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

by Mark Nation

Bonhoeffer, let it be said over and over, was not arrested for participating in any assassination attempts. He was arrested for helping to save the lives of fourteen Jews and was imprisoned for subverting the military’s power to conscript him into service.

Race specifically is named in the discussion of “the Orders” within the overall article on creation and sin. Here the authors say that “the Bible and confessions understand the human race as one united race in its origin and its final destination. . . . A human being is a human being, and this unity of the human race calls for our obedience. In the course of history this unity has unfolded as numerous tribes and peoples. But the modern concept of race is not found in either the Bible or the confessional writings” (388). A few sentences later, they write: “To speak of the Creator God, who made the entire human race, is to speak of the humanity that exists over and above the distinct peoples. That means, ‘the stranger that dwells among you shall be unto you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself . . . I am the Lord your God.’ (Lev. 19:34)”116 (389).

In their article on Christ, the authors importantly state: “We reject the false doctrine that would make the crucifixion of Christ the fault of the Jewish people alone, as though other peoples and races had not crucified him. All races and peoples, even the mightiest, share in the guilt for his death and become guilty of it every day anew, when they commit outrage against the Spirit of grace”

We should also not underestimate his efforts to help the Protestant Church see that it was theological heresy to imagine that ethnic Jews could not be Christians. More than one out of every six ethnic Jews in Germany considered himself or herself a Christian.

But I cannot end this chapter without quoting from Bonhoeffer’s remarkable essay “After Ten Years,” which he wrote for three friends at the end of 1942.148 In it he reflects on ten years of living under the rule of the Nazis. Here is one of his key lessons: “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”

One of these is the subject of evil. A commitment to nonviolence for Christians does not require a naïveté about evil. “Our concern here is not only with evil,” Bonhoeffer says, “it is with the person who is evil. Jesus calls the evil person evil. My behavior should not give excuses and justification for those who indulge in violence or who oppress me. Nor do I intend to express my understanding for the rights of an evil person by my patient suffering. Jesus has nothing to do with such sentimental considerations. The humiliating blow, the violent deed, and the act of exploitation remain evil. Disciples are to know this and to give witness to it just as Jesus did, because otherwise the evil person will not be engaged and overcome.” But having made this clear, Bonhoeffer also says: “There is no thinkable deed in which evil is so large and strong that it would require a different response from a Christian. The more terrible the evil, the more willing the disciple should be to suffer. Evil persons must be delivered into the hands of Jesus. Not I but Jesus must deal with them”

Anyone who has read widely in the Bonhoeffer corpus knows that Bonhoeffer was understandably disheartened and sometimes disgusted by the way in which most of the German Protestant Church—especially its leaders—had abandoned the gospel for Nazi ideology. But as he reflects on Matthew 10, he reminds himself and his readers that if our work is truly shaped by the call of Jesus, then we, like him, feel sadness, weep for the brokenness of those co-opted by Nazi lies, and do acts of mercy out of love—for those sheep without a shepherd.

He also knows that truly witnessing to the gospel will entail suffering for the messengers who bring the good news. And the temptation will be great to avoid the work to which we are called, out of fear. Thus, he says: “Anyone who is still afraid of people is not afraid of God. Anyone who fears God is no longer afraid of people. Daily reminders of this statement are valuable for preachers of the gospel” (196). And, finally, Bonhoeffer reminds his readers that those who toil in the work of the gospel must trust that such labor will produce fruit, as promised by Jesus.

“Discipleship in essence never consists in a decision for this or that specific action; it is always a decision for or against Jesus Christ.”

