Tag Archives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL

This text originally appeared in German in Der Tagesspiegel, 7 February 2025, pg. 12-13.

There is a portrait of the former court and cathedral preacher Adolf Stoecker in the reserve room of Berlin Cathedral. For a long time, the huge painting hung in the sacristy of the church, where the clergy prepare for their sermons. Together with other portraits of cathedral preachers, the painting was taken down years ago, wrapped in packing paper and tied up tightly. This has symbolic power: Stoecker, the Christian-social co-founder of modern German antisemitism, has been made to disappear for the time being.

Stoecker died in 1909 and was buried with great expressions of condolence by the Protestant congregation. The renowned theologian Reinhold Seeberg from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin gave a memorial speech for the deceased and paid tribute to him as a powerful, strong man of great gifts: a “pious child of God” and “gentlemanly man” at the same time. The cathedral preacher and the professor of theology were kindred spirits. With justification, Seeberg can be counted among the main guardians of Stoecker’s spirit. In 1922, he gave a lecture on Judaism and the church to the Central Committee for Inner Mission: the fight against the “Jewish spirit” is to be waged as a struggle against an orientation hostile to Christianity and Germanness. Seeberg saw Judaism as a foreign body that promoted the “dissolution of the historical and national life of the peoples”. The poison that “the Jew” served to others – so the theologian believed – was not injurious to himself. However, Seeberg rejected the unleashing of a “racial struggle” against Jewry with the aim of expulsion. One could not resort to the methods of Bolshevism. Anti-Jewish measures of violence, such as those recommended by Luther in his writings on the Jews, no longer made sense for that time.

Court and cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring spread similar resentment. Previously he had mixed his aggressive war sermons with racial antisemitic vocabulary. In his cathedral sermon on April 25, 1924, he declared that the “national question” now so burning in Germany had been awakened by the “shameless behavior of Judaism, which is hostile to Christ”. Ancient Jews could have become “the people of the earth”, but they had stoned their prophets and nailed Christ to the cross. As a people, they had thus condemned themselves to die. The clergyman proclaimed to his ever-growing audience in the cathedral that the Jews had become the “typical negative” of the world. With such convictions, the political preacher agitated in organizations such as the Evangelical League, in other associations, through a flood of newspaper articles, and as a member of the DNVP in the Reichstag.

A third important Protestant representative was also inspired by Stoecker. As a theology student, Otto Dibelius had attended a celebration of the Association of German Students in 1900, heard Stoecker’s speech, and spontaneously joined the antisemitic association. This marked the beginning of his career as an antisemitic publicist. In 1922, he complained of an “undesirable mixture of blood” due to the excessive immigration of “Eastern Jews.” In June 1927, now as general superintendent of the Kurmark in the rank of bishop, he wrote in the Berlin Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt: “The Jewish question is not primarily a religious but a racial question. The proportion of Jewish blood running through our national body is much higher than the religious statistics show.” Dibelius associated the political rise of the NSDAP after 1930 with expectations of a re-Christianization following the end of the “godless Republic” of Weimar. Accordingly, he welcomed the rise of Hitler’s party to power in alliance with the German Nationals. In the aftermath of the Nazi boycott of Jews, on April 1, 1933, which he justified, he made a more fundamental statement on the “Jewish question”: the “Jewish element” had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last fifteen years. The strong influx of Jews from the East had endangered “German national life.” No one could seriously object to the current suppression of Jewish influence. In order to solve the “Jewish question”, Germany’s eastern border had to be strictly sealed off.

Professor Seeberg, Cathedral Preacher Doehring, General Superintendent Dibelius – these voices are not outsiders, but represent the center of national Protestantism in the Weimar era. Their hybrid antisemitism combined theological anti-Judaism with set pieces of political and cultural antisemitism, while at the same time their speech about “the Jews” was mixed with völkisch ideology. With Hitler’s rise to power and the advance of the German Christian (Deutsche Christen – DC) movement, Protestant antisemitism became seriously radicalized. The publication Die Judenfrage (1933) by the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel should be singled out from the wealth of corresponding creeds. With his writing, he wanted to give the fight against Judaism a Christian meaning: the “meaning of our antisemitic struggle” must be to place Jews under strict immigration law again. The Christian also had his place in this battle. Jews were once the people of God, but they were no longer. Because they crucified Jesus, they had become homeless. In the New Testament, Kittel recognized the “most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.”  The “calamitous mixing of blood and race” since the Enlightenment had caused a “putrefaction” of the German people and had to be corrected through strictly nationalist policies.

Where the German Christians predominated as they did in Berlin, they erased traces of Jewishness in theology, liturgy and songs. “Non-Aryan” pastors were ousted. Church hymns had to be rewritten; for the future, no “Zion” and no “Hosanna” were to be heard in the German church. Lectures on “Luther and the Jews” or Adolf Stoecker were the order of the day. In March 1937, the Berlin superintendent Schleuning* was thankful for the special edition on the “Jewish question” issued by the inflammatory newspaper Der Stürmer. He proudly emphasized that the Nuremberg Laws that Hitler gave to the Germans had their precursors in the church’s own Jewish legislation.

Now, the German Christians were not the only ones who represented the Protestants during the Nazi era. There were other, more moderate groups – or, like the Confessing Church (BK), there was church opposition. But even there, opposition to Nazi Jewish policy remained an exception – such as the high school teacher Elisabeth Schmitz‘s memorandum, “On the situation of German non-Aryans” (1935), or the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, ambivalence predominated in the church opposition camp: alongside sympathy and support for the persecuted, there were also explicitly antisemitic voices.

