Apostles' Creed (6): he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven

Here's the sixth sermon on the Apostles' Creed – on Christ's descent and resurrection:

Origen and the problem of writing

Origen was the church's first professional writer; but in his day Christianity was not yet a literary religion. Jerome lists 800 books by Origen, but a more accurate list by Eusebius details 2,000 books (most of them now lost). Origen's patron Ambrose of Alexandria commissioned most of these books and put a huge staff of scribes and copyists at Origen's disposal.

When Origen was asked to respond to Celsus, a pagan writer who had attacked Christianity in a book called True Doctrine, Origen observed that a written response was not really appropriate for the Christian faith. "Now Jesus is always being falsely accused," Origen says in the preface to Contra Celsum. "He is still silent in face of this and does not answer with his voice; but he makes his defence in the lives of his genuine disciples, for their lives cry out the real facts and defeat all false charges." The only real apologetics is the life of Christ's followers, not written arguments. Indeed Origen suggests that producing a written defence of the faith might actually diminish the vitality of the Christian community: "I would therefore go so far as to say that the defence which you ask me to compose will weaken the force of the defence that is in the mere facts, and detract from the power of Jesus."

He goes on to write the book anyway, a big doorstopper of a book, 500 pages in the English translation. But his bad conscience – his need to apologise for the act of writing – is revealing.

When he got to the fifth book of his massive Commentary on the Gospel of John – he had completed four books so far, and had only got through a few verses – Origen paused to reflect on the words of Ecclesiastes: "My son, beware of making many books" (Ecclesiastes 12.12). He admits that he seems to have transgressed this command, and he explores this problem at length before resuming the commentary.

In the first place, Origen notes that "none of the saints has produced numerous compositions and set out his understanding in many books." Even Moses left only five books, and Paul was content to dash off a few lines when the occasion demanded. As for John, Origen poignantly observes that he "has left one Gospel while confessing that he could compose so many that the world could not contain them."

Origen is distressed by the sheer quantity of all that he has written compared to the prophets, apostles, and saints. "I get dizzy as though I were suffering vertigo, lest perhaps by obeying you [Ambrose] I have disobeyed God and have not imitated the saints." And he quotes another seemingly damning Wisdom saying: "In a multitude of words you will not escape sin" (Proverbs 10.19).

Yet Origen ventures a defence of his prodigious literary output. He notes that the perfect Word of God is not "a multitude of words" but one single Word. A person who contradicts this Word is being loquacious; he says too much, and sins in what he says. But a person who speaks truthfully always speaks the one simple Word, "even if he says everything so as to leave out nothing." You could talk forever and still be saying just one Word; and you could speak a pithy falsehood and be condemned for multiplying words. Truth is simple, falsehoods are multiple. As an example of the simplicity of truth, Origen notes that there are not four Gospels in scripture; rather "there is truly one gospel through the four."

The conclusion is that it's quality that counts, not quantity. If Origen can set forth the truth in his many writings then he will be speaking only one word. But if he speaks contrary to the truth in even one place, he will have written "many books."

The whole procedure is a striking example of Origen's spiritual exegesis, an attempt to press beneath the literal sense of the prohibition against "making many books" and to yield up its theological meaning. Only after securing this exegetical conclusion does Origen also mention the obvious practical exigency: the heretics are busy writing "many books" (literally, and in a spiritual sense!), and somebody has to answer them "on behalf of the teaching of the church." Otherwise the inquisitive and the vulnerable will be led astray.

Origen says that he has offered this defence "for myself" as well as "for those who are able to speak and write." He is assuaging his own troubled conscience, but he is also spelling out an exegetical rationale for a literary Christian culture, a culture in which writers can "make many books" while cleaving to the one simple Word.

