Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

In a tired and decadent world where such beliefs had become fatally attenuated, or where they had devolved to pro forma exercises in religious tradition, Bonhoeffer believed them utterly. And he saw that the failure on the part of the German church to believe these things made the way for the river of blood that was National Socialism. So as a result of what Bonhoeffer saw and others didn’t, he was a prophet in his time and is a prophet in ours too. Few in his day could hear what he had to say. Can we?

To both these groups Bonhoeffer had nothing to say. He could not explain himself to them, but neither would he let their lazy theology dissuade him from what he believed God had called him to do. So he might have said, in the words of Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” He knew it would be useless to try and convince others of what he was doing, so he would play only to his Audience of One, trusting the results to Him.

For that kind of inaction reveals what we really think of God, that he is a legalistic moral policeman waiting for us to slip up just so that he can make his arrest quota for the day. What could be more cynical? Of course that God was not Bonhoeffer’s God—and is not God at all. Did not Jesus heal on the Sabbath; and did not David’s men eat the shewbread in the temple? There are times when our faith may look like a lack of faith to some people. But what does it look like to God? That is the question.

And then came the truly startling news from my editor that the book was selling “briskly.” But it was not really until I saw reviews from a pair of obviously enraged scholars that I understood that my straightforward accounting of Bonhoeffer’s life and writings had any particularly lasting value.

Karl August’s textbook on the history of dogma was still used by theological students in the twentieth century. Toward the end of his life, he was awarded a hereditary peerage by the Grand Duke of Weimar and a personal peerage by the king of Württemberg.

On February 4, 1906, their fourth and youngest son, Dietrich, was born ten minutes before his twin sister, Sabine, and he teased her about this advantage throughout their lives. The twins were baptized by the kaiser’s former chaplain, their grandfather Karl Alfred von Hase, who lived a seven-minute walk away.

Sisters Käthe and Maria van Horn came to the Bonhoeffers six months after the twins were born, and for two decades they formed a vital part of the family’s life. Fräulein Käthe was usually in charge of the three little ones. Both van Horn sisters were devout Christians schooled at the community of Herrnhut, which means “the Lord’s watch tower,” and they had a decided spiritual influence on the Bonhoeffer children. Founded by Count Zinzendorf in the eighteenth century, Herrnhut continued in the pietist tradition of the Moravian Brethren. As a girl, Paula Bonhoeffer had attended Herrnhut for a time.

Paula Bonhoeffer’s faith15 was most evident in the values that she and her husband taught their children. Exhibiting selflessness, expressing generosity, and helping others were central to the family culture. Fräulein Käthe remembered that the three children liked to surprise her by doing nice things for her: “For instance they would lay the table for supper, before I could do it. Whether Dietrich encouraged his sisters to do this I don’t know, but I should suspect it.” The van Horn sisters described all the children as “high-spirited” but as absolutely never “rude or ill-mannered.” Still, their good behavior did not always come naturally. Fräulein Käthe remembered: Dietrich was often mischievous16 and got up to various pranks, not always at the appropriate time. I remember that Dietrich specially liked to do this when the children were supposed to get washed and dressed quickly because we had been invited to go out. So one such day he was dancing round the room, singing and being a thorough nuisance. Suddenly the door opened, his mother descended upon him, boxed his ears right and left, and was gone. Then the nonsense was over. Without shedding a tear, he now did what he ought.

The faith that Paula Bonhoeffer21 evinced spoke for itself; it lived in actions and was evident in the way that she put others before herself and taught her children to do the same. “There was no place for false piety or any kind of bogus religiosity in our home,” Sabine said. “Mama expected us to show great resolution.” Mere churchgoing held little charm for her. The concept of cheap grace that Dietrich would later make so famous might have had its origins in his mother; perhaps not the term, but the idea behind it, that faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God. During the rise of the Nazis, she respectfully but firmly prodded her son to make the church live out what it claimed to believe by speaking publicly against Hitler and the Nazis, and taking actions against them.

The Bonhoeffer children were taught to be in firm control of their emotions. Emotionalism, like sloppy communication, was thought to be self-indulgent. When his father died, Karl Bonhoeffer wrote, “Of his qualities25, I would wish that our children inherit his simplicity and truthfulness. I never heard a cliché from him, he spoke little and was a firm enemy of everything faddish and unnatural.”

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 singing. Before Luther, no one outside the choir sang in church.

