Review of "Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer," by Charles Marsh

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on a weekend getaway with confirmands of
Zion's Church congregation (1932) | Wikipedia biographical link

The Journey of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2014/09/01/the-journey-of-dietrich-bonhoeffer/

by Scot McKnight

September 1, 2014

Comments

There are a number of very important biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, none more complete or significant than the one by Bonhoeffer’s friend, Eberhard Bethge (Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography). Bethge’s biography is complete though not exhaustive (even if at times a bit exhausting) and takes serious commitment to finish. The prose is not captivating. Alongside Bethge is F. Schlingensiepen’s solid and recent biography (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Those two describe a similar journey for Bonhoeffer (see below) while Eric Metaxas (Bonhoeffer) told a different story, a more evangelical one, which is why so many evangelicals have found Bonhoeffer in the last five years. Mark Thiessen Nation provides in his study (Bonhoeffer the Assassin?) a different journey for Bonhoeffer (see reviews by Scot McKnight and Roger Olson).

Amazon link

But the best written description of Bonhoeffer’s journey is now by Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Why use the word “journey”? Because people have made meaning out of Bonhoeffer’s life and theological development according to the scheme they find in his story. The fork in the road or the place of decision is right here: When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany after that aborted visit to Union Theological Seminary in the summer of 1939, did his theology shift from a pacifist Discipleship and Life Together direction toward a more Niebuhrian realism/responsibility vision? That is, did he enter into the Abwehr (double agent) in Hitler’s National Socialist party as one who was seeking the downfall, assassination, and replacement of Hitler, or was his life as a double agent a ruse for his continued life in the ministry of the ecumenical movement?

The standard journey is the journey from a rather naive and optimistic hope for church renewal through intense commitment to discipleship toward a more realistic, even compromising, assumption of responsibility (this term is big in this discussion and must be connected to Reinhold Niebuhr at Union) all reshaped in his decision that the best way to act as a responsible Christian under Hitler was to assume the guilt of the nation and seek his country’s collapse. Maybe the best way of all to frame this is to say Bonhoeffer took leave of Discipleship by the time he was writing Ethics. That, at any rate, is the most common journey told of Bonhoeffer’s theological development. I have already covered Mark Thiessen Nation’s proposal and this post is about Marsh’s study, but it appears to me Bonhoeffer’s pacifism can remain in tact in spite of his realism since he saw entrance into the resistance as guilt (personal and national).

Bonhoeffer did come by his ecclesial faith naturally: his father was not a believer, his mother was and led family devotions in the evening. The family did not attend church frequently though he went through confirmation and was both spiritually and theologically curious when young. Most of his siblings were not Christians, and even having completed his theology degree at Berlin (where as a liberal he encountered Barth) Bonhoeffer still was not much a church goer. His position as assistant pastor in Barcelona engaged him for the first time in serious church work. After his return to Germany he was committed to the church — but as much to the ecumenical church, to conferences, as he was to local parish ministry.

Bonhoeffer embraced Barth’s theology deeply and this is one reason for Marsh’s general approach to Bonhoeffer’s journey: Barth is present in his dissertation on the communion of the saints, in his habilitation on German philosophical history (Marsh thinks this book was “one of the great theological achievements of the twentieth century”), but it is profoundly present in Ethics. The first “chapter” of that book could be taken from Barth’s theory of revelation in dialectical thinking (and unfortunately dialectical method in writing!) in its unifocal concentration on God in Christ as the true revelation by which all things are measured — including the world. Furthermore, Bonhoeffer here has embraced some of Barth’s universalism for the thematic center of that first chapter is about the reconciliation (ontologically) of the world in Christ already. Marsh keeps Barth before the readers of Bonhoeffer’s life.

Bonhoeffer’s twin sister, Sabine, married a Jewish man (who had been baptized). That fact opens up a window that tosses light deep into Bonhoeffer’s theology: he was deeply committed to the brotherhood and sisterhood of the church and Judaism, of Christians and Jews, and therefore of Jews and Germans. When most were circling the wagons or wondering what was really going on, DB saw through to the heart of what Hitler and the National Socialists were setting up to accomplish in Germany and beyond. If he was anything, he was highly principled and so he refused to budge or surrender an inch to the National Socialists. Bonhoeffer’s balking at both The Bethel Confession and The Barmen Declaration, the former he had an early hand in, concerned their lack of commitment to solidarity with Jews — believers or not. Seemingly ahead of everyone else in theological circles, including Barth, Bonhoeffer saw the Jewish Question as the Christian Problem. He helped his sister and brother in law escape from Germany to England through Switzerland. They survived the war, Dietrich did not. Marsh’s Bonhoeffer is probing pluralism in affirmative terms, and Marsh is accurate.

Marsh has exceptional sections on Bonhoeffer in the USA fascinated by African Americans, their theology and spirituality (and songs), and this experience (at Abyssinian Baptist in Harlem) shaped Bonhoeffer’s thinking about what it takes to be a gospel Christian and what racism does to a people and nation. He not only introduced his students in Zingst and Finkenwalde to Negro spirituals, but he saw racism in Germany more intensively than others because of his time in NYC. No one is more attuned to racism’s impact on theology and the need to combat it than Charles Marsh, so his sections here are more sensitive and insightful than other sketches of Bonhoeffer.