The churches were generally silent about the November 1938 pogroms, with some DC regional bishops even explicitly welcoming the outbreaks of violence. Critical voices were few and far between. Open protest against the state’s Jewish policy was dangerous. The reformed theologian Helmut Hesse preached in Wuppertal in June 1943: the church had to resist all antisemitism, testify to the salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtliche] importance of Israel in the face of the state, and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. He was imprisoned and later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he died at the end of 1943 at the age of 27.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, hybrid Christian antisemitism was not immediately overcome. The racist antisemitism of the German Christians was no longer present in the church public. But where had the many Nazi pastors gone? What about traditional religious anti-Judaism? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 made no mention of the persecution of Jews, in which the church itself was partly involved. The Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who was the first Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), defended the severely incriminated Tübingen “Jewish researcher” Gerhard Kittel in an expert opinion (April 1947): it had been part of Kittel’s ecclesiastical teaching assignment to point out the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.” Kittel’s theologian friends in Tübingen even said that, with his writings, Kittel had “resisted in the most pronounced sense” in the area of the “Jewish question.”

The “Hoff case” was shameful: in 1943, the Berlin provost Walter Hoff* had boasted in writing that he had participated in the liquidation of Jews during the war in the East. After he had initially been stripped of his clerical rights, growing calls within the church leadership to rehabilitate the alleged Holocaust pastor reached Otto Dibelius, who had risen to become bishop of Berlin. The consistory’s decision in February 1957 restored the former provost’s full pastoral rights.

Only a few voices spoke plainly. Theological revisions of the Christian-Jewish relationship took a long time. As a religious mentality, the anti-Jewish spirit of Stoecker was deeply ingrained and outlasted the caesura of 1945. Leading churchmen such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Hans Meiser in Bavaria and Otto Dibelius remained influenced by it throughout their lives. Ultimately, breaking away from this unfortunate tradition was a generational issue. The critical zeitgeist of the 68ers brought a breath of fresh air, in theology as well as in the churches. In January 1980, the Rhineland Regional Church adopted a groundbreaking declaration on the renewal of Christian-Jewish relations. It acknowledged its shared responsibility for the Holocaust, condemned all anti-semitism and renounced the mission to the Jews. A significant step was the Day of Repentance sermon by Wolfgang Huber, then bishop of Berlin, in 2002, which was dedicated to remembering the fate of Christians of Jewish origin. According to Huber, the Confessing Church as an institution had also failed at the time.

Through synod resolutions, the appointment of commissioners on antisemitism, and various other activities, the member churches of the EKD   have distanced themselves from antisemitic traditions and are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jewish communities. The painful issue is not closed. Uncompromising church self-education about its own antisemitic past in the twentieth century remains an important prerequisite to convincingly oppose any spread of völkisch ideas in the church and in politics and society today. Adolf Stoecker has now been taken down in Berlin Cathedral, firmly packed away in the storeroom. Thank God, one might say. May he remain there forever.

 

Notes:

* Translator’s note: Johannes Schleuning, superintendent of Berlin-Lichtenberg, was a Russian-German chaplain and journalist.

* Translator’s note: well-known for his antisemitism, Walter Hoff was provost of St. Peter’s Church in Berlin beginning in the mid-1930s. During the Third Reich, he was a member of the German Christians (DC) and the Nazi Party. He served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

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Review Article: Tim Lorentzen, Bonhoeffers Widerstand im Gedächtnis der Nachwelt

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Review Article: Tim Lorentzen, Bonhoeffers Widerstand im Gedächtnis der Nachwelt. (Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2023). Illustrations. ISBN 978-3-506-70473-3.

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English edition, and former director, Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.[i]

This fall a new film about the German theologian/resistance figure Dietrich Bonhoeffer has revived debates among Christians about his legacy and its relevance for contemporary issues. The film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, provoked protests (in which I was involved) from German and North American scholars in the Bonhoeffer Society and eighty-six members of the extended Bonhoeffer family, as well as disclaimers about the film’s marketing by the German actors and the film’s director. Like most films on Bonhoeffer, the new production plays fast and loose with the historical facts. Readers of this journal will be surprised, for example, to see Martin Niemoeller preaching a rousing sermon in defense of German Jews after Kristallnacht and Winston Churchill appreciatively reading excerpts from Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question.” Most protests focused on the film’s portrayal of Bonhoeffer’s resistance as a militant embrace of violence in the name of a just cause: a stunning misrepresentation of Bonhoeffer’s theology and, at a time of rising political violence and Christian Nationalism in the United States, a potentially dangerous one.

But as Tim Lorentzen’s new book illustrates, it is hardly the first time that interpretations of Bonhoeffer have been based on his ties to the German resistance. Lorentzen, Professor of Early Modern Church History at Kiel University, traces the chronology of German cultural narratives about Bonhoeffer’s resistance, and their intersections with German Protestant memorialization, from 1945 to 2006. His focus on resistance (rather than German historiography about Nazism, the Holocaust, the Protestant Kirchenkampf, or Bonhoeffer’s theological writings) is a narrow lens through which to understand Bonhoeffer, but it raises interesting and provocative questions. As historians know, Bonhoeffer was a minor figure in the resistance circles—and yet this very aspect of his life has become central in the narratives about him. Would Bonhoeffer’s theology be as well-known and widely read today if this were not the case? Has the emphasis on resistance led to the historical distortions one finds in many works on Bonhoeffer? Conversely, does it offer insights we might not otherwise have into his theology and his life?

In his introduction, Lorentzen argues that despite the growing body of scholarship on memorialization and memory cultures (especially with respect to the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust), there has not yet been a work focusing on church memory culture, where Bonhoeffer has achieved unusually central and symbolic status (and not just in Germany). This is especially important between 1948 and 1989, when parallel memory cultures about the Nazi era emerged in the German Democratic Republic in the east and the Federal Republic in the west.