By the late fourth century such a literary Christian culture could be taken for granted. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the changes Christianity had undergone than a remark from Athanasius, an Egyptian theologian writing around the middle of the fourth century. In a letter written during one of his many exiles (if only Athanasius had a dollar for every time he was exiled!) he apologises for the brevity of his previous 50-page letter. "I thought what I wrote was ever so brief, and I accused myself of great lethargy for not being able to write as much as is humanly possible against those who are impious toward the Holy Spirit" (Letters to Serapion, 2.1.1).

"I accused myself of great lethargy": Athanasius has a guilty conscience too. He feels bad for not having written enough.

By the fifth century Christianity has produced a writer like Augustine. One finds him in a provincial town in North Africa, an ageing bishop carefully overseeing the maintenance of the vast library of his own works. Augustine devotes the end of his life to itemising each book chronologically; he makes revisions and corrections; he collaborates with his librarian Possidius, taking every pain to ensure the preservation of his works for posterity. If some earlier Christians had happened to be writers, Augustine is an author. He writes not simply to refute heresy or to respond to this or that local problem; he writes because he is an author. He writes for his contemporaries, and for those not yet born. He thinks of himself essentially as a man of letters. His identity is bound up with the production of literature. In a letter of 412, Augustine had remarked: "I try to be one of those who write by making progress and make progress by writing" (Epistle 143.2). And in his De Trinitate Augustine describes writing as a path of discovery, a way of seeking the face of God.

In the same period, one finds an author like the Roman poet Prudentius, for whom writing is not a tactical necessity but a spiritual vocation in its own right. In the preface to his collection of poems, Prudentius writes:

When I write or speak of these things,
how I wish to break free from the chains of my body
to the place where my nimble tongue's last sound carries me!

[Haec dum scribo vel eloquor
vinclis o utinam corporis emicem
liber quo tulerit lingua sono mobilia ultimo!]

Augustine writes to make progress; he writes to seek God. Prudentius writes to transcend the world of the flesh; he writes to be saved. Writing has become something quite different here, something Origen could never have imagined. It has become part of the apparatus of spiritual life, a means of purgation and transformation. Writing has become a vocation and a spiritual discipline. Writers have become authors. With Prudentius and Augustine, the transformation of Christianity into a literary culture is complete.

Apostles' creed video (5): suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried

And here's the fifth sermon in the series on the Apostles' Creed. Unfortunately the recording didn't work for the first minute, so you miss out on a quote from Karl Barth: Pontius Pilate enters the creed "like a dog into a nice room."

Scooby doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

God loves otherness. She’s an anti-Sameite.

The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / The black man picking cotton,/ The woman washing plates – but the gay man marrying his mate? It’s so not order of creation, isn’t it?

One hundred and fifty years ago, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation outlawing slavery in ten Confederate States. Two years later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution extended the prohibition to all of the United States. Of course, the anti-abolitionists insisted that government had neither the right nor the power to contradict the Bible, Christian tradition, and natural law, all of which speak quite perspicuously on the institution of slavery.

Gay marriage is not just morally wrong but (like dissoluble marriage) ontologically impossible. Attending a gay wedding (like attending a second wedding), one thinks of Dr. Johnson, walking with Boswell, kicking the stone, declaring, “Thus do I refute Berkeley.”

“First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for me, because I spoke out against the homosexualists.” That’s Niemöller updated in the light of the apocalyptic tone – the beginning of state fascism, the elimination of Christianity, Queens who are lesbians (and presumably Kings who are queens) – of the anti-gay marriage lobby in the UK.

In protest against the legalisation of gay marriage in France, Dominique Venner shoots himself in the mouth at the altar in Notre Dame Cathedral. A sad, sad symbolic (Freudian?) gesture, if not prophetic action, rather lacking in both tactical nous and strategic foresight, as presumably Venner will be spending eternity in hell with the wedded sodomites he so opposed – and in the same seventh circle (if in the middle rather than the inner ring).

You can always count on some Christian leader to pontificate on two subjects about which we know next to nothing for sure: suffering and sex. So like you’re going to trust them not to talk guff about God, right?