Marsh, in my view, downplays Discipleship and Life Together because, again in my view, he sees a different journey for Bonhoeffer: it is one that sees the highlight years in DB’s life not in the outside-the-system seminary (they weren’t underground until the end) writings and spirituality but in the more “responsible” political theology of the Ethics and his Letters and Papers from Prison. His sketches of DB’s theology after his return to Germany and while in prison were a highlight for me.

In fact, Marsh has all but convinced me of the Christian realism move of Bonhoeffer. But before I will go on board officially I want to re-read Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison, which I’m doing now. One thing has become clear to me: the conspirators were profoundly naive in planning to be those who would run Germany when Hitler was removed. Profoundly naive, if not delusional. I need to read more on this plot but that’s how it strikes me.

Marsh has complete control of the sources of Bonhoeffer’s life: he has obviously read them in German as well as in English (in fact I saw one or two mistakes in footnotes because he was referring to the German editions and not the English translations). Detail after details is pressed from the original sources, in a historically chronological manner, and for this reason alone Marsh’s Strange Glory stands among the best of Bonhoeffer biographies.

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I must mention one feature of this book because if I don’t it will emerge in the comments and this short explanation allows me a bit of more accurate expression. Marsh’s biography is undoubtedly the best biography to read (though nothing can replace Bethge’s fullness) but it will be remembered as the biography that suggested Bonhoeffer was gay or was romantically attracted to Eberhard Bethge. There is no explicit evidence - the relationship remained chaste; Bethge was engaged and then married and Bonhoeffer himself was engaged; there is Hitler’s extermination system that included homosexuals. There are suggestions according to Marsh: they shared a bank account; they shared Christmas presents; they spent constant time together; Bonhoeffer’s (not Bethge’s) endearing language in letters; Bonhoeffer’s getting engaged not long after Bethge got engaged; and Bonhoeffer’s obsessiveness with Bethge. OK, but it’s all suggestion, and this is complicated by Bonhoeffer’s obsession with clothing and appearance. [For a Marsh interview, see this.] Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, but it seems their relationship could at least be explored in another context: male friendships among German intellectuals of this era, which maybe needs the reminder that friendships have been between same sexes for most of Western history. I quote here from Wesley Hill’s exceptional post on this topic about DB:

But, second, it also seems to me there’s an opposite danger that, in our effort to articulate and defend the existence of something like “close, non-sexual friendships between men” in past eras, we may overlook the importance of homosexual feelings in shaping those friendships. Yes, of course, “homosexuality” as we know it didn’t exist as a social construct until relatively recently, but that doesn’t mean the reality of persistent, predominant same-sex sexual desire didn’t exist and that it didn’t have a friendship-deepening effect for those who experienced it. Sure, Bonhoeffer wasn’t “gay” in our post-Stonewall sense. But what Marsh’s biography tries to explore is whether Bonhoeffer may have experienced same-sex attractions and how those attractions may have led him to look for ways to love his friend Bethge. Bonhoeffer evidently didn’t—and maybe didn’t even want to—have sex with Bethge (and presumably Bethge himself wouldn’t have consented anyway). But did Bonhoeffer’s romantic feelings for his friend, if indeed they existed (as Marsh believes they did), lead him into a pursuit of emotional and spiritual intimacy with Bethge that he wouldn’t otherwise have sought? I think there’s a danger in avoiding that question, too, even as there’s a danger in jumping to the conclusion “Bonhoeffer was gay.” [Wes has a very good review of Marsh's biography in the most recent edition of Books & Culture.]

In an earlier post on the same topic, Christopher Benson asked this powerful question with a brief comment:

Did Bonhoeffer ache for a romantic friendship with Eberhard Bethge or for the romance of a friendship that unites body and spirit, emotion and intellect? This is a distinction with a difference, and it is lost upon us because we are no longer in touch with “the tradition of late-antique and early-medieval Johannine Christianity, in which intimacy and understanding go hand in hand,” according to Samuel Kimbriel’s new book,Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation.

Perhaps then DB had same-sex attractions for Bethge but they were unreciprocated and the desires subdued by Bonhoeffer, but that those feelings had a “friendship-deepening effect.” That is at least a reasonable explanation of the letters between DB and Bethge. But there’s a bit more evidence that I had not known about prior to this post. In F. Schlingensiepen’s very complete and well-researched study of Bonhoeffer, on p. 393, there is a footnote in which Bethge responds to the suggestion that the authors of the letters (in Letters and Papers from Prison, most recent edition?) must have been homosexuals. Bethge says unequivocally Nein.

So maybe DB’s obsessions with Bethge deserve to be considered as expressions of a controlling, if not authoritarian, personality type. In fact, the Union professor, Paul Lehmann, said DB “simply took command, uncalculated command, of every situation in which he was present” (I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 42). Bethge himself said Bonhoeffer could sometimes be “imperious and demanding” (46).

Marsh knows that there’s some hagiography about Bonhoeffer, not least some of the descriptions of his last hours and minutes. He suggests Bonhoeffer was cruelly tortured for hours before he died.