Bonhoeffer wants to make it clear: “Christ speaks to us exactly as he spoke to [the original disciples as portrayed in the Gospels]” (202). In other words, “the synoptic Christ is neither more nor less distant from us than the Christ of Paul,” says Bonhoeffer. “The Christ who is present with us is the Christ to whom the whole of scripture testifies. He is the incarnate, crucified, risen, and glorified Christ; and he encounters us in his word” (206).

in a letter to his grandmother, on August 20, 1933, he said: “It is becoming increasingly clear to me that what we are going to get is a big, völkisch national church that in its essence can no longer be reconciled with Christianity, and that we must make up our minds to take entirely new paths and follow where they lead. The issue is really Germanism or Christianity, and the sooner the conflict comes out in the open, the better. The greatest danger of all would be in trying to conceal this.”

Bonhoeffer still believed—and taught—that Christians should speak out for and act on behalf of those who cannot speak or act for themselves. He still believed what he said in a letter to his brother in early 1936 as he reflected on his vision for a new form of monasticism: “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.”

Moral weapons of the past simply will not do, says Bonhoeffer; “we must replace rusty weapons with bright steel” (81). The central—and defining—weapon in our arsenal is “the living, creating God” (81). In fact, if we are grounded “in the reality of the world reconciled with God in Jesus Christ, the command of Jesus gains meaning and reality” (82). Then we will realize: The world will be overcome not by destruction but by reconciliation. Not ideals or programs, not conscience, duty, responsibility or virtue, but only the consummate love of God can meet and overcome reality. Again, this is accomplished not by a general idea of love, but by the love of God really lived in Jesus Christ. This love of God for the world does not withdraw from reality into noble souls detached from the world, but experiences and suffers the reality of the world at its worst. The world exhausts its rage on the body of Jesus Christ. But the martyred one forgives the world its sins. Thus reconciliation takes place. Ecco homo.

Considering the destructive oppression of the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer returns to a practical—but radical, almost unthinkable—outcome of having our lives centered in the living God. “Only because God became human is it possible to know and not despise real human beings. Real human beings may live before God and we may let these real people live beside us and before God without either despising or idolizing them. This is not because of the real human being’s inherent value, but because God has loved and taken on the real human being” (87).

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”

The subtle clues are “the concrete neighbor, as given to me by God” and “risked in faith.” For Bonhoeffer these are not trivial modifiers, but rather defining ones. However, we need not depend simply on such hints. For his framing of these comments is anything but subtle. For all of the key terms for understanding Bonhoeffer’s evocative (and often misunderstood) language—responsibility, vicarious representation, taking on guilt and freedom—are given their meaning in reference to Jesus Christ.385

“Good is the action that is in accordance with the reality of Jesus Christ; action in accordance with Christ is action in accord with reality” (228–29; emphasis his). “Jesus Christ is the very embodiment of the person who lives responsibly.”

Bonhoeffer follows these extraordinary claims by offering ten pages of argument for why the Sermon on the Mount is crucial for understanding our Christian actions within real human history. Toward the end of these reflections—written in 1942 Germany—he says: “The Sermon on the Mount is either valid as the word of God’s world-reconciling love everywhere and at all times, or it is not really relevant for us at all” (243). “The responsibility of Jesus Christ for all human beings has love as its content and freedom as its form. . . . The commandments of God’s righteousness are fulfilled in vicarious representation, which means in concrete, responsible action of love for all human beings” (232). Very specifically he says, “by grounding responsible action in Jesus Christ we reaffirm precisely the limits of such action” (224). We must keep such comments in mind when he says that “the essence of responsible action intrinsically involves the sinless becoming guilty.” For he begins this sentence by saying: “Because of Jesus Christ . . .” Moreover, he follows it by saying, “It is a sacrilege and an outrageous perversion to extrapolate from this statement a blanket license to commit evil acts.

we should also hear Bonhoeffer’s own cautions, expressed in a letter on July 8, 1944. There he says that “the Bible does not know the distinction that we make between the outward and the inward life. . . . The ‘heart’ in the biblical sense,” says Bonhoeffer, “is not the inner life but rather the whole person before God.”403

