This world will be redeemed through and through—not by this or that political means, but by God. –DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, to his congregation in 1931
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a twentieth-century Jeremiah. A German Lutheran minister, Bonhoeffer witnessed firsthand the rise of the Nazi regime but, unlike many of his colleagues, refused to embrace Adolf Hitler's ideology and charisma. Many churches in Germany went so far as to display a portrait of Hitler at the altar alongside the crucifix of Christ. Bonhoeffer would have none of it. He boldly proclaimed from a Berlin pulpit in February, 1933: "We have only one altar in the church and that is to the Most High Lord, to whom all honor and worship belongs. We have no second altar for the honoring of men."
Bonhoeffer recognized the moral absurdity of Nazism, how antithetical it was to the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ. His sermons were laced with appeals for justice, compassion, repentance, and hope. Even when the Gestapo forbade him to preach or teach, he continued to work behind the scenes in the resistance movement, covertly distributing sermons, letters, and poems to likeminded Christians. He challenged the Church to become an active weapon against evil rather than its appeaser. So passionate and persuasive were his sermons that, when he was imprisoned during World War II, inmates in another location attempted to smuggle him into their area of confinement so that they might hear him in person. With courage and resolve Bonhoeffer maintained his faith, even celebrating the church festivals in prison every year until, after a brief trial, he was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945. His last words were, "This is the end— but for me the beginning of life." Six days later, the Germans surrendered.
Jeremiah, often called the "weeping prophet," lived his childhood in the small priestly village of Anathoth, three miles north of Jerusalem. As a young man, he became aware of God’s call on his life. Akin to Moses at the burning bush, he fain would have dismissed that call, but something inside compelled him to obey:
If I say, "I will not mention Him
nor speak any more in His name,"
Then there is in my heart as it were
a burning fire shut up in my bones,
And I wear myself out trying to hold it in,
but I can’t!
Jeremiah 20:9
Jeremiah prophesied during the sunset of the seventh century B.C. and the dawn of the sixth. Over one hundred years earlier a succession of prophets—first Amos and Hosea to the northern kingdom, then Isaiah and Micah to the south—accused Israel of shirking her covenant responsibility and her covenant God. Jeremiah stood squarely on the shoulders of these eighth century prophets. He exposed the people’s sin, demanded their repentance, and predicted their judgment. He decried the nation’s bent toward religious syncretism and idolatry, labeling it spiritual adultery. Although the places of worship were filled to record capacity, Jeremiah saw beneath the rituals a hollow core. The heart had gone out of religion, and he called the people once again to look inward. Even the hallowed rite of circumcision, he warned, was meaningless to God unless it reflected something deeper. "Circumcise yourself to Yahweh," he said, "and remove the foreskins of your hearts" (4:4). Consistent with this attack on externalism, he longed for a future time when a new, inner covenant would replace the old:
"The time is coming," declares the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them," declares the Lord. "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people." –Jeremiah 31:31-33
Early on, especially during the reform of King Josiah, Jeremiah seemed to hold out hope that the Davidic dynasty could right the ship. But when King Jehoiakim, Josiah’s grandson, gave his full political consent and aid to paganism, Jeremiah denounced the state and predicted its doom. Before an incredulous audience, he took a clay pot and shattered it on the ground to punctuate his prediction: Israel would fall to Babylon, the rising power in the east, and the hallowed Temple on Mount Zion would be laid to ruin. The hired prophets, whose job it was to sooth the king’s fancy, were so furious they attempted to execute Jeremiah by hanging, only to be dissuaded by cooler heads within the palace.
Many plots against Jeremiah’s life followed, and more than once he was imprisoned. The cumulative toll on his spirit was great. In words reminiscent of Job, he cursed the day he was born (20:14-18). No doubt, his despair was due in part to the persecution he faced, but the grim reality of his nation’s plight multiplied the misery. "The wound of the daughter of my people," he lamented, "is my heart wounded… Oh, that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night over the slain of the daughter of my people" (8:21-9:1).
Jeremiah considered himself a citizen first and foremost of God’s kingdom. Everything else, including secular governments, he judged by that standard. The kingdom of Israel, he declared, was anything but God’s kingdom. In fact, Jeremiah went so far as to say that God was actively on the side of the Babylonians and nothing could steer Him off-course. Defeat was inevitable.
In 587 B.C. the siege of Jerusalem and the leveling of the Temple went from prophetic prediction to historical fact. Many of Israel’s leading citizens were deported to Babylon. Others, Jeremiah among them, fled to other lands. He lived his final years in Egypt, and there he was buried.
John Bright, an Old Testament scholar, praises Jeremiah "for violence of passion and tenderness of feeling, for agony of spirit and plain raw moral courage," and goes on to say that "he has few peers in the history of religion." Several men and women, Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them, have subsequently emulated his character and taken up his cause. Bright describes the link between the Old Testament prophet and the twentieth century German pastor this way:
Jeremiah considered himself a citizen first and foremost of God’s kingdom. Everything else, including secular governments, he judged by that standard. The kingdom of Israel, he declared, was anything but God’s kingdom. In fact, Jeremiah went so far as to say that God was actively on the side of the Babylonians and nothing could steer Him off-course. Defeat was inevitable.
In 587 B.C. the siege of Jerusalem and the leveling of the Temple went from prophetic prediction to historical fact. Many of Israel’s leading citizens were deported to Babylon. Others, Jeremiah among them, fled to other lands. He lived his final years in Egypt, and there he was buried.
John Bright, an Old Testament scholar, praises Jeremiah "for violence of passion and tenderness of feeling, for agony of spirit and plain raw moral courage," and goes on to say that "he has few peers in the history of religion." Several men and women, Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them, have subsequently emulated his character and taken up his cause. Bright describes the link between the Old Testament prophet and the twentieth century German pastor this way:
[Jeremiah] was a man who had confronted the awful realization that God and the plain moral right of the matter were no longer on the side of his country. He was, in this respect, somewhat in the position of an anti-Nazi German or an anti-Communist Russian who, dearly loving his country as he may, nevertheless feels obliged to break with it. The leaders of his country will no doubt brand him a traitor, but perhaps he may be accorded a higher sort of patriotism… Here was, more, a good man who suffered because of a sinful people and, in his suffering, conferred on all posterity an inestimable benefit.