12 Essential Bonhoeffer Quotes

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/books/12-essential-bonhoeffer-quotes

by Dargan Thompson

February 6, 2014

The famed theologian's birthday would have been this week, so here's some of his timeless wisdom.

Initially, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s parents discouraged him from studying theology.

The Bonhoeffers were an upper-middle class German family of doctors and scientists, so going into ministry was not thought to be a fitting profession for their sixth child.

It’s a good thing for the modern Church that Bonhoeffer was determined in his course. There’s no doubt that Bonhoeffer, who was born 108 years ago this week, is one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century.

Bonhoeffer’s thoughts are powerful in and of themselves, but even more so in the context of his circumstances. As a pastor in Germany in the era between WWI and WWII, he saw firsthand the subtle shifts in the German church and the German consciousness.

Many of Bonhoeffer’s actions seem nonsensical when viewed with an objective eye. He split from the German Church to form the Confessing Church, he got involved in an assassination plot (against Hitler), he returned to Germany from the safety of the U.S. right before the war reached its worst. But put all together, they reveal the story of a man of great conviction, who was willing to go against the norm and undergo suffering for his people and for the God he was committed to following. He was a man who, by the end of his life, really understood the cost of discipleship that he famously wrote about.

Bonhoeffer was killed at a concentration camp just a few months after his 39th birthday, but his legacy continues. Even today, almost 60 years after his death, Bonhoeffer’s life is a challenge to us all to pursue justice even when it’s not popular, to care for and defend the persecuted and to relentlessly follow God’s leading.

He had much wisdom to share—his numerous books are not the easiest reads, but are well worth reading in full—but for now, here are 12 of his quotes that are sure to give you some food for thought:

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“Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.”

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

- The Cost of Discipleship

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“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”

“If we are to learn what God promises and what he fulfils, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus. It is certain that we may always live close to God and in the light of his presence, and that such living is an entirely new life for us; that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God; that no earthly power can touch us without his will, and that danger and distress can only drive us closer to him. It is certain that we can claim nothing for ourselves, and may yet pray for everything; it is certain that our joy is hidden in suffering, and our life in death; it is certain that in all this we are in a fellowship that sustains us. In Jesus God has said Yes and Amen to it all, and that Yes and Amen is the firm ground on which we stand.”

“O Heavenly Father,

I praise and thank you

For the peace of the night; 

I praise and thank you for this new day; 

I praise and thank you for all your goodness and 

faithfulness throughout my life. 

You have granted me many blessings; 

Now let me also accept what is hard 

from your hand. 

You will lay on me no more 

than I can bear. 

You make all things work together for good 

for your children .... ”

(First Christmas Prayer from Prison)

- Letters and Papers from Prison

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“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.”

"Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God's word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity."

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

“When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.”

"The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them."

- Life Together

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“A God who lets us prove his existence would be an idol”

“There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.”

"God does not love some ideal person, but rather human beings just as we are, not some ideal world, but rather the real world."

- Meditations on the Cross

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Dargan Thompson is a writer and editor who loves music, traveling and deep conversations. She also loves grammar and is one of the editors at RELEVANT. You can follow her extremely random train of thought on Twitter@darganthompson.

For Dietrich's biograhy go to the Wikipedia  - click link here

Amazon.com's Bonhoeffer page - click link here

Bruce Epperly - The Process Theologian's "Bonhoeffer"

Bonhoeffer’s Vision and Process Theology

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingaholyadventure/2013/11/bonhoeffers-vision-and-process-theology/

by Bruce Epperly

November 18, 2013

Comments

A Response to The Bonhoeffer Reader, edited by  Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge

Few theologians have responded as creatively and forthrightly to the postmodern challenge as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer recognized the pluralistic, multi-centered, experience-oriented world of our current religious landscape. He imagined an emerging Christianity, no longer at the center of culture, but at the margins, and making these same margins the ground of a frontier faith. Postmodernism presented a threat to the old-time religion and Christian supremacy, but it also presented an opportunity to a fluid, agile, and worldly faith.

In the midst of the maelstrom of war, Bonhoeffer saw the eclipse of Christendom and imagined a dynamic, counter-cultural Christian faith of the future. The Bonhoeffer Reader, edited by Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge not only captures the breadth and evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theology, but gives special care to his final expansive visions of a Christianity big enough to embrace a radically-changing world.  From his prison cell, Bonhoeffer saw more than most free-ranging people. He saw, in the words of Bishop John Shelby Spong, that Christianity must change or die. He did not see the future of Jesus’ mission in megachurches, dreams of Christian dominion, or Christian supremacy, but in living out the mission of the suffering servant Jesus of Nazareth and the God who celebrates and suffers with us.

Bonhoeffer never had the opportunity to fully articulate his vision of God, but his emerging vision touches the edges of process theology. His vision of God shapes the contours of an interactive, relational, and affirmative Christianity, comfortable with diversity and open to the insights of secularity. According to Bonhoeffer, God “needs” us to achieve the best in our ambiguous world. God is not a “timeless fate” but “waits for and responds to prayer and sincere actions” (769-770). This vision touches process theology’s insight that God evolves with the world: neither God nor the world are complete, but are open-ended. In the spirit of Jewish mysticism, God needs us to be God’s companions in tikkun ‘olam, “mending the world.” The healing of the world requires our participation; there is no preordained end of history, or end-time goal, or apocalypse, but rather an ongoing process which requires our positive action for God’s vision to be embodied.

