More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the more Bonhoeffer’s name proliferates in American public discourse, the more fuzzy become the details of his life and the more stubbornly errors attach themselves to his legacy.
Yad Vashem
Gushee further fleshed out what he saw as the German theologian’s relevance for contemporary evangelicalism by focusing on one of its most “besetting sins”—the tendency to acculturate itself to the “American way of life.”
“How frequently we have confused being Christian with being American, loving nation with loving God,” Gushee wrote.
was a jeremiad against conservative Christian elites who, “in exchange for political access and power, ransacked the faith and trivialized its convictions.”
The damning evidence cited by these internal critics ranges from idolatrous Christian nationalism to easy accommodation to war to the conflation of Christianity with the American way of life. Their solution is to remind evangelicals that authentic faith may lead Christians into “principled opposition to nation and culture.”
Things had come to the point, Black wrote, that the American church would do well “to consider the steps taken by the Confessing Church in Germany in calling Christians to repentance during the dark days of Hitler’s Third Reich.”
began with the suggestion that Americans might be flirting with homegrown totalitarianism.
Too often overlooked, he noted, was the role of conservative intellectuals, financed by corporate interests, who “denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality, and cosmopolitan culture.”
“Resist the beginnings of compromises that dull the moral senses and take their ease in a life of cheap grace. Resist the beginnings that give evil, willed blindness, and civic passivity a foothold. Don’t let the right eye wink at complicity or the left hand abet it. Resist becoming unwitting accomplices to an errant leader. Resist all the places in your own soul that give way. A discerning spirituality is as vital as the right politics and indispensable to it.”
clumsy analogies
The irony is that the portrait of Bonhoeffer developed by death-of-God theologians is generally viewed by scholars as a cautionary tale about interpreters who, like Metaxas, look into Bonhoeffer’s face only to behold their own reflections.
In truth, Barmen’s failure to address the “Jewish Question” is so widely acknowledged that a standard resource on the Holocaust concedes that the declaration did “not mention Jews or express the slightest critique of Nazi antisemitism
In this sense Metaxas does a disservice to evangelical, and all other, interpreters of Bonhoeffer by reinforcing a notion against which most of them have long fought—that Bonhoeffer’s writings are a sort of Rorschach test onto which one can project contemporary interests and needs.
Christians perceived the moment as a sort of kairos—the New Testament term for a time pregnant with meaning and opportunity.
The fuzzy logic, which was uncharacteristic of Metaxas, revealed his desperation to find an argument that might keep evangelicals in the Trump camp through the election.
There is no doubt, Marsh wrote in conclusion, “that honest engagement of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and thought moves us a long way from the harrowing worldview of Donald J. Trump.”
“For many Christians,” I noted, “Hitler’s quirks and lack of refinement were overshadowed by his promises to restore law and order, reassert the church’s cultural relevance, put the country back on par with its international rivals, and generally make Germany ‘great again.’ ”
In truth, however, “Bonhoeffer’s early antipathy toward Hitler was regarded with irritation by most Christian leaders in Germany, even among those who opposed the church’s nazification.” I reminded readers that Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries viewed him as an “unreasonable partisan who was too uncompromising in church disputes, too quick to criticize the fledgling Nazi state, and too pessimistic about Germany’s auspicious future under Hitler.”
“patriotism or statism can become idolatry.”
“To Mr. Trump’s skillful manipulations of reality” Edington juxtaposed Bonhoeffer’s own words from Discipleship: “In this question of truthfulness what matters first and last is that a man’s whole being should be exposed, his whole evil laid bare in the sight of God. But sinful men do not like this sort of truthfulness, and they resist it with all their might.
Do we acknowledge that God has made from one blood all people that dwell on the Earth? Are we attempting to make ourselves into ‘good people,’ defined by our weekly Sunday morning communities, ones that draw the boundaries of our social responsibilities quite narrowly, or are we looking to serve the Christ we meet in social encounters with real humans every day?”
According to several scholars of American history, “the invocation of a president’s name as a jaw-jutting declaration of exclusion, rather than inclusion, appears to be unprecedented.”
