In recent weeks many people have been thinking back to the second World War with mixed emotions. Those who lived through it will be conscious of the terrible cost in human terms, recalling at the same time the joy and the hope that marked its ending.
For thinking people of all ages looking back there is surely the awareness that the moral ascent of man to higher and nobler things is never assured - it has to be worked for. Belsen and Auschwitz prove that beyond doubt.
A correspondent of the time courageously pointed out that the atrocities of the war were not just a failing of the German people but a failing of humanity. But it was not a total failure, even within Germany. While we focus on the generalities, the great battles and political developments and think in terms of winners and losers, there are other important matters to keep in mind. We know, for example, of many courageous people in Germany and elsewhere who stood out against the monstrous evils of the day, often at great cost to themselves and their families. Many of them, motivated by strong religious and moral conviction, are unknown and unsung.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, was one of the leading young theologians of his day with an international reputation. By 1936 he had been banned from teaching by the Nazis and a year later the seminary of which he was head was closed. He was opposed to the German-Christians (Deutsche Christen), a powerful evangelical group who were advocating an interpretation of Christianity that could accommodate Nazism. He joined what was known as the Confessing Church, which laid the foundation for resistance to attempts to make the evangelical churches instruments of Nazi policy. In 1942 he tried to mediate between those Germans opposed to Hitler and the British Government but he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald.
Bonhoeffer was adamant that no political system could supersede in any way the authority and meaning of Jesus Christ. Writing about the cross he commented: "God's victory. . .means reducing the world and its clamour to silence; it means the crossing out of all ideas and plans, it means the cross. The cross of Jesus Christ means the bitter scorn of all human heights, the bitter suffering of God in all human depths, the rule of God over the whole world." In a message to an English friend he said: "I believe in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain." Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death and not long before his execution some of his fellow prisoners asked him to conduct a service for them. They were greatly encouraged by his firm preaching of the Easter Hope. When he finished he was taken away. Later a prison doctor observed him kneeling in prayer. "The devotion and evident conviction of being heard that I saw in this intensely captivating man," the doctor recorded, "moved me to the depths." Next day Bonhoeffer was hanged. It was Good Friday 1945 and he was 39.
Tomorrow is the Feast of Pentecost, that day when Christians give thanks for the gift of the Holy Spirit. We can too easily diminish our understanding of this extraordinary presence by relegating his/her activity to things which in a narrow way are perceived to be religious. But the Spirit is not owned or controlled by the Church or anyone else. The Spirit is available in all places, at all times, to all people of goodwill, who seek to make known to the world "the wonderful works of God". It is good to remember, in these days of special and often painful memories for some, that even in the darkest days of a world at war the Spirit of peace was present and active in and through the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others like him.
G.L.