As Bonhoeffer said in his proposal for establishing a “House of Brethren” within the Finkenwalde seminary: “The goal is not monastic isolation but rather the most intensive concentration for ministry in the world.”417 In fact the spiritual practices encouraged at the seminary were precisely expressions of how “he sought to build a counter-politics and counter-Church in the heart of Nazi Germany at Finkenwalde.”418 In prison his context had changed. But one of the first things Bonhoeffer did after he was arrested was to “establish a strict daily routine from which he did not depart: physical exercise, his long-accustomed meditation [and prayer], and after his Bible was returned to him on the third day, the memorizing and reading the Scriptures.”419 Such regular spiritual practices continued to shape Bonhoeffer’s life lived before God—and sustained his ongoing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Through his acts of generosity and comfort, he sought to create as much community as was possible even in the bleak, individualistic world he was forced to endure in prison.

Bonhoeffer named some of the specifics he had in mind when he offered reflections from prison for the baptism of Eberhard and Renate Bethge’s newborn son, Dietrich: What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one’s enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us, we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it and express it. This is our own fault. Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world.435 If we are to recover these ways of understanding and living out the Christian faith, said Bonhoeffer in 1944, speaking of the next generation, then it must begin with the realization that “all Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of . . . prayer and action.”436

this, I will utilize a little-known essay, “The Church as Witnessing Community,” by the late theologian and widely respected Barth scholar, John Webster, because this essay sounds so much like Bonhoeffer.

Cultural testimony must emerge from the church’s constant and singular preoccupation, which is to give attention to God’s self-declaration in the gospel, and to allow its thought, speech and action to be broken and remade through its hearing. The community of Jesus Christ is a community which is brought into being by the gospel, sustained in life by the gospel and summoned to bear witness to the gospel; and because that is true, the church can only be what it is if its entire life and activity emerges out of the event of starting again with the gospel. For the community of Jesus Christ, there is simply nowhere else to begin. (21) This sort of affirmation is at the root of Bonhoeffer’s opposition to a principled approach to ethics (which leaves the gospel behind) and an articulation of what in his earlier writings sounded like a radically contextual approach to ethics (wanting to make room for a fresh hearing of the gospel each day). These root concerns would remain with Bonhoeffer. However, he came to have confidence not only in the ongoing revelation of God through Jesus Christ but also in its ongoing consistency (known through Jesus, the biblical witness, and Christ existing as community). But he also realized the need for vigilance in sustaining the Christian community’s ongoing dependence on the God known through Jesus Christ.

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”

And third with his notion that the church is meant to be what the world will ultimately be.

In other words, the gospel is not something merely “usable” but rather “the gospel concerns God and God’s actions, and so is known only in the miracle of revelation and faith, and present among us after the manner of God, that is, spiritually, and not as some kind of religious or ecclesiastical possession” (24). If “we lose sight of this, and convert the gospel into just another Christian cultural commodity, then it very rapidly becomes ‘something which would survive as Good News apart from faith and without God” (25). Put most simply, “the gospel is ‘the gospel of Christ.’ Jesus himself, the proclaimer and embodiment of God’s good news is the gospel” (25; emphasis his). It is important to remind ourselves that the gospel is indeed good news. It is such because “in it we encounter God’s gracious work for us and our salvation” (25). This good news originates “in God himself, it concerns his presence and action, and points human life to its true fulfillment in fellowship with God” (25). Though ultimate redemption lies in the future, “the gospel is the presence of salvation, the freeing of all things from disorder and confinement and the gift of life in fellowship with God. The gospel is the active reality of God’s grace, God taking up the cause of those whose sin has eaten away at their humanity” (26). And the gospel is good news “because it is comprehensively true. All human reality is what it is in the light of the gospel” (27). This means that the gospel is “particular be...