God’s vision for us is not timeless but God acts in real time and not in “advance” (769), similar to process thought’s image of God’s vision of possibilities appropriate to each moment. We are given strength, insight, and the resources to achieve God’s aim that all things work out for good. This happens right where we are with all its limitations and opportunities.

The parent of process theology, Alfred North Whitehead describes God as “the fellow sufferer who understands.” Echoing this, Bonhoeffer asserts that humans are called to share in God’s sufferings” (804). Note well, “God’s sufferings.” Only a suffering God can save, a God with skin, who shares our condition and seeks to bring beauty from ugliness and justice from injustice. Jewish spiritual teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel speaks of the “divine pathos” as being the heart of prophetic religion: God experiences the details of our lives and is truly hurt by injustice; God suffers in the anguish of the vulnerable and dispossessed. God is not apathetic but passionate in God’s care for creation: God is not an Aristotelian “unmoved mover,” but as process philosopher Charles Hartshore claims, the “most moved mover.”

Process theologian, Bernard Loomer described two kinds of power – unilateral and relational. (1) Unilateral power, characteristic of the Christendom that had died in the modern world, described God as determining and knowing everything in advance: the all-powerful God established the powers of the universe, and determined success and failure and life and death. Images of God’s omnipotence inspired and undergirded the unilateral and often oppressive actions of religious institutions and nation states. After all, if we are the chosen servants of an all-determining God, we alone are equipped to shape history, especially as it relates to government, church, and non-Christians and foreigners.

In contrast, (2) a relational God works with the world, creating along with the evolving history of humanity and the non-human world, being subject to our actions as well as shaping our actions. When Bonhoeffer invokes the “powerlessness” of God, he is also speaking of God with us, not as omnipotent, but as the One who suffers with us, who experiences our pain, but also invites us to invest ourselves in the worldliness of a secular world.

Writing in the shadow of the culture Christianity of World War II Germany, Bonhoeffer asserts that you will not find God’s vision in those who identify God and country, and advocate national supremacy. Nor, according to Bonhoeffer’s theological vision, will we find God’s vision in the machinations of congressional leaders who demean the poor and underinsured by shutting down government. Who traumatize the children of undocumented immigrants by advocating the deportation of their parents. Or, who see Christ as dominating the political sphere, guiding them to shut down government or default on loans to avoid expanding health care to the vulnerable. While such persons may call themselves Christians, they will truly experience God’s costly grace only when they let go of the power to exclude and welcome the power to embrace the least, the last, and the lost.

Liberals also may live by what Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace, especially as they privilege the middle class and forget the traumas of the dispossessed in order to seek a better day for all. The vulnerable are never expendable, even for a good political cause or for a greater good. God feels the pain caused by conservatives for whom the greatest good is lower taxes, smaller government, and the right to bear arms; and liberals whose liberalism obscures the needs of the least of these to obscure political goals. The truly great society must include everyone and start with the least of these, whose faces reveal the suffering face of Christ.

Much more could be said and of course Green and DeJonge’s Bonhoeffer Reader gives a complete picture of Bonhoeffer’s evolving theology. Nevertheless, the insights of the later Bonhoeffer parallel those of process theology in their respective affirmations of: 

1) a God who evolves along with the world,

2) a God whose power is limited by the world,

3) a God who is touched by our pain,

4) a God who needs our best efforts to secure God’s vision on earth, and

5) a humanity whose vocation is to become God’s companions in transforming the world so that God’s vision on earth as well as heaven be realized.

The Continuing Debate to Bonhoeffer's German Resistance and Its Implications for Jesus' "Kingdom Ethics"

Bonhoeffer: Was he really involved in the attempt to kill Hitler?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/28/bonhoeffer-was-he-really-involved-in-the-attempt-to-kill-hitler/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 28, 2013

Comments

 

First, some context for me. In writing my Sermon on the Mount I struggled with how to deal with Bonhoeffer, or with which Bonhoeffer. I wrote up a section for early in the commentary that set out how I had learned to interpret Bonhoeffer’s ethics in the unfolding of his life and thought. This is what I wrote:
 

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

Before offering a new way of framing the ethics of Jesus we need to consider the ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man whose status has arisen of late due to the completion of the critical editions of his works and due to a popularity uptick from several recent biographies and studies. Bonhoeffer had the courage of a hero in his singular defense of Jews over against a developing German Christian movement and in his razor-sharp perception of Hitler’s manifold evils.[1]

 

His theological career can be divided into three periods:

 

Early: theological discovery (1923-1931)

 

Middle: pastoral theologian (1932-1940)

 

Late: conspirator (1941-1945).