Nature? Nurture? Mystery!

In his recent Making Sense of Sex, Adrian Thatcher likens the experience of post-coital serenity to the sharing of the peace at the eucharist. So does the liturgy in Thatcher’s church contain a rubric for having a cigarette before the distribution of the elements?

Theology is the text; literature is the commentary.

Shelley famously declaimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Good poets. Bad poets are the world’s US Congress.

Scientists are confident that the fossil remains of a prehistoric quadruped, recently discovered on a farm near the town of Hicksville, New York, will revolutionise our understanding of Palaeolithic zoology and mammalian evolution. Here is an artist’s reconstruction of the creature –

– the Hicks bison.

Sitting in a hospital waiting room, suddenly I was overcome by a feeling of foreboding. I asked God for a sign. Then I looked around the room, and on the wall was a large photograph: mirabile dictu! – what are the chances? – the cover photograph of my book. My heart sank. “Jeez, Lord!”... I asked for another sign.

On Saturday morning, around six, I was sitting in my study about to pray. I looked up. In the front garden, not six feet away – a fox! – sleek, still, watchful. It just stood there for a couple of minutes, and I just watched … I just watched. Then, concerned – early traffic, passers-by – I tapped the window. It turned to me, stared, then leapt and vanished over the low red-brick wall. And that was my prayer-time.

What is celebrity texting but digital digit painting?

You go to church. Perhaps much of what you hear in the prayers, hymns, let alone the sermon, doesn’t ring true. Still, say “Amen”. You have worshipped. God isn’t looking for your agreement.

I love the quip, aimed at the rich and powerful, privileged by birth, that just because you find yourself on third base doesn’t mean you hit a triple. And the stupid ones – you can hear them standing at the hot corner yelling, “Hey Dad, I got a double!”

The enduring power and influence of Day, Hammarskjöld, Bonhoeffer, Merton, Romero: what might a bullshitless life look like, a truthful, kenotic life, life as a transformational grammar?

The monastery is the kitchen of civilisation: the telos of prayer is the production of beer, cheese, and chocolate.

So you’re a minister. Do you have an office? If you do, you’re not a minister. A CEO has an office, a minister has a study.

Wallace Stevens said that the most beautiful thing in the world is the world itself. Add that the most terrible thing in the world is the world itself and you’ve got the ergo to the book of Job.

The one insuperable sorrow of dying is knowing that your friends will grieve.

“We can honour the lives of the fallen while lamenting the gross destruction of war” (from Darkwood Brew). For Christians, unless “the fallen” includes the enemy’s fallen (observe the accompanying iconic Iwo Jima image), and the “lamenting” (biblically) includes emphatic protest at unjust wars (like every war the US has fought since WW II), this much trumpeted declaration becomes this year’s Memorial Day cliché. And speaking of a bombastic Memorial Day cliché – jeez, those camouflaged baseball caps: farcical, or what?

Physically, I am finding my mid-sixties to be a time of small change, i.e., the beginning of being nickeled and dimed to death.

My wife was paedobaptised a Lutheran – strike one (looking); confirmed an Anglican – strike two (screwball); converted to Catholicism – strike three (wild pitch). Finally, however, she married a Barthian Reformed minister. Moral: grace isn’t just another at-bat, it’s a walk-off after a K.

Apostles' Creed video (4): conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary

Here's the fourth installment in my sermon series on the Apostles' Creed:

Karl Barth's theological method: some analytic notes and queries

A post dedicated to Oliver Crisp, to celebrate the launch of his new open access Journal of Analytic Theology.
 

One of Karl Barth's most characteristic patterns of thinking – you'll find it everywhere in the Church Dogmatics – goes something like this:

(1) God has done x

(2) Therefore God can do x

(3) But God doesn't have to do x

(4) Therefore x is an act of God's freedom (the Can) and God's love (the Doesn't-have-to)

(5) By recognising God's Can and God's Doesn't-have-to in x, we understand x as revelation (i.e., a revelation of the God who loves in freedom).

