Bonhoeffer
Pastor, Martyr,
Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxes
A biography, written by Eric Metaxes, Bonhoeffer; chronicles the extraordinary journey of German
theologian during the time Adolf Hitler and the Nazi establishment. The
biography is written seamlessly, weaving Bonhoeffer’s theology and history
together. I was most fascinated by Bonhoeffer’s evolution as a theologian in
response to Nazism and how to persevere through the most hideous persecution.
The notes that follow are reflections and direct quotes from the book that I
found interesting or noteworthy.
Upbringing
Dietrich was born a twin into an affluent German family; his
father was a leading psychiatrist and neurologist and his mother a teacher.
During his adolescence, he grew up exploring the outdoors with siblings (there
were eight Bonhoeffer children in total) and showed an affinity for
intellectualism. His family always knew that he would become a theologian. In
fact, when Dietrich turned 14, he wrote in his journal that he wanted to become
a theologian. This in itself is fascinating, as my thoughts at 14 did not reach
these lofty standards. His mother was the strongest advocate for his faith. A
devout and pious woman, she trained her children in the faith. Her grandfather
was the Karl Von Hase, a famous Lutheran theologian. Karl, his father, was not a
Christian. Although his conclusions may have been different from his son’s, “His respect for truth and for other human
beings of different opinions formed the foundation of a civil society in which
one might disagree graciously and might reason together civilly and
productively.” His father’s stance towards openness allowed Dietrich to see the benefit of
an open society, where ideas could be shared without reproach. Among many other
reasons, the stifling of these ideas during the Nazi propaganda machine truly
bothered Dietrich.
Graduate Studies
Bonhoeffer obtained his Phd in Theology at Berlin University in 1927 and followed up his studies traveling and living in Italy, Spain, and the United States.
American Church
Bonhoeffer had the opportunity to study in the United States in his early 20’s. He spent time at Union Seminary in New York, but traveled extensively throughout the east coast. Here are his thoughts on the American Church:
“Anyone who has seen the weekly program of one of the large NY churches, with their daily, indeed almost hourly events, teas, lectures, concerts, charity events, opportunities for sports, games, bowling, dancing for every age group, anyone who has heard how they try to persuade a new resident to join the church, insisting that you’ll get into society quite differently by doing so, anyone who has become acquainted with the embarrassing nervousness with which the pastor lobbies for membership—that person can well assess the character of such a church. All these things, of course, take place with varying degrees of tactfulness, taste, and seriousness; some churches are basically “charitable” churches; others have primarily a social identity. One cannot avoid the impression, however, that in both cases they have forgotten what the real point is.
This is a characteristic of all American thought, particularly as I have observed it in theology and the church; they do not see the radical claim of truth on the shaping of their lives. Community is therefore founded less on truth than on the spirit of “fairness.” One says nothing against another member of the dormitory as long as he is a “good fellow.”
He was surprised that in the American Church scene, tolerance trumped truth.
Bonhoeffer’s experience with the African-American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American Church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering. This would shape his thoughts during the height of Nazi power.
Confessing Church Actions towards the state
In 1933, the national church passed the Aryan
Paragraph—meaning that pastors and officials of Jewish ascent were removed from
all posts. Furthermore, 20,000 Christians demanded the removal of the Old
Testament. Seeing these movements as an affront to the traditional church, the
Emergency League was formed, as the forerunner to the confessing church. The
Confessing Church, which Bonhoeffer took part, ascribed to the belief that
Christ was the head of the Church, not the fuhrer.
Bonhoeffer’s recurring theme of incarnation—that God did not
create us to be disembodied spirits, but flesh-and-blood human beings—led him
to the idea that the Christian Life must be modeled. Jesus did not only
communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived.
And by living with his disciples, he showed them what life was supposed to look
like, what God had intended it to look like.
Bonhoeffer enumerated three possible ways in which the
church can act towards the state:
1.
The church questions the state regarding its
actions and their legitimacy.
2.
Aid the victims of state action (the Jews)
3.
Not to bandage the victims under the wheel, but
to put a spoke in the wheel itself (take down the Nazis).
