Beeson podcast, Episode 476
Piotr Malysz
Dec. 24, 2019

Announcer:          Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla.

Doug Sweeney:       Welcome to today's special Christmas episode of the Beeson podcast. I'm Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla, and we're looking forward to the next 30 minutes of reflecting on the meaning of Christmas as we prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate the incarnation of our Lord. Kristen, would you please introduce today's guest?

Kristen Padilla:    Merry Christmas, everyone. We are so glad to have one of our own colleagues with us today, Dr. Piotr Malysz. Dr. Malysz is Associate Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, where he teaches history and doctrine. He is the author of Trinity, Freedom and Love: An Engagement with the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel and co-editor of Luther Refracted: The Reformer's Ecumenical Legacy. He is also an ordained Lutheran pastor, and he's going to tell us more about himself in just a minute. If you are a regular listener of the podcast, you will have heard Dr. Malysz on June 21, 2016. He was on the show talking about the volume on Luther, episode 293, so we are glad to have you back with us again for this special Christmas episode. Welcome.

Piotr Malysz:       It's a pleasure to be here.

Kristen Padilla:    Please introduce yourself, especially for those who have not met you or have not heard that episode in 2016. Where are you from, what's your Christian background, and what led you to Beeson?

Piotr Malysz:       I'm originally from Poland, although I've lived in America for about 20 years now, 21 years. I became an American citizen about two years ago, so I very much feel like an American. And I've been at Beeson for about nine years, so I also very much feel like a southerner, or at least I'm trying to do my best. I grew up in Southern Poland, towards the tail end of the Soviet Bloc years. I grew up in a Lutheran family, a very self-consciously Lutheran family. For example, I remember at the age of six, every Saturday, my parents would send me off to religious instruction at our local congregation, whereas my friends were able to watch Don Quixote on television. I went to to catechesis, but that really has paid off, because I think that's how I developed just a genuine love for the Lord, but also for Christianity. And eventually through a kind of a linguistic detour, I began my theological studies here in the US and then my doctoral studies as well.

Doug Sweeney:       Piotr, today we want to help our listeners prepare for Christmas with some insight, with some counsel, with some words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and those of us who are part of the Beeson Divinity School family know that Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been very important to the life of Beeson for many years, but for those who are listening now who don't know a lot about Bonhoeffer and why he's important and why we would focus on Bonhoeffer in this Christmas episode, can you help our listeners a little bit? Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Why is he such a big deal?

Piotr Malysz:       Sure. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian in the first half of the 20th century. He was born in 1906, and he died at the Flossenburg concentration camp in 1945. He's probably best known for his very early and very vocal opposition to Nazi politics. He was one of the very few theologians in Germany who in a sense saw the writing on the wall and who realized what Hitler's rise to power portended, and really sought to oppose that, both by public speaking but also through kind of an alternative theological education.
                    Bonhoeffer was also a university professor, but he was also an underground educator, if you like, at the Confessing Church seminary. The Confessing Church was a wing within the German Protestant Church that really did not see alignment with Nazi politics as in any way reflective of the spirit of Christianity. They actually saw it as a perversion of Christianity. So Bonhoeffer was very active in the Confessing Church and ultimately was the leader of an underground seminary in Pomerania. He was also an ecumenist. He traveled quite widely, and ultimately, as I indicated, he was also a martyr for the faith.
                    He made a very controversial decision. I think the jury is still out on how to evaluate it, but I think he had very good theological reasons, certainly not easy reasons, to become a member of an assassination plot on Hitler's life, and ultimately Bonhoeffer paid with his own life for that involvement, only days before the Flossenburg concentration camp was liberated.

Kristen Padilla:    Before we get to Bonhoeffer's specific thoughts on Christmas, can you tell us briefly what sort of context shaped those reflections?

