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Anyone who truly understands how God’s grace comes to us will have a changed life. That’s the gospel, not salvation by law, or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.
Realizing he needed to fuel the British war effort, Prime Minister Winston Churchill fused the Germans and the Nazis into a single hated enemy, the better to defeat it swiftly and end the unrelenting nightmare.
As the couple took in the hard news that the good man who was their son was now dead, so too, many English took in the hard news that the dead man who was a German was good. Thus did the world again begin to reconcile itself to itself.
But the welter of wonderfulness that was their heritage seems to have been a boon, one that buoyed them up so that each child seems not only to have stood on the shoulders of giants but also to have danced on them.
Luther in a single blow shattered the edifice of European Catholicism and in the bargain created the modern German language, which in turn effectively created the German people. Christendom was cleft in twain, and out of the earth beside it sprang the Deutsche Volk.
It maintained that the real enemy in the war
was not the Allied powers, but those pro-Communist, pro-Bolshevist Germans who had destroyed Germany’s chances of victory from within, who had “stabbed it in the back.” Their treachery was far worse than any enemies Germany had faced across the battlefields, and they were the ones who must be punished.
With great success he fanned the flames of this idea, and increasingly harped on the idea that Bolshevism was really international Jewry, that the Jews and the Communists had destroyed Germany.
The right-wing monarchists and the military pledged to support the new government, but never did. Instead they would distance themselves from it and blame the loss of the war on it, and on all other leftist elements, especially Communists and Jews.
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. This 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? It was the question he would attack in his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, and in his post-doctoral work, Act and Being.
Indeed, his thoughts on the nature of the church would lead him into the ecumenical movement in Europe, causing him to link hands with Christians outside Germany, and therefore to see instantly the lie at the heart of the so-called orders of creation theology, which linked the idea of the church with the German Volk.
Ideas had consequences, and this idea, now just budding, would flower in his opposition to the National Socialists and bear fruit in his involvement in the conspiracy to kill a human being.
For him, it was difficult to be closed to a church that somehow partook of the splendor of classical antiquity, that seemed to see the best in it and even to redeem some of it. The Lutheran and Protestant traditions were less connected to the great classical past and could therefore veer toward the heresies of Gnostic dualism, of denial of the body and of the goodness of this world.
When the Nazis were taking over the German Lutheran Church, he would lead the charge to break away and start the Confessing Church.
But someone who grew up dining with Karl Bonhoeffer, and who was allowed to speak only when he could justify every syllable, had probably developed a certain intellectual confidence and may be somewhat excused if he was not intimidated by other great minds.
Like most theological students in the late nineteenth century, Barth absorbed the regnant liberal theology of his time, but he grew to reject it, quickly becoming its most formidable opponent. His groundbreaking 1922 commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, fell like a smart bomb into the ivory tower of scholars like Adolf von Harnack, who could hardly believe their historical-critical fortress pregnable, and who were scandalized by Barth’s approach to the Bible, which came to be called neo-orthodoxy, and which asserted the idea, particularly controversial in German theological circles, that God
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As a result of his intellectual openness, Bonhoeffer learned how to think like a fox and respect the way foxes thought, even though he was in the camp of the hedgehogs. He could appreciate the value in something, even if he ultimately rejected that something—and could see the errors and flaws in something, even if he ultimately accepted that something.
between the neo-orthodox Barthians and the historical-critical liberals was similar to the contemporary one between strict Darwinian evolutionists and advocates of so-called Intelligent Design.
Bonhoeffer agreed with Barth, seeing the texts as “not just historical sources, but [as] agents of revelation,” not merely “specimens of writing, but sacred canon.”
It was the God beyond the texts, the God who was their author and who
spoke to mankind through them, that fired his interest.
This was a very radical and dramatic thing to say, but it is the perfectly logical conclusion to the idea that apart from God’s grace, one can do nothing worthwhile. Anything good must come from God, so even in a sermon that was poorly written and delivered, God might manifest himself and touch the congregation. Conversely in a sermon wonderfully written and delivered, God might refuse to manifest himself. The “success” of the sermon is utterly dependent on the God who breaks through and “grasps” us, or we cannot be “grasped.”
Then he came to his main point: the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ.
religion was a dead, man-made thing, and at the heart of Christianity was something else entirely—God himself, alive. “Factually speaking,” he said, “Christ has given scarcely any ethical prescriptions that were not to be found already with the contemporary Jewish rabbis or in pagan literature.” Christianity was not about a new and better set of behavioral rules or about moral accomplishment. He must have shocked some of his listeners, but his logic was undeniably compelling. He then aggressively attacked the idea of “religion” and moral performance as the very enemies of Christianity and of
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Bonhoeffer did go high and far, and those who focus overmuch on these latter heights may be somewhat excused for failing to know that somewhere below the clouds, there was an orthodox theological foundation to which they were solidly connected.
