Dietrich Bonhoeffer On Our Imaginary God and the Challenge of Immersing Ourselves in Jesus

For many people, the Incarnation of Christ means very little. That is because the American Christian doesn’t look to Jesus as the Revelation of God, but rather people come with prior pseudo-knowledge of who they think God is, which is then imported onto God. The Imported God is ultimately an Imaginary God, rather than the Incarnated God. As Christian, we should have none of this. For Christians, if we are to know anything about God, it must come through immersing ourselves in the narrative of Christ, through which God is revealed to us by the Holy Spirit. What seems to be clearly missed about God in Christ Jesus in the gospel accounts, is that he looks nothing like the way people conceive of God generally. Most Americans gain there understanding of who God is through their human systematic theologies, by way of greek philosophical concepts that have been passed down through the West, and of course from protestant hymns. In all of this, the American/Western God seems more like a Conquering Caesar than a Christ Crucified. It might be time, like the early Christians did for the first few centuries, to live into the Jesus story and to understand God as the one revealed in bodily flesh. In that way, the Incarnation can find its meaning in our lives again in a meaningful way.

Consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on this confusion, as he sat in prison at the end of his life and reflected on the solution while he wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge:

Everything we may with some good reason expect or beg of God is to be found in Jesus Christ. What we imagine a God could and should do—the God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with all that. We must immerse ourselves again and again, for a long time and quite calmly, in Jesus’s life, his sayings, actions, suffering, and dying in order to recognize what God promises and fulfills. What is certain is that we may always live aware that God is near and present with us and that this life is an utterly new life for us; that there is nothing that is impossible for us anymore because there is nothing that is impossible for God; that no earthly power can touch us without God’s will, and that danger and urgent need can only drive us closer to God.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich; Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (2010-06-01). Letters and Papers from Prison DBW Vol 8 (Kindle Locations 15896-15901). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.