Piotr Malysz:       Everything that Bonhoeffer says about Christmas, and he has quite a lot to say, is really shaped by a larger kind of Christological vision for theology. Bonhoeffer was a very diligent student of Luther, and from Luther he inherited this anti-speculative, if you like, thrust of his theological thinking. You know, Luther very famously said that the proper subject of theology is the human that is condemned and the God who justifies by grace that condemned human being. So theology has a very practical, very kind of, the big word here to use would be very actualist, thrust for Bonhoeffer. It's not about speculation, it's about God's action, if you like.
                    He was also a student of Barth, and from Barth he also inherited a very similar kind of emphasis. Barth very famously says in an early essay that the Bible is not at all about what we think about God, but it's about God's thoughts about us. It's about God's movement towards us. These two influences very much shape Bonhoeffer and make his Christology stand out or make Christology a very prominent part of his theological reflection.
                    But Bonhoeffer is not only a good student of Luther and Barth, he also takes their thought further. He radicalizes it, you might say. And what that means for him is that God is not to be sought, he would say, where we still have room for him or where we still feel like we need him. Bonhoeffer writes, "I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries, but at the center, not in weakness when I'm at my wit's end, but in strength, and therefore not in death and guilt, but I would like to speak of God in human life and goodness." And then he adds, "God is the beyond in the midst of our life. That's where we should see God." And that kind of radicalization of the cross and the import, the importance of the cross has a very strong ethical dimension for him, because to live as a Christian for Bonhoeffer means to follow after Christ in such a way that we enter the world very radically.
                    Bonhoeffer says, "We have learned to believe in a church which follows its Lord beneath the cross, and under the cross Jesus Christ returns us to the earth and its work and toil, but in so doing, he binds us anew to the earth and to the people who live, act, fight, and suffer upon it." Bonhoeffer's thought, in fact, gets so radical on this issue that towards the end of his life in some of his letters and papers from prison, he even talks about religionless Christianity, Christianity that is so immersed in the world, that follows Christ or follows after Christ into the depth of the world, where the purpose of being a Christian is not to make something of yourself, but rather to serve in a very radical kind of way. He becomes a critic of what he calls escapism disguised as piety.
                    "To renounce a full life and its real joys in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human," he says. And what that means is that a Christian can never say for Bonhoeffer, "I am above it all," in such a way that it would simply mean well to hell with it, but rather a Christian is in the midst of life where joy happens, but where also pain is a real threat and a real possibility, but that pain can be committed to God himself. So that's one set of reflections that defines Bonhoeffer's Christology, this very radical following after Christ and thinking of everything through Christ and thinking through life itself by means of Christ or with Christ, if you like.
                    Bonhoeffer's thoughts on Christmas also have a kind of more practical location, if you like. They flow not just from his Christological reflection, but they flow from his real setting, real pastoral setting and embeddedness. Bonhoeffer did not serve in the army. He was exempt from military service, because he worked for the military intelligence, but a number of his students and fellow pastors went to the front, and therefore Bonhoeffer sort of saw it as his real duty and a calling to write these circular letters to the pastors, especially those serving on the front and those who were in many ways sort of discouraged by what was happening in Germany at that time and really the fate of the Confessing Church and its perceived lack of impact, the way it was sort of dominated and ultimately tyrannized by the government, including the closure of that underground seminary.
                    So it's in the circular letters to his brethren from the seminary and pastors in the Confessing Church that some of Bonhoeffer's Christological thought and some of his thought on Christmas and Advent takes shape. It's also in his sermons, and we have quite a few of them left, and I'm going to quote from some of them. I've already quoted from a few as well. And ultimately we also certainly have Bonhoeffer as an educator, as a professor, and we have his lectures, where again we see that emphasis where he moves from Christ secularized into an example that was very prominent in the kind of liberal theology that Bonhoeffer had been educated in, to Christ as the very self-expression and movement of God into the world.
                    And perhaps the last thing that I'd like to add is that Bonhoeffer's writings make a distinction between Advent and Christmas. Bonhoeffer worked within a tradition that use the lectionary and the church calendar, and there was a distinction for him between Advent and Christmas and the theological meaning, and again, the ethical implications of both as he expressed that in his letters and sermons.

Doug Sweeney:       Tell us a little bit about the letters that Bonhoeffer wrote that particularly deal with Advent themes. What kinds of things, when he's distinguishing Advent as a season of the church year from Christmas, does he want us to be thinking about? We're airing this during Advent, we're recording it during Advent. How can Bonhoeffer help us to commemorate this Advent season?