The process began even before all the family members had received confirmation of his death and the deaths of his brother Klaus and two brothers-in-law. In May 1945, the ecumenical press office in Geneva issued a press release about his death. The report was sent to Reinhold Niebuhr in the United States, and on June 15 Niebuhr’s tribute, “The Death of a Martyr,” was published in the U.S. biweekly magazine Christianity and Crisis. In July 1945 Bishop George Bell presided over a memorial service in London’s Holy Trinity Church, broadcast by the BBC, in which he praised Bonhoeffer and the other executed resistance figures as examples of “the other Germany” that he had championed throughout the war. One week later, Confessing Church veterans held their first postwar synod in Spandau, where Probst Hans Böhm expressed his hope that Bell’s service in London could renew the bond between British and German churches; Bonhoeffer was similarly honored at the Treysa synod in August 1945. In early October, George Bell published an account of his last conversation with Bonhoeffer in Sigtuna, Sweden, in May 1942, when Bonhoeffer had told him that God would punish Germany for its guilt and that resistance was “an act of repentance.” Weeks later in Stuttgart, German church leaders met with ecumenical leaders, including Willem Visser ‘t Hooft (who was familiar with Bell’s article), and wrote the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. Lorentzen argues that Bell’s account influenced the wording of the Stuttgart Declaration in October 1945. That same month, George Bell visited Germany and met with Eberhard Bethge, who had compiled excerpts of various Bonhoeffer texts. In December 1945, the World Council of Churches published these texts in a short paperback titled  Zeugnis eines Boten.

By the end of 1945, then, Bonhoeffer was recognized internationally as both Christian martyr and political resister. His story had become a cornerstone of the revived relationship between the German Protestant churches and their international partners, but this meant something very different on either side of the border. Inside Germany, tensions were already developing between Bonhoeffer’s closest allies and the official postwar church. Bethge in particular viewed Bonhoeffer’s resistance and death as an implicit accusation against those who had collaborated and compromised. In contrast, some postwar German church leaders found it a useful alibi as they reconstituted the Protestant Church and navigated their relationship with the Allied occupation government. They embraced Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom and resistance as exemplary of the Protestant Church’s courage under the Nazi regime (a deceptive move that obscured the complicity of the churches and, in many cases, their own).

As Lorentzen astutely observes, the memorialization of Bonhoeffer was a public process from the very beginning of the postwar era: “there was not a single moment when it was confined to being a family affair.” [13] This is worth pondering in terms of what it meant for Eberhard Bethge, who in the summer of 1945 was helping a traumatized family that had just lost four family members to Nazi violence and assisting the survivors of several other resistance families. In his Bonhoeffer biography and elsewhere, Bethge later contended that Bonhoeffer’s significance was quickly marginalized in the postwar Protestant Church and that he was dismissed by figures like Bishop Meiser as a “political” martyr, not a religious one. Lorentzen makes a convincing case that this was untrue (and one of the features of this book is that he pushes back against Bethge’s version of some things)—although, I would add, Lorentzen’s narrow focus omits a closer look at the broader early postwar disputes among Protestants who had been involved in the Kirchenkampf (which was the background for many of Bethge’s battles).

In any case, Bethge was central to the elevation of Bonhoeffer’s story. In spring 1946 he published some of Bonhoeffer’s poetry in Unterwegs, an occasional publication by Bonhoeffer’s former students; the poems also appeared in other publications, including the international newsletter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Each publication put a different spin on the texts—the Berlin newspaper Neue Zeit published the poem “Night Voices in Tegel,” for example, without mentioning that Bonhoeffer was a theologian. In February 1946, on the 40th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth, Bethge published an article in Neue Zeit, George Bell wrote a two-part article on the German resistance for the New York Herald Tribune, and Reinhold Niebuhr published a piece in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review about Bonhoeffer’s resistance. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom was now firmly interwoven into German Protestant postwar ties to foreign churches, and there was international fascination with his story.

All of this influenced early perspectives on the Kirchenkampf and the German resistance. Lorentzen argues that many theologians and church leaders already understood the broader German resistance in the context of Bonhoeffer (not the other way around), leading to an early “sanctification” of the July 20 conspirators and an emphasis on Christian resistance against Nazism. This was also possible, I would add, because in the 1930s much of the international reaction to the Kirchenkampf had focused on the “Nazi persecution of Christians.” Martin Niemoeller’s trial and imprisonment became an international cause célèbre (in December 1940, Time Magazine put him on the cover as the “Martyr of 1940”). Although Lorentzen doesn’t delve into those precedents, his analysis helps to explain how the Bonhoeffer legacy dovetailed with early postwar portrayals of Confessing Church heroism. In his lectures and essays in the late 1940s, Bethge offered a similar framing of the resistance. In 1951 the first German edition of the prison letters, Widerstand und Ergebung, was published (the English publication of Letters and Papers appeared in 1953).

By then, Bonhoeffer’s status as a martyr was well established. A new phase began in which his legacy was incorporated into other postwar political narratives in the new German Federal Republic. There were two major processes between 1946 and 1961 (which Lorentzen describes as the “martyrization” phase). First, Bonhoeffer’s status as “martyr” and resistance figure gave him a broader political symbolic value. Secondly, however, postwar Germany was already moving on to the burning political issues of the 1950s. Church and civil commemorations of events like the July 20 bomb plot continued, but surviving figures from the Kirchenkampf—people like Martin Niemoeller, Otto Dibelius, Eugen Gerstenmaier, and Theodor Heckel—were now focused on issues like the Cold War and German rearmament. Gerstenmaier and Heckel (former nemeses of Bonhoeffer with whom Bethge continued to do battle) had moved into the political sphere.

