Peter Slade

“In a letter from Tegel Prison, written on the occasion of the baptism of the son of Eberhard and Renate Bethge in May 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of the new form that Christian witness would assume in “the revolutionary times ahead”—that period following the German church’s complicity in mass death and the mission to create a world without Jews. Bonhoeffer offered this “first child of a new generation,” Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge, a sober assessment of the possibility and future of Christianity. It was not solely intended to gentle him into the faith; the challenges of the coming years would throw everyone back to first convictions. What could be more obvious than that the church had lost its capacity to make real the word of reconciliation and redemption to the world? “We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. For your thought and action will enter on a new relationship; your thinking will be confined to your responsibilities in action. With us thought was often the luxury of the onlooker; with you it will be entirely subordinated to action.”1”
― Peter Slade, People Get Ready: Twelve Jesus-Haunted Misfits, Malcontents, and Dreamers in Pursuit of Justice