Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

The church must “continually ask the state whether its action can be justified as legitimate action of the state, i.e., as action which leads to law and order, and not to lawlessness and disorder.”

If the state is not creating an atmosphere of law and order, as Scripture says it must, then it is the job of the church to draw the state’s attention to this failing. And if on the other hand, the state is creating an atmosphere of “excessive law and order,” it is the church’s job to draw the state’s attention to that too. If the state is creating “excessive law and order,” then “the state develops its power to such an extent that it deprives Christian preaching and Christian faith . . . of their rights.” Bonhoeffer called this a “grotesque situation.” “The church,” he said, “must reject this encroachment of the order of the state precisely because of its better knowledge of the state and of the limitations of its action. The state which endangers the Christian proclamation negates itself.”

Bonhoeffer then famously enumerated “three possible ways in which the church can act towards the state.” The first, already mentioned, was for the church to question the state regarding its actions and their legitimacy—to help the state be the state as God has ordained. The second way—and here he took a bold leap—was “to aid the victims of state action.” He said that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society.” And before that sentence was over, he took another leap, far bolder than the first—in fact, some ministers walked out—by declar...

The church would be “in statu confessionis and here the state would be in the act of negating itself.” This Latin phrase, which means “in a state of confession,” was originally used as a specifically Lutheran phrase in the sixteenth century. By Bonhoeffer’s time it had come to mean a state of crisis in which the “confession” of the gospel was at stake. To “confess the gospel” simply meant to speak forth the good news of Jesus Christ.* Bonhoeffer continued, “A state which includes within itself a terrorized church has lost its most faithful servant.”

The advent of the Nazi victory and the Nazis’ attempt to co-opt the church resulted in chaos within the church itself, and in fighting and politicking among the many factions of the church. Bonhoeffer wanted to drown out the cacophony of voices and look at these things calmly and logically. He knew that if these questions were not addressed properly, one would be reduced to merely “political answers” or “pragmatic” answers. One could begin to veer away from the true gospel, toward worshiping a god made in one’s own image, rather than God himself, the “eternally other” of whom Barth had spoken and written. And just as many well-meaning Christians at Union had unwittingly abandoned that God for many good reasons, so too many of the well-meaning 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

As late as 1939, they founded “the Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life.” Like the famous Jefferson Bible that omitted anything not to Jefferson’s liking, this institute took a cut-and-paste attitude toward the Bible, excising anything that seemed Jewish or un-German. One of the leaders, Georg Schneider, called the whole Old Testament “a cunning Jewish conspiracy.” He went on: “Into the oven, with the part of the Bible that glorifies the Jews, so eternal flames will consume that which threatens our people.”

That was the weed in the garden of Protestantism. Even Luther had questioned17 the canonicity of some books of the Bible, especially the book of James, for what he took as its preaching of “salvation by works.” And Bonhoeffer’s professor, the liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack, had questioned the canonicity of much of the Old Testament. There’s little question that the liberal theological school of Schleiermacher and Harnack helped push things along in this direction. But the other piece of this puzzle has to do with the confusion that inevitably arises when the Christian faith becomes too closely related to a cultural or national identity. For many Germans, their national identity had become so melted together with whatever Lutheran Christian faith they had that it was impossible to see either clearly. After four hundred years of taking for granted that all Germans were Lutheran Christians, no one really knew what Christianity was anymore.

But even among these young people, there was a gap between opposing the German Christians and opposing Hitler. They thought the German Christians too radical in wanting to bring Nazi doctrines into the church, but most of them still thought of themselves as patriotic Germans who were devoted to the country—and its Führer. So at the rally after walking out, they declared their submission to Hitler’s leadership. Bonhoeffer said that “one student gave a Heil for the Reichskanzler, the rest following suit.”

Bonhoeffer even suggested convening a church council, as had been done in early church history at Nicea and Chalcedon. He believed the Holy Spirit could speak and solve the problem if they behaved like the church. But he was mostly speaking to liberal theologians for whom the notions of a council, heresy, or schism seemed archaic. He was calling the church to behave like the church, but his declarations fell on deaf ears.

If the state did not pull back and let the church be the church, the church would cease behaving like the state church and would, among other things, stop performing funerals. It was a brilliant solution. 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.