Thus the Trump era, however long it should last, represents a true test for Christians who regard Bonhoeffer as a model of discipleship. Bonhoeffer never forgot after Hitler came to power that he was not living in ordinary times, no matter how many of his countrymen adjusted and assimilated to Germany’s “new normal.” We who claim some kinship with Bonhoeffer must similarly resist becoming accustomed to ways of thinking, speaking, and acting that are anti-Christian, and antihuman, in spirit. And we must work to discredit claims on Bonhoeffer by those who do think, speak, and act in these ways.
...more
First, there is nothing remotely “Christian” about Donald Trump. I try to be charitable in my judgments of people I do not know, but this is the only conclusion I can draw. The question for the moment isn’t whether someone’s personal moral failings disqualify him or her from holding office, but just how serious and pervasive these failings are in the case of Donald Trump.
I think Amy Sullivan said it best when she wrote that Trump is “pretty much the human embodiment of the question ‘What would Jesus not do?’ ”3 Indeed, Trump’s personal mottoes—“always get even” and “hit back harder than you were hit”—represent the antitheses of Jesus’s own, which were “blessed are the merciful” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” Furthermore, neither his stable of evangelical advisers nor his White House handlers have had any success in controlling the flow of evidence that Trump’s character is animated by the least Christian of qualities—self-aggrandizement, enrichment at
...more
You taught me to judge people on the basis of their character, revealed particularly in the way they treat others. By this standard, Donald Trump is the least “Christian” political candidate in recent memory, and everything you taught me about God and the Christian life demands that I despise him. Claims that he is “rough,” “inexperienced,” “unrefined,” or “unused to governing” are all true as far as they go. But they do not address the moral issue you trained me to recognize and take with utmost seriousness: behavior and langu...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Trump has not publicly indicated a desire to follow or honor Christ.
They want us to trust a “feeling” they had while they were in Trump’s presence, while asking us to ignore his public treatment of people, his habits, and his words.
So when, exactly, did character stop mattering in our assessment of political candidates?
Your fierce embrace of Trump has begun to do real damage to American Christianity.
An evangelical journalist recently made the credible claim that you actually represent a new religious movement called “Fox evangelicalism.” At the heart of this new religion, she writes, is the “nationalistic, race-baiting, fear-mongering form of politics enthusiastically practiced by Mr. Trump and Roy Moore in Alabama.” She describes regular Fox News viewers as taking in “a steady stream of messages
These leaders’ responses to this latest scandal have led some to claim that we are now seeing evangelicalism’s true colors.
but long-standing commitments to racism and sexism.
In this view Trump has revealed the evangelical movement’s true priorities, which, according to Goldberg, include “the preservation of traditional racial and sexual hierarchies.”
Trump’s “court evangelicals” have made their political bargain with open eyes.
Your embrace of Trump is eerily reminiscent of German Christians’ attachment to Hitler in the early 1930s. I make this point not to convince you that Trump is Hitler but to remind you of the troubling ways Christians have compromised themselves in endorsing political movements in which they perceived the hand of God.
Being familiar with this history, I have been struck by how reminiscent many of your responses to Trump are of the way Christians in Germany embraced a strong leader they were convinced would restore the country’s moral order. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many Christians in Germany let themselves be persuaded that Hitler was a deeply pious man, placed in power by God through a graceful act of intervention in German history. Hitler encouraged these ideas not by claiming any allegiance to Christ but by employing vague religious language, promising a return to the “good old days,”
...more
“With National Socialism an epoch in German history has begun that is at least as decisive for the German people, as for example the epoch of Martin Luther.” “No one could welcome January 30, 1933 more profoundly or more joyfully than the German Christian leadership.” “Adolf Hitler, with his faith in Germany, as the instrument of our God became the framer of German destiny and the liberator of our people from their spiritual misery and division.” “[Hitler is] the best man imaginable, a man shaped in a mold made of unity, piety, energy and strength of character.” “[Hitler], the most German man,
...more
Honestly, Hitler was better at pretending to be a Christian.
it is ironic that you do not seem bothered by these leaders who are repeating the mistakes so clearly displayed by German Christians in the wake of the Nazi revolution.
