Today marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was executed by the Nazis as an enemy of the state on April 9, 1945, mere weeks before the end of World War II. He has much to teach us in our own time.
The first I heard of Bonhoeffer was in a dank, windowless classroom as an undergrad student in the early ‘70s. That religion professor at Florida Southern remains among the worst teachers I have ever had.
In that course, the professor assigned us short books from the series, Makers of the Modern Theological Mind. I later took courses in grad school from the series editor himself, Dr. Bob E. Patterson. The series included neo-orthodox scholars such as Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, and Bonhoeffer.
In the course at Florida Southern, we were assigned the books to read ahead of time. But in the class itself the professor simply read them aloud word-by-word in a monotone, nasally voice. No explanation, no discussion, just reading what we’d already read. To keep from falling asleep – snoring and drooling were problematic – I worked on assignments for other classes.
Despite that terrible introduction, I came to appreciate both Bonhoeffer’s life story and his writings. Several years later in grad school at Baylor University, I was introduced to his academic works such as Act and Being.
But the greatest impact came from reading The Cost of Discipleship, published as Bonhoeffer was immersed in resisting Hitler’s regime. The book became a must-read for many of us Chi Alpha campus ministers back in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, as did his short volume, Life Together.
Today Bonhoeffer’s robust and activist faith continue to speak broadly. A hero to evangelicals and to those on the political right in the US, his writings and example also appeal to justice warriors, liberal theologians, and scholars from other faith traditions.
Such a diverse capture is often the case with influencers who die young. Bonhoeffer was only 39 when he was hanged. Shortened lives often lead to differing conjectures about what direction a person might have headed. Yet his writings themselves are as complex as they are profound and reveal a thinker on a journey.
His was a thought-life in process and he left much unfinished, including Ethics, a book he considered his most important work. His Letters and Papers from Prison is a helpful reflection on his own thinking. The 1970 enlarged edition I’ve read contains more than 200 documents – extensive correspondence with his family and others, theological notes, and his prison poems – smuggled out by his sympathetic prison guards.
Where Bonhoeffer would have gone in his thinking had he lived longer is difficult to say. His neo-orthodoxy was a protest of the liberal theological writings of the previous generation. Although he would not have considered himself a Christian fundamentalist in the 1930s style, he was greatly influenced by the gospel preaching of Black Protestants in the US.
Much has been written about him, and there is good reason for all that attention. His writings and the way in which he lived and died had great impact on his own generation as well as on the generations that have followed.
This much is true: he was a man who wrestled intensely with a faith to which he was deeply committed. And that commitment drove him to action both in the pulpit and in the political resistance of his day.
On this the 80th anniversary of his death, there are four things that speak to me about Bonhoeffer for the time in which we now live.
- He had a pastor’s heart.
Bonhoeffer was a brilliant scholar, who taught university students and seminarians alike. But everything he said and wrote, he digested with the heart of a pastor. Meaning he did so with the tenderness of a shepherd looking after the sheep into whose care they had been entrusted.
Ordained a German Lutheran minister at the age of 25, Bonhoeffer ministered to congregations in Germany and in England. This shepherd’s heart shines through in his writings, particularly Life Together.
It drove him to establish the Confessing Church when the official German Lutheran Church’s mission was being diverted by the Nazis. It moved him to defend German Jews, guiding many of them to safety in neighboring Switzerland.
And it propelled him to keep training local pastors through underground seminaries and his “seminary on the run”, even as Hitler was engulfing all of Germany, including the official church, in the Nazi war machine. Although Bonhoeffer’s arrest ended his own efforts, he remained a pastor on duty in prison until the end.
- His commitment to the church drove his opposition to Hitler.
Some writers portray Bonhoeffer as primarily political. It is true that his faith propelled him to take actions political in nature, but he saw neither himself nor the church as political. In fact, he resisted the politicization of the German church. Speak and act against injustice but resist partisan subversion of the faith.
Hitler rose to power on the cult of personality, meaning his power was focused on himself even as everything in German society – including the church and the state – was sucked up into that personality cult. Hitler even pressured the church to alter scriptures, scriptural interpretations, and creedal statements to reflect his war against the Jews.
But as Hitler was capturing the minds of church leaders and the church apparatus itself, Bonhoeffer helped lead the charge with the Confessing Church and his rogue seminaries. Bonhoeffer believed the church must be protected from capture by the politics of the age – any age – and he opposed that capture to his own demise.