The first histories of the Kirchenkampf were also written during this period; Wilhelm Niemoeller’s Die Evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich appeared in 1956. Survivors of the July 20 circles and other groups that had been persecuted and imprisoned under the Nazi regime founded their own organizations and began holding their own commemorations. Bethge was increasingly uncomfortable with Bonhoeffer’s inclusion in the celebration of “Heldentod” (the deaths of heroes). In 1960 a two-volume set titled Das Gewissen Steht Auf and Das Gewissen Entscheidet was published (the second volume had a foreword by Willy Brandt). The books profiled individual resistance figures from the July 20 group, the Protestant and Catholic churches, all the executed members of the Bonhoeffer family, and many other resisters.

Certain events (notably the mid-1950s trials of Walter Huppenkothen, who had overseen the trials and executions of Bonhoeffer, Canaris, and other conspirators in Flossenbürg) brought Bonhoeffer’s name back into the public eye, revealing ongoing postwar divisions about the resistance. Public reaction to these trials showed that Germans were still divided in their opinions about the July 20 group, with almost half of those polled (as well as some still-some prominent apologists for the Nazi regime) condemning the conspirators as “traitors.” Huppenkothen and his co-defendants were eventually sentenced to the time they had already served in prison.

But here, Lorentzen argues, public statements from Bonhoeffer’s sole surviving brother Karl-Friedrich, survivors of the conspiracy,  and Protestant theologians altered public discussion of the trials and led to a “lasting shift” in how Germans thought about the resistance. The theological memorandum and testimony from former Confessing pastor and theologian Han Joachim Iwand, in which he explained the theological foundation for resistance and even declared that the churches should have resisted in 1933, had a profound impact that extended beyond the trial. (I should add, however, that these battles continued for several decades. In 1976 Eberhard Bethge and Gerhard Leibholz won a defamation suit against a right-wing propagandist on behalf of the Bonhoeffer family).

Although Lorentzen doesn’t mention it, the Huppenkothen trial had another impact on postwar politics and international relations. A 38-minute excerpt from the trial was filmed and distributed by the West German Government Office of Political Education (the USHMM in Washington, DC, has a copy). The film clip (which opens with photographs of Bonhoeffer, Oster, Dohnanyi, and Canaris) was produced at the very moment when the Adenauer government sought to reestablish the West German military. By honoring the German conspirators who died for their resistance to National Socialism (especially Oster and Canaris, who had been leading military figures) and showing a public democratic trial of former Nazis, the clip was intended in part, I suspect, to reassure western allies at a time when German rearmament was still controversial.

It was still the era of Bonhoeffer’s “martyrization”,  but his story was now firmly embedded in the historical complexities of the post-Nazi era. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the period during which Eberhard Bethge left Germany to serve a church in London in 1953 and then came to Harvard in 1957 to begin writing the biography, where he famously observed how in the United States, ”Everyone here has his own Bonhoeffer.” In the United States, too, Bonhoeffer was already well-known as a martyr, and over the ensuring decades (to the present moment, I would argue) there are multiple and very different American spins on that story.

In 1961, the Berlin Wall was built. Divided Germany became ground zero for many international political battles. Lorentzen describes the years between 1961 and 1989 (when the Berlin Wall came down) as the era of the “politicization” of Bonhoeffer’s memory. He continued to play a morally symbolic role for German Protestants on both sides of the border, but increasingly on behalf of very different political causes. During the same years, the first postwar generation of Germans reached adulthood and began to critically challenge early hagiographies. There was a growing focus on the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the churches’ complicity with the Nazi regime. Rolf Hochuth’s critical play, Der Stellvertreter, about the role of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust, premiered in 1963. It was also during this period that Wolfgang Gerlach wrote his And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Jews (although it was not published in Germany until 1987).

Bonhoeffer acquired a new symbolic status as a politically critical theologian who was embraced by younger theologians. His resistance against Nazism represented a critique of church leaders who had made compromises with the Deutsche Christen and the Nazis. It also offered the basis for postwar activism on other issues: his pacifism, for example, became a rallying cry for anti-nuclear groups. His postwar relevance was amplified by the 1967 publication of Bethge’s massive Bonhoeffer biography (an abridged English translation was published in 1970). Bethge’s narrative encompassed the story of the German churches and the Kirchenkampf, the role played by theologians like Karl Barth, and the German resistance, but with Bonhoeffer at the heart of every story. The biography was also Bethge’s first systematic attempt to explain Bonhoeffer’s theological journey, especially his vision for the future of the Protestant Church.

This intersected with a growing number of international church conversations in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In the German Democratic Republic, the head of the Protestant Church was Albrecht Schönherr, who had been one of Bonhoeffer’s seminarians in Finkenwalde. Schönherr took Bonhoeffer’s understanding of “the church for others” as the model for what he wanted the “church in socialism” to be. During this same period, the international Bonhoeffer Society was founded, bringing together theologians and clergy from around the world. Its first meeting was in 1976 in Geneva, underscoring Bonhoeffer’s role (and ongoing relevance) in the ecumenical movement. Bonhoeffer’s story had become seminal to Christian memory culture on a global scale, from South Africa to the United State to Asia. His theology and his life story resonated in very different churches and political circumstances.

Bethge was a singular and influential force in these developments, internationally and increasingly in terms of the publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings . During this period the German publication of the seventeen-volume Bonhoeffer Werke began, with Bethge’s involvement. He was also influential in the German church, where he often invoked Bonhoeffer’s legacy. From 1961 to 1975 he was director of the Pastoral College in the Rhineland, and in 1981 he was instrumental in shaping the Rhineland Synod’s declaration on Christian-Jewish relations, making the Rhineland church the first German Landeskirche to acknowledge the validity of Judaism.