As much as he had heard about this fabled place, he was quite unprepared for what he saw. Bethel (Hebrew for “house of God”) was the fulfillment of a vision that Bodelschwingh’s father had in the 1860s. It began in 1867 as a Christian community for people with epilepsy, but by 1900 included several facilities that cared for 1,600 disabled persons. The younger Bodelschwingh took it over at his father’s death in 1910, and by the time of Bonhoeffer’s visit, it was a whole town with schools, churches, farms, factories, shops, and housing for nurses. At the center were numerous hospital and care facilities, including orphanages. Bonhoeffer had never seen anything like it. It was the antithesis of the Nietzschean worldview that exalted power and strength. It was the gospel made visible, a fairy-tale landscape of grace, where the weak and helpless were cared for in a palpably Christian atmosphere.

As would happen so often in the future, he was deeply disappointed in the inability of his fellow Christians to take a definite stand. They always erred on the side of conceding too much, of trying too hard to ingratiate themselves with their opponents.

He had become convinced that a church that was not willing to stand up for the Jews in its midst was not the real church of Jesus Christ. On that, he was quite decided. He was far ahead of the curve6, as usual. Some wondered whether he was just kicking against the goads, but when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn’t join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn’t. “If you board the wrong train,” he said, “it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”

The statement contained four main points. First, it declared that its signers would rededicate themselves to the Scriptures and to the previous doctrinal confessions of the church. Second, they would work to protect the church’s fidelity to Scripture and to the confessions. Third, they would lend financial aid to those being persecuted by the new laws or by any kind of violence. And fourth, they would firmly reject the Aryan Paragraph. Much to the surprise of Niemöller, Bonhoeffer, and all involved, the response to the statement was extremely positive.

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.

He had begun to see that the overemphasis on the cerebral and intellectual side of theological training had produced pastors who didn’t know how to live as Christians, but knew only how to think theologically. Integrating the two was increasingly important to him.

There were other levels of meaning and depth to what he was facing. While Hildebrandt, Niemöller, and Jacobi were thinking about how to defeat Müller, Bonhoeffer was thinking about God’s highest call, about the call of discipleship and its cost. He was thinking about Jeremiah and about God’s call to partake in suffering, even unto death.

I find myself in radical opposition to all my friends; I became increasingly isolated with my views of things, even though I was and remain personally close to these people. All this has frightened me and shaken my confidence so that I began to fear that dogmatism might be leading me astray—since there seemed no particular reason why my own view in these matters should be any better, any more right, than the views of many really capable pastors whom I sincerely respect.

In this, and in his desire to convert leaders to the Christian faith, Buchman seemed to have overlooked the biblical injunction to possess the wisdom of serpents. He naively hoped to convert Hitler and reached out to him and the German Christians.

And given his extraordinary gifts as a leader, he was soon shaping the opinions of other German pastors in London. At this crucial time, he would guide their individual and collective responses to the Reichskirche. Because of Bonhoeffer, the German churches in England even joined the Pastors’ Emergency League and, later, the Confessing Church. Of all the countries with German congregations, only one country—England—would take such a stand, all because of Bonhoeffer.

In the original version that Bonhoeffer drafted, it went further, saying they “no longer recognize[d]” the Reichsbischof. That was too strong for some, so it was softened to the nonetheless electrically charged “withdraw our confidence.” In either case, to declare such things to the Reichskirche was as close to the Rubicon of a status confessionis as the opposition churches had ever come. As events were unfolding, they would cross that river soon enough.

Even the ecumenical movement has to make up its mind and is therefore subject to error, like everything human. But to procrastinate and prevaricate simply because you’re afraid of erring, when others—I mean our brethren in Germany—must make infinitely more difficult decisions every day, seems to me almost to run counter to love. To delay or fail to make decisions may be more sinful than to make wrong decisions out of faith and love. . . . [I]n this particular case it really is now or never. “Too late” means “never.”

We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State.

What made him stand out, to some as an inspiration, to others as an oddity, and to others as an offense, was that he did not hope that God heard his prayers, but knew it. When he said they needed to humble themselves and listen to God’s commands and obey them, he was not posturing.

Many in the ecumenical movement and in the Confessing Church obviously didn’t quite believe that. But Bonhoeffer knew that God could not help them unless they acted out of faith and obedience.

Bonhoeffer said that first and foremost, the church must hear God’s Word and must obey. Those from theologically liberal backgrounds were not used to the language or the tone he used. The idea that God was speaking, demanding anything, made some uncomfortable. Dudzus said that Bonhoeffer “charged so far ahead that the conference could not follow him.” But it was hard to miss the power behind the words.

