In Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer began to write more emphatically about his “bitterness against the Churches for their not having checked in any siginificant way the evils perpretated by nazism.” (from A Testament to Freedom, p.40

“Bonhoeffer had come to see in religion a form of culture, turned in on itself, conscious of clerical privilege, and bent on its own survival in the derstruction of war.” (p. 41)

“Religion” , when it separates itself from faith, which is real only in life and devotion to Christ, most clearly defined for Bonhoefer in the Sermon on the Mount. While faith can certainly advocate a religious lifestyle, there are “religiosities” which exude a culture other than that of one driven by the core of the Christian faith, and yet seek to maintain their association with Christianity by re-emphasizing OTHER things. Bonhoeffer often asked questions like “Who is Christ for us today?”

It is indeed ironic that so many “devotional” Christians today are so enthsed about Bonhoeffer’s writings, and yet are also many of the same at the forefront of Bush administration support and affirmation of the “faith-based” values of this administration, and urging all Christians to support this president. The Iraq war alone would be cuase enough for Bonhoefer to make the same kind of calls to the American Church to “be the Church” as he had to make for Germany.

“I should like to speak to God”, he wrote, “not on the boundaries but at the center, not in weakness but in strength; and therefore not indeath and guilt but in life and goodnerss….God is beyond in the midst of our life. The Church sttands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village” (Letter and Papers from Prison, p.282)