In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer mentions his prison reading and his thoughts on where God fits into the modern scientific world view. This excerpt is from a letter dated 29 May 1944.
I am now completely absorbed in Weizsäcker’s book on The World View of Physics. It has once again become completely clear to me that we can no longer let God play the role of standing in the gaps of our incomplete knowledge. If we do that, when the limits of our knowledge are pushed ever further back (as is inevitable), then along with them God will be pushed ever further away into a continual retreat.
It is in what we know that we should find God, not in what we do not know. God desires to be understood by us in the problems we have solved, not in our unsolved problems. This is true for the relationship between God and scientific knowledge. It is just as true for the general human problems of death, suffering, and guilt.
Today for these questions as well there are human answers which leave God completely out of consideration. Humans will deal with these questions without God-they always have; and it is simply not true that only Christianity has an answer. Christians solutions may be convincing or unconvincing, just like other possible solutions. Even here God is not a gap-filler.
God must be known first not at the limits of our possibilities but in the center of our life-first in life and not in death, first in health and strength and not in suffering, first in activity and not in suffering-that’s where God desires to be known.
The basis of all this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He is the center of life and in no way “came for this cause”-to answer our unsolved questions.
