42 dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 41, Number 1 • Spring 2002 Probing the Will of God: Bonhoeffer and Discernment Lisa E. Dahill Lisa E. Dahill is a researcher at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Menlo Park, California, and an adjunct professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley. Abstract: Like the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the spiritual discernment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer seeks to bring one’s life into conformity (Gleichgestaltung) with Christ. Such conformation makes discipleship costly; but it also overflows with the fullness of life. K ey T erms: Bonhoeffer; discernment; discipleship. Today, as I begin writing this article, is the feast day of St. Ignatius, July 31. As a Lutheran, I might have overlooked this feast (it’s not in the LBW calen- dar), but a Jesuit friend reminds me of the day and celebrates it with Christians around the world in honor of the 16 th century Spaniard. Among other things, Ignatius of Loyola was an extraordinarily gifted spiri- tual director whose sensitivity to the movements of the human and divine spirit bears continuing fruit in the Spiritual Exercises he developed, still in widespread use today. 1 In these Exercises Ignatius provides a dy- namic framework for the spiritual director guiding directees in a 30-day retreat. This structured retreat is centered in the movement through the paschal expe- rience of Jesus Christ and in the directee’s discern- ment of his or her own authentic vocation in response to the love and gifts of Christ. Although Ignatius him- self would not have used this language in this way, his Exercises provide a creative, powerful tool bridging for retreatants the gap between religion and spirituality. In other words, Ignatius structures the resources of the religion–the vast and potentially remote-seeming biblical, liturgical, moral, theological, and devotional traditions of the church–in such a way as to allow them to come to life in the prayerful personal experi- ence of the retreatants, that is, in their spirituality. 2 At the heart of this mediating role is the Exercises’ centering in the practice of discernment. That is, what mediates between religion and spirituality is the dis- cernment of the “for me” or “for us” central also to Lutheran experience, or that which brings religious truths (Word of God) to life in particular personal or historical circumstances (Word of God pro me, pro nobis). Martin Luther thus distinguished the Bible as text, full of historical and theological assertions, from the living Word of God encountering the hearer or reader through that text. 3 “God must say to you in your heart that this Word is God’s Word, otherwise it is uncertain. Even if you had all the wisdom of the whole of Scripture, and all reason, yet if what is said here did not come or was not sent from God it would be nothing at all.” 4 The task of interpretation, then, is to discern that living Word, by the power of the Holy Spirit, for new listeners and contexts. In more recent years, Dietrich Bonhoeffer similarly sought to discern the pro me/pro nobis of faith: the question that haunted him at the end of his life, writing from his Nazi prison cell, was not so much, “Who is Jesus Christ?” (a reli- gious question) as “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” 5 Yet for all the contemporary insistence in many quarters that religion is outdated and spirituality alone worth our attention, note that in fact none of these spiritualities–Ignatius’, Luther’s, or Bonhoeffer’s– makes any sense on its own, without the religion it animates. Without the biblical and traditional imag- ery that both frames and is the very stuff of the Exer- cises, there can be no living encounter with the cruci- fied and risen One. Without the Scriptures themselves,