Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

By the time of Hitler’s ascension, much of the German church understood grace only as abstract acceptance—“God forgives; that’s his job.” But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others. Anyone who truly understands how God’s grace comes to us will have a changed life.

At the beginning of the war, it was possible to separate the Nazis from the Germans and recognize that not all Germans were Nazis. As the clash between the two nations wore on, and as more and more English fathers and sons and brothers died, distinguishing the difference became more difficult. Eventually the difference vanished altogether.

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.

When Germans working to defeat Hitler and the Nazis contacted Churchill and the British government, hoping for assistance to defeat their common enemy from the inside—hoping to tell the world that some Germans trapped inside the Reich felt much as they did—they were rebuffed. No one was interested in their overtures. It was too late. They couldn’t...

The rich world of his ancestors set the standards for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own life. It gave him a certainty of judgment and manner that cannot be acquired in a single generation. He grew up in a family that believed the essence of learning lay not in a formal education but in the deeply rooted obligation to be guardians of a great historical heritage and intellectual tradition.

Count Zinzendorf advocated the idea of a personal relationship with God, rather than the formal churchgoing Lutheranism of the day. Zinzendorf used the term living faith, which he contrasted unfavorably with the prevailing nominalism of dull Protestant orthodoxy. For him, faith was less about an intellectual assent to doctrines than about a personal, transforming encounter with God, so the Herrnhüter emphasized Bible reading and home devotions.

191217, Dietrich’s father accepted an appointment to the chair of psychiatry and neurology in Berlin. This put him at the head of his field in Germany, a position he retained until his death in 1948. It’s hard to overstate Karl Bonhoeffer’s influence. Bethge said that his mere presence in Berlin “turned the city into a bastion against the invasion of Freud’s and Jung’s psycho-analysis. Not that he had a closed mind to unorthodox theories, or denied on principle the validity of efforts to investigate unexplored areas of the mind.” Karl Bonhoeffer never publicly dismissed Freud, Jung, or Adler and their theories, but he held them at arm’s length with a measured skepticism borne of his devotion to empirical science.

Karl Bonhoeffer would not20 have called himself a Christian, but he respected his wife’s tutelage of the children in this and lent his tacit approval to it, even if only by participating as an observer. He was not the sort of scientist who ruled out the existence of a realm beyond the physical and seemed to have had a genuine respect for the limits of reason. With the values that his wife taught the children, he was entirely in agreement. Among those values was a serious respect for the feelings and opinions of others, including his wife’s.

faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.

The worlds of folklore and religion were so mingled in early twentieth-century German culture that even families who didn’t go to church were often deeply Christian. This folk song is typical, beginning as a paean to the beauty of the natural world, but soon turning into a meditation on mankind’s need for God and finally into a prayer, asking God to help us “poor and prideful sinners” to see his salvation when we die—and in the meantime here on earth to help us to be “like little children, cheerful and faithful.” German culture

Luther’s influence cannot be overestimated. His translation of the Bible into German was cataclysmic. Like a medieval John Bunyan, 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.

The Luther Bible was to the modern German language what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language. Before Luther’s Bible, there was no unified German language. It existed only in a hodgepodge of dialects. And Germany as a nation was an idea far in the future, a gleam in Luther’s eye. But when Luther translated the Bible into German, he created a single language in a single book that everyone could read and did read. Indeed, there was nothing else to read. Soon everyone spoke German the way Luther’s translation did. As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther’s Bible created a single German tongue.

Suddenly millers from München could communicate with bakers from Bremen. Out of this grew a sense of a common heritage and culture.

But Luther brought Germans to a fuller engagement with their faith through singing too. He wrote many hymns—the most well-known being “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”—and introduced the idea of congregational singin...