Some observations and queries about this pattern of thought:

a. This might be called a theological method, but it is the furthest thing in the world from a generic method for producing knowledge. It would be more accurate to call it a distillation of Barth's doctrine of God, which is organised around the two mega-attributes of love and freedom (see Barth's definition in CD II/1: God is "the one who loves in freedom"). The content of theology is already written into the theologian's method.

b. This method of thinking would not get anywhere without (1) – that is, without God doing something. Method alone does not generate information about God. Method generates information only as it is applied to (1), to the fact of God's having done something. Specifically, in any given instance of God doing something, method is used to infer from that instance certain things about God's freedom (the Can) and God's love (the Doesn't-have-to). These inferences supply the content of theology. It is in this sense that Barth understands all theology as obedience, as thought following after God. His method is inferential abstraction from the facts of revelation.

c. Yet in (1) – "God has done x" – the word "God" already has content. The God who does something in this instance is already assumed to have a particular character, to be "the one who loves in freedom". It is only this assumption that gives the ensuing method any traction. For example, if God were not already assumed to be free, then instead of (3) we might simply posit that "God must have needed to do x", and the rest of the chain of reasoning would be aborted.

d. Does this mean that the method is incoherent? That in fact the Can and the Doesn't-have-to are supplied not by revelation itself but by the theologian? If so, it would mean that the method is in fact functioning as a revelation, since God's freedom and love are prescribed in the method and not derived from God's doing x.

e. Or does this reflect a recursive pattern that is proper to theological knowing? That the theologian's reflection on God's doing x will be a means of participating in the reality that x itself has brought into being? If so, then the method of theological knowing is itself one of the effects produced by revelation. The theologian does not initiate a process of knowing, but begins to think out of a participation in the God who has been revealed in x as the one who loves in freedom. In that case, what happens to the knower in the event of revelation supplies the method by which the knower begins to appropriate revelation as knowledge.

Edward J. Edwards: a biography of the founder of our civilisation

PREFACE

Though no one would deny that Edward J. Edwards is the founder of civilisation as we know it today, the story of his life, his career, and his untimely death has until now never been told in a complete and satisfying way. Many are the books, the journal articles, the conference papers, the postgraduate dissertations on Edwards' work. But they are partial; they consider the minutest details but miss the great outlines. They sever the man from his work, and on that account even their most satisfying conclusions have about them something cold and unpersuasive. I have studied the literature; I have attended the conferences where Edwards' ideas are parcelled out like items at a yard sale. I have seen how his thoughts are bought and sold. I have watched the scholars haggling over prices. But Edwards – Edwards himself, Edwards the personality, Edwards the man behind the work – where is he in all this? Who is he?

Naturally it would be impossible for any writer to give a comprehensive account of such a mighty subject. To present Edwards adequately would require another polymath, another Edwards. Who among us could even begin to take the measure of Edwards' contributions not only to theology, philosophy, psychiatry, theosophy, but also to chemistry, neurobiology, art history, philology, Egyptology? And that is to leave aside his stranger, harder to evaluate experiments in poetry, music, sculpture, as well as the anatomical sculpture of plastination. Yet without some idea of how and why Edwards spread his genius across these far-flung continents of learning and inquiry, how can we ever hope to fathom that one great all-consuming labour toward which he bent the full power of his mind: I speak, of course, of anastology. We will, I believe, never fathom the depths of the science of anastology until we come to terms – somehow – with its discoverer, its pioneer, its architect and priest. 

That is why I have resolved to write this book. Not merely to uncover some isolated aspects of Edwards' thought, nor to unravel some of the complex strands of his legacy, but to uncover the person himself – the Man behind the Work.

