Renate and Eberhard Bethge
It was May 24th, 1944, less than a year before the end of the Second World War in Europe. The war in the Pacific would drone on for three more months after that. But in May 1944, the Allies were bombing Germany relentlessly, seeking to bring the war to the quickest end possible. Prison camps, unfortunately, were often close to the battle lines, and that meant that an imprisoned pastor by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in harm’s way. Outside of prison, Bonhoeffer’s family worried about him as he worried about them. His niece, Renate, was married to Eberhard Bethge, his best friend and the future biographer of his life and ministry. In the second year of marriage, Renate and Eberhard had a child and named him after Dietrich. On the day of the infant’s baptism, the namesake of the child was meditating on the baptism he would miss and the family he loved. Sitting in his prison cell, he wrote these words:
“I’ve just written the date of this letter as my share in the baptism and preparations for it. At the same moment the siren went, and now I’m sitting in the sick-bay and hoping that today at any rate you will have no air raid. What times these are! What a baptism! And what memories for the years to come! What matters is that we should direct these memories, as it were, into the right spiritual channels and so make them harder, clearer, and more defiant, which is a good thing. There is no place for sentimentality on a day like this. If in the middle of an air raid, God sends out the gospel call to his kingdom in baptism, it will be clear what that kingdom is and what it means.
It is a kingdom stronger than war and danger, a kingdom of power and authority. Signifying eternal terror and judgment to some, and eternal joy and righteousness to others, not a kingdom of the heart, but one as wide as the earth, not transitory but eternal, a kingdom that makes a way for itself and summons men to itself to prepare its way, a kingdom for which it is worthwhile risking our lives.”
Letters and Papers from Prison, 304.
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran, and so when he talks about making memories, he is talking about the parents and all those present at the baptism rather than the infant being baptized. But I think his meditation on what it means to have a baptism in the midst of an air raid is a dramatic and defiant celebration of the gospel’s power and call to the world. It is as if the people of God are declaring to the violence around them, “You cannot and will not win. Repent and believe the gospel before your judgment comes.”
Let the church of America remember,
that such a message is worth risking our lives to proclaim.
Let he who has ears to hear,
hear what history tells us.
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