 

Discipleship, in which his brilliant exposition of the Sermon on the Mount is found, belongs to the second period of his life when he was pastoring and teaching students in the underground seminary at Finkenwalde. His understanding of ethics grew and shifted. The middle period differs from the early period[2] and his ethics in the second period vary from his ethics in the later period. It was during that third period that two other works emerged: his Ethics and his Letters and Papers from Prison.[3]

 

The important consideration for understanding Bonhoeffer and the Sermon is that the Bonhoeffer of Discipleship is not identical to the Bonhoeffer of those latter works.[4] A case can be made that the Bonhoeffer of that later period is at odds with the Bonhoeffer of Discipleship. The contrast between the two periods, which the quotation in the next paragraph will illustrate, could be explained by Bonhoeffer’s reluctant move toward a version of the two realms in Lutheran theology.  That is, (1) in the realities of life, in the realm of the world, Bonhoeffer lived in a way at odds with (2) the ethics of the Sermon, an ethics for the kingdom of God.

 

Importantly, Bonhoeffer does not justify his life as a double agent in the Military Intelligence in his later period, a time devoted to deception, to the conspiracy against Hitler and to founding a different Germany and German church. In this later period Bonhoeffer surrenders to a kind of irresistible reality, to worldliness, that is, to the guilt and shame of German corruption in order to rid Germany of that corruption by praying and working for the defeat of Hitler.[5]

 

How he lived during this period contrasts with the vision he articulated in Discipleship. Here is how Bonhoeffer put it in the last year of his life: “For a long time…. I thought I myself could learn to have faith by trying to live something like a saintly life. I suppose I wrote Discipleship at the end of this path. Today I clearly see the dangers of that book, though I still stand by it.”[6]  There is tension here between his “this-worldliness” and his earlier Discipleship. That he has to say he still stands by the early work is a telling concession that emerged in his thinking as a result of his participation in the conspiracy.

 

Bonhoeffer knew what was involved at the deepest level of life when he chose to enter into the conspiracy. Listen to these words that reflect his experience in the conspiracy and what it was doing to character:

 

“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings. Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?”[7] The admission of the need to “find our way back” is the revelation of the contrast between the two periods in his life.

 

Because Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship is one of the most important studies ever on the Sermon on the Mount, and because I will make him one of the principal scholars with whom I interact in the pages that follow, it is important to locate his classic work in its proper place in his life and theological development. Bonhoeffer’s own journey is the struggle the church has always had with how to live out the Sermon on the Mount. 

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[1] For the “German Christian” (technical expression) movement, see S. Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[2] E. Bethge, Biography, 457.

[3]Ethics (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works; ed. I. Tödt; trans. R. Krauss; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), and Letters and Papers from Prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works; ed. C. Gremmels; trans. I. Best; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).

[4] For more continuity in the relationship of Discipleship to the later Ethics, see G. Stassen, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 175-195. Because of the complexity of the relationship of the middle period to the later period and various versions of sections in Ethics, I have avoided discussion of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics.  Yet it is important to observe that Bonhoeffer did not move from youthful, Platonic idealism in Discipleship to mature realism in the conspiracy years. Instead, it was a (tragic) shift from kingdom realities to this-wordliness realities.

[5] For a full study, the one indispensable biography is the mammoth work of E. Bethge, Biography, e.g., 628, 675-678, 720-721. For Bonhoeffer’s exploratory statement on the relation of church and state, D. Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 1940-1945 (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works; ed. J. Glenthøj; trans. L.E. Dahill; Minneapolis Fortress, 2006), 502-528.

[6]Letters and Papers from Prison, 486.

[7]Letters and Papers from Prison, 52.

 

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Because I am not a Bonhoeffer specialist, nor have I read his entire works in chronological order ever in my life, I thought it would be wise to check out what I had written with a Bonhoeffer expert. I chose Mark Thiessen Nation, professor at Eastern Mennonite University, and a leading Bonhoeffer (and Yoder) scholar. We had some exchanges, included in which was his telling me that he was at work with two others on a book about Bonhoeffer that would seek to show that Bonhoeffer was not in fact involved in any plot to assassinate Hitler. In other words, that he was not involved in the conspiracy to eliminate the Führer.

 

I was a bit stunned by his comments, not the least of which reasons was that I didn’t know how else to read the man’s life. But out of respect for Mark’s work, I chose to eliminate the above section and to modify the commentary wherever I had assumed this scheme of reading Bonhoeffer in three stages. The most important element of this scheme was that Bonhoeffer changed his mind from being a pacifist to being a (Niebuhrian) realist. I reasoned, however, that if Nation was going to prove that theory wrong, it would be wise for me to await publication of his book before I both came to a more complete understanding and published anything about it.

 

Mark Thiessen Nation, along with Anthony G. Siegrist and Daniel P. Umbel, have now published their work: Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2013). They ask if Bonhoeffer was involved in the conspiracy to kill Hitler. They conclude he was not. In part two of this review I will sketch their views and respond to their proposal.
 

 

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Bonhoeffer and the Conspiracy

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/11/01/bonhoeffer-and-the-conspiracy/

 

by Scot McKnight

Nov 1, 2013

Comments

 

A standard reading of Bonhoeffer, one I have believed most of my academic life, is that Bonhoeffer shifted from a kind of traditional socially conservative, fairly nationalistic approach to church-state relations to a pacifist-Sermon-on-the-Mount stance but that, once he returned to Hitler’s Germany after a brief spell at Union Theological Seminary, he shifted to a kind of (Niebuhrian) realism and abandoned his former pacifist stance.