I do not, of course, presume to be able to explain the mind of Edward J. Edwards. One does not explain a thing like that, any more than one explains poetry or hatred or the immense blank beauty of our poisoned seas. I do, however, intend to take a wide view, abandoning the safe limitations of the specialised monograph and seizing as my theme the man himself – his childhood, his studies, his travels, his career, his work habits, his relationships, as well as the tangled circumstances surrounding his death. Only then, I believe, will it be possible to provide a clear and (as far as possible) comprehensive view of what Edwards' work was fundamentally about.

To speak of his achievement is hardly necessary. But to say what that achievement was for – that is the aim that I have set myself in this book. How far I may succeed is for the reader to judge.

It is not hard to see why no one until now has attempted a comprehensive study of Edwards' life. For one thing, there is the whole history of the heresy trials and the Anastological Wars – with all that this entailed for the freedom and limits of scholarly inquiry into anastological science, especially in Europe and North America. Then there is the destruction of so many of Edwards' writings and personal papers at the time of his death – a melancholy obstacle for the would-be biographer, notwithstanding scholars' careful reconstruction of several writings from the fragments that survived. To these challenges must be added the peculiarities of Edwards' working habits. A person whose research was carried out in libraries, universities, and laboratories might indeed have left behind a colourful trail of documentary evidence. But a life such as Edwards' leaves for posterity precious few institutional traces, given his tendency to pursue his research in slums, factories, brothels, insane asylums, not to mention of course the many morgues and cemeteries where Edwards laboured in his final years.

All this has prevented earlier scholars even from contemplating the audacity of a comprehensive biography. But our frustrating reliance on partial and piecemeal interpretations of Edwards' thought has emboldened me to attempt this work, in spite of its obvious limitations. It is my hope that this biography will enable a fuller appreciation of the huge and multiple dimensions of Edwards' legacy, and will inspire a more penetrating insight into the science (what some, before the Wars, falsely called the miracle) of anastology. 

This work is dedicated to my grandfather, a first-generation anastological subject (born 2 April 2011, died 28 December 2073, resurrected 3 January 2074), and a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in my work.

Teaching the Apostles' Creed: videos

This year I'm trying to devote as much of my energy as possible to teaching (i.e. learning!) the Apostles' Creed. I've been teaching an undergraduate class on the Apostles' Creed, leading retreats and seminars on the creed, writing about the creed (starting soon I hope to do a monthly magazine column on the creed), and I've just finished teaching an intensive course for lay preachers on the Apostles' Creed. 

You'd think it might get boring after a while, or that you'd run out of ideas, but actually I've found it very refreshing and stimulating. Theologians can easily give the impression that they're building castles in the sky – developing a completely abstract conceptual system that long ago lost contact with ordinary reality – so there is something impressively sober and concrete about sticking to the creed in all its objective plainness and clearness. The Apostles' Creed is just there – and theology, as reflection on the creed, isn't guesswork or speculation but a description of something that's actually there.

Anyway on Sundays I'm also doing a series of sermons on the Apostles' Creed. Videos of the first few are available, and if you're interested I'll add links to the rest of the series in the coming weeks. Here are the first three:

1.  I Believe

2.  In God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth

3.  And in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord.

A funeral homily

Preached last week in Swansea by Kim Fabricius

The historian Professor Gareth Elwyn Jones, MBE, MA, MEd, PhD, DLitt, FRHistS died on April 20th. He was a universally respected figure in Welsh academic life, and the pre-eminent authority on the history of education in Wales. In 1992, at the age of 53, Gareth was severely injured in a car accident, and subsequently confined to a wheelchair – which didn’t stop this teacher’s teacher from teaching, nor interrupt the steady stream of rigorously researched and elegantly written articles and books, nor dampen his deeply Christian courage and joie de vivre.

