"Christianity stands or falls by its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power, and by its apologia for the weak."

—Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer's understanding of our responsibility to take the side of the weak arose from his understanding of God's own weakness, revealed for us in the cross:

And it shaped his understanding of faith as weakness, too, as @RootAndrew says:

"Faith for Bonhoeffer can never be vital, vibrant ... faith can only be 'weak'; not weak in the sense of pathetic, but weak because it takes the form of its Lord, found on a cross."

His understanding of this truth only deepened for him over time. As he says in his Letters: "God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which God can be with us and help us."

The line quoted at top of this thread is from a sermon on 2 Cor. 12:9. In the same sermon he argues that "all human suffering and weakness shares in God’s own suffering and weakness in the world" and that "God is glorified in the weak as God in Christ was glorified on the cross."

And he concludes: "Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power. It should give more offence, more shock to the world, than it is doing. Christianity should take a much more definite stand for the weak than for the potential moral right of the strong."

As Charles Marsh and Reggie Williams, among others, have shown, Bonhoeffer's realization of this truth came about in large part through his experiences at a black church in Harlem. And this strikes me as a prophetic word to/against Christians in the USA.

He knew what we have to learn: to be freed from whiteness and nationalism, greed and violence, we must embrace weakness and humiliation, looking up to those who've been despised, seeing in their faces how the truth about ourselves and about God is not at all what we've imagined.

And he knew that only fanatics imagine strength is holy. So long as we imagine God as strong, desiring to assert our power over others (whether directly or indirectly via some symbolic authority, like the police or the military), we will remain restless, unsettled, tormented.

This insight cuts right to the heart of the matter for Xians, IMO. And it leaves me convinced our responses to whatever happens—including the pandemic and the presidential transition—must be marked by (weak!) intercession for the weak and (weak!) protest against strength. /end