Seminary Zingst and Finkwelwalde
In the midst of the Nazi’s power takeover, Bonhoeffer opened
two underground seminaries: Zingst and Finkelwalde to train Confessing Church
pastors. His idea for a seminary looked very different from the traditional
Lutheran model. He had in mind a kind of Monastic community, where one aimed to
live in the way Jesus commanded his followers to live in his Sermon on the
Mount, where one lived not merely as a theological student, but as a disciple
of Christ.
Each day began with a forty-five minute service before
breakfast and ended with a service just before bed. They would go though the
whole psalter (Book of Psalms) in a single week. There was a half an hour of
meditation. Then everybody went to his room and thought about the scripture
until he knew what it meant for him today, on that day. During this time, there
was absolute quite; the telephone couldn’t ring, nobody could walk around. We
were supposed to concentrate completely on whatever God had to say to us.
It is, though, certain that both theological work and real
pastoral fellowship can only grow in a life which is governed by gathering
around the Word morning and evening and by fixed times of prayer. Bonhoeffer
broached the subject of personal confession between students. It had been
Luther’s idea that Christians should confess to one another instead of to a
priest (Protestant tenant). Students would form in smaller groups of
confession.
Cost of Discipleship
Bonhoeffer’s most influential writing is his book on the
Sermon on the Mount, The Cost of
Discipleship. Influenced by a friendship with a Frenchman Jean Lessarre. He
respected Lessarre as a theologian, but not his pacifist views. Lessarre often
spoke on the sermon of the mount. Lessarre also motivated Bonhoeffer to become
involved in the ecumenical movements and eventually lead to his resistance to
Hitler and the Nazis. He started the book in 1932 and was published in November
1937.
THOUGHTS
Thoughts on Prayer:
Where a people prays, there is the church, and where the
church is, there is never loneliness.
It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a
praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with
prayer as vanity.
The religion of Christ is not a tidbit after one’s bread, on
the contrary, it is the bread or it is nothing. People should at least
understand and concede this if they call themselves Christian.
Thoughts on Church Growth
Should one not rejoice at a full church, or that people are
coming who had not come for years, and on the other hand, who dare analyze this
pleasure, and be quite certain that it is free from the seeds of darkness?
Thoughts on the Universal Church
“To think of the church as something universal would change everything and would set in motion
the entire course of Bonhoeffer’s remaining life, because if the church was
something that actually existed, then it existed not just in Germany or Rome,
but beyond both. The glimpse of the church as something beyond the Lutheran
Protestant Church of Germany, as a universal Christian community, was a
revelation and an invitation to further thinking. What is the church? This
became his doctoral dissertation: Sanctorum
Communio.”
Relationship with Karl Barth
Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian whose thoughts on Christian
Dogmatics are unparalleled, mostly heavily influenced Bonhoeffer. They
corresponded frequently.
“God is the one that reveals himself to us, we can do
nothing to reach him. Several times Bonhoeffer used Barth’s image of the tower
of Babel as a picture of religion, of
man trying to reach heaven through their own efforts, which always failed. “
The success of a sermon is utterly dependent on the God who
breaks through and “grasps” us, or we cannot be “grasped.”
Letter to his brother-in-law who was a liberal
theologically
(Bonhoeffer was conservative)
This poignant letter to his brother perfectly exemplified
how we should follow Christ, regardless of our theological differences.
“First of
all I will confess quite simply—I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to
all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly,
in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to
enquire of it. Only in this will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it
the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God
speaks to us. Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other
book, that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc.; there
is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will
reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not
grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply
receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our mind, simply
because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal
more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering
them in our heart,” so it will be with words of the Bible.
Only If we
will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as through in them this God
were speaking to use who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our
questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible…If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall
always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is
connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found,
then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and
which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And
whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the
Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely
contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but
also in the Old Testament.
And I would
like to tell you know quite personally: since I have learnt to read the Bible
in this way—and this has not been for so very long—it becomes every day more
wonderful to me. I read it in the morning and in the evening, often during the
day as well, and every day I consider a text which I have chosen for the whole
week, and try to sink deeply into it, so as really to hear what it is saying. I
know that without this I could not live properly any longer.”
