URC Daily Devotion for Wednesday 20th August 2025

Wednesday 20th August 2025

Bonhoeffer 3

Psalm 8:1-5
O LORD, our Sovereign,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
    to silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
    and crowned them with glory and honour.

Reflection        
In February 2002 the then United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, gave a news briefing about lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. He stated ‘that there are…known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ Historically, God has been seen by some people as an explanation for things we do not know; the so-called ‘God of the gaps’ – the gaps in our knowledge.

From his prison cell on 29th May 1944 Bonhoeffer wrote ‘how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge’. To do this means that as the frontiers of our knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed further back with them and is constantly in retreat.’ Rather than thinking this way, Bonhoeffer argues that ‘we are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realise his presence not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved.’ 

The amount of knowledge has increased tremendously in the eighty years since Bonhoeffer wrote, from astrophysics and space exploration, on the one hand, to microbiology on the other. The extent of God‘s (ever-expanding) creation is beyond our ability to measure, let alone to comprehend, but Christians believe that the God who created and sustains all that exists was revealed most clearly and completely in Jesus as one who loves every person in a personal way, whether or not they know it.

Prayer        
Loving God, 
help us to experience You in what we know. 
Guide those who are involved in research and exploration. 
And may fresh discoveries, of whatever kind, 
only serve to deepen a sense of wonder 
at your greatness and your goodness, 
both for ourselves and for others. Amen.