Dietrich distinguished himself as especially resourceful in procuring food. He got very involved in tracking down food supplies, so much so that his father praised him for his skill as a “messenger and food scout.” He even saved his own money to buy a hen. He was eager to do his part. Some of that had to do with his sense of competition with his older brothers. They were five, six, and seven years older than he, and brilliant, as were his sisters. But the one area in which he would outstrip them all was in musical ability.

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.”

Dietrich’s brother Klaus had chosen a career in law and would become the top lawyer at the German airline Lufthansa. In a dispute about Dietrich’s choice of theology, Klaus homed in on the problem of the church itself, calling it a “poor, feeble, boring, petty bourgeois institution.” “In that case,” said Dietrich, “I shall have to reform it!” The statement was mainly meant as a defiant rebuff to his brother’s attack, and perhaps even as a joke, since this was not a family in which one made boastful statements. On the other hand, his future work would lean more in that direction than anyone could have guessed.

His brother Karl-Friedrich was the least pleased with Dietrich’s decision. Karl-Friedrich had already distinguished himself as a brilliant scientist. He felt Dietrich was turning his back on scientifically verifiable reality and escaping into the fog of metaphysics. In one of their arguments on this subject, Dietrich said, “Dass es einen Gott gibt, dafür lass ich mir den Kopf abschlagen,” which means something like, “Even if you were to knock my head off, God would still exist.” Gerhard von Rad58, a friend who knew Bonhoeffer from his visits to his grandmother’s home in Tübingen, recalled that “it was very rare for a young man of this academic elite to decide in favor of the study of theology. The 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.”

A host of other clergy, including seminarians and monks, was at the altar: “The universality of the church was illustrated in a marvelously effective manner. White, black, yellow members of religious orders—everyone was in clerical robes united under the church. It truly seems ideal.” He had likely been to a Catholic service in Germany, but now, in Rome, in the Eternal City, the city of Peter and Paul, he saw a vivid illustration of the church’s transcendence of race and national identity. It obviously affected him. During the Mass, he stood next to a woman with a missal and was able to follow along and enjoy it all the more. He gushed over the choir’s singing of the Credo.

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.

But another reason15 he was so open to the Catholic church now had to do with Rome itself, where the best of the classical pagan world he so loved met and coexisted harmoniously with the world of Christendom. Here in Rome it was all part of some continuum. 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.

Bonhoeffer was a remarkably independent thinker, especially for one so young. Some professors regarded him as arrogant, especially because he refused to come too directly under the influence of any one of them, always preferring to maintain some distance. 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 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. For refusing to swear his allegiance to Hitler, Barth would be kicked out of Germany in 1934, and he would become the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, in which the Confessing Church trumpeted its rejection of the Nazis’ attempts to bring their philosophy into the German church.

Harnack’s theology was something like Archilochus’s proverbial fox, knowing many little things, while Barth’s theology was like a hedgehog, knowing one big thing. Bonhoeffer would side with the hedgehog, but he was in the fox’s seminar, and through his family and the Grunewald community, he had many ties with the fox. As a result of his intellectual openness, Bonhoeffer learned how to...

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. This attitude figured into his creation of the illegal seminaries of Zingst and Finkenwalde, which incorporated the best of both Protestant and Catholic traditions. Because of this self-critical intellectu...

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.

It was a one-way street, and of course this was directly related to the especially Lutheran doctrine of grace. Man could not earn his way up to heaven, but God could reach down and graciously lift man toward him.

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. There was more to life than academia.

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.

It’s startling that Bonhoeffer put it that way in 1928, sixteen years before he famously wrote to Eberhard Bethge about “religionless Christianity” in those letters that Bethge buried in the Schleichers’ backyard in a gas-mask canister. But it’s more startling that those exhumed ruminations have sometimes been described as marking a profound and new turn in his theology.

If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. —MARTIN LUTHER

So now, with Bonhoeffer back in Berlin, they resumed their argument. Hildebrandt became Bonhoeffer’s best friend, his first close friend outside the family. In a few years Hildebrandt would also become Bonhoeffer’s closest ally in the church struggle. Hildebrandt was three years Bonhoeffer’s junior and, like Bonhoeffer, had grown up in the Grunewald district of Berlin.

That these “non-Aryans” had publicly converted to the Christian faith meant nothing, since the lens through which the Nazis saw the world was purely racial. One’s genetic makeup and ancestral bloodline were all that mattered; one’s most deeply held beliefs counted for nothing.

But when it came to the Jews, Luther’s legacy is confusing, not to say deeply disturbing.

