BETHGE & BAPTIST SPIRITUALITY
I have been away at our annual faculty retreat for a few days. This weekend I am scheduled to speak on Baptist spirituality. I hope to do so, DV, through the medium of Baptist history. These words of Eberhard Bethge, friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are an important reminder of why I am taking this approach:
“Commemoration renders life human; forgetfulness makes it inhuman. …even when remembrance carries grief and shame, it fills the future with perspectives. And the denial of the past furthers the affairs of death, precisely because it focuses exclusively on the present.” [Friendship and Resistance. Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Geneva: WCC Publications/Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 105].
“Commemoration renders life human; forgetfulness makes it inhuman. …even when remembrance carries grief and shame, it fills the future with perspectives. And the denial of the past furthers the affairs of death, precisely because it focuses exclusively on the present.” [Friendship and Resistance. Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Geneva: WCC Publications/Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 105].