In 1917 their two eldest, Karl-Friedrich and Walter, would be called up. Both were born in 1899; now they would go to war. Though they might easily have done so, their parents didn’t pull any strings to help them avoid serving on the front lines. Germany’s greatest need was in the infantry, and there both boys enlisted. In a way their bravery foreshadowed what lay twenty years ahead in the next war. The Bonhoeffers raised their children to do the right thing, so when they behaved selflessly and bravely, it was difficult to argue. The extraordinary words that Karl Bonhoeffer would write to a colleague in 1945 after learning of the deaths of his sons Dietrich and Klaus—as well as the deaths of two sons-in-law—capture the Bonhoeffers’ attitude during both wars: “We are sad, but also proud.”

Things were still looking very well for Germany that year. In fact, the Germans were so confident that on March 24, 1918, the kaiser declared a national holiday.

In 1918 all that changed. The kaiser, who represented the authority of both church and state, and who, as a figurehead, represented Germany and the German way of life, would abdicate. It was devastating.

Finally, in November, the nightmare came true: Germany lost the war. The turmoil that followed was unprecedented. Just a few months earlier they had been on the bright verge of victory. What had happened? Many blamed the Communists for sowing seeds of discontent among the troops at a crucial time. This was where the famous Dolchstoss (stab-in-the-back) legend came about. 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.

It was a grotesque50 and painful task, since Hindenburg was a monarchist. But for the sake of the nation, he went to the Belgian city Spa and delivered the epochal ultimatum to his kaiser. When Hindenburg left the conference room after that meeting, a seventeen-year-old orderly from Grunewald was standing in the hallway. Klaus Bonhoeffer never forgot the moment when the stout Hindenburg brushed past him. After the death of Walter, with Karl-Friedrich still in the infantry, it’s no wonder the Bonhoeffer parents wanted to find their youngest soldier a position out of harm’s way. As a result, he was stationed at Spa, and that day witnessed history. He later described the exiting Hindenburg as being “rigid as a statue both in countenance and bearing.”

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. Meanwhile, less than a mile down the street, the Communists, having taken over the kaiser’s Stadtschloss (palace), were not ready to surrender. They still wanted a full-blown Soviet republic, and two hours after Scheidemann had declared “the German republic” from the Reichstag window, Liebknecht followed suit, throwing open a window in the Stadtschloss and declaring a “free Socialist republic”! It was in this childish way, with two windows flung open in two historic buildings, that the great troubles began. The four-monthlong civil war, called the German Revolution, now started.

But as the spring of 1919 wore on, just as everyone thought things were being restored to something they could live with, the most humiliating and crushing blow of all came. That May, the Allies published the full terms of peace that they demanded and that they had signed in the fabled Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The Germans were astonished. They had thought the worst was over. Hadn’t they done all the Allies had asked? Hadn’t they chased the kaiser from his throne? And then hadn’t they crushed the Communists? And after they’d dealt with the right and the left, hadn’t they set up a decently centrist democratic government that possessed elements of the U.S., English, French, and Swiss governments? What more could be decently expected from them? As it turned out, much more. The treaty required Germany to give up territory in France, Belgium, and Denmark, as well as all of her Asian and African colonies. It also required her to pay exorbitant reparations in gold, ships, lumber, coal, and livestock. But there were three demands that were particularly unbearable: first, Germany must give up most of Poland, thus cutting off East Prussia from the rest of the nation; second, she must officially accept sole responsibility for the war; and third, she must eviscerate her military. These demands were individually heinous, but taken together, they were something beyond comprehension.

A year earlier, when the Germans still expected overall victory in the war and had just defeated Russia, hadn’t they forced the Russians to sign a treaty that was almost certainly worse than what they were being forced to sign now? Hadn’t they shown less mercy then than they were being shown? The worm had turned, and these tit-for-tat troubles, now being sown like wind, would grow and grow.

study of theology, and the profession of theologian, were not highly respected in those circles. In a society whose ranks were still clearly discernible, the university theologians stood rather apart, academically and socially.”

Walther Rathenau, a politically moderate Jew, had been the German foreign minister, and he felt Germany should pay its war debts as stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles while simultaneously trying to renegotiate them. For these views, and for his Jewishness, he was despised by the right wing, who that day dispatched a carful of thugs with machine guns to murder him on his way to his offices in the Wilhelmstrasse, near Bonhoeffer’s school.