Though Gareth and Kim did not know each other well, it was Gareth’s wish that Kim take his funeral, which took place on May 7th at Tabernacle United Reformed Church, Swansea. Professor David Howell gave the eulogy for his friend and colleague. Then Gareth’s wife Kath, herself a formidable teacher and writer, and his two children, Bethan, a university lecturer in English, and Matthew, a musician, paid wonderful tribute to Gareth as husband and father. Bethan (on clarinet) and Matthew (on violin) also played two pieces of music intimately connected to life with father. Then Kim preached the homily.

Kath, Bethan, Matthew, family, friends:

In January 1939, Donald Bradman hit his fourth consecutive century, Superman made his debut in the comics – and Hitler called for the extermination of the Jews.

Later that year, in Wales, for the first time ever, both chair and crown were withheld at the National Eisteddfod – and the first wartime civilian evacuees arrived from across the border.

And there were some notable births in Wales: Donald Anderson, Rhodri Morgan – it was a good year for the Labour Party – and, rewinding to January – the 30th – in Abergavenny, to a father who was a local Congregationalist minister and a mother who had trained as a nurse, one Gareth Elwyn Jones.

Dates and facts. Dates and facts.

Via Morriston, Swansea, the family settled in Whitland, Carmarthenshire. To improve his educational prospects, little Gareth was sent to Caterham, a Congregationalist school in south London. But Surrey is not exactly Carmarthenshire: Gareth hated it. He returned to Whitland to excel at the local grammar school; then on to Swansea to read history.

During his time in Swansea, Gareth worshipped at Walter Road Congregational Church. So did another Swansea student, a philosopher in a department world-renown as a centre of Wittgenstein studies. Perhaps she cited the great Austrian philosopher to the lad sitting next to her in the pew – “If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done” – because in 1963 Kath and Gareth were married in Newport.

Dates and facts. Dates and facts.

Then off to Croydon – ironically, a town just a few miles from Caterham – where the newlyweds began to teach. But only for two years. Hiraeth: back to Wales, to Cardiff, then to Swansea, Pennard, where Gareth and Kath settled – and then, as we’ve heard, the CV takes off. Jones the lecturer; Jones the professor; Jones the dean; Jones the article and Jones the book; Jones the distinguished man of letters – eventually there would be over 20 of them following his name. In short, Jones the teacher and Jones the learner – and the terrific teacher precisely because the lifelong learner. Meanwhile, Jones the husband had also become Jones the dad: Bethan born in 1971, Matthew in 1973.

Date and facts. Dates and facts.

   

And then there were church commitments, community responsibilities, and even some time for leisure. Gareth worshipped here, at Tabernacle, where he became a deacon and elder. He served on the governing bodies at Bishopston Comprehensive School and Pentrechwyth Primary School. And the camping, the cricket, and – yes – the cars ... the collision, on July 3rd, 1992 ... and then the chair...

Dates and facts. Dates and facts. It’s time to move on from dates and facts. Gareth spent his professional life contending against the Gradgrindian – and, alas, Govean – notion that history is reducible to dates and facts. Dates and facts are just data. Things only begin to get interesting, and the real work of the historian only begins, with the conversion of dates and facts into evidence, and the deployment of evidence in the intellectual venture of reconstruction and interpretation, which while partial and provisional might just turn out to be “true”. Why study history? “There are only two good reasons,” observes Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: “to enhance life and prepare for death.”

   

So the date and fact of Gareth’s accident – fine. But what did his disability do to him, and more, what did Gareth do with it? Hemingway said that life breaks everyone, but some grow strong at the broken places. Gareth grew strong at his broken place. His can-do mindset and professionalism – unabated. His cheerful, generous spirit and lofty idealism – undaunted. His devotion to his family, eventually as a delighted tad-cu – unreserved. Not dates and facts, here we are talking about character, shaped by a story. And as a student of John Fines, Gareth knew the crucial importance of story in fashioning human identity. Who am I? I am my story.

