Nick Cave, the great Australian Gothic rock artist, is both God-bothering and God-bothered. But his most popular song is best-known for its apparently atheistic or deistic line, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God.” Along with REM’s Losing my Religion, it’s the anthem for many a New Atheist. Many Christians are at a loss to what he’s singing about.

Tragically, this atheist static and our tone deafness to Cave’s craving for love—human and divine—distracts us from addressing the similar longing of Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, which he describes as “cross-pressured”. There’s a definite dichotomy here: unbelievers who are aware that the rumour of God kept alive by billions can’t be easily dismissed; and believers who are aware that many unbelievers have some good reasons for unbelief, hearing doubting echoes on dark and silent nights.

But Cave then sings to his lover, “But darlin’ I know you do”, hymning God in the resounding refrain: “into my arms O Lord, into my arms”. To attempt to understand Cave’s impassioned cry to the Intimate Interventionist, we’ll draw him into dialogue with the great theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer—specifically while he was anxiously awaiting a possible reunion with his young fiancé in his Berlin prison cell, tragically denied by Hitler’s hangman.

This great theologian was a critic of a childish faith in a conveniently interventionist “God of the gaps” with “an occasional walk-on part”; an abstract, dualistic transcendence, a pious religiosity. He saw it as a cover-up of  our follies and irresponsibilities. But he finds in the incarnate, fleshy and crucified God a love that fulfils the highest human loves, not just one that fills the gaps.

Cave’s magnificent “Into my Arms” is from The Boatman’s Call CD. The album title recalls the mythical boatman of the final, watery journey to the underworld. It provides the dark background that enables the love song to shine brighter. Christians who only hear its “I don’t believe …” miss its “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief” tension. For Cave continues: “But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him/ Not to intervene when it came to you/ Not to touch a hair on your head/ To leave you as you are/ And if He felt He had to direct you/ Then direct you into my arms.”

This humorous “doubter’s dialogue” with Cave’s believing better half turns serious with his prayerful plea to enlighten her journey back, to constantly return her “into my arms, O Lord” so they may “walk like Christ, in grace and love”. Underneath his arms, the lover trusts, “are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27). This is indeed an intimate interventionist.

Bonhoeffer unpacks the intimate nature of God’s interventions in his Letters and Papers from Prison (1953 translation), especially in his letters to best friend and confessor Eberhard Bethge. He wrote while separated from his fiancée Maria while Bethge faced army enforced separation from his wife Renate and first child Dietrich:

“In the first place nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try and find anything. We must simply hold out and win through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap: he does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain.”

Anyone who’s grieved the loss of loved ones knows that gap, though well-meaning Christians often try to use God to fill it.

On July 21 1944, the day after the failed plot to assassinate Hitler that he’d been involved in, Bonhoeffer wrote in a way that connects to Cave’s “Into My Arms”, of,  “throwing oneself completely into the arms of God”, identifying with “the suffering of God in the world … awake with Christ in Gethsemane”. We are called to be on the side of suffering humanity, as Jesus, “the man for others” was, in a form of “this-worldly transcendence or intercessory intervention”.

In rejecting religious manipulation of God for “religionless Christianity” Bonhoeffer, like Moses, Luther and C. S. Lewis, saw God as like the sun, too blindingly transcendent to be seen directly. But God is indirectly omnipresent in everyday events, behind the masks of his human images. This opened Bonhoeffer to a polyphonic, multi-voiced, and multi-dimensional faith, as this letter to a distressed Bethge on May 20 1944 reveals.

“There is always a danger of intense love destroying what I might call the ‘polyphony’ of life … God requires that we should love him eternally with our whole hearts, yet not so as to compromise or diminish our earthly affections, but as a kind of cantus firmus [pre-existing tune] to which the other melodies of life provide a counterpoint. Earthly affection is one of these counterpoints or themes … Even the Bible can find room for the Song of Songs, and one could hardly have a more passionate and sensual love … Where the ground bass is firm and clear, there is nothing to stop the counterpoint from being developed to the utmost of its limits. Both ground bass and counterpoint are ‘without confusion and yet distinct’.”

“In the words of the Chalcedon formula, like Christ in his divine and human natures. … Perhaps … polyphony in music is a musical reflection of this Christological truth, and … therefore an essential element in the Christian life … Only a polyphony of this kind can give life a wholeness, and at the same time assure us that nothing [calamitous] can go wrong so long as the cantus firmus is kept going… Perhaps … the separation which lies ahead will be easier for you to bear [with this in mind].”

Bonhoeffer, a concert level pianist, extends the musical analogy to Christ’s two natures, divine and human, which join without confusing or destroying divine and human love. The intimacy of the Incarnation links divine and human life and love through the membrane of Christ’s manhood. The natural sphere of human love is not annihilated by heavenly, ultimate, “supernatural” divine love, but nature is preserved and perfected by grace. As Bonhoeffer’s mentor Karl Barth said, “God doesn’t have to make humanity small to make himself big”. God is not a distant divinity or generic “God-ness”, nor is humanity an abstract rationality, but both are found in the particular divine human person of Jesus Christ, the very definition of divine and natural life and love.

Bonhoeffer is literally closest to Cave’s “Into My Arms” on December 18, 1943: “To long for the transcendent when you are in your wife’s arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste, and … not what God expects of us. We ought to find God and love him in the blessings he sends us. If he …grants us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself… ‘To everything there is a season [Ecclesiastes 3]. Everything has its time … a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing’.”

Ultimately, Cave’s craving for his lover, his carnal desire to cradle her in his arms, is sanctified by the incarnate God of the cradle, cross, resurrection and consummation. Bonhoeffer’s desire for his fiancée was not fulfilled in this life, but as he embraced the beginning of new life before the gallows, an even larger love, as “the Infinite and the intimate became one” for him. This is a God of the gallows, not of the gaps.

Gordon Preece, Director of Ethos, is the co-editor of ‘Bonhoeffer Down Under’. www.atfpress.com