Piotr Malysz:       Some of his early writings are relatively conventional in their approach to Advent. Advent is a time of preparation and self-examination for Bonhoeffer, and he really wants to emphasize that. I think he's already sort of in a culture that tries to set that aside, and in that sense he feels like it will trivialize Christmas if we move through Advent a little too fast.
                    He writes, for example, "We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God's coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God's coming should arouse in us. We're indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience. Only when we have felt the terror of the matter can we recognize the incomparable kindness. God comes into the very midst of evil and death and judges the evil in us and in the world, and by judging us, God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love. God makes us happy as only children can be happy. We are no longer alone."
                    That's a pretty long quote, but I think it encapsulates precisely what Bonhoeffer is after, that Advent is also a time of waiting, but it's a particular time of waiting. It's a time of waiting where we take a really good look at ourselves, because that's how we sort of make sense of why God comes in our midst. And in a kind of an echo of one of Luther's theses, actually the first one, the first of the 95, where Luther says that the whole life of Christians should be one of repentance, Bonhoeffer says the whole life of a Christian should be one of Advent. It's a time of waiting.
                    But then he asks himself in some of these early letters, well, what does it mean to be not just a waiting person, but a waiting people who take their future from God? It's in the waiting, in the waiting for a future that is assured, that we also find our assurance of rescue from captivity, from slavery, and where we know that all the evil and sickness and death has already found its end, where we know that our lives no longer need to be determined by unforgiven sins that otherwise would deprive us of a sense of purpose in life.
                    And he says the following, "This Advent word," and he says that by means of a summary, "this Advent word is not meant for the well-fed and satisfied, but for those who hunger and thirst. Lift up your heads, you army of the afflicted, the humbled, the discouraged, you defeated army with bowed heads. The battle is not lost. The victory is yours. Take course and be strong. There is no room here for shaking your heads and doubting, because Christ is coming."
                    So these are some of the early themes that we see in Bonhoeffer's reflections on Advent, but his later reflections are definitely shaped by the political situation and then ultimately by the war and the carnage and the fact that so many of his friends and fellow pastors perish in the war. So you might say that it's in that context that these rather general remarks, I think, take on a different kind of depth and a different kind of life. He's dealing with real feelings and quite a range of different feelings.
                    To give you a couple of examples, one would be simply the waning of excitement and the lack of joy, which he sees as really afflicting the entire Confessing Church on the eve of World War II. That has to do with, again, the closure of the underground seminary, some of the arrests by the Gestapo, and so on and so forth. And what seemed like a real and viable opposition to the Nazis now seems to be just simply sort of like a blade of grass in the wind. It just appears weak, and obviously what accompanies it is this lack of joy and lack of excitement. And together with that come a resignation, an experience of powerlessness.
                    If I may quote kind of an early bit from Bonhoeffer's sermon, which I think is very prescient and just remarkable, it comes from a 1935 sermon on the fall of Babylon, right before the season of Advent, towards the end of the church year. Bonhoeffer, remember he's saying that in 1935, when by all appearances it might seem that the Third Reich would be a thousand year Reich as the Nazis touted it, but Bonhoeffer says the following, and it really directly relates to these later feelings of resignation and powerlessness.
                    This is what he says in the sermon. "Babylon, the enemy of God, the city which does not cease building its tower up into the heavens, Babylon, which willfully defies Christ the crucified Lord, which intoxicates the world with its glittering and enticing vices as prostitutes intoxicate their lovers with heavy wine, which transforms and corrupts and woos the world with every kind of pomp and godless splendor, Babylon, whom the world loves, with whom the world is infatuated, running blindly into its nets." And let's remember, that was the sociopolitical reality in Germany at that time, when Hitler seemed almost to be a messianic figure, perhaps not even almost, he seemed like the messianic figure saving the nation.
                    "Babylon, whom the world loves, with whom the world is infatuated, running blindly into its nets, Babylon, which demands nothing else from its worshipers than blind love and intoxication, which gives them liberally and prodigally all that their hearts and wild desires crave. Who would dare say of this Babylon, it is not eternal, it will have a great fall?"
                    Some of the other feelings that Bonhoeffer deals with in the context of the war, also include, again, real suffering, as I've already mentioned. Death. Bonhoeffer opens a lot of his circular letters from the wartime by remembering the dead friends and pastors, so we can sort of see the sadness that is palpable, the grief, what he calls the sorrowfulness of the heart, and how overpowering that feeling can be, both for his fellow pastors and for him who is not with them.
                    There is also the feeling of impatience, I think some, and maybe perhaps Bonhoeffer himself ultimately succumbed to it, although like I said, the jury is still out on his joining of the coup and the assassination group that attempted to take Hitler's life or remove Hitler from power. So impatience is, again, a real feeling. And remember, we're talking about Advent here, a time of waiting. How do we deal with the fact that God is not coming through when we would like him to come through?
                    And together with that, I think the last sort of cluster of feelings that I would like to mention here is a desire for vengeance. Bonhoeffer has some amazing sermons on the imprecatory Psalms, and he asks himself, under what conditions can a Christian pray these Psalms, and what does it mean to pray them in Christ? And he says Christian should pray them, but we can only pray them in Christ, because in order to pray for God's vengeance, one has to be innocent. Otherwise the vengeance would fall just just as exactly on you as on your enemies, and therefore only Christ can pray those Psalms.
                    But Christ has prayed them in a particular way, Bonhoeffer says. He prayed them in such a way that the blows fell on him, and he said of his enemies, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." And ultimately, I think Bonhoeffer reminds himself and a number of fellow pastors and theologians that we should not demonize our enemies. He says something very significant about about that, which I think speaks to our situation as well a lot of the time. He says, and you can see the Christological thrust again of his remarks, "Whoever work to take revenge, take their enemy's life in their own hands and forget that God has already laid a hand on these persons by dying for them on the cross. Those who seek vengeance on the other person thwart Christ's death. If I seek revenge, then I despise the other's salvation."
                    "Your enemies," Bonhoeffer continues, "are those who in effect stand destitute before you and without being able to voice it themselves, beseech you, 'Help me, give me the one thing that can still help me out of my hate. Give me love, God's love, the love of the crucified Savior.'" Pretty powerful. So these are the sort of moods, feelings, postures that Bonhoeffer now writes his later Advent letters towards, that he seeks to address in his later Advent letters. This kind of conventional understanding of the Advent as a time of waiting and of life as a continued Advent now becomes something more tangible, something more real. It seeks to address simply real situations.
                    And so Bonhoeffer has the following to say in some of his later remarks. He says, "War is nothing unusual," perhaps a very shocking remark, "because war only clarifies," Bonhoeffer says, "our existence in the world. It makes visible in a kind of highly condensed way what our life as sinners and what our life in a sinful world or the world we as sinners make is all about. War only makes visible the sorrows and the troubles of human bodies and souls, the lies, the unlawfulness, and the violence." And in those letters, Bonhoeffer actually encourages his readers to be patient above all, and he connects patience in an interesting way to faithfulness. "God is a God of promise, God who has already in Christ set a limit to evil in the world, and therefore to be patient is to in a sense live out of God's time and out of God's patience." And that becomes a very prominent theme.
                    And he also has a word of caution, because you know, everybody that Bonhoeffer was writing to was in some sense afflicted and suffering, and the suffering was very real. And Bonhoeffer says, yes, we should not downplay, soft pedal the suffering that we're going through, but let's also remember that in suffering, as we approach our own suffering and the suffering of others, that we mustn't confuse ourselves with Christ. And he has the following to say. He says, "In the end, we cannot suffer with people in our own strength, because we are unable to redeem." So again, he takes us to Christ, takes us to Christ as the one who has come and who is coming, whom we await, who has already suffered, who has already set a limit to suffering in the world. So those are some of the later Advent-related emphases of Bonhoeffer's letters.

