Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

Hitler’s attitude toward Christianity was that it was a great heap of mystical out-of-date nonsense. But what annoyed Hitler was not that it was nonsense, but that it was nonsense that did not help him get ahead.

Himmler was deeply involved in the occult and in astrology, and much of what the SS perpetrated in the death camps bore Himmler’s saurian stamp.

The most serious Christians in Germany recognized the incompatibility of Christianity and Nazi philosophy. Karl Barth said Christianity was separated “as by an abyss from the inherent godlessness of National Socialism.”

Ludwig Müller, the man whom Hitler would put forward as his choice to lead a “united German church”—in the new position of Reichsbischof—declared that the “love” of the German Christians had a “hard, warrior-like face. It hates everything soft and weak because it knows that all life can only then remain healthy and fit for life when everything antagonistic to life, the rotten and the indecent, is cleared out of the way and destroyed.” This was not Christianity, but Nietzschean social Darwinism. Müller also publicly stated that the idea of grace was “un-German.”

the church struggle. Bodelschwingh’s short tenure as Reichsbischof

As would always be the case, their suggestion was too strong and too dramatic for most of the conciliatory Protestant leaders. Bonhoeffer’s decisiveness was unsettling to them, since it forced them to see their own sins in what was happening. Just as the politically compromised military leaders would one day balk when they ought to have acted to assassinate Hitler, so the theologically compromised Protestant leaders now balked. They couldn’t muster the will to do anything as stark and scandalous as staging a strike, and the opportunity was lost.

For Bonhoeffer and Hildebrandt, the time for schism had arrived. A church synod had officially voted to exclude a group of persons from Christian ministry simply because of their ethnic background. The German Christians had clearly broken away from the true and historical faith.

Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.

Krause gave the performance of his life, but it was a fatal miscalculation for the German Christians. In the morning the press reported on the event, and most Germans beyond the packed Sportpalast were shocked and outraged. It was one thing to wish for a church that was relevant to the German people and that inspired Germans to rise from their defeat at the hands of the international community and the godless Communists. But to go as far as Krause had gone, mocking the Bible and St. Paul and so much else, was too much. From that moment, the German Christian movement was effectively doomed to Barth’s abyss. Mainstream Protestants saw them as beyond the pale, as openly heretical and fanatically Nazi. And most of the Nazis, who were not Christians, simply thought of them as laughable.

In London he would not be as directly under the authority of the Reichskirche, not as much under the watchful eye of the church or political authorities in Berlin. He would also be free to work with ecumenical contacts to tell the truth about what was happening inside Germany. This was important and would have been impossible while still in Germany.

While dean of Canterbury, Bell had invited Dorothy Sayers and Christopher Fry as guest artists, but his most important invitation would be in 1935, when he commissioned T. S. Eliot to write the play Murder in the Cathedral, which dramatized the murder of Thomas à Becket that had taken place there in 1170.

There can be little question that for the next decade, Bell and Bonhoeffer were vital to galvanizing British sentiment against Hitler and the Third Reich.

And what none of them could know was that Pastor Bonhoeffer was talking, in some large part, about himself and about his future, the future that God was showing him. 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—and in that defeat and the acceptance of that defeat, there was victory. It was a sermon that applied to anyone with ears to hear, but few could actually hear

clear, the Barmen Declaration did not constitute a secession from the “official” German church because calling it a secession would give an appearance of legitimacy to that “official” German church. It was not the Confessing Church that had broken away, but the Reichskirche. The Barmen Declaration signaled that a group of pastors and churches acknowledged, repudiated, and officially distanced themselves from that de facto secession. It reclarified what it—the legitimate and actual German Church—actually believed and stood for.

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.

Bonhoeffer believed it was the role of the church to speak for those who could not speak. To outlaw slavery inside the church was right, but to allow it to exist outside the church would be evil. So it was with this persecution of the Jews by the Nazi state. Boldly speaking out for those who were being persecuted would show the Confessing Church to be the church, because just as Bonhoeffer had written that Jesus Christ was the “man for others,” so the church was his body on this earth, a community in which Christ was present—a community that existed “for others.” To serve others outside the church, to love them as one loved oneself, and to do unto them as one would have others do unto oneself, these were the clear commands of Christ.

They had never been forced to deal with the boundary of this scriptural idea of obedience to worldly authorities. The early Christians stood up against Caesar and the Romans. Surely the Nuremberg Laws would force the Confessing Church to take a stand against the Nazis.

The National Socialists’ strategy of dividing and conquering its opponents, of confusing and delaying, was working with the Confessing Church.

He knew that whatever befell him or the faithful brethren would open new opportunities in which God would operate, in which his provision would become clear.

If ever a golden opportunity was lost to put Hitler and the Nazis on an early train and deliver Germany from the unthinkable fate that awaited her, the flubbed Fritsch Affair was it. But it was from this lowest of low points that much of the resistance to Hitler would emerge.

This was when Bonhoeffer most clearly saw the connection: to lift one’s hand against the Jews was to lift one’s hand against God himself. The Nazis were attacking God by attacking his people. The Jews in Germany were not only not God’s enemies; they were his beloved children. Quite literally, this was a revelation.

