Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Recovering the True Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

by Mark Nation

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.

That semester we worked on the exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount; later he worked this into his book Discipleship. It became clear to us on the basis of this Bible study that it is not possible for Christians to justify killing or to justify war. So, of course, we also had to talk about the very immediate question of what we would do if it came to war or even if it didn’t come to war, what we would do if we were drafted, since the draft had been introduced. . . . When it came to the point when we were in fact drafted—I was called up on May 15, 1939—we went in with a bad conscience. It was against our convictions. But the alternative was being lined up against a wall and shot. I remember that when it came to the outbreak of war on September 1st 1939, I was still hoping that the Confessing Church would come out with a loud “no,” but by then it was no longer in a position to act at all.270

Bishop Theodor Heckel, director of the Church Foreign Office of the German Protestant Church, wrote a letter to the Regional Church Committee on March 7, 1936, denouncing Bonhoeffer. Heckel encouraged the committee “to take measures to ensure that he will no longer train German theologians.” Why? “Because one could charge him with being both a pacifist and an enemy of the state.”

I was gratified that in composing a critical, article-length review of Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, the senior Bonhoeffer scholar Clifford Green struggled to find any Bonhoeffer texts that challenged my basic argument.

“There is no revealed commandment of God here.” The instructions continue, “The church can never give its blessing to war and weapons. The Christian can never participate in unjust wars. If the Christian takes up arms, he must daily ask God for forgiveness for this sin and pray for peace.”273 Two paragraphs earlier the instructions offer these reflections on the sixth commandment: “God alone is Lord over all life and has given us friend and foe that we may not harm them, hate them, despise them, be angry toward them, but rather love them, preserve their lives, serve, benefit, forgive them, pray for them.”274

Thus “the 1936 catechism is interesting,” Bethge says, “because it summarizes what Bonhoeffer viewed at the time as the absolute minimum of what the congregation’s message should be,” for those who did not agree with his own views.276

it is in January 1936 when he says to Elizabeth Zinn that he sees pacifism as simply self-evident. Joachim Kanitz, who was one of the students who stayed more than the normal term of study, is clear that Bonhoeffer taught them pacifism and connected this to conscientious objection. And there are the more than fifteen pages of Discipleship that articulate the call to love enemies and renounce violence, even at great cost to ourselves

think we can see that that is certainly not true by listening once more to the testimony of Joachim Kanitz. He recalls a conversation he had with Bonhoeffer in August 1942, while he was on leave from the military. He was wearing his officer’s uniform and felt shame wearing it in Bonhoeffer’s presence. He remarks on Bonhoeffer’s great sensitivity as they spoke, noting that Bonhoeffer said nothing to him to make him feel ashamed. But Kanitz also states his resolve related to what his teacher had taught him. “The reason I tell about this,” says Kanitz, “is that through the pacifism that Bonhoeffer had taught us, that we had come to by reading the Bible, the will to resist fascism and dictatorship had been planted so firmly in me that these seven years as a soldier were utter hell for me. Sometimes I was close to insanity because of it. At any rate, the only thing I could conclude for the rest of my life was: never again.”279

Nachfolge, discipleship, was not a common topic among theologians or pastors within Germany in the 1930s.291 What I was not aware of until 2010 was the following, which is reported by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, the son of a Confessing Church pastor, in his biography of Bonhoeffer: “At all Nazi public events there were speeches about ‘Führer and followers.’ During the war these were made into a song with the refrain, ‘Führer, befiehl, wir folgen dir’ [‘Leader, command, we’ll follow you’].” Schlingensiepen comments: “When Bonhoeffer called his lecture course [and, later, his book] Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), he was not only using a New Testament concept, but also contrasting it expressly with a term widely used by the Nazis.”292

This contemporizing of the Christian message leads directly to paganism, which means that the only difference between G[erman] C[hristians] and so-called neo-pagans is honesty.301