“Politicization” is too narrow a term for some of this, but Lorentzen skillfully illustrates how Bonhoeffer’s memory remained central in shaping the German churches’ public positions during this period. During these years (especially in the 1980s, after the nationwide television broadcast of the American docudrama Holocaust), numerous localized memorials and exhibitions about the Nazi persecution of the Jews began to appear. There were also new memorials to Bonhoeffer, and hundreds of churches, schools, and streets were named after him. One of the most striking examples of this “politicization” is the Bonhoeffer statue in an outside corner of the Petrikirche in Hamburg, at the site of a protest against atomic weapons by a Tübingen teacher, Hartmut Gründler, who burned himself to death there in 1977. The site soon became a shrine for environmental activists, who covered it with flowers and marked it with a series of memorial plaques intended both to honor Gründler as well as to inspire others to protest. The ongoing protests and demonstrations inspired a deep debate within the church and in the wider public. This ended when Axel Springer, the conservative publisher of Germany’s largest tabloid, gave the money for a Bonhoeffer statue on that very spot. There it stands to the present day: an ironic “memorial” that is simultaneously an erasure (there are two images of the statue in the book’s appendix of illustrations).

It is a useful reminder that memorial culture invariably elevates certain themes and obscures others. Drawing on German bishop Wolfgang Huber’s description of Bonhoeffer as a “Protestant saint,” Lorentzen describes the third phase, from 1990-2006, as a period of “sanctification.” There were a growing number of pilgrimages, especially from other countries, to Flossenbürg, Finkenwalde, the resistance memorial sites in Berlin, and of course the Bonhoeffer Haus (where the family had lived) in Charlottenburg. Bonhoeffer’s writings and history were regularly invoked by churches and in the ecumenical movement. Even Catholic countries and shrines have honored Bonhoeffer alongside Catholic victims of Nazism like Alfred Delp and Bernard Lichtenberg. In the appendix of illustrations, Lorentzen includes photographs of many memorials to Bonhoeffer, including some there were unfamiliar to me. The most famous memorial of course is the statues of ten “modern martyrs” at the West Entrance to Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 1998. There, Bonhoeffer stands alongside figures from around the world, including Maximilian Kolbe, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Oscar Romero. But there is also an icon in the Church of San Bartolomeo in Rome (where Bonhoeffer is pictured with Catholic Bishop of Münster Clemens Graf von Galen, Bernard Lichtenberg, and Friedrich Weissler), and the Romanian Orthodox Cathedral in Nuremberg, which features Bonhoeffer together with Catholic and Protestant saints through the centuries.

The final chapter explores the significance of “Christian resistance” in church memorial culture and the inherent tensions between religious and cultural interpretations of memory. In many ways, memorialization “domesticates” resistance figures; the Petrikirche memorial statue is certainly a striking example of that. Bonhoeffer is an interesting figure in this regard because he continues to be claimed by very different kinds of Christian groups (especially in the United States).  It is almost as if the status of “resister” has lifted him above theological and political divisions that might otherwise prevent people from claiming him. In the process, what scholar Stephen Haynes once called the “Bonhoeffer Phenomenon,”[ii] leads to misinterpretations of his theological writings and his historical role.

Lorentzen’s book masterfully illustrates the process by which Bonhoeffer acquired an “über-historical” status soon after the war. To this day, many books and films about him are symbolic and very selective histories of heroism and martyrdom, not actual studies of the man and his times. Not surprisingly, this also means that they are riddled with false historical claims, not just with respect to the resistance but in terms of his significance in the Kirchenkampf. Lorentzen’s book helps us understand how this happened. For that reason alone, the  book is a major achievement that any student or scholar of Bonhoeffer who is writing reception history or looking at Bonhoeffer’s impact in postwar Germany should read. By focusing specifically on the issue of resistance, this book offers a fascinating analysis of how, in east and west, postwar Germany wrestled with the intersections of resistance and martyrdom over six decades. It also offers some new insights into the theological literature on Bonhoeffer, much of which has been shaped by legends of his centrality in the resistance.

At the same time, however, this work parallels (but does not discuss at any length) the changes in historical narratives about the German Kirchenkampf, the German scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the different phases of political memorialization and commemoration and specific debates around the Historikerstreit, and the more critical studies of the Wehrmacht and resistance circles. It would naturally be impossible to include all these other influences on the Bonhoeffer narrative and still have a coherent book, but this does skew his account of some developments.

There is one issue in particular that I wish he had addressed in greater depth:  how German political and church memory cultures in these postwar decades addressed the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. I suspect this is partly because this remains a significant gap in the Bonhoeffer literature—which tells us something about the symbolic and ahistorical nature of many books on him. But over the decades there was growing discussion of the Holocaust in the German churches, in the various Kirchentags, and among theologians like Dorothee Soelle—and it certainly became central to the public discourse after 1979. I was surprised, for example, that he didn’t discuss Tetyana Pavlush’s 2015 Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik,[iii] which traces these discussions in both Germanys (and she includes some analysis of Bonhoeffer’s impact).

Nonetheless, Lorentzen’s book stands on its own merits. This is an important work that led me to rethink some of my own assumptions. While not about reception history per se, it is a masterful study of the myriad political influences that shape the construction and revision of biographical and theological narratives over time. Along the way, Lorentzen offers some fascinating glimpses into the postwar telling of the Bonhoeffer story in Germany.

 

Notes:

[i] The views expressed in this essay are the author’s own.

[ii] Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (2004); Lorentzen mentions Haynes’ work (including his other The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives (2006).

