s other passions can be fully enjoyed and expressed.
This theme of the intertwining realities of life in Christ and the resultant freedom to live life passionately surfaced in an earlier letter to Eberhard and Renate: “Who in our time could, for example, lightheartedly make music, nurture friendship, play, and be happy? Certainly not the ‘ethical’ person, but only the Christian.” Over the course of his adult life, Bonhoeffer increasingly sought to teach others that obedience to God in following Jesus resulted in the kind of life that could be described as “fully human.” He not only taught others this idea, but also lived it out for all his students and friends to see. Bonhoeffer’s life was full of the kind of freedom and joy that things like music can bring, and he sought to bring this reality into the life of the communities in which he participated. In this way, music was a means of illustrating the importance of the cantus firmus of life in Christ and the contrapuntal fruits like play, friendship, erotic passion, and enjoyment of life such a centered existence could bear.
That same month, Bonhoeffer had written down some thoughts to give to the Bethges regarding the baptism of their son, Dietrich, which were addressed directly to the baby boy. Among the themes of this letter are the nature of the future, the next generation, coming changes to urban and rural life, young Dietrich’s numerous inherited family legacies, and reflections on the future of Christianity in the Western world. Toward the beginning, Bonhoeffer surmises that young Dietrich’s “great-grandfather will be able to tell you about people he knew personally who were born in the eighteenth century; and some day, long after the year 2000, you will be the living bridge for your descendants to an oral tradition going back over 250 years”, God willing, of course. So then, Dietrich’s birth and baptism were opportunities for a generation in the midst of great turmoil and upheaval to reflect on “how times change, and to try to discern the outlines of the future.” I think many of us are thinking similar thoughts right now, in our own moment of hope in the mist of global turmoil.
As I see babies born, and think about their potential futures, and what those might hold, I feel a faint kinship with Bonhoeffer, reflecting on the significance of the emerging life of these brand new people, some of whom will no doubt live beyond the year 2100. Bonhoeffer reflects on the importance of simplicity, health, lack of pretension, and other virtues of Eberhard Bethge’s upbringing and family in a small village parsonage. He extols the value of the middle-class, urbane, bourgeois, historical-rooted and culturally connected life of his own extended family, and especially the home Dietrich Bonhoeffer had lived in for so many years, and in which Eberhard and Renate first met. Home, and rootedness in tradition, and connection, spiritual values, and especially music are highlighted and cherished and recommended to young Dietrich as gifts to be treasured. At one point, in a short discussion of urban and rural life, Bonhoeffer even seems to predict the materialization of suburbs, as people fled the war-and-vice-torn cities of the West.
Bonhoeffer reflects on the fact that “each person must plan, develop, and shape his own life, that there is a life work on which one must decide, and that he must pursue this with all his might.” But, he says, “from our own experience we have learned that we cannot even plan for the next day, that what we have built up is destroyed overnight.” Bonhoeffer has come, in the midst of this destruction, to value actions over thoughts, hope over planning, taking responsibility over theorizing about potential outcomes, true friendship over reason, yielding to divine judgment over clinging to privilege, prayer and doing justice over any kind of Christian words:
So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.
It is not about rebuilding powerful organizations, Bonhoeffer tells his young godson, it is about re-formation and re-molding of the church until the time comes to speak the word of God again, in a changed and renewed way. “Until then the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time. May you be one of them, and may it be said of you one day: ‘The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day’ (Prov. 4:18).”
So, in 2021, as babies are made, as energy and adventure and erotic love lead to new life, and as we welcome these new lives into our communities, my prayer and my hope are similar to Bonhoeffer’s: that my son Theodore, and the babies dedicated or baptized at churches the world over in the coming months, would be a righteous person, a person of prayer and of justice, a person who can change with the times while still being connected to tradition and our faith and our God, a follower of Jesus who waits until the right time to speak Christian words, whose path shines brighter and brighter until full day. May he also become a person whose love of God is a cantus firmus, a strong theme against which the other passions and loves of human being can serve as bold counterpoint, in this unpredictable, ever-changing, rising and swelling and falling and hushing polyphony of life. May you and your babies embrace the same.
Outstanding Ryan!!!❤️