Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

In one slim book, Bonhoeffer was claiming that Jesus had given his imprimatur to the Psalms and to the Old Testament; that Christianity was unavoidably Jewish; that the Old Testament is not superseded by the New Testament, but is inextricably linked with it; and that Jesus was unavoidably Jewish. Bonhoeffer also made clear that the Psalms spoke of Jesus and prophesied his coming. The following March he would find that publishing this small exegetical tract resulted in his being forbidden to publish anything again.

Henning von Tresckow3 was a typical Prussian with a strong sense of honor and tradition who had come to despise Hitler early on. He was the first officer at the front to contact the conspirators. When he heard about the Commissar Order, he told General Gersdorf that if they weren’t able to convince Bock to have it canceled, “the German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years.” He said the guilt would fall not only on Hitler and his inner circle, “but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and mine.” For many generals this was the turning point. The indefatigably weak-willed Brauchitsch was so shocked by the Commissar Order that he brought it up with Hitler, who promptly hurled an inkwell at the venerable general’s head.

Canaris did. He took morning horseback rides in Berlin’s Tiergarten with Heydrich, the piscine ghoul, and yet was at this very time using his power to undermine Heydrich and the Nazis at every turn. The gangsterism of Hitler sickened him. On a trip to Spain, while riding through the countryside in his open car, he stood and gave the Hitler salute to every herd of sheep he passed. “You never know,” he said, “whether one of the party bigwigs might be in the crowd.”

It was during this time that Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and his cousin von Stauffenberg overcame their fundamental feelings against conspiracy. Both were devoutly Christian and had been raised in the caste of German military aristocracy. What they witnessed was a reversal and mockery of every value they held dear. Stauffenberg would take the lead in the famous July 20, 1944, attempt to kill Hitler, as we shall soon see.

As earthly human beings we have to take account of an earthly future.

We need not despise happiness simply because there is so much unhappiness. We should not arrogantly push away the kind hand of God because God’s hand is otherwise so hard. I think it is more important to remind one another of this in these days than of many other things, and I received your wedding announcement gratefully as a fine testimony to this very thing. . . . May God also prepare you through this divine kindness to bear again the divine hardship if necessary.*

God to step out in freedom and not to cringe from future possibilities.

Bonhoeffer knew that to live in fear of incurring “guilt” was itself sinful. God wanted his beloved children to operate out of freedom and joy to do what was right and good, not out of fear of making a mistake. To live in fear and guilt was to be “religious” in the pejorative sense that Bonhoeffer so often talked and preached about. He knew that to act freely could mean inadvertently doing wrong and incurring guilt. In fact, he felt that living this way meant that it was impossible to avoid incurring guilt, but if one wished to live responsibly and fully, one would be willing to do so.

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 ranged against him. He was serving God by taking them all for a long ride.

The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.

“Who stands fast?” he asked. “Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.”

If we want to be Christians22, we must have some share in Christ’s largeheartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.

“It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

They wished to avoid the confrontation of a trial, especially since the plans to assassinate Hitler were going forward. When that happened, the trial would be moot. So the months passed and the legal battle raged. By October, Bonhoeffer marked six months at Tegel. It had all gone on far longer than he’d ever thought.

All of which has led to a terrific misunderstanding of Bonhoeffer’s theology and which lamentably washed backward over his earlier thinking and writing. Many outre theological fashions have subsequently tried to claim Bonhoeffer as their own* and have ignored much of his ouevre to do so. Generally speaking, some theologians have made of these few skeletal fragments something like a theological Piltdown man, a jerry-built but sincerely believed hoax.

What Bonhoeffer meant by “religion” was not true Christianity, but the ersatz and abbreviated Christianity that he spent his life working against. This “religious” Christianity had failed Germany and the West during this great time of crisis, for one thing, and he wondered whether it wasn’t finally time for the lordship of Jesus Christ to move past Sunday mornings and churches and into the whole world. But this was simply an extension of his previous theology, which was dedicatedly Bible centered and Christ centered.

The church stands not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes is something that I’m thinking about a great deal and I shall be writing to you again about it soon.

For Bonhoeffer, there is no reality apart from God and no goodness apart from him. All pretense to that effect is Barth’s pejorative notion of religion, a scheme to subvert God altogether and make a fallen humanistic path to heaven alone. It is Barth’s Tower of Babel, and it is the fig leaf that tries to fool God, but fails.

There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world. Partaking in Christ, we stand at the same time in the reality of God and in the reality of the world. The reality of Christ embraces the reality of the world in itself. The world has no reality of its own independent of God’s revelation in Christ. . . . [T]he theme of two realms, which has dominated the history of the church again and again, is foreign to the New Testament.

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. If we look only to principles and rules, we are in a fallen realm where our reality is divided from God: “Be wise as serpents64 and innocent as doves” is a saying of Jesus (Matt. 10:16). As with all of his sayings, it is he himself who interprets it. No one can look at God and at the reality of the world with undivided gaze as long as God and the world are torn apart. Despite all efforts to prevent it the eyes still wander from one to the other. Only because there is one place where God and the reality of the world are reconciled with each other, at which God and humanity have become one, is it possible there and there alone to fix one’s eyes on God and the world together at the same time. This place does not lie somewhere beyond reality in the realm of ideas. It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle. It lies in Jesus Christ the reconciler of 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 embryo65 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.

It was because of this that he embraced the humanity of Jesus Christ in a way that religious pietists could not, and it was because of this that he felt justified in embracing the good things of this world as gifts from the hand of God, rather than as temptations to be avoided. So even in prison, Bonhoeffer’s enjoyment of people and life was very much alive.

Appropriately enough, one of them reads, “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.” And the final one seems to reprise his poem: “Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”

In one of those moments for which the word Schadenfreude seems to have been invented, the supremely wicked Freisler was brained by a ceiling beam and dispatched to another bar of justice altogether, one with which he seemed to have been less well acquainted. As a result of Freisler’s unscheduled appearance in that other court, Schlabrendorff’s exit from this world was delayed by decades.* But things that day would get stranger still.

Even if millions have seen Bonhoeffer’s death as tragic and as a prematurely ended life, we can be certain that he did not see it that way at all. In a sermon he preached while a pastor in London, he said: No one has yet believed21 in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence. Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up—that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death? . . . Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heave...

“We know not what to do; but our eyes are upon Thee.” The unrest of the quest ends in the discipleship of Christ, the theme of his last book, now carried into practice in his own life. Law and Gospel, command and promise point to the one clear certain way which he had sought: “only the believer is obedient, and only he who obeys believes.”