London, Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, October 28, 1934
In this sermon, the third in a series on 1 Corinthians 13, Bonhoeffer speaks of knowledge, of the search for understanding that he assumed was in some way a goal in every person’s life. Having an older brother, Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer, who was a physical chemist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was well aware of the achievements of physical science and of the recent shake-up in scientific understanding regarding the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. His correspondence with his brother, who later struggled mightily to go on doing his research during the war, shows how he longed for Karl Friedrich to realize that his, Dietrich’s, goal was also plausible. Though their paths toward understanding were different, each of the two brothers remained respectful of the other’s beliefs.
1 Corinthians 13:8–12 rsv: Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
In troubled times, if we stop to ask ourselves what will really come of all our agitation, when our thoughts go back and forth from one idea to another; what will come of all our worries and fears, all our wishes and hopes, in the end—and if we are willing to have an answer from the Bible—what we will hear is: There will be just one thing in the end, and that is the love that was in our thoughts, worries, wishes, and hopes. Everything else ends and passes away—everything we did not think, and long for, out of love. All thoughts, all knowledge, all talk that has not love comes to an end—only love never ends.
Now if we are aware that something will come to an end, then it is probably not even worth starting. Life is too short and too serious for us to have time to waste, to spend on things that will only come to an end. Now and then we realize this for ourselves with shattering clarity. On New Year’s or on our birthday, when we look back at what we have done during the past year or in the period of our lives just past, we are sometimes horrified to see that we have done nothing of lasting value. All our worries and efforts, all the things we have thought and said, have long since died away to nothing. Nothing is left—except perhaps an act of love, a loving thought, a hope for someone else, which may have occurred almost by chance, perhaps without our even being aware of it.
Where this is leading is clear: everything, all our knowledge, insight, thinking, and talking should in the end move toward and turn into love. For only what we think because of love, and in love, will remain, will never end.
Why must everything else come to an end, and why does only love never end? Because only in love does a person let go of himself or herself and give up his or her will, for the other person’s benefit. Because love alone comes not from my own self but from another self, from God’s self. Because it is through love alone that God acts through us—whereas in everything else it is we ourselves who are at work; it is our thoughts, our speaking, our knowledge—but it is God’s love. And what is ours comes to an end, all of it—but what is of God remains. Because love is God’s very self and God’s will; that is why it never ends, it never doubts, it stays its course. It pursues its way with sure steps, like a sleepwalker, straight through the midst of all the dark places and perplexities of this world. It goes down into the depths of human misery and up to the heights of human splendor. It goes out to enemies as well as to friends, and it never abandons anyone, even when it is abandoned by everyone. Love follows after its beloved through guilt and disgrace and loneliness, all of which are no part of it; it is simply there and never ends. And it blesses every place it enters. Everywhere it goes, it finds imperfection and bears witness to perfection.
Love desires to enter into the world of our thoughts and our understanding. Understanding is the most like love. This is because its object is the other; it goes toward the other. Knowledge wants to grasp and understand and explain the world and other people and the mysteries of God. There is no human being who does not take part in the search for understanding. Human beings are fundamentally creatures who seek to understand, who must try to understand, even against their own will, even when thinking is not their calling and not their personal goal. There are great questions on which each person tries out his or her capacity to understand and comes to understand the limits of our understanding. These questions are: What is a person’s own path that he or she should follow through life? What is the other person’s path? What is the path of God, which underlies all our human paths? There is no one who is not familiar with these questions and does not have to keep asking them, but there is no human person who would be able to answer them on the strength of his or her own ability to understand.
All the solutions that people in this world have tried, which we try every day, are imperfect; they will all pass away. No one knows this better than someone who has done a lot of thinking and knows a great deal. Today there is no one who knows it better than those who, not so long ago, were so proud and confident in their success—physicists and other scientists. And this truth was recognized by one of the greatest thinkers of all time [Socrates] as the end and the beginning of all wisdom, when he said: I know that I know nothing. That was indeed the end; that was his final certainty.
But beyond this certainty, Paul recognized an infinitely greater certainty: Our knowledge is imperfect—but when that which is perfect comes, the imperfect will end. That which is perfect is love. Understanding and love are the imperfect and the perfect. And the more longing for perfection there is in the person who seeks knowledge, the more loving he or she will be. Perfect understanding is perfect love. This is a strange but very profound and true statement by Paul.
