Pastor meaning poem from a child free#

Too many in the time of Hitler trusted that God’s judgment and mercy would rule, but in reality it was human choices to mete ungodly injustice that led Bonhoeffer to resist and ultimately be killed by the state. The title of the poem comes from the Friday of Good Friday, the day on which Christ was crucified.

Pastor meaning poem from a child free#

Spears writes that the poem is “a kind of post-existentialist piece, reflecting on how dreadfully complete man’s freedom is, with none of the excitement and extravagance Auden used to display, but in a tone of chastened puzzlement and shock, tempered by colloquial diction and sardonic wit.” The poem opens and closes with the argument that we are free: first we are free to choose to believe in God and repent, or not later we are free to interpret the Crucifixion of Jesus with our best guess.

Bonhoeffer was active in the resistance from the war’s outset, warning Germany by radio after Hitler became Chancellor that she should not indulge in an idolatrous cult of the Führer, but his words were cut off mid-sentence.Ĭritic Monroe E. This late, twelve-stanza poem was composed in 1958 and dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and Nazi resistance fighter who was executed by hanging for his participation in a plot of the German Military Intelligence Office to assassinate Adolf Hitler. While Jesus suffered in public, Bonhoeffer died relatively privately at a concentration camp like a slave. We are free to interpret it for ourselves. Something important happened “on the cross,” but to the speaker it might be either gain or loss. Nevertheless, even “conscious unbelievers” perceive a kind of Judgment Day in the world. As for direct facts, did Jesus “really break the seal / And rise again” from the dead? Man can use tools to achieve various ends, even conflicting ones, but the Mind of Universal Man does not understand its own power.įurthermore, to the speaker, our ideas of justice and of God are based on analogies rather than direct facts, and God (whether he exists or not) has not even acknowledged our theological reasoning.

This force came to pass.ĭoes God emphasize justice or mercy? It seems irrelevant when so much power to punish is assumed by humans “He lets the Adam whom He made / Perform the acts of God.” Even when this judge is not a dictator but “Universal Man,” when we take a good look we see nothing special.

God told us we were free to choose, but because we had the minds of children we thought that he would only use force against us as a last resort, for those who would not repent. An epigraph reads: “(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945).”