 

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Christian Realism is a philosophical perspective developed by the theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Niebuhr argued that the Kingdom of God cannot be realized on earth because of the innately corrupt tendencies of society. Due to the injustices that arise on earth, a person is therefore forced to compromise the ideal of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Niebuhr argued that human perfectibility was an illusion, highlighting the sinfulness of humanity at a time when the world was confronted by the horrors of experiences such World War ll, the reigns of both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and the Holocaust. The movement was in part a reaction to the Social Gospel movement. Numerous political figures have been influenced by Christian realism, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Madeleine Albright, and John McCain.^[1] - Wikipedia (link here)

 

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But a new book is out, by Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, called Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (BakerAcademic, 2013), and this book challenges front to center this standard reading of Bonhoeffer. There’s already a bit of a dustup about the proposals in that Roger Olson thinks Nation et al have overcooked their theory, and already Mark Nation has responded back (on Roger Olson’s blog’s comments).

 

I want to summarize their theories in brief compass and not drag this post on and on.

 

1. There is no evidence from Bonhoeffer himself — in writing — that he was involved in any conspiracy to kill Hitler. Yes, his brother-in-law and friends were conspirators, but there’s nothing from Bonhoeffer’s own hand that proves it.

 

2. Yes, Bonhoeffer was involved in the Third Reich’s Abwehr, their military intelligence agency, and this could have had as its purpose participation in the conspiracy against Hitler, since a fraction there were conspirators, but the evidence we have suggests Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the Abwehr was prompted in order to prevent him from having to serve in the military on the front lines and in the killing in the name of Hitler. The evidence further suggests he used his Abwehr work to further his ecumenical work and to pass on insider information about the atrocities of Hitler to outsiders and foreigners.

 

3. The evidence that Bonhoeffer was involved in the conspiracy comes exclusively from his biographer, Eberhard Bethge (Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography), by far the best biography and done by one who personally worked with and knew well Bonhoeffer himself. Bethge says Bonhoeffer was a conspirator and that his conspiracy work involved him in “boundary work” — that is in doing things that were on the border of his ethical beliefs. The evidence, then, is based on Bethge’s memory. Roger Olson presses this point hard to argue that he trusts Bethge.

 

4. But Nation et al are arguing their case on a profoundly informed basis: they have mapped carefully the development of Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics from his early period (Barcelona in the late 1920s), the most influential Discipleship book in the late 30s when he was leading the underground seminary, and then in the later Ethics where we encounter his “worldliness.” What this book does in the middle chapters, chapters harder to read than the others, is to demonstrate that there is a decisive break between Barcelona and Discipleship, one in which Bonhoeffer shifts from anti-pacifism to pacifism on the basis of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ teachings. What the book also demonstrates is that there is no such break or significant shift between Discipleship and Ethics, but that once one understands the role both Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being (his dissertation and habilitation) plays in his development, one sees much more continuity — a Jesus based and christologically shaped ethic — than discontinuity. To argue that Bonhoeffer changed his mind requires that he significantly changed his mind and abandoned his Discipleship themes. Bonhoeffer himself denies this and affirms that he stands by his Discipleship. Without that evidence of shift between Discipleship and Ethics, the argument about Bonhoeffer shifting just doesn’t gain traction.

 

Put differently, the issue can’t be reduced to Bethge’s words but the pro-conspiracy folks must also show that there is evidence for a clear diminishment of the ethical theories at work Discipleship in the later Ethics. So, to argue Bethge got it right one must prove that Bonhoeffer changed his mind on how to do Christian ethics. Bonhoeffer himself says he stood by Discipleship late in his life.

 

Put yet one more way: the memory of Bethge is being challenged by the concrete evidence of the texts themselves. This is methodologically reasonable.

 

My own response:

 

1. I no longer place Bethge’s words at the level I would have placed them; I don’t know what to think of Bethge’s claims. Nation et al have, so I think, made a good case for testing Bethge’s statements over against the documentary evidence and, more importantly, the themes and their development in Bonhoeffer’s ethics.

 

2. The case for seeing continuity at a deep structural level — Christology, incarnation, new context — between Discipleship and Ethics is very hard to disprove. I think Nation et al have done their work here; for me to counter this would mean some very careful reading of Ethics and a comparison with Discipleship. I do not know Ethics well enough to do this nor will my schedule likely permit such work right now. (Though I’d love to do that.) All in all, then, I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to see a crisis of change in Bonhoeffer’s thinking for us to accept the fairly standard realist shift in Bonhoeffer’s WW2 thinking.

 

3. In summary, I consider this book a successful challenge to the ruling paradigm that sees a major shift in Bonhoeffer from his idealism of Discipleship to a realist posture in Ethics [that is, he changed his mind]. In other words, if you remember my first post on this (28 Oct), I’m glad I removed that section. I no longer think Bonhoeffer made a tragic mistake in entering into the conspiracy and so shifted from his pacifism because I’m not convinced he entered into the conspiracy. Bonhoeffer may well have sustained his pacifism.

 

 

 

 

When Pacifism Meets Reality: Examining Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Hitler-Dilemma"

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer a Would-Be Assassin? (Review of a New Book)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/10/was-dietrich-bonhoeffer-a-would-be-assassin-review-of-a-new-book/

 

by Roger Olson

October 12, 2013

Comments

 

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer a Would-Be Assassin?