[iii] Reviewed in this journal in 2016: https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2016/06/review-of-tetyana-pavlush-kirche-nach-auschwitz-zwischen-theologie-und-vergangenheitspolitik/

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Film Review:  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Film Review:  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin, directed by Todd Komarnicki (Angel Studios, 2024)

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, Continuing & Professional Studies

Introduction

On the morning of April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age 39, was hanged on a gallows at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and General Hans Oster, key conspirators in the military resistance against Hitler, met with the same fate that day, as did several others. Dietrich’s brother, Klaus, and brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi – who had recruited Dietrich into the resistance – and Rudiger Schleicher were executed the same week. Almost from the beginning of Todd Komarnicki’s sincere but problematic new film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin, Bonhoeffer’s end is in focus. This review centers on the film’s historical content and its narrative, but also includes an examination of controversies surrounding its marketing and message.

The Film’s “Bonhoeffer” and Bonhoeffer the Man

The film, which is beautifully shot and scored, but at times laden with clunky dialogue, begins with a glimpse into the domestic life of the Bonhoeffer family (warm and loving, and also tranquil until Dietrich’s beloved older brother Walter is killed in the Great War). Yet it largely focuses on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in 1933. The film flashes back and forth, from Bonhoeffer’s imprisonments in Buchenwald and Flossenbürg to the years preceding the war. It tells the tale of a young theologian whose participation in the 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer and overthrow the Nazi regime seems nearly inevitable. The flashbacks often muddle both the chronology and the film’s interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s de-contextualized words.

Bonhoeffer did provide nearly contemporaneous early details of the first deportation of Jews to “the east” and was involved in “Operation Seven,” an intricate and successful plot to rescue fourteen Jews. Yet the extent of his involvement in resistance efforts, including “Operation Valkyrie,” the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler’s life (but not the March 21, 1943 Gersdorff plot depicted in the film), has been debated extensively by Bonhoeffer scholars.[1] In any case, he was arrested in April 1943 for plotting to rescue Jews, using his travels outside of Germany for matters unrelated to German military intelligence, and abusing his position in the Abwehr to help Confessing Church pastors escape military service. He was initially imprisoned in the Wehrmacht’s Tegel prison in Berlin.

Though Bonhoeffer knew of efforts to topple the Hitler regime as early as 1938, his tangential involvement in Operation Valkyrie was the occasion of Dietrich’s ultimate demise. A couple of months after only one of the two planned bombs exploded near Hitler and injured but did not kill him, the Gestapo discovered documents implicating especially Dohnanyi but also Bonhoeffer. Shortly thereafter, Dietrich was moved to a notorious prison cellar at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin; in February 1945, he was transferred to Buchenwald, then moved to the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

In a pivotal sequence, the film cuts back and forth breathlessly between the aborted March 21, 1943 Gersdorff assassination attempt and Bonhoeffer’s imagined practice sermon at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1939. The scene, which, as happens many times in the film, conflates various writings penned by the young theologian, highlights the famous quote from The Cost of Discipleship (1937): “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” One implication seems to be that Bonhoeffer was prophetic – or at least that he somehow had a sense, even before the war began, that participating in resistance against Hitler and the Nazis would lead to his own death more than five years later. Another takeaway is the central message that the film wants to convey: that Christians should be willing to die (or at least be willing to suffer greatly) for their faith.

Yet, while Bonhoeffer was indeed executed by direct order of Hitler in April 1945, it was Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff who carried explosives into the Zeughaus in Berlin; he intended to tackle Hitler just before the bomb, with its ten-minute fuse, was set to explode. The conspirators had expected Hitler to spend a significant amount of time at the Prussian war museum, but instead he hurried through the exhibition, prompting Gersdorff to defuse the bomb in the lavatory (he only had a couple of minutes to do so).[2] It was Claus von Stauffenberg who carried the bomb into the “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia on July 20, 1944.

This is not to say that Bonhoeffer lacked courage; his participation in the daring activities that he carried out as a spy for the resistance in the Abwehr was of course extremely courageous and led ultimately to his death by hanging. But the desire to put Bonhoeffer closer to the center of this story than he was distorts the historical picture even if it meets a perceived need to put Dietrich’s endorsement of violent means at the center of the narrative. This distortion also minimizes his efforts both to save the lives of European Jews as well as to discern and proclaim some theological meaning not only about martyrdom, but about what it means to live in the world as a follower of Christ.

The imagined Harlem sermon also includes a reference to the shooting of 33,000 Jews near Kyiv – the Babyn Yar massacre, which did not occur until September 1941. Dietrich’s sojourns in Harlem were indeed central to his thinking, especially about matters related to race. Yet, the conflation of events that took place closer to the height of the genocide (most Jews who were killed during the Holocaust died in 1942 and 1943) with occurrences and writings from the summer before the war downplays the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology; so much of his thought was a painstaking yet direct response to what he was witnessing with his own eyes (and hearing about from his contacts in the resistance).

Victoria Barnett, a leading authority on the life and work of Bonhoeffer and past editor for this journal,[3] thinks we should read Bonhoeffer in a different way than do so many films and books that insist on making him an uncomplicated hero; he was “one decent human being who understood better than any of us that in evil times, we must remain faithful … for the sake of future generations ….” Ferdinand Schlingensiepen urges that “Bonhoeffer did not want to be venerated; he wanted to be heard. Anyone who puts him on a lonely pedestal is defusing that which … makes a thoughtful encounter with him worthwhile.”[4] Bonhoeffer was a complex individual and theologian; he was also, above all else, a thinker and a writer. Bonhoeffer never justified his participation in the assassination plot on biblical or theological grounds – indeed, he believed he needed to ask forgiveness for it.