- He resisted using the ways of the world to oppose worldliness.
Did Bonhoeffer really try to assassinate Hitler, as is often portrayed? Amidst evidence that can appear conflicting, I embrace the perspective of those who affirm that Bonhoeffer never deviated from his pacifism.
He may have been on a journey, as many say, from traditionalist to pacifist to some sort of realist. But he never forsook his commitment to the teachings of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. As he wrote in Letters about the views he expressed in Discipleship, “Today I see clearly the dangers of that book, though I still stand by it.” (emphasis added by me)
In fact, it was his pacifism that earned him the label, “enemy of the state.” For to be a pacifist as a German citizen was to defy Hitler’s goals of destroying and subjugating alien races and forcefully expanding Germany’s borders. He trembled that he might be conscripted and went to great lengths to avoid it.
Including joining the counterintelligence operation, Abwehr. Through the Abwehr, he reached out to his international ecumenical contacts, endeavoring to make the outside world aware of the German resistance. And it was through Abwehr operations that he joined in helping Jews escape.
Others around him may have sought to end Hitler’s life – and it may have been his temptation – but it is doubtful it ever became his goal. As ever, his bedrock commitment was to defend and protect the church, its mission, and its believers.
- His actions were rooted in how seriously he took Jesus.
Bonhoeffer began pursuing an education in theology as a boy of 14, completing his Doctor of Theology degree by age 21, graduating with top honors. But shortly thereafter, his pursuit of faith became more than intellectual and from then on, he was all in on following Jesus.
If he was going to follow Jesus, he was going to take Jesus seriously. As he wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Following Jesus was all or nothing with Bonhoeffer, and that included suffering as Christ had suffered.
But suffering, as Bonhoeffer understood it, was not an inward focused thing; it was the inevitable outcome of proclaiming Christ in both word and deed. Bonhoeffer famously spoke out against cheap grace, a grace that costs nothing.
Instead, he saw the Christian’s calling as incarnational as was Christ’s own calling. Incarnational living meant getting down in the dirt in rooting out the injustices that oppressed people from living as God intended. In this light, he wrote in his essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question”: “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
Bonhoeffer wrote this essay in 1933 regarding what was happening to Jews in Germany. But his dedication to engage in the struggle for justice had been birthed in his experiences with Black Americans and the Black Church in New York City starting in 1930. It was also during his brief time in the US that he became engaged with the ecumenical movement, embracing the larger Christian community.
By 1941, the Nazis were shutting down Bonhoeffer’s rogue ministry. In that year he was forbidden to print or publish anything, though he continued to write and kept up with his underground training of pastors. That was the year he joined the Abwehr and became a courier for the resistance movement.
He was arrested in April 1943 and imprisoned awaiting trial. In the prison, he continued reaching out to fellow prisoners and guards – and writing those letters which those guards in turn smuggled out.
Two years later on April 4, 1945, the diaries of the head of Abwehr were discovered by the Nazis and immediately Hitler ordered that Bonhoeffer and the rest of the Abwehr membership be executed. After a sham of a trial with no due process, Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death. The next day, April 9, he was executed.
As our own world once again convulses in its fallen state, I am fortified by Bonhoeffer’s example and teachings. In a sermon written in 1938 and much later published in The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2012), he wrote:
“Your Yes to God demands your No to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and the poor, to all godlessness and mocking of the holy. Your Yes to God demands a brave No to everything that will ever hinder you from serving God alone, whether it be your profession, your property, your house, your honor before the world. Faith means decision.”
For my readers, I highly recommend two books by Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. For those wishing to dive deeper into Bonhoeffer’s internal tensions and faith journey, I recommend his Letters and Papers from Prison as a good place to start.
A helpful critique of the way in which Bonhoeffer has recently been portrayed in film has been written by Myles Werntz, ‘Bonhoeffer’ Bears Little Resemblance to Reality. For those seeking an opinion on Bonhoeffer’s pacifism contrary to popular belief, I recommend reading Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbrel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (2013). Or follow some of Scot McKnight’s writings on this subject. For a take on the American Black church’s influence on Bonhoeffer, see Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (2014, 2021).
In my blog, “A Journey in the Borderlands”, I regularly reflect on faith & politics, justice & compassion, the life of faith, leadership, ethics, and other topics. Subscription is free and you can sign up here.
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