   

Or rather, I am the one who is the intersection of stories. My personal history intersects with contemporary history – the present is simply what the past is doing now; intersects with various narratives, domestic, national, and global; cultural narratives that colonise our lives and give them direction: narratives of money and power, health and beauty, and an obsession with denying death at all costs. Bewitching narratives, but narratives that are quite unable to deliver the purpose they promise, and narratives that finally shape grotesquely distorted characters.

   

The good news is that we meet here today in the context of a bigger narrative, a cosmic narrative, an eternal narrative that yet intersects with time. It is, of course, the narrative of Jesus – his life, death, resurrection – and his continuing story – Christ reigns as Lord of history, hidden in it: human history is his-story. It is the story that informs and transforms us in an altogether different way from the stories of our time. It is the story that in our doubts gives us faith, in our despair gives us hope, and in our fears gives us peace. It is the love-story of God’s passionate embrace of the world in Jesus, the story in which Gareth has played his part so well – and now moves on to play other roles in the chronicles of heaven. And it is an endlessly unfolding story, the story – as C. S. Lewis puts it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the story “that goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

   

It is my belief that we are all characters in this story, though some of us may have lost the plot. Perhaps on an occasion like this, in which we celebrate Gareth’s earthly life, grieve its end, and celebrate its final integration into God’s never-ending story – perhaps this is a good time to begin to find the plot again – find faith again – and play our own parts with commitment, imagination, gratitude, and joy.    

Bonhoeffer on the magical powers of leadership

Thanks for the interest in my paper on Bonhoeffer's critique of leadership. This should eventually be published in a collection of essays resulting from the colloquium, so I'll let you know when it's available. In the mean time, here's another excerpt from the first part of the paper (before it gets into a detailed reading of Life Together – “God hates visionaries” and all that):

Bonhoeffer spent much of his life opposing leadership. When Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1933, Bonhoeffer was one of the first voices in Germany to urge for caution. Just two days after Hitler’s installation, 26-year-old Bonhoeffer gave a radio broadcast on “The Younger Generation’s Altered View of the Concept of Leader [Führer].” Bonhoeffer acknowledged that leadership is a normal and necessary part of life. “Naturally, there have always been leaders. Where there is community there is leadership.” But he argued that the concept of political leadership had been transformed in modern Germany; the German Youth Movement had dangerously projected all its longings and aspirations on to the concept of the Leader. Thus, Bonhoeffer said, “the originally prosaic idea of political authority is transformed into the political-messianic idea of leader that we see today.” Authentic leadership, in Bonhoeffer’s view, is the administration of an objective office. “The leader points to the office.” Where political leadership fuses with quasi-religious functions – giving people hope, investing their lives with meaning, awakening their spiritual yearnings – it becomes a dangerous and potentially unlimited power. Leadership becomes “personal and not objective.” In such circumstances, the leader (Führer) can very easily become the misleader (Verführer) – not so much because of anything innately bad in the leader, but because of the powerful illusory longings projected on to the leader. As a sort of definition of authentic leadership, Bonhoeffer remarks: “The true leader must always be able to disappoint.” Though the radio address was cut off before it finished, Bonhoeffer’s text concluded with the somber warning that all leaders are only “penultimate authorities” under the authority of God; the “leader and office that turn themselves into gods mock God.”

In the years that followed, Bonhoeffer applied his critique of political leadership to the question of leadership in Christian communities. In the 1933 Bethel Confession, drafted by Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, the nature of Christian ministry is defined in explicit contrast to leadership. “The power of the ministry,” the confession states, does not depend “on the powers with which a human soul may be gifted.” Hence “we … protest against the attempt to apply the modern leadership principle to the preaching ministry.” Christian ministry, as “service to the Word,” is indeed “the opposite of any magical powers of leadership.” Here the point seems to be that Christian ministry consists in responsibility to an objective office and an objective word that God has given; it does not depend on influence, charisma, or what Bonhoeffer elsewhere called the “melting together” of souls.