Perhaps someone will ask: But what does understanding have to do with love in the first place? Knowledge means precisely the objective, factual kind of knowing, without any personal opinion entering into it. Certainly that is true. But in order even to be able to see something, we need to love it. If we are indifferent toward a person or a thing, we will never understand it. We will always misunderstand a thing or a person we hate. Only a person whom we love can we fully know. We will know only as much about a person as we love in him or her.
The so-called worldly wise person, who is reckoned to be a good judge of people, actually knows and understands nothing about them. He or she has a trick of knowing about people’s evil inclinations and being especially wary of them—but must do this precisely because of not really understanding people. Imagine that someone whom we do not find likable has done something to us that surprises us, and then that someone whom we love very much has done something that we simply cannot understand. In the first case we will immediately have all sorts of explanations for the bad motives that led that person to such an action; while, on the other hand, we will endlessly search and ask, and indeed invent excuses, in an effort to understand why the person we love acted the way he or she did. We will certainly finish by knowing this second person better than we know the first.
All real understanding is a piece of love, even if it is a love that is still all wrapped up in vanity and self-centeredness and thirst for fame. But it has within it a longing for the perfection that will come when the imperfect has passed away, when perfect truth, knowledge, and love will dawn on us.
“But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away”—it doesn’t happen gradually, as if the imperfect could grow up into the perfect. Instead, the perfect, which the imperfect can never achieve, simply comes by itself. It will come, in complete freedom, in the perfection of its power, and the imperfect will stop, will break up, as a reflected image breaks up when one sees the reality.
It is a surprising image that we have here, in which childhood is compared to imperfect knowledge and mature adulthood to the perfection of love. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. . . .” Knowing without loving is childish, childish reasoning, a childish attempt to become master of the world in a sneaking way. Proud knowledge without love is like the bragging of a stupid youngster who does not deserve to be taken seriously, at which a mature adult can only smile. “When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” We would have said it exactly the other way around—childishness is knowledge with love in it, and maturity is realistic knowledge without love. But Paul says that love is the thing that shows mature insight, true knowledge, adulthood. The way of love is the way an adult acts. This makes the distinction clear between this sort of love and any sort of passion, weakness, or sentimentality. Love means truth in the eyes of God; it means perfect knowledge in the eyes of God.
Then another image: “For now we see in a mirror. . . .” The thoughts of God are only seen in the world as if reflected in a mirror. We see them only as if in mirror writing. And God’s mirror writing is hard to read. It says that the great is small and the small is great, that right is wrong and wrong is right, that a promise awaits the hopeless while judgment awaits those who are full of hope; it says that the cross signifies victory and death signifies life. We can read God’s mirror writing in Jesus Christ, in his life and sayings and dying.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly. . . .”—seeing the cross dimly, in God’s mirror writing, makes it really hard to recognize and to understand. That is the way we see now, certainly—“but then face to face.” “But then,” when the perfect comes breaking in, when the mirror of this world is shattered and the glorious light of God surrounds us. “But then,” at the end, at our end, in the hour of our dying and ceasing and departure. “But then,” face to face. . . . Then all will be clear, and perfect love will be with us. “Face to face”—to see God as God truly is; not only to believe in love but to see it and feel it, touch it and experience it, to live in its blessedness. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God ” [Matt. 5:8]—then, face to face.
“Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.” The answer is in that last phrase, “even as I have been fully understood.” That is the only reason why I may hope to understand fully and to experience perfection—that I am understood by God, by love, by that which is perfect. God’s light seeks out my eyes; God’s love seeks my heart. God has long since known me and loved me—that is why I am so irresistibly drawn to God, to know God and to love God in return. That is why I press on so urgently toward God, toward perfection, even though I know only in part. I could never know God if God had not first known me. God and the human creature recognize each other. They see each other face to face, they know about each other, they know about their love for each other; they know that they cannot and should not be without each other. And now they are with each other and in each other, they are one in knowledge, one in the blessed mystery of their love. The human creature sinks down to the ground and stretches out his or her hands, and is no longer his or her self, but is in God. That is perfection. Amen.