“More than anything else,” therefore, this gospel entails “a matter of disorientation.” There is an immediate consequence to be drawn here for the church’s social and cultural witness: that witness must not proceed by transmuting the gospel into a stable, measurable, quantifiable social or cultural value. We can no more do that than we can channel a volcano into a domestic heating system. The gospel is no mere “principle” which can then be “applied” to issues about forms of common life or political economy. The gospel is about death and resurrection, new creation, and it is that new order of reality, rather than any immediate social applicability, which is the burden of the church’s testimony. (27) All of this has implications for how we think about the church. “Most fundamentally, it means that the church is what it is because of the gospel” (27). If this is to have any meaning then we must be “very strict to allow the gospel to exercise in an immediate way a controlling and critical influence” within our Christian communities (28). “‘Church’ is the event of gathering around the magnetic centre of the good news of Jesus Christ” (28). But since the church is possessed by rather than itself possessing the gospel, then “it will be most basically characterized by astonishment at the good news of Jesus” (29). The church is church both in its activities of gathering together and being dispersed into its daily life beyond the gathered community.

“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.”477 As this Jewish philosopher ends these reflections, he feels compelled to say, after living with this story for almost twenty years, that he knew with “all certainty that Trocmé’s belief in God was at the center of the rescue efforts of the village.”478 And what is obvious as one reads this story is that God is known centrally to Trocmé and these parishioners through Jesus Christ. It was in his name that they sacrificed; it was to his name that they gave witness.479

The Weapons of the Spirit,” in Grose, Good Place to Hide, 304–8. For Trocmé’s much later, more fully developed views see Trocmé, Jesus and Nonviolent Revolution.

is striking to note the contrast between two film documentary accounts of this story: Weapons of the Spirit, directed by Pierre Sauvage, and Heroes: Saving Jewish Lives from the Nazis, directed by Marc Villiger. The former film presents the story in a way that largely coincides with the story as told by Philip Hallie. The latter film mostly strips out the specifically Christian dimensions of the story, reframing it mostly in secular terms.

parameters for knowing when this happened. For as recently as 1929 Bonhoeffer’s views on war were similar to those of most Germans of his time. In February of that year, in a lecture on ethics in Barcelona, Spain, Bonhoeffer gave a rationale for killing in war: “I will defend my brother, my mother, my people, and yet I know that I can do so only by spilling blood; but love for my people will sanctify murder, will sanctify war.”517 Eberhard Bethge says Bonhoeffer would never speak in these terms again. In fact, he would speak in quite different terms after his time in New York City, 1930–1931.

Both Eberhard Bethge and Sabine Dramm, in her book Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance, note this. We now know that at both his trial and his brother-in-law’s trial, a key issue for the judge was that Bonhoeffer was effectively living as a conscientious objector, which after 1939 was a capital offense. For the judge suspected that his work was not essential to the welfare of Germany and thus his “work” with the Abwehr was a ruse to keep him “entirely, partially, or temporarily from fulfillment of military service, [which] subverts military power.”

Discernment rather than law-making or undeviating principle-formation was his method of knowing what to do in a concrete situation.

One says: if we could be absolutely certain on the basis of Scripture that the path of the Council of Brethren is pleasing to God, then we would follow it. Demonstrate this from Scripture and we will follow. Thus I want to have the scriptural evidence in my pocket as the guarantee for my path. But the Bible can never fulfill this kind of request either, because it is not intended to be an insurance policy for our paths, which may become dangerous. The Bible does only one thing: it calls us to faith and obedience in the truth that we know in Jesus Christ. Scripture points not to our paths but to the truth of God. Let no one among you think after this meeting today that he can go home armed with scriptural evidence that justifies his decision for the Council of Brethren; if so, he misunderstands both the Scripture and the essence of faith. The scriptural evidence does not spare us from faith but actually leads us into the venture of faith and obedience to God’s word, and it strengthens us in this. According to Scripture we do not first know and comprehend the way and then decide to follow it; it is rather the one who is on the journey who knows that he is on the right way. Knowledge comes only in action and decision. Only he who is in truth will recognize the truth. Jesus says: “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God” (John 7:17). For this reason, scriptural evidence can be provided only along the way, that is, for the one who be...