Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twentieth-century German pastor and theologian, executed under the Nazi regime for his association with the 20 July plot to kill Hitler. He’s a martyr of the church, who wrote about costly grace, the idea of following the Gospel even at your own expense. In his most famous work, the 1937 The Cost of Discipleship, he says that there probably wasn’t any point banning slavery. The Christian slave, Bonhoeffer suggests, “is already torn from the world’s clutches, and become a freedman of Christ. That is why the slave is told to stay as he is. As a member of the Body of Christ he has acquired a freedom which no rebellion or revolution could have brought him.” Ah, shit.

The Christian dynamic of salvation and civil liberty is complicated. It’s a tension between this world and the next. If we’re saved for heaven, why bother with Earth? If we’re getting too political, too focused on material conditions in this world, aren’t we missing something about the transcendent beyond? That’s the criticism of liberation theology from within the Catholic church – it’s atheistic materialism, it’s Marxist. It’s a set of social and political actions rather than a faith. In short, the complaint goes, what happens to Jesus? What happens to God? The concern sounds whingy, but it’s not totally unfounded. There are plenty of Christian thinkers (like Harnack) who have a very materialist view on the faith. Harnack writes that the miracles of the Bible are obviously unbelievable: “That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe”. God, in this line of thought, ultimately retreats into metaphor and symbol. He doesn’t actually do anything, or have any power – and the faith in turn retreats into this sort of group for social goodwill. They spend less time praying and more time out planting trees – not a bad thing in itself, but also not really any sort of religion. The two extremes are visible and real. There’s the hellfire preachers who don’t care at all about the state of the world, and the filthy tree hippies who end up in the camp of spiritual but not religious. In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer seems to tend more towards the former.

In Chapter 30, ‘The Visible Community’, Bonhoeffer talks about the Epistle to Philemon, a five hundred word book of the Bible just before Hebrews. It’s a letter from Paul to Philemon, a slaveowner who probably lived in Colossae. Paul tells Philemon that he has to treat kindly the bearer of the letter, Onesimus, most likely an escaped slave who’s been sent back to Philemon and the Colossian church. It’s possible that Onesimus stole something, or even that he simply disobeyed by running away – Paul tells Philemon “If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account.” Paul in this letter doesn’t look to overthrow the institution of slavery – he doesn’t say it’s bad or wrong – but he sends Onesimus as a Christian brother, with the expectation that Philemon treat him with dignity and care. “For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldst receive him for ever; Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh and in the Lord?” It’s not the end of slavery, but it’s the start of slave/slave-owner fellowship. Does that sound compelling? Bonhoeffer thinks so. “Master and slave are now both members of the Body of Christ. Their common life is now a tiny cell in the Body of Christ, the Church.”

Bonhoeffer correctly sees something valuable in people coming together in the church, regardless of their position in life. We shouldn’t have to iron out all the problems of the world – all the inequalities and injustices that we ourselves are implicated in, that we perpetrate against each other – we shouldn’t have to fix everything before we come to church. There must be some level of grace, of dignity that we provide to each other. But surely that has to be the starting point from which we go away and try to improve things. The faith shouldn’t void these conflicts, right? For Bonhoeffer, it does. That is why the slave is told to stay as he is,” he claims. “As a member of the Body of Christ he has acquired a freedom which no rebellion or revolution could have brought him.” Revolution is not only unnecessary, Bonhoeffer says: it would actively obscure the vision of Christ in the world. “The whole world has already been turned upside down by the work of Jesus Christ, which has wrought a liberation for freeman and slave alike. A revolution would only obscure that divine New Order which Jesus Christ has already established.” It’s been maybe a couple hundred years since the British ended their slave trade – 1807 for the Slave Trade Act, which ended slave trading in the British Empire, and 1833 for the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery in its overseas territories. Abolition in the USA came around in 1865. Did any of those interfere with Christ’s divine new order? Is that really a defensible position? “Let the slave remain a slave!” Bonhoeffer writes. “It is not reform that the world needs, for it is already ripe for destruction.”

We’re coming back around to the plot to kill Hitler. I’m not sure that Bonhoeffer was actively involved, but he probably knew about it, and it definitely killed him. Does suitcase bombing Hitler count as revolution or reform? That’s really the pointy end of this conversation. Slavery probably seems a little quaint as the example for this whole argument – it’s not something most of us have any experience of. But would you really sit in church beside a Nazi? Would Bonhoeffer? It’s a trick question: he couldn’t have sat beside them, because the Nazis shut down the Confessing churches. From 1937 to 1940, Bonhoeffer ran an illegal underground seminary training Confessing priests. We can pose his own questions back to him. Is there any point training secret priests if the world’s ripe for destruction? Shouldn’t he really have sat back and waited for the end of the world? It’s an argument not borne out by the facts of his life. Bonhoeffer’s faith took him to the gallows. Reform, revolt, rebel. The hippies have it right.