 

We’re in the middle of another Dietrich Bonhoeffer renaissance. A new wave of interest in the German theologian is being lifted by new biographies and examinations of his theology. Everyone seems to want to claim Bonhoeffer for their own causes. This was the case, of course, in the 1960s when radical theologians such as John Robinson and Harvey Cox attempted to appropriate him for secular theologies. And it has happened every few years since.

 

I was surprised to learn, when studying theology in Germany in the 1980s, that there, in Germany, he’s generally not considered one of the “giants” of twentieth century theology alongside Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich or even Niebuhr. There his legacy is tied to his role in the Confessing Church movement and his participation in a plot to overthrow the Hitler regime. I sometimes wonder if it weren’t for the latter, including his execution by the Nazis, and his enigmatic sayings in Letters and Papers from Prison whether he would be as well remembered and widely discussed as has been the case.

 

Years ago I read Eberhard Bethge’s magisterial biography of Bonhoeffer entitled Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage (1967, ET 1977). Bethge was, of course, one of Bonhoeffer’s closest friends and confidantes. He was his student and they lived together in the “underground seminary” that Bonhoeffer led for the Confessing Church movement. Eventually, Bethge moved into Bonhoeffer’s family home in Berlin and married his mentor’s niece. After the war and after Bonhoeffer’s execution Bethge took it upon himself, with the support of the Bonhoeffer family, to collect Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s papers and publish them. Throughout the 1950s through the 1970s he became the expert on Bonhoeffer. His biography is 841 pages long in English translation (not including the index).

 

I think it’s fairly safe to say that if it were not for Bethge, Bonhoeffer would largely be forgotten. I have trusted Bethge about Bonhoeffer implicitly, as have most others. Bethge was a scholar and member of the Bonhoeffer family and does not seem to have had any axe to grind that would cause us to consider his accounts unreliable.

 

A few days ago a new book arrived: Bonhoeffer the Assassin?: Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking by Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel (Foreword by Stanley Hauerwas) (BakerAcademic, 2013). The “myth” referred to in the title is that Bonhoeffer participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler. That is clearly expressed and argued (viz., that it is a myth) in Chapter 3, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Assassin?” (pp. 71-97). The authors’ thesis is expressed in several ways, but I find this passage especially concise: “There is no evidence that Bonhoeffer was ‘involved in the plots to kill Hitler.’ Hopefully we have also shown that there is no real evidence that Bonhoeffer himself affirmed the killing of Hitler.” (p. 93).

 

The authors of Bonhoeffer the Assassin? argue for continuity between Bonhoeffer’s pacifist theology, as expressed in writings such as The Cost of Discipleship (or just “Discipleship” depending on the edition) and his life in the Abwehr—the German military intelligence agency that was the breeding ground for some of the plots to overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime. They furthermore argue that there is no evidence that Bonhoeffer ever actually participated in any conspiracy to kill Hitler even though his ecumenical contacts on behalf of the conspirators to overthrow Hitler (in Switzerland and Sweden) involved him indirectly in the resistance to the Hitler regime. According to them, Bonhoeffer remained a pacifist throughout his adult life and never encouraged killing anyone.

 

The authors admit that Bonhoeffer knew some of the plotters, even those who were conspiring to kill Hitler and others, very well and had personal conversations with them. His brother and brother-in-law were members of the conspiracy and almost certainly had few, if any, qualms about killing Hitler (after a certain point when simply overthrowing him did not seem feasible). They are right, however, to point out, as Bethge does, that Bonhoeffer’s own actual role in the Abwehr conspiracy was remote. It was confined largely to traveling to neutral countries (mentioned earlier) to meet with religious leaders (mostly British) to talk about German surrender and cessation of war should the conspiracy (either to overthrow Hitler or kill him) succeed. A few remnants of those conversations remain in letters and memories (later written).

 

If we are to agree with Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel, that Bonhoeffer never advocated, condoned or participated in an actual plot to kill Hitler (or anyone else), we have to question Bethge’s testimony which is clear. And the authors do question it. They suggest his memory of Bonhoeffer’s own sayings to him and to others was faulty. (pp. 92-93)

 

But let’s look again at Bethge’s own recorded memories in Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And let’s remember that much of the material in that biography was not first “remembered” by Bethge in 1967 when he wrote it. He had been deeply involved in Bonhoeffer scholarship for over a decade then—collecting, compiling, interviewing, reviewing, writing. So we should not picture Bethge, at age fifty-something (we don’t know exactly when he wrote the parts of the biography but only when it was published) for the first time sitting down to write about these events and conversations and striving to remember them.

 

The relevant section of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is “Section Two: Conspiracy” of “Part Three: Sharing Germany’s Destiny.” It comprises pages 627-702 of the 1977 Harper & Row paperback edition. Bethge there leaves no doubt that he believed Bonhoeffer at least tentatively gave up his pacifism in a “boundary situation,” namely, the extremity of having to end the war and the holocaust.