Kristen Padilla:    Let's move quickly to Christmas. What does Bonhoeffer have to say about the significance of Christ's birth and the first Christmas?

Piotr Malysz:       For Bonhoeffer, the first Christmas is of just ultimate theological significance. He says there was suddenly no priest and no theologian that was by the cradle in Bethlehem, but he says, all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders, namely, that God became human. And Bonhoeffer says that the task of Christian theology is not to unravel that mystery, but rather to preserve its wonder. What he means by that specifically is that just like the ancient church, we too should imprison reason in obedience to Jesus Christ. And as we approach this mystery of God becoming human, we should succumb neither to what he calls the modern pretense that this mystery can only be felt or experienced, because he says the early church, when it reflected on that mystery, already knew the corruption and self-deception of human feeling and experience.
                    So it's not just a mystery that is subject to or can only be grasped by means of feeling and experience, but neither is it the kind of reality that we can think out logically. And here we must again imprison every thought and in some sense, in however halting a way, follow after Christ, even if it requires sort of speaking in paradoxes. But our task is not to unravel the mystery but to bear witness to it and to glorify God as we bear witness to it. And ultimately, Bonhoeffer says, this mystery can only be understood in worship. It is in worship that we both grasp it and even more so are sort of grasped by it.
                    And maybe one thing to add, which I think is very significant, because now we can ask, well, so what is this mystery of God becoming human? And here you can see just how important theology and theological reflection is to Bonhoeffer. He says the center, the core of that mystery is that the Son of God did not assume a man, but assumed human nature. And that for Bonhoeffer is the unique wonder of the incarnation. The Son of God did not assume a man, but he assumed human nature. Now, you might think that this is sort of an arcane point of theology, but Bonhoeffer is very quick to explain in one of his sermons what that means. He says, "The body of Jesus Christ is our flesh. He did not assume a man, he assumed our nature, which means his body is our flesh. He bears our flesh," Bonhoeffer writes.
                    "Therefore, where Jesus Christ is, there we are, whether we know it or not. It is all our poor flesh and blood which lies there in the crib. It is our flesh which dies with him on the cross and is buried with him." So the Christmas message, Bonhoeffer says, "The Christmas message for all people runs, 'You are accepted. God has not despised you, but he bears in his body all your flesh and blood.'"
                    "Look at the cradle," Bonhoeffer says. "In the body of the little child, in the incarnate Son of God, your flesh, and that means all your distress, anxiety, temptation, indeed all your sin is born, forgiven, and healed." And there's also a bit of pastoral advice. "If you complain, 'My nature, my whole being is beyond salvation, and I must be eternally lost,' the Christmas message," Bonhoeffer says, "replies, 'Your nature, your whole being is accepted. Jesus bears it. In this way, he has become your savior.'"

