2 thoughts on ““America Is Being Torn Apart And The Church Has Remained Silent””

  1. “The price we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organised church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptised, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving… But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.”

    Dietrich Bonhoeffer

    Bonhoeffer was not silent. He spoke out and resisted Hitler and the Nazis. He was a determined opponent of the regime from its first days. Two days after Hitler was installed as Chancellor, Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address in which he attacked Hitler and warned Germany against slipping into an idolatrous cult of the Führer (leader), who could very well turn out to be Verführer (misleader, or seducer). He paid the price for that . He was finally arrested, imprisoned and executed by hanging.

    Here is a hymn he wrote:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agY9jiBggbI

    If you want to learn more about Bonhoeffer his book “The Cost of Discipleship ” is still in print

    Here is a short review of this book:

    “What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” “Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is the grace we bestow on ourselves…grace without discipleship….Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the girl which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know….It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
    The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty.”

    1. Thanks, Fred. The problem is that some churches– and some Christians– have no sense of civic duty. But as Bonhoeffer demonstrates, what we do in the world, and the stand we take, matters– and they SHOULD matter.

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