In the beginning of his career, Luther’s attitude toward the Jews was exemplary, especially for his day. He was sickened at how Christians had treated Jews. In 1519 he asked why Jews would ever want to become converted to Christianity given the “cruelty and enmity we wreak on them—that in our behavior towards them we less resemble Christians than beasts?” Four years later in the essay “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” he wrote, “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property.” There is no question that Luther believed Jews could convert to the Christian faith and wished they would do so—and therefore never thought being a Jew and being a Christian mutually exclusive, as the Nazis did.

The Nazis were anti-Christian, but they would pretend to be Christians as long as it served their purposes of getting theologically ignorant Germans on their side against the Jews.

Bonhoeffer went to Union with a bit of a chip on his shoulder and not without reason. German theologians were unsurpassed in the world; Bonhoeffer had studied with the best of them—and ridden the trolley with them. Not many Union students could lay claim to commuting with Adolf von Harnack.

This is quite characteristic10 of most of the churches I saw. So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that—who knows how—claims the right to call itself “Christian.” And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation.

The Bible texts provided a clue of what lay ahead. The first was from Revelation 2:4–5: “Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.” People familiar with Bonhoeffer’s preaching, upon hearing these verses, might well have slipped out the side exit. On the other hand, if they had been in the mood to be blasted backward by a bracing philippic and had chosen to stay, they would not have been disappointed.

Bonhoeffer opened with the bad news5: the Protestant church was in its eleventh hour, he said, and it’s “high time we realized this.” The German church, he said, is dying or is already dead. Then he directed his thunder at the people in the pews. He condemned the grotesque inappropriateness of having a celebration when they were all, in fact, attending a funeral: “A fanfare of trumpets is no comfort to a dying man.” He then referred to the day’s hero, Martin Luther, as a “dead man” whom they were propping up for their selfish purposes. It was as if he’d thrown a bucket of water on the congregation and had then thrown his shoes at them. “We do not see that this Church is no longer the Church of Luther,” he said. He called it “unpardonable frivolity and arrogance” for them to blithely appropriate Luther’s famous words, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” for their own ends—as if these words applied to them and the Lutheran church of their day. So it went.

He also knew that a word might be delivered that had come straight from heaven and be rejected, just as the messages of the Old Testament prophets had been rejected and just as Jesus had been rejected. The prophet’s role was simply and obediently to speak what God wished to say. Whether or not the message was received was between God and his people. And yet to preach such a burning message, and to know that it was God’s Word for the faithful, who rejected it, was painful. But this was the pain of the prophetic office, and to be chosen by God as his prophet always meant, in part, that the prophet would share in God’s sufferings.

He pointed out that nowadays we often ask ourselves whether we still need the Church, whether we still need God. But this question, he said, is wrong. We are the ones who are questioned. The Church exists and God exists, and we are asked whether we are willing to be of service, for God needs us.

One wished to arrive at answers that could stand up to every scrutiny because one would have to live out those conclusions. They would have to become actions and would have to become the substance of one’s life.

One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus 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. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us.

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 minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love;

Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible. . . .

Its profoundly misguided concept of leadership is dramatically different from more modern concepts of leadership. It enabled Hitler’s rise to power and led to the horrors of the death camps. This Führer Principle was at the heart of Bonhoeffer’s objection to Hitler. In his speech that day, Bonhoeffer laid out his thoughts on the subject.

The German notion of the Führer arose out of this generation and its search for meaning and guidance out of its troubles. 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.

If the German people believed the Communists had tried to burn down the parliament building, they would see the need for extraordinary actions on behalf of the government. 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.

Many people believed Göring’s henchmen were behind the fire and hoped the incorruptible Karl Bonhoeffer would give evidence to support that belief and perhaps use his position and credibility to denounce the Nazis, whom he loathed. The major and vitally important trial was moved to Leipzig and then later, back to Berlin.

He addressed the issue of the church’s attitude toward the state and created common ground with his skeptical readers by paraphrasing Romans 13: “There is no power, but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God.” In other words, governments are established by God for the preservation of order. The church had no fundamental quarrel with the state being the state, with its restraining evil, even by use of force. His dramatic opening sentence seemed to overstate the case: “Without doubt, the Church of the Reformation has no right to address the state directly in its specifically political actions.” But he was aware of his audience and wished to establish that he shared their attitude here. He was also aware of speaking within a tradition that took its cues from Luther, and Luther’s attitude toward the role of the state erred much on the side of the state, whom Luther applauded in crushing the Peasants’ Rebellion, for example. Bonhoeffer must tread carefully.