The longer I dwell with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the less I am able to distinguish any substantial difference between his ideas as a young man and his radical-sounding ideas in Letters and Papers from Prison.
For example, in LPP he speaks of a non-religious or religionless Christianity. While not using either specific phrase in 1928, while an intern in Barcelona, he did write
“Christianity contains a seed of animosity to the church since we wish to base a demand on God on our devotion to Christ and church. . . .Ethics and religion lie in the direction of human beings toward God. Christ, however, speaks alone, entirely alone, of the direction of God to people; not of the human way to God but of the way of God to human beings.”
Religion (and ethical systems!), Bonhoeffer is already noting, leave us in control. We determine which liturgy and religious language to use. And, just as likely, we determine just how God is supposed to respond to our religiosity. That is what the old Greeks would call hubris. And we recall that hubris makes us fly too close to the sun, which melts our wings and we plunge to our death. (That’s the old Greek myth of Icarus.)
Religion, it seems to me, is often little more than our way of appeasing God, giving him enough attention that we think he’ll not ask anything more of us. Bonhoeffer was rejecting such religion in 1928 and most emphatically in 1944.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Evangelicals 