Heinrich Heime:
Famous Quote during Nazi dictatorship: Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people too.
References to Jeremiah and the Psalms
The book of Jeremiah spoke to Dietrich in his decision to
return from the safety of the United States to the perilous conditions in
Germany.
“I have had
the time to think and to pray about my situation and that of my nation and to
have God’s will for me clarified. I have come to the conclusion that I have
made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period
of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I shall have no
right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after
the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.
Christians
cannot be governed my mere principles. Principles could carry one only so far.
At some point every person must hear from God, must know what God was calling
him to do, apart from others. Bonhoeffer did not believe it was permissible for
him to take up arms in this war of aggression, but he also did not feel that he
could make an absolute rule out of this, or declare it and put the Confessing
Church in a difficult spot.
1.
“Jeremiah was not eager to become a prophet of
God. When the call came to him all of a sudden, he shrank back, he resisted,
and he tried to get away.”
Bonhoeffer
saw Jeremiah in his own situation. He was beginning to understand that he was God’s prisoner, that like the prophets of
old, he was called to suffer and to be
oppressed—an in that defeat and the acceptance of that defeat, there was victory.
2.
When Jeremiah said, in his people’s hour of
direst need that “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this
land.”
“It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn
thy statues.” Psalm 119.71
In the prayerbook of the Bible, Bonhoeffer linked the idea
of Barthian grace with prayer by saying that we cannot reach God with out own
prayers, but by praying “his” prayers—the Psalms of the Old Testament, which
Jesus prayed—effectively piggyback on them all the way to heaven. The Psalter filled the life of early Christianity and Jesus
died on the cross with words from the Psalms on his lips.
When it was too difficult to meditate on verses, he had
simply memorized them, which had a similar effect. The verses opened up an
unexpected depth One has to live with the texts, and then they unfold.
A major theme for Bonhoeffer was that every Christian must
be “fully human” by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some
‘spiritual’ realm.
Bonhoeffer’s role in the Valkyrie Plot and Eventual
Imprisonment
In collaboration with others, Bonhoeffer helped plot
assassination attempts on Hitler. Bonhoeffer joined the Abwehr (a German
military intelligence organization) that allowed him to stay in Germany under
the guise of working with the Nazis, when in fact he was securing more
ecumenical contacts in the country and abroad traveling to the United Kingdom,
Sweden, and Norway. On suspicion of smaller conspiracy charges, he was
imprisoned for a year and a half in Tegel Prison awaiting trial. When the July
20th, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler was rebuffed, secret
Abwher documents were found that further implicated Bonhoeffer as a traitor to
the state.
Cell 92 at Tegel
Prison
During his time in prison he wrote letters, studied the word
and lived in communion with his prisonmates and guards.
He had theologically redefined the Christian life as
something active, nor reactive. Bonhoeffer was so busy in prison he said, “I
even feel that I have no time here for this or that less important matter!
After breakfast in the morning (about 7 o’clock) I read some theology, and then
I write till midday; in the afternoon I read, then comes a chapter from
Delbruck’s World History, some
English grammar, about which I can still learn all kinds of things, and
finally, as the mood takes me, I write or read again.”
“As I see it, I’m here for some purpose, and I only hope I
may fulfill. In the light of the great purpose all our privations and
disappointments are trivial. Nothing would be more unworthy and wrongheaded
than to turn one of those rare occasions of joy, such as you’re now
experiencing, into a calamity because of my present situation. That would go
entirely against the grain, and would undermine my optimism with regard to my
case.
Death
On April 9th, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was
executed by hanging at Flossenburg Concentration Camp only two weeks before the
US army would liberate the camp. A man who saw the execution had these words to
say, “His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I
worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to
the will of God.”
Notable Bonhoeffer Publications:
1.
Cost
of Discipleship
2.
Letters
and Papers From Prison
3.
Ethics
4.
Life
Together and the Prayer Book of the Bible
Great review Matthew of the life of a very impressive theologian who has continued to influence Christian thought.
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