 

Bethge opens this section of his biography with a quotation attributed to Bonhoeffer by one of his ecumenical contacts, Bishop Bell with whom Bonhoeffer met in Sweden in 1942. According to Bell, Bonhoeffer told him that he once responded to fellow resistance members who proposed ceasing subversive activities that could result in Hitler’s death, thus making him a martyr, “If we claim to be Christians, there is no room for expediency. Hitler is the Antichrist. Therefore we must go on with our work and eliminate him whether he be successful for not.” (pp. 626-627) Bell published this quote from Bonhoeffer (Bonhoeffer quoting himself to Bell) in 1945—two to three years after the fact (assuming it happened at all). Bethge did not doubt anything except that Bonhoeffer called Hitler the “Antichrist” (p. 627) and Nation, et al., call on this doubt to cast doubt on the whole quotation. What’s interesting, though, is that Bethge wrote about Bell’s account (of what Bonhoeffer said he said to his fellow resisters) that it “contains accurate and improbable parts.” (p. 627) The only “improbable part,” according to Bethge, who knew Bonhoeffer very well throughout this whole time, is Bonhoeffer’s calling Hitler the Antichrist. He did not call Bonhoeffer’s calling for Hitler’s “elimination” into question. In fact, in effect, he called it “accurate.” After wrestling with whether Bonhoeffer would have called Hitler the Antichrist for an entire page (p. 627) Bethge concludes thus: “If that rather crude theological expression [viz., Hitler as the Antichrist] could really have encouraged his friends, Bonhoeffer might perhaps have used it verbally.”

 

Bethge’s chapter argues convincingly for “Bonhoeffer’s actual complicity in the plot against Hitler.” (p. 628) And by that he clearly did not mean some kind of remote knowledge of the plot. According to Bethge, Bonhoeffer was remembered, after the war, for saying things like “You can rely on it, we shall overthrow Hitler!” to his ecumenical contacts and others during his trips to Switzerland and Sweden. (p. 632)

 

Bethge nailed down what he meant by Bonhoeffer’s complicity with a saying he remembered Bonhoeffer uttering in September, 1941 at Sakrow, where Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, a major player in the plot lived then. First, notice the time and place. Clearly Bethge was not merely going by (faulty) memory. Here is what he recorded Bonhoeffer as saying then and there: “That if it fell to him to carry out the deed [viz., killing Hitler], he was ready to do so, but that he must first resign, formally and officially, from his Church….” (p. 656)

 

Nation, et al., cast doubt on Bethge’s “decades old memory” (pp. 92-93). I find that rather cavalier given Bethge’s naming the month, year and place where the conversation took place.

 

Bethge left us no doubt what he thought. On page 659 he recollects from conversations with Bonhoeffer about other, non-violent resisters, that “Bonhoeffer…was already pleading the need for assassination.” This is specifically in contrast to resistance leader Helmuth von Moltke of the “Kreisau Circle” who urged non-violent resistance to Hitler. Nation, et al., make much of Moltke at the beginning of their book and hold him up as a model of non-violent resistance to Hitler. Bethge clearly thought, from personal conversations with Bonhoeffer, that Bonhoeffer thought the Krisau Circle, von Moltke, and non-violent resistance to Hitler was useless.

 

Bethge opened his final section (of the chapter) entitled “The ‘Boundary Situation’” thus: “Today, in more orderly times, some people are reluctant to call Bonhoeffer a ‘conspirator’, and to give primary importance to such an originally degrading term. The further we are from the events, the more we hesitate to use the term. But it seems as if all attempts to tone it down fail to see the exceptional reality that Bonhoeffer faced, and merely cover up what is shown to us here.” (p. 696) I suspect if Bethge were alive today he would say the same about Nation’s, Siegrist’s, Umbel’s, and Hauerwas’s reluctance to identify Bonhoeffer as a conspirator to kill Hitler. Nobody calls Bonhoeffer an “assassin,” so the book’s title is a bit misleading. There is no “myth” of Bonhoeffer “the assassin” (that I’m aware of). “Participating in a plot to assassinate” would be a better, more descriptive term for what many, including Bethge, believe about Bonhoeffer. But Nation, et al., also deny that.

 

Bethge did not use the nearly worn out phrase “teleological suspension of the ethical” (often attributed to Kierkegaard) to describe Bonhoeffer’s own sense of justification for his involvement in the conspiracy to overthrow and then to kill Hitler. However, this entire final section of the chapter amounts to that. For Bethge, Bonhoeffer found himself in a “boundary situation” where he had to act contrary to his own best ethical principles and throw himself on the mercy of God. Bethge quoted (p. 700) from a sermon of Bonhoeffer’s in which he prophesied a time “when martyrdom would be called for” but in which “this blood…will not be so innocent and clear as that of the first who testified. On our blood a great guilt would lie….” Clearly Bethge believed that Bonhoeffer foresaw a glimpse of his own fate.

 

My conclusion is that the authors of Bonhoeffer the Assassin? (and Foreword author Hauerwas) fail to give us a strong enough statement of Bethge’s proximity to Bonhoeffer throughout the time of his involvement in the resistance against Hitler and unjustly cast doubt on his veracity about Bonhoeffer’s role in it. Anyone who reads the book must also read Bethge’s biography of Bonhoeffer, or at least the portion of it dealing with the conspiracy, and then make up their own mind. Believing Nation, et al., will require more than doubting Bethge. And if Bethge could be wrong about this, he must not [then] be considered as a "reliable" witness to the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.