The Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Broadleaf Books, 2022

This little book on the Psalms was originally published by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany in 1940 and first translated into English in 1974, a slim devotional psalter designed to be slipped into a pocket or bag and opened at any time. Broadleaf Books has reprinted that volume (in an English-language translation by James Burtness) in a neatly enhanced way, with the text of various psalms inset in the chapters. There’s a brief, slightly breathless Introduction by Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann and a biographical sketch by Eberhard Bethge that’s far less informative than, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on Bonhoeffer and therefore only has proximity to recommend it. 

The book itself is and always has been puzzling Lutheran nonsense. What passes for Bonhoeffer’s central contention (apart from claiming that Jesus Christ is central to understanding the Psalms, of course, even though the anonymous writers of the Psalms had never heard of Him) is that humans need help to pray – and, presumably, that the omniscient and omnipotent Creator of the universe needs help to hear those prayers, like a Victorian dowager with tin ear-horn. Bonhoeffer wastes no time cautioning against the very idea of a personal God:

It is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicings – all of which the heart can do by itself – with prayer … Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one’s heart. It means rather to find the way to God and speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that, one needs Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer largely justifies this stance by pointing out that in the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus actually teaches his followers a prayer and instructs them that they should use it. He Himself is not mentioned in that prayer, nor is there any ancillary caution that the prayer can’t be used without Him, but nonetheless, thereby the whole concept of Bonhoeffer’s idea of intercession was born, where the faithful can’t talk to their God unless they’re friends with His Son. 

Despite the fact that They’re the same Person, although virtually never in Bonhoeffer’s conceiving:

God has promised to be present in the worship of the congregation. Thus the congregation conducts its worship according to God’s order. But Jesus Christ himself has offered the perfect worship by perfecting every prescribed sacrifice in his own voluntary and sinless sacrifice. Chris brought in himself the sacrifice of God for us and our sacrifice for God.

Bonhoeffer was famously hanged by the Nazis in 1945, and devotion to his devotionals has been fervent ever since in ways it might not have been otherwise, and this pretty little volume from Broadleaf Books will have immediate appeal to that readership. And there’s a certain muscular elegance to Bonhoeffer’s thinking that will extend that appeal, admittedly.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.