It was worse than anything he had dreamed. And what Bonhoeffer now knew would make him feel more alone than ever because many in the church and ecumenical world were expending great energies toward ending the war. But Bonhoeffer was not. He now believed that the principal goal was to remove Hitler from power. Only afterward could Germany negotiate for peace. Knowing what he knew, any peace with Hitler was no better than war. But he couldn’t say such things, even in ecumenical circles. This was when he began to realize that he was already part of the conspiracy to remove Hitler.

Hitler’s hour had arrived, and on the first of September, a brutal new Darwinism broke over Europe: the Nietzschean triumph of the strong over the weak could at last begin. The weak who could be useful would be brutally enslaved; all others would be murdered. What seemed so offensive to the international community—that Hitler would take the territory of the Polish people by force—was nothing compared to what the Nazis were doing.

More Jews and Poles were being butchered every day. They must plan another coup. Many of them were Christians and had no qualms about calling what they saw evil, and felt a duty to stop it at all costs. Many felt that to be good Germans and faithful Christians at that time meant turning against the man leading their country.

Preparations for the T-4 euthanasia program had been under way for years. Now they hit the ground running. In August 1939 every doctor and midwife in the country was notified that they must register all children born with genetic defects—retroactive to 1936. In September, when the war began, the killing of these “defectives” began. In the next few years five thousand small children were killed. It wasn’t until later that fall that attention was formally focused on the other “incurables.”

The places to which these poor souls were transferred would murder them. At first the method was via injection, and later on via carbon monoxide gas. The parents or relatives of these patients had no idea of these goings-on until they received a letter in the mail, informing them of the death of their loved one, who had already been cremated. The cause of death was usually given as pneumonia or a similarly common ailment, and the ashes of their loved one’s remains arrived shortly thereafter.

The methods of killing used at these euthanasia centers and the methods of cremation were the first attempts by the Nazis to undertake mass killings. The lessons learned in murdering these helpless patients helped the Nazis streamline their killing and cremation methods, which would culminate in the death camps, where hundreds of thousands and then millions of innocents were killed.

All his life, Bonhoeffer had applied the same logic to theological issues that his father applied to scientific issues. There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it or none. 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. To be an ethereal figure who merely talked about God, but somehow refused to get his hands dirty in the real world in which God had placed him, was bad theology. Through Christ, God had shown that he meant us to be in this world and to obey him with our actions in this world. So Bonhoeffer would get his hands dirty, not because he had grown impatient, but because God was speaking to him about further steps of obedience.

Hitler and Germany had waited twenty-three years for this triumphant moment, and if ever Adolf Hitler became the Savior of the German nation, this was it. Many Germans who had reservations and misgivings about Hitler now changed their opinions. He had healed the unhealable wound of the First War and Versailles. He had restored a broken Germany to her former greatness. The old had passed way, and behold, he had made all things new. In many people’s eyes he was suddenly something like a god, the messiah for whom they had waited and prayed, and whose reign would last a thousand years.

After Hitler’s success in France, a new day had dawned. Bonhoeffer and so many in the Resistance had been convinced that Hitler would ruin Germany by dragging it into a miserable military defeat. But who could have dreamed he would destroy Germany through success, through an ever-escalating orgy of self-love and self-worship? Actually Bonhoeffer considered it in the truncated speech given two days after Hitler came to power. He knew that if Germany worshiped any idol, it would incinerate its own future, as those who worshiped Moloch did by burning their children. After the fall of France, many understood that Hitler was destroying Germany through success.

In the essay Bonhoeffer gave the example of a girl whose teacher asks in front of the class whether her father is a drunkard. She says no. “Of course,” Bonhoeffer said, “one could call the child’s answer a lie; all the same, this lie contains more truth—i.e., it corresponds more closely to the truth—than if the child had revealed the father’s weakness before the class.” One cannot demand “the truth” at any cost, and for this girl to admit in front of the class that her father is a drunkard is to dishonor him. How one tells the truth depends on circumstances. Bonhoeffer was aware that what he called the “living truth” was dangerous and “arouses the suspicion that the truth can and may be adapted to the given situation, so that the concept of truth utterly dissolves, and falsehood and truth draw indistinguishably close to each other.”

To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by “rules” or “principles.” One could never separate one’s actions from one’s relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. Legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate.

Such doubts and questions from others would plague Bonhoeffer, but he certainly wasn’t free to explain what he was doing to those outside his inner circle. This represented another “death” to self for him because he had to surrender his reputation in the church. People wondered how he escaped the fate of the rest of his generation. He was writing and traveling, meeting with this one and that one, going to movies and restaurants, and living a life of relative privilege and freedom while others were suffering and dying and being put in excruciating positions of moral compromise.

By the fall of 1941, however, all hopes that the conspiracy could get Britain’s assurances of a negotiated peace were gone. The war had dragged on too long. With Germany fighting Russia, Churchill saw it as all or nothing. He was not interested in the conspiracy—if one even existed. He took a defiant stance that branded every German a Nazi and turned a deaf ear to the voices of the conspirators.