Historical Context

The film also gets some significant aspects of the broader historical context wrong. Crucially, as in Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer biography, Hitler and the Nazi Party leadership are portrayed as taking over the German Protestant Church and, apparently, never relinquish their hold over it, creating a “Reich Church.”[5] Meanwhile, the Confessing Church – here led by Bonhoeffer and Niemöller – courageously fights the Nazis, especially their anti-Jewish policy and actions, including the Holocaust. This misleading narrative suggests that there were two sides of the Church Struggle: the (apparently fearless) Confessing Church and the “Reich Church,” which in the film represents the remainder of the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (German Protestant Church, DEK) who supposedly had been coopted by Hitler’s “brute nationalism.”

This version of the Church Struggle fuses with the Reich Church the significant minority faction of the DEK, the German Christians, who eagerly embraced many aspects of Nazism and created and used “de-Judaized” Bibles and hymnals. Yet it omits altogether the majority of German Protestants, who chose not to affiliate with either the German Christians or the Confessing Church. It also elides the fact that Hitler eventually gave up on the idea of a Reich Church. In 2010, Victoria Barnett critiqued the similarly-misplaced portrait of the German Protestant Church during the Third Reich in Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer biography in this journal.

Further, as many scholars have demonstrated, the German Protestant myth of the Church Struggle as a courageous fight against Nazism, which was proliferated after the war chiefly by pastors and theologians determined to paint their actions and that of their churches in the most benign light, has been refuted. Many of the churches in fact cooperated with Hitler, in many cases promulgating Nazi ideology, including antisemitism.[6] Bonhoeffer’s evolving views about Jews and Judaism and certainly his later embrace of a (enigmatic but potentially very potent) “religionless Christianity” were held by very, very few Protestant Christians of his day. As our own Kyle Jantzen related in 2015, “For better or worse, Bonhoeffer has received more attention than his historical roles in the German church struggle, resistance, or ecumenical world would merit.”

Other inaccuracies in the film are characterized as intentional, with various reasons offered by the filmmakers (e.g., a depicted event being a “metaphor” or a means of condensing storytelling for a film). It is common for filmmakers to conflate events for the purpose of telling a story more efficiently. The scene with Bonhoeffer jamming in a jazz club with Black musicians, for example, did not happen; yet it is certainly the type of event that could have happened at the time and comports with what we know about Bonhoeffer: he was a skilled pianist and his time in Harlem really did expand his musical tastes (as well as his theology).[7]

Yet, other scenes are unintentionally inaccurate or “metaphorical.” When Martin Niemöller recites the (now famous) poem “First they came for the socialists …” he does so in a thunderous sermon in prophetic fashion, as if he uttered those famous words before the Nazis “came for him.” In the film, the sermon is apparently given in 1944 even though Niemoller was arrested in 1937 and would have been in Dachau in 1944. (the film’s Niemöller states during the sermon that he had been their pastor “for thirteen years”; Niemöller became a pastor at Berlin-Dahlem in 1931). What came to be known as Niemöller’s “confession” was not uttered until after the war, and thus after his seven-year incarceration in first a Berlin prison, then Sachsenhausen, and finally Dachau.

A staunch nationalist, the pastor of the Berlin Dahlem Confessing Church neither resisted nor even opposed the regime’s persecution of Jews and other minorities from 1933 to July 1937 (when he was arrested). Placing the words of the famous poem in his mouth in 1944 obscures the historical reality of a man who only realized his sins against Jews and other victims of Nazism after the Holocaust. This heroizing of Niemöller aligns with the film’s portrait of Bonhoeffer. The audience is robbed of the more complex picture of this complicated man with deep German nationalist sympathies who dissented against the regime in defense of the German Protestant Church, not Jews and other victims of Nazism, a man who recognized his sins against the latter only later in life (gradually, beginning at Dachau, but continuing for decades thereafter).[8]

Controversial Marketing

As the film was promoted in the weeks before yet another contentious US presidential and congressional election, and was released just weeks afterward, its marketing campaign engendered significant controversy. A post on X (formerly Twitter) by the distribution company, Angel Studios, still available as of this writing, reads in part “The battle against tyranny begins now! Watch Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. in theaters November 22! …”; the text appears above a poster with Bonhoeffer carrying a gun.

An international group of Bonhoeffer scholars wrote and circulated a petition condemning such abuses of Bonhoeffer’s legacy; it has to date garnered thousands of signatures. Similarly, many of the German actors in the film, the Board and staff members of the Bonhoeffer Haus in Berlin as well as members of Bonhoeffer’s extended family issued statements condemning misuses of Bonhoeffer’s life and work.

Misinterpretations or misuses of Bonhoeffer are certainly not confined to the religious right. In Charles Marsh’s biography, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer has a romantic attraction to Eberhard Bethge, a notion that, however close their friendship, is belied by weightier evidence to the contrary. In another Bonhoeffer biography, the authors contend that Bonhoeffer was a committed pacifist.[9]

Yet, Victoria Barnett argues that Bonhoeffer’s views on the quest for peace conflicted with his participation in the resistance in ways that he could never fully resolve. The coupling of an image of Bonhoeffer with a gun and the descriptor “assassin” in the film’s title is irresponsible, as it turns the Berlin theologian into someone he was not, at a time of heightened political polarization in the US and Europe and war in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Conclusion

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin has many flaws, not least of which is the last descriptor in its title. The portrayal of the German Protestant Church lacks nuance; the elevation of thematic messages over chronology leads at times to significant misinterpretations of Bonhoeffer, Niemöller, and the Holocaust. Its pre-release marketing campaign included some disconcerting messaging, especially as it coincided with a highly contentious US presidential election during which one of the candidates was the target of an assassination attempt. Thankfully, despite its imperfections, the film is infused with an unvarnished appreciation for its protagonist – who is indeed worthy of admiration – and its filmmakers clearly care about the perils of antisemitism and racism. We would all do well to imbibe these messages, however flawed their presentation.