Søren Kierkegaard, his fellow Lutheran from almost a century earlier: Lutheranism [with its rhetorically strong emphasis on grace] is a corrective—but a corrective made into the norm, the whole, is eo ipso [by that very fact] confusing in the next generation (when that for which it was meant to correct no longer exists). And as long as this continues things get worse with every generation, until in the end the corrective produces the exact opposite of what was originally intended. And such, moreover, is the case. Taken by itself, as the whole of Christianity, the Lutheran corrective produces the most subtle type of worldliness and paganism.310

This point is particularly important to register because there exists a permanent temptation, theological and practical, to substitute something else for the offensively particular name of Jesus, to search for something more generic, something which does not bring with it the affront of Jesus’ implausible and singular direction: “Follow me.” It is a temptation to which the church has often succumbed and continues to do so: contemporary substitutes for the name of Jesus include: justice; spirituality; inclusiveness; orthodoxy; moral truth. However valuable some of these generic realities may appear to be, however much gospel resonance they may bring with them, they run the risk of abstracting from the pure singularity of Jesus and his command. His name—his non-transferrable identity as this one—is the one reality in which salvation is to be found. And his name is to be filled out, not by reference to some principle which he illustrates or which may even be drawn from him. He is the divine self-declaration in person.323

Two cautions must be remembered as such discernment is employed. First, “obedience to Jesus’ call is never an autonomous human deed. Thus, not even something like actually giving away one’s wealth is the obedience required” (83). And, second, “wherever simple obedience is fundamentally eliminated, there again the costly grace of Jesus’ call has become the cheap grace of self-justification” (81). In other words, as Bonhoeffer says later in a prison letter, the Christian life is not about trying to be a saint; it is about having faith, a lifetime of daily, active faith.331

Too much evangelical exposition has said that the miracle of regeneration is the alternative to obedience rather than the way to obedience, an escape clause rather than an entry qualification, a way to be saved without having to abandon one’s quest for wealth rather than the way that saves one from the quest for wealth.

At this point, the Reformation interpretation introduced a decisively new concept, namely, that we should differentiate between harm done to me personally, and harm done to me as a bearer of my office, that is, in the responsibility given me by God. In the former case I am to act as Jesus commands, but in the latter case I am released from doing so. Indeed for the sake of true love, I am even obligated to behave in the opposite way, to answer violence with violence in order to resist the inroads of evil. This is what justifies the Reformation position on war, and on any use of public legal means to repel evil. But this distinction between private person and bearer of an office as normative for my behavior is foreign to Jesus. He does not say a word about it. He addresses his disciples as people who have left everything behind to follow him. “Private” and “official” spheres are all completely subject to Jesus’ command. The word of Jesus claimed them undividedly. He demands undivided obedience. In fact, the distinction between private and official is vulnerable to an insoluble dilemma. Where in real life am I really only a private person and where only the bearer of my office? Wherever I am attacked, am I simultaneously the father of my children, the pastor of my congregation, the statesman of my people? For this reason, am I not required to fight back against any attack, just because of my responsibility for my office? Am I not always myself in my office, too, who stands al...

Very Kierkegaardian

What is truly important, says Bonhoeffer, “is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality. Where God is known by faith to be the ultimate reality, the source of my ethical concern will be that God be known as the good [das Gute], even at the risk that I and the world are revealed as not good, but as bad through and through” (48).

Inconsequentialism

For those of us who worship this crucified one, we can see that success is often idolized. When this happens, people “become blind to right and wrong, truth and lie, decency and malice. They see only the deed, the success”

Consequentialism

The statement that success is the good is challenged by an opposing one that looks at the conditions of lasting success, namely, that only the good is successful. Here the capacity for judgment is retained in the face of success. Here right remains right and wrong remains wrong. Here one does not close one’s eyes at the decisive moment, only to open them after the deed has been done. And here, consciously or unconsciously, a law of the world is acknowledged according to which justice, truth, and order are, in the long view, more stable than violence. (89)

!!!!!! Best summary of consequentialism and eudaimonism

It is worse, he says, to be a liar than to tell a lie, worse to be evil than to commit an act of evil. It is also worse, Bonhoeffer says, to fall away than to fall down.