Little did these theologically ignorant Nazis know that the man with whom they were dealing had worked out a theological defense of deception against the likes of them. In some ways he was their worst nightmare. He was not a “worldly” or “compromised” pastor, but a pastor whose very devotion to God depended on his deceiving the evil powers raged against him. He was serving God by taking them all for a long ride.

Again and again in various accounts, people write about how strong Bonhoeffer was during the air raids, how he was a comfort and bulwark to those around him when everyone believed death was at hand. But his strength was borrowed from God and lent to others. Because Bonhoeffer was not afraid to share his weaknesses and fears with Bethge, the courage he expressed can be seen as real. He seems genuinely to have entrusted himself to God and therefore had no regrets or real fears:

To renounce a full life and its real joys in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human.

Bonhoeffer’s theology had always leaned toward the incarnational view that did not eschew “the world,” but that saw it as God’s good creation to be enjoyed and celebrated, not merely transcended. According to this view, God had redeemed mankind through Jesus Christ, had re-created us as “good.” So we weren’t to dismiss our humanity as something “un-spiritual.” As Bonhoeffer had said before, God wanted our “yes” to him to be a “yes” to the world he had created. This was not the thin pseudohumanism of the liberal “God is dead” theologians who would claim Bonhoeffer’s mantle as their own in the decades to come, nor was it the antihumanism of the pious and “religious” theologians who would abdicate Bonhoeffer’s theology to the liberals. It was something else entirely: it was God’s humanism, redeemed in Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer believed that, historically speaking, it was time for everyone to see these things. The evilness of the Nazis could not be defeated via old-fashioned “ethics,” “rules,” and “principles.” God alone could combat it. Under “normal” circumstances, he said, people are concerned with ideas of right and wrong. They try to do right, as they see it, and try to avoid doing what is wrong. This would never suffice, but at the time of the Nazis, the failure of such a “religious” approach had become more obvious.

Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition. In his Ethics, he wrote that in our efforts to do good we, like that “knight of the doleful countenance,” are tilting at windmills. We think we are doing good and fighting evil, but in fact, we are living in an illusion. There was no moral condemnation in what Bonhoeffer said, however. “Only the mean-spirited can read the fate of Don Quixote,” he wrote, “without sharing in and being moved by it.” This is our universal predicament as human beings. The solution is to do the will of God, to do it radically and courageously and joyfully. To try to explain “right” and “wrong”—to talk about ethics—outside of God and obedience to his will is impossible: “Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.” We must look only at God, and in him we are reconciled to our situation in the world.

To those for whom Bonhoeffer’s few words on religionless Christianity were the sine qua non of all he ever said, this uncompromising Christocentrism would be strong meat, as are his pronouncements in Ethics on a number of other issues, such as abortion: Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

The oaken table was in smithereens. Hair was on fire. The ceiling had descended to the floor. Several men lay dead. But contrary to what Stauffenberg believed as he rushed toward the airfield, none of these dead men was “evil incarnate.” Hitler was fine and dandy, albeit cartoonishly mussed. His secretary, Gertraud Junge, recalled, “The Führer looked very strange. His hair was standing on end, like quills on a hedgehog, and his clothes were in tatters. But in spite of all that he was ecstatic—after all, hadn’t he survived?” 481 “It was Providence that spared me,” Hitler declared. “This proves that I’m on the right track. I feel that this is the confirmation of all my work.” His extraordinary survival amidst this smoke and death was proof positive that he was straddling the very zeitgeist.

Bonhoeffer famously said that he could “see the dangers” of his own book Discipleship, “though I still stand by what I wrote.” What he meant was that with the Christian life that he advocated in that book, there is always the temptation to become religious in the pejorative, Barthian sense, to use the Christian faith as a means to escape life rather than as a means to live life more fully.

“Absolute seriousness is never without a dash of humor.” Another one reiterates his theme that being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will: “The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one’s life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration.”

Henning von Tresckow and others took their own lives, most of them for fear of revealing the names of others under torture. Before he did so, Tresckow spoke to Schlabrendorff, who recalled his words: 487 The whole world will vilify us now, but I am still totally convinced that we did the right thing. Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany but of the world. When, in a few hours’ time, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify in good conscience what I did in the struggle against Hitler. God promised Abraham that He would not destroy Sodom if just ten righteous men could be found in the city, and so I hope that for our sake God will not destroy Germany. None of us can bewail his own death; those who consented to join our circle put on the robe of Nessus. A human being’s moral integrity begins when he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions.

As much as Bodelschwingh’s community at Bethel had been a living embodiment of the gospel of life, where the weak were cared for and loved, Buchenwald and its equivalents throughout the Third Reich were living embodiments of the satanic worldview of the SS, where weakness was preyed upon and crushed.

The difficulties are still the same as before. In these “Christian medical circles” the standpoint is being taken that it goes without saying that a young German aviator should be allowed to risk his life but that the life of a criminal—who is not drafted into military service—is too sacred for this purpose and one should not stain oneself with this guilt. . . . We two should not get angry about these difficulties. It will take at least another ten years until we can get such narrow-mindedness out of our people. But this should not affect the research work which is necessary for our young and splendid soldiers and aviators.