Doug Sweeney:       You've given us a lot of profound theology to reflect on, Dr. Malysz, as we celebrate Advent and Christmas this year. Why don't we close for our listeners by giving some counsel from Bonhoeffer for Christians today? Our context is so different from his, it's so different from first century Palestine, it's so different from World War II era Germany. In 21st century Birmingham, Alabama, or the United States, what might Bonhoeffer offer by way of guidance as we celebrate Advent and Christmas?

Piotr Malysz:       I think kind of the profound insight, which I think is extremely relevant and perhaps even more relevant to us today, is that Christmas is not for Bonhoeffer a time of escape, that if Christmas is all about God's coming into the depth of the world, into the depth of our condition, where again, he bears our flesh, and that also means that he bears all the distress that relates to our flesh, and he puts an end to it in his own person and work.
                    Bonhoeffer reflects on this, again, during the time of war, and it's already during the time of war where I think in his own time, people were sort of tempted to say, "Oh, let's just sort of escape into Christmas. Let's forget about the war, at least for a moment." But Bonhoeffer says almost counter-intuitively that war actually gives in a special way the possibility of real Christmas. For us, perhaps it's not war. We have all kinds of other temptations to escape. We escape into Christmas shopping, Christmas cleaning, and so on and so forth. And I think, again, perhaps for us the escape is more trivial, but Bonhoeffer's words very much stand.
                    This is what he says, what he asks. "To what extent have we Germans made Christmas into just such an island on which one can save oneself from the true reality of life for a couple of days or at least hours? Christmas, just a holiday from myself, holiday from living." And Bonhoeffer realizes that there is a sense of weariness Christmas seems to respond to. The world that we encounter, the world that sort of encounters us, assaults us with thousands of demands, plans, summonses, exhortations. And we try to overcome that distress, and yet we always seem to fail at that. And that's why Christmas seems like such an escape.
                    But to that, again, Bonhoeffer replies, "Escapism is prohibited, because in the feast of Christmas, we are directed in a new way to the very thing that stands in the center of the Bible. We are directed to the simple reality of the gracious and merciful action, which comes from God into this lost world." So let me summarize that very briefly. For us, Christmas seems like an escape, because we recognize our failure to put the world right. It doesn't bend to our will, and Christmas seems like a place where we can at least rest from that.
                    But Bonhoeffer says the real meaning of Christmas is that God has already made everything come out right, and therefore we don't need to escape, we don't need to burden ourselves with fixing the world. And therefore we can in some sense enter the world in a much more meaningful, in a much more profound, but perhaps also kind of a joyful and more relaxed way. Christmas can become this message of deeper living. And here we can think of Bonhoeffer and his fellow pastors living in community, sharing food, making music together, reading scripture, praying for each other, interceding, sharing joys, and so on and so forth.
                    So I think for Bonhoeffer, again, to put it very briefly, the meaning of Christmas has to do with what we began this conversation with, namely, God's coming and the action of God. As long as we see our life as one of having to fix the world, Christmas will always be an escape. As long as we see that God is at work in the world, Christmas will be an encouragement to follow in his footsteps.

Doug Sweeney:       You have been listening to Dr. Piotr Malysz, a dear brother and beloved professor here at Beeson Divinity School. Thank you very much, Piotr, for being with us today. We wish all of those in our audience a wonderful, blessed Christmas. We thank you for joining us, and we say goodbye for now.

Kristen Padilla:    You've been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.