Dietrich also followed in his father’s footsteps by joining the Igel fraternity. The Igels had come into existence in 1871, the same year as the German Reich. It was then, following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, that Prussia had led the way in uniting the twenty-five states of Germany. They became a federation called the German Empire, and for the nearly fifty years of its existence this Reich was led by Prussia and the Hohenzollern dynasty. The first German emperor was Wilhelm I, king of Prussia.

For Germany, 1923 was disastrous. The German mark, which had begun to slide two years earlier, went into free fall. In 1921 it dropped to 75 marks to the dollar; the next year to 400; and by early 1923 it plunged to 7,000. But this was only the beginning of sorrows. Germany was buckling under the pressure of meeting the payments stipulated by the Versailles Treaty. In 1922, unable to bear up any longer, the German government asked for a moratorium. The savvy French wouldn’t be taken in by this ruse and staunchly refused. But it was no ruse, and Germany soon defaulted. The French promptly dispatched troops to occupy the Ruhr region, Germany’s center of industry.

by August a dollar was worth one million marks; and by September, August seemed like the good old days. By November 1923 a dollar was worth about four billion German marks.

On November 8 Hitler, sensing his moment, led his famous Munich Bierhall Putsch. But he sensed it prematurely and was trundled off to jail for high treason. There, in the peace and quiet of Lansberg am Lech, like an exiled emperor, he met with cronies, dictated his crackpot manifesto Mein Kampf, and planned his next move.

Such political turmoil called for a level of military readiness that the Allies were unwilling to grant, so the Germans invented ways around it to avoid the interference of the Allied Control Commission. One was for university students to receive covert training during the semesters. These troops were referred to as the Black Reichswehr. In November 1923 it was Dietrich’s turn.

That winter while Dietrich9 was living with his grandmother, they discussed the idea of his visiting Gandhi in India. His grandmother encouraged it. What her interest in Gandhi was we cannot know for sure. During the previous century, she was active in the budding field of women’s rights: she built a home for elderly women and founded a domestic school for girls in Stuttgart. For her efforts she was awarded a medal of the Order of Olga, presented to her by the queen of Württemberg.

In a few years the zeitgeist would blow the Igel fraternity to the right and when, in 1935, they officially adopted the terrible Aryan Paragraph, Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Walter Dress would disgustedly and publicly resign their memberships.

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.

But Bonhoeffer was no mere academic. For him, ideas and beliefs were nothing if they did not relate to the world of reality outside one’s mind. 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. This idea of a church defined by racial identity and blood—which the Nazis would violently push and so many Germans tragically embrace—was anathema to the idea of the universal church.

The openness that Bonhoeffer brought to this idea of the church—and to the Roman Catholic Church—was hardly typical of German Lutherans. Several things account for it, the first being his upbringing. He had been reared to guard against parochialism and to assiduously avoid relying on feelings or anything unsupported by sound reasoning. To his father’s scientist’s mind, any actions and attitudes based on anything like tribal affiliations were wrong, and he had trained his children to think the same way. For Dietrich the theologian to hold a prejudice in favor of Lutheranism or Protestantism, or even Christianity, would be wrong. One must consider every possibility and avoid predisposing oneself to where it would all lead. During his lifetime, Bonhoeffer brought this critical and “scientific” attitude to all questions of faith and theology.

“It is Rome as a whole that came to be epitomized most clearly by St. Peter’s. It is the Rome of antiquity, the Rome of the Middle Ages, and equally the Rome of the present. Simply stated, it is the fulcrum of European culture and European life. My heart beat perceptibly when I saw the old water conduits accompanying us to the walls of the city for the second time.”

During Holy Week, he wondered about the Reformation and whether it went wrong when it officially became a church rather than simply remaining a “sect.” In a few years this would become crucially important to him. When the Nazis were taking over the German Lutheran Church, he would lead the charge to break away and start the Confessing Church. That, too, was first considered a movement—the Confessional Movement—but then it became an official church. He would have much to do with its taking that direction. Bonhoeffer was already laying the intellectual groundwork for what he would face in the Germany of the Third Reich, ten years ahead.