He differentiated between Christianity as a religion like all the others—which attempt but fail to make an ethical way for man to climb to heaven of his
own accord—and following Christ, who demands everything, including our very lives.
Before he was finished, he made a third provocative point. He identified “the Greek spirit” or “humanism” as “the most severe enemy” that Christianity ever had. He then masterfully linked the idea of “religion” and moral accomplishment as a false way to God with dualism, the idea that the body is at war with the soul. Dualism was a Greek notion, not a Hebrew or biblical notion. The biblical affirmation of the body and the material world was another theme to which he would return again and again in his life:
Bonhoeffer’s father was his primary mentor in this way of thinking. Karl Bonhoeffer’s conclusions may have been different from
his son’s, but 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.
the Nazis had entered the lists as the ninth and smallest of Germany’s political parties, with a pitiful twelve members in the Reichstag—Hitler hoped to quadruple that number—but by day’s end they would have exceeded even his own febrile expectations, amassing 107 seats, and in a single bounding alley-oop had vaulted into being the second largest political party in the land.
Seeing an opportunity to knock out fundamentalism in New York, the Rockefeller Foundation promptly funded the construction of a church for Fosdick, one that would serve as a proper platform for his “progressive” modernist views. Bonhoeffer had just begun his studies at Union when it opened—and it opened to such pomp and circumstance that no one could have failed to know about it. It was a major cultural event.
He was active in combating racism and minced no words about the saving power of Jesus Christ. He didn’t fall for the Hobson’s choice of one or the other; he believed that without both, one had neither, but with both, one had everything and more. When the two were combined, and only then, God came into the equation. Then and only then was life poured out. For the first time Bonhoeffer saw the gospel preached and lived out in obedience to God’s commands.
Bonhoeffer’s experiences 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. Somehow he had seen something more in those churches and in those Christians, something that the world of academic theology—even when it was at its best, as in Berlin—did not touch very much. His friendship with the Frenchman Jean Lasserre spoke to him in a similar way.
Since then everything has changed. I have felt this plainly, and so have other people about me. It was a great liberation. It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must belong to the Church, and step by step it became plainer to me how far that must go.
It is likely that he now began to think of the church as called by God to “stand with those who suffer.”
Bonhoeffer was not interested in intellectual abstraction. Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian.
They had to find a place on the grass and sit quietly for an hour and meditate on that verse. Many of them found it difficult, as Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde ordinands would find it difficult. Inge Karding was among them: “He taught us that the Bible goes directly into your life, [to] where your problems are.”
Bonhoeffer was working out the ideas that would find their way into the illegal seminaries of the Confessing Church in a few years. For him, such things as meditating on Bible verses and the singing formed integral parts in a theological education. 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
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The difference between real leadership and the false leadership of the Leader was this: real leadership derived its authority from God, the source of all goodness. Thus parents have legitimate authority because they are submitted to the legitimate authority of a good God. But the authority of the Führer was submitted to nothing. It was self-derived and autocratic, and therefore had a messianic aspect.
So the German people clamored for order and leadership. But it was as though in the babble of their clamoring, they had summoned the devil himself, for there now rose up from the deep wound in the national psyche something strange and terrible and compelling. The Führer was no mere man or mere politician. He was something terrifying and authoritarian, self-contained and self-justifying, his own father and his own god. He was a symbol who symbolized himself, who had traded his soul for the zeitgeist.
The theme was the same as in his radio address, but now the altar before which idol worshipers would worship would not have said, “To an unknown false god.” Now everyone knew who the false god was that would be worshiped. Now the Führer to whom the Führer Principle referred had a name. Hitler had stepped onto the altar. All that remained was to deal with those closed-minded troublemakers who still worshiped other gods.
They would welcome giving up a few liberties to preserve the German nation against the Communist devils. So the fire was set and the Communists blamed and the Nazis triumphed. But just how it happened that night remains a mystery.
With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made “legal.” Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.
It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions of a state; at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil. This, he said, is permitted only when the church sees its very existence threatened by the state, and when the state ceases to be the state as defined by God.
In the spring of 1933, Bonhoeffer was declaring it the duty of the church to stand up for the Jews. This would have seemed radical to even staunch allies, especially since the Jews had not begun to suffer the horrors they would suffer in a few years. Bonhoeffer’s three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state’s victims, and work against the state, if necessary—were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.
Christians in Germany were now doing. They were convinced that if they bent their theology a bit, it wouldn’t matter—the results would be all right in the end. Many of them honestly believed that under Hitler the opportunities for evangelism would increase.
But Bonhoeffer knew that a church that did not stand with the Jews was not the church of Jesus Christ, and to evangelize people into a church that was not the church of Jesus Christ was foolishness and heresy.
The SA also handed out pamphlets and held placards: “Deutsche Wehrt Euch! Kauft Nicht Bei Juden!” (Germans, protect yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!) Some signs were in English: “Germans, defend yourselves from Jewish Atrocity Propaganda—buy only at German shops!” Even the offices of Jewish doctors and lawyers were targeted.