Once again, in the midst of his reflections on responsibility, Bonhoeffer challenges the Kantian notion of universal principles. In specific situations, norms for behavior are not derived from “a clearly recognized good and a clearly recognized evil.” Rather they are known in the encounter with “the concrete neighbor, as given to me by God.” Choices for behaviors are “risked in faith while being aware that good and evil are hidden in the concrete historical situation” (221). Bonhoeffer continues: “Those who act responsibly take the given situation or context into account in their acting, not merely as raw material to be shaped by their ideas, but as contributing to forming the act itself. It is not some foreign law that is imposed on reality. Instead, the action of the responsible person is most profoundly in accord with reality” (222).

What does this have to do with my rereading of Bonhoeffer on “the structure of the responsible life”? On the one hand, Bonhoeffer is very clear. “Where Christ, true God and true human being, has become the unifying center of my existence, conscience in the formal sense still remains the call, coming from my true self, into unity with my self” (278). And whatever he may mean by embracing responsibility—joined to a free conscience—he makes it clear that “acceptance of responsibility must not destroy this unity” (281). A central way for Bonhoeffer to name this is to say that “the origin and goal of my conscience is not a law but the living God and the living human being as I encounter them in Jesus Christ” (278). However, in the midst of these reflections, he mentions that Jesus “ate with sinners and outcasts.” “As one who loved without sin, he became guilty, seeking to stand within the community of human guilt” (279). As I reread this, I realized something. Bonhoeffer, in the midst of seeking to live out of “the unifying center of his existence”—namely, Jesus Christ—had truly been freed, like Jesus, to be at peace with being misunderstood by others.

The church is church only when it is there for others. As a first step it must give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the freewill offerings of the congregations and perhaps be engaged in some secular vocation. The church must participate in the worldly tasks of life in the community—not dominating but helping and serving. It must tell people in every calling what a life with Christ is, what it means “to be there for others.” In particular, our church will have to confront the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy and illusionism as the roots of all evil. It will have to speak of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment. It will have to see that it does not underestimate the significance of the human “example” (which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus and is so important in Paul’s writings!); the church’s word gains weight and power not through concepts but by example.433

Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself.

“It is not the content of the gospel of the Reformation that repels people so much as the form of the gospel, which one still tries to tie to the state. If it had remained a sect it would have become the church the Reformers intended.”448

receivds

If one is to urge Christian involvement in the world, as did Bonhoeffer, and sustain theological integrity in doing so, then theological attention must be given to how the gospel relates to public witness. This is true, “first, in order to resist the moralism which so easily afflicts the church’s social and cultural testimony. By ‘moralism’ I mean the fatal turn by which the church’s human responsibility and action become the centre of gravity in its dealings with its context. When that happens, then gospel, church and witness all are distorted. ‘Gospel’ is instrumentalized” (22). In the context of Nazi Germany—but really in any context, where there are elements of violence, injustice, and unrighteousness that need to be countered—Christians must address public issues. However, we must also strenuously avoid aligning the church with any non-Christian ideology or being overly focused on specific policies. For, if the Christian witness is “to be protected from moralism, it can only be by being faced with the gospel as something which resists us, which cannot just be harnessed to whatever social and cultural projects we consider it ought to pull in its train. And the task of theology is just that: to exemplify the church facing the resistance of the gospel” (22).

Hallie follows this by saying: Ever since the woman from Minneapolis witnessed to that hope, I realized that for me too the little story of Le Chambon is grander and more beautiful than the bloody war that stopped Hitler. I do not regret fighting in that war—Hitler had to be stopped, and he had to be stopped by killing many people. The war was necessary. But my memories of it give me only a sullied joy because in the course of the three major battles I participated in, I saw the detached arms and legs and heads of young men lying on blood-stained snow. The story of Le Chambon gives me unsullied joy.476 He continues, “The reason the rainbow is closer to my heart than the Flood that was World War II is that the people of Le Chambon helped without harming, saved lives without torturing and destroying other lives. This is why the rainbow gives me unsullied joy and necessary and useful killing does not.”