It is hard to overestimate23 the importance of the Catholic church’s value for European culture and for the whole world. It Christianized and civilized barbaric peoples and for a long time was the only guardian of science and art.

Karl-Friedrich was working with Albert Einstein and Max Planck.

In 1924 the theological faculty was headed by Adolf von Harnack, then seventy-three and a living legend. He was a disciple of Schleiermacher, which is to say staunchly theologically liberal, and one of the leaders of the historical-critical method of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His approach to the Bible was limited to textual and historical-critical analysis, and had led him to conclude that the miracles it described never happened, and that the gospel of John was not canonical. Harnack lived in the Grunewald neighborhood, as did most distinguished academics then, and the young Bonhoeffer would often walk with him to the Halensee train station and ride with him into Berlin.

But there was another theologian who had a greater influence on Bonhoeffer than any of these, and whom he would revere and respect as much as anyone in his lifetime, who would even become a mentor and a friend. This was Karl Barth of Göttingen.

Barth was Swiss by birth and was almost certainly the most important theologian of the century; many would say of the last five centuries. Bonhoeffer’s cousin Hans-Christoph was studying physics at Göttingen in 1924, but after hearing Barth, he promptly switched to theology and stayed there. 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 actually exists, and that all theology and biblical scholarship must be undergirded by this basic assumption, and that’s that. Barth was the principal figure in challenging and overturning the influence of the German historical-critical approach pioneered at Berlin University by Schleiermacher—and furthered there by the current éminence grise Harnack. Barth stressed the transcendence of God, describing him as “wholly other,” and therefore completely unknowable by man, except via revelation. Fortunately he believed in revelation , which was further scandalous to theological liberals like Harnack. ...

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.

Theological liberals like Harnack felt it was “unscientific” to speculate on who God was; the theologian must simply study what is here, which is to say the texts and the history of those texts. But the Barthians said no: the God on the other side of the fence had revealed himself through these texts, and the only reason for these texts was to know him.

As a theological candidate, Bonhoeffer had an obligation of parish work as well. He could have gotten permission to do a minimal amount, since his superiors knew how much academic work he was carrying, but characteristically Bonhoeffer did the opposite, ambitiously taking on a Sunday school class at the Grunewald parish church with vigor and vision. He worked under a youth pastor, Rev. Karl Meumann, and every Friday at Meumann’s house he and the other teachers prepared their Sunday lessons. Bonhoeffer became deeply involved in this class, and it took up many hours each week. In addition to the lessons, he often preached sermons in which he used dramatic stories to communicate the gospel, sometimes inventing fairy tales or parables. With Sabine gone, Bonhoeffer became closer to his youngest sister, Susanne. He persuaded her to help him run the class, and soon they were inviting these children home to play games or taking them on outings around Berlin.

Bonhoeffer had an obvious gift for communicating with children.

Bonhoeffer began to wonder whether he ought to pursue the life of a pastor rather than that of an academic. His father and brothers thought that would be a waste of his great intellect, but he often said that if one couldn’t communicate the most profound ideas about God and the Bible to children, something was amiss.

Out of this Sunday school class grew something else: the Thursday Circle, a weekly reading and discussion group of young men he personally selected, which met at his home and which he taught. He issued invitations to this group, which began in April 1927. The invitations stated that the group would meet “Every Thursday 5:25–7:00 p.m.” Bonhoeffer did it of his own accord; it had no connection to his church obligations. But he felt it vitally important to train up the next generation of young men. The participants tended to be bright and mature for their ages, and some came from prominent Jewish families in Grunewald.

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

Then he came to his main point: the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ. He expanded on the theme learned from Karl Barth that would occupy so much of his thinking and writing in the years to come: 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 Christ because they present the false idea that somehow we can reach God through our moral efforts.