Christ must be brought into every square inch of the world and the culture, but one’s faith must be shining and bright and pure and robust. It must be free of cant and “phraseology” and mere religiosity, or the Christ whom one was bringing into the world and the culture was not Christ at all, but a tawdry man-made counterfeit. Bonhoeffer advocated a Christianity that seemed too worldly for traditional Lutheran conservatives and too pietistic for theological liberals. He was too much something for everyone, so both sides misunderstood and criticized him.

I think I am right in saying that I would only achieve true inner clarity and honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. Here alone lies the force that can blow all of this idiocy sky-high—like fireworks, leaving only a few burnt-out shells behind. The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount. I believe the time has come to gather people together and do this. Forgive me for these rather personal ramblings, but they just came to me as I thought about our time together recently. And after all, we do have an interest in each other. I still have a hard time thinking that you really find all these ideas of mine completely mad. Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

Most of the ordinands in that course and the subsequent four courses would end up serving in the military, and Bonhoeffer never tried to argue them out of it or make an issue of it. He was not a committed pacifist in that sense and was certainly not convinced that Christians must be conscientious objectors. Bonhoeffer was respectful of the students’ points of view. He never wanted his classes or the seminary to become a cult of personality, centered on him. He was interested only in persuading via reason. Forcing his thoughts on others was something he thought of as fundamentally wrong, as worthy of a “mis-leader.”

The authority of a servant leader, as opposed to the authoritarianism of the mis-leader, came from God and was a leadership of serving those below oneself. That was Christ’s example to the disciples, and Bonhoeffer strove to lead that way too.

Bonhoeffer felt comfortable19 sharing with Bethge what he called acedia or tristitia—a “sadness of the heart” that we might typically call depression. He suffered from it but rarely showed it, except among close friends. Gerhard Jacobi said, “In private conversation he made a less calm and harmonious impression. One noticed at once what a sensitive person he was, what a turmoil he was in, and how troubled.” And it’s doubtful20 that Bonhoeffer discussed it with anyone but Bethge. He knew that Bethge’s towering intellect and his mature and well-established faith were up to the task of dealing with him in his complexities, even in his doubts, such as they were. He knew that Bethge could function in the role of pastor to him, which he did, and not just at Finkenwalde, but thenceforth. He touched on his depression years later, in a letter to Bethge from Tegel prison: “I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains—or spiritual trial? Once they’re over, the world looks quite a different place again.” There was little question21 that Bonhoeffer was sometimes extremely intense, that his brilliant and overactive mind could lead him into temporary cul-de-sacs of agitation. But in Bethge, he had a friend to whom he could show this worst side. Bethge was as naturally sunny as Bonhoeffer could be intense. Bonhoeffer mentioned it in another letter from Tegel: “I don’t know anyone who does not like you, whereas I...

Bonhoeffer strove3 to see what God wanted to show and then to do what God asked in response. That was the obedient Christian life, the call of the disciple. And it came with a cost, which explained why so many were afraid to open their eyes in the first place.

It was guilty of the typically Lutheran error of confining itself to the narrow sphere of how church and state were related. When the state is trying to encroach upon the church, this is a proper sphere of concern. But for Bonhoeffer, the idea of limiting the church’s actions to this sphere alone was absurd. The church had been instituted by God to exist for the whole world. It was to speak into the world and to be a voice in the world, so it had an obligation to speak out against things that did not affect it directly. 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.

For Bonhoeffer, the challenge was to deliver the Word of God as purely as possible, without feeling the need to help it along or to dress it up. It alone had the power to touch the human heart. Any frippery would only dilute the power of the thing itself. He had told his ordinands of this time and again. Let this power speak for itself, unhindered.

Christ has given23 his church power to forgive and to retain sins on earth with divine authority (Matt. 16:19; 18:18; John 20:23). Eternal salvation and eternal damnation are decided by its word. Anyone who turns from his sinful way at the word of proclamation and repents, receives forgiveness. Anyone who perseveres in his sin receives judgement. The church cannot loose the penitent from sin without arresting and binding the impenitent in sin.

The promise of grace is not to be squandered; it needs to be protected from the godless. There are those who are not worthy of the sanctuary. The proclamation of grace has its limits. Grace may not be proclaimed to anyone who does not recognize or distinguish or desire it. Not only does that pollute the sanctuary itself, not only must those who sin still be guilty against the Most Holy, but in addition, the misuse of the Holy must turn against the community itself.