If one is looking for a more accurate portrayal of Bonhoeffer’s life, including his political resistance efforts, the International Bonhoeffer Society has a good list of documentaries and films. Better still, one might get to know Bonhoeffer a bit better by reading Schlingensiepen’s excellent biography[10] or by delving into some of Bonhoeffer’s writings.

 

Notes:

[1] Lori Brandt Hale and W. David Hall, eds., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theology, and Political Resistance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020)

[2] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, (Bloomsbury, 2010) 312-313.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, 16 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995–2014).

[4] Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945, xvii.

[5] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010).

[6] Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 10.

[7] See Reggie Williams’s insightful take on the film, which includes a thoughtful critique of its portrayal of Black and Jewish people. “The Tropes that Birth a Hero,” Christian Century, November 25, 2024, https://www.christiancentury.org/features/tropes-birth-hero.

[8] Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

[9] Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2013).

[10] Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945.

 

 

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Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pp . 313 + ix. ISBN: 9780197516447

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In the ruins of 1945 Berlin, American Christian leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., worried about the danger of Communism to Christian civilization as he and other US Protestants knew it. Just as problematic, however, was the “German Problem” they had grappled with throughout the war years: how could Germany be both the birthplace of Protestantism and the country of Nazism—home to Adolf Hitler’s racial nationalism and militarism. And where did the theological liberalism of Germany fit into the picture?

This is the starting point for James D. Strasburg’s fine study, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe. It is the story of how, during and after the Second World War, leading US Protestants “identified Germany as the prime territory for creating a new Christian and democratic world order in the heart of Europe, one that could dispel any new totalitarian threat, whether spiritual or political” (2).

God’s Marshall Plan revolves around two groups of US Protestants. The first is the “ecumenists,” who worked through the powerful Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and were eager to develop a new “’World Christianity,’ an imagined global community that was ecumenically Protestant in its spirituality and democratically oriented in its politics” (2). Moreover, “they marshalled their spiritual and political energies to oppose any perceived ‘totalitarian’ threat to such an order—including communism and secularism, as well as Catholicism and Protestant fundamentalism—both at home and across the European continent” (3).

The second group is the “evangelicals” (often “fundamentalists” in Strasburg’s narrative), who “promoted biblical fundamentals and conversionary mission as the proper theological expression of Protestant Christianity. They also identified individual liberty, limited government, free market capitalism, and an America-first foreign policy as their nation’s proper political values” (3).

As Strasburg explains, his book “narrates the origins and history of these competing American Protestant missions to Germany and Europe.” More specifically, “it examines how ecumenical and evangelical American Protestants used the onset of two world wars and an era of reconstruction as rationale to spiritually and politically intervene in Europe” in order to develop their “respective world orders.” Beyond that, the book explains “how this spiritual struggle for Europe activated and advanced American Protestantism’s long-standing Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world” (3).

As they worked for Europe’s spiritual recon­struction, both ecumenists and evangelicals drew on an American “‘conquering faith’—its spir­itual impulse to shape, lead, and transform the globe through the spread of Protestant Christianity and American democracy.” In pursuit of this aim, both groups of US Protestants “mobilized for world war and pursued strategic partnerships with federal officials, foreign policymakers, and the American military. Through these efforts, they hoped to spread dem­ocratic values and Protestant Christianity to Europe, and as such, to remake the continent in the American image” (4).

But, as Strasburg argues, the competing agendas of US Protestants in postwar Germany both grew out of and reflected religious fractures at home, as ecumenists and evangelicals struggled over “the spiritual leadership of their nation and the so-called ‘Christian West’” (4). Moreover, European Protestants had their own ideas about the spiritual and social reconstruction of war-torn Germany and Europe, the most prominent of which was a “third way” theology of peace and reconciliation independent of either superpower. This, in turn, prompted some US Protestants to rethink their own approaches to world missions and global politics in the era of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, here too ecumenists and evangelicals clashed, and so “the spiritual struggle for Europe thus left American Protestants deeply divided and at odds over their global mission. It ultimately forged competing theologies of global engagement—Christian nationalism and Christian globalism—that transformed the United States, diplomacy, and re­ligion in an era of world war and beyond” (5).

As Strasburg demonstrates throughout God’s Marshall Plan, when US Protestants grappled with rival ideologies—democratic liberal, fascist, and communist—very often,

their national and po­litical allegiances overpowered their religious commitments. In particular, such loyalties often challenged their faith’s summons to love of neighbor, re­gardless of that neighbor’s nationality, race, or politics. Christian nationalism likewise clashed with the biblical admonition to prioritize peacemaking and to seek the welfare of the wider world. Finally, it undercut the biblical man­date to hold a higher citizenship in heaven and to declare a greater devotion to a kingdom that knew no borders. (12)

One cannot read this history and not be struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment. In so many ways, the fissures Strasburg explores throughout his book remain challenges at the very heart of American Christianity today.

God’s Marshall Plan traces this story from the aftermath of the First World War through the rise of totalitarian regimes on through the Second World War and into the Cold War that followed. With respect to the book’s title, Strasburg notes:

The Marshall Plan serves as an apt metaphor for the ambitions of American Protestants in Europe. As the American govern­ment worked to remake the continent’s markets and politics, American Protestants complemented these efforts through tent revivals, theo­logical exchanges, and reconstruction programs designed to revive the continent’s soul. In effect, they worked to establish an American empire of the spirit. They hoped that exporting their faith’s values abroad and creating new ocean-spanning religious networks would provide spir­itual support for America’s new transatlantic democratic order