Dear Friends in Christ,

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran theologian whose life and death gave his theology its ultimate credibility—he was executed by the Nazi regime in April 1945, just weeks before the war’s end. His concepts of “costly grace,” the “church for others,” continue to challenge comfortable faith and complicit institutions across the theological spectrum.

We as individuals and community, all together, know how much we need challenge, primarily from ourselves, to be fully alive.

In his essay “On Stupidity,” written from Tegel prison in 1943, included in what became Letters and Papers From Prison, Bonhoeffer is explicit that he is not talking about a lack of intelligence. He writes that stupid people are often intellectually capable—even gifted—but that something has happened to them socially and spiritually.

Stupidity, for Bonhoeffer, is a sociological phenomenon before it is a psychological one. It is what happens to people when they surrender their inner life to a movement, a leader, a crowd. The individual becomes a mouthpiece. Critical judgment atrophies. Not because the person can’t think, but because the social environment has made independent thinking feel dangerous, disloyal, or simply unnecessary.

He observed that when people came under the sway of powerful historical forces—and he was watching Nazism do this in real time—they became defenseless. Not against bombs or armies, but against slogans. Against the seductive simplicity of a narrative that tells them who the enemy is and promises to restore greatness and order.

The stupefied person doesn’t reason their way to complicity. They drift into it, step by comfortable step, each accommodation feeling reasonable in isolation.

What makes this chilling is Bonhoeffer’s conclusion: you cannot reach the stupid person by argument.

Reason has no purchase.

Only an “inner liberation”—his phrase—can restore the capacity for genuine thought, and that ultimately, for Bonhoeffer, is a spiritual event.

Grounding must be something other than the crowd.

A society gripped by stupefaction lets go of moral distinctions. The distinction between violent rhetoric and legitimate political speech dissolves. The distinction between the policy of disagreement and the active harming of vulnerable people dissolves. Other disappearing distinctions are strength and cruelty, loyalty to a leader, and idolatry.

The late Walter Bruggemann, perhaps the most eminent Old Testament scholar of recent times, wrote about this as the triumph of the royal consciousness—the numbing, satiation and managed reality that the empire requires in order to sustain itself.

The prophetic imagination is, for Bruggemann, precisely the counter-practice: the refusal of numbness, the insistence on grief before hope, the naming of death as death before any resurrection can be announced. The prophet is the one who has not been stupefied—and who therefore appears dangerous, disloyal, and naive to those who have.

None of us can resist the forces that pull towards corruption of soul if we remain in a private silo. Bonhoeffer named the antidote—costly grace, the embodied following of Christ in the world.

Not religion as private comfort.

Not cheap grace that asks for nothing.

But a discipleship that keeps the self anchored in something the crowd cannot dissolve—the claim of the other person on my conscience, the reality of the victim’s face, the non-negotiable weight of the neighbor. This is the anchoring of one in the claims of Christ as in Matthew 25. When ideology claims that some are expendable, we resist.

Your fellow traveler,

—Richard