The Gospel is protected by the preaching of repentance which calls sin sin and declares the sinner guilty. The key to loose is protected by the key to bind. The preaching of grace can only be protected by the preaching of repentance.

From the pulpit he declared, “We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of the authorities, than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”

They preferred to do their work quietly, under cover of night when possible, but now as they walked down the street, they were the objects of a jeering congregation, outraged that their pastor was being taken from them, and letting everyone within earshot know about it. What’s more, the Gestapo were unwittingly marching their prisoner in the wrong direction. Hildebrandt and his parishioners knew it, but they were not in a mood to help the Gestapo, who appeared more and more foolish with each step. In the end Hildebrandt was taken to the Gestapo headquarters on the Alexanderplatz.

In a conversation about it with his ordinands the next day, someone put forth the accepted theory about the “curse” upon the Jews. The young ordinands did not condone what had happened and were genuinely upset about it, but they quite seriously suggested that the reason for the evils must be the “curse” that the Jews bore for rejecting Christ. Bonhoeffer knew the young men were neither hateful nor anti-Semitic, but he firmly refuted their interpretation. They were in error. In his Bible18 that day or the next, Bonhoeffer was reading Psalm 74. This was the text he happened to be meditating upon. What he read startled him, and with his pencil he put a vertical line in the margin to mark it, with an exclamation point next to the line. He also underlined the second half of verse 8: “Sie verbrennen alle Häuser Gottes im Lande.” (“They burn all of God’s houses in the land.”) Next to the verse he wrote: “9.11.38.” Bonhoeffer saw this as an example of God speaking to him, and to the Christians in Germany. God was telling him something through his Word that day, and as he meditated and prayed, Bonhoeffer realized that the synagogues that had been burned in Germany were God’s own. 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 re...

Bonhoeffer was using the words of Jews—David, Zechariah, and Paul—to make the point that the Jews are God’s people, that the Messiah came from them and came for them first. He had never abandoned them, but longed to reach those who were the “apple of His eye.” If Christianity has come to the Gentiles, it came in some large part so that the Jews could receive their Messiah. Bonhoeffer was identifying the evil done to the Jews as an evil done to God and God’s people, but he was not taking that next theological leap to suggest that Christians were not meant to take the gospel of Christ to the Jews.

It is for us as it is for soldiers, who come home on leave from the front but who, in spite of all their expectations, long to be back at the front again. We cannot get away from it any more. Not because we are necessary, or because we are useful (to God?), but simply because that is where our life is, and because we leave our life behind, destroy it, if we cannot be in the midst of it again. It is nothing pious, more like some vital urge. But God acts not only by means of pious emotions, but also through vital ones. “Come before winter”—it is not a misuse of Scripture if I take that to be said to me. If God gives me grace to do it.

Future generations would be convinced that nothing good could ever have existed in a country that produced such evil. They would think only of these evils. It would be as if these unleashed dark forces had grotesquely marched like devils on dead horses, backward through the gash in the present, and had destroyed the German past too.

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.

He knew that if Germany worshiped any idol, it would incinerate its own future, as those who worshiped Moloch did by burning their children.

Jesus took the Old Testament laws to a deeper level of meaning and obedience, from the “letter of the Law” to the “Spirit of the Law.” Following the letter of the law was the dead “religion” of which Barth, among others, had written. It was man’s attempt to deceive God into thinking one was being obedient, which was a far greater deception. God always required something deeper than religious legalism.

Bonhoeffer knew that the flip side of the easy religious legalism of “never telling a lie” was the cynical notion that there is no such thing as truth, only “facts.” This led to the cynical idea that one must say everything with no sense of propriety or discernment, that decorum or reserve was “hypocrisy” and a kind of lie.

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.

Prayer cannot come from us. “For that,” he wrote, “one needs Jesus Christ!” By praying the Psalms, we “pray along with Christ’s prayer and therefore may be certain and glad that God hears us. When our will, our whole heart, enters into the prayer of Christ, then we are truly praying. We can pray only in Jesus Christ, with whom we shall also be heard.”

“The Psalter filled the life of early Christianity. But more important than all of this is that Jesus died on the cross with words from the Psalms on his lips. Whenever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure is lost to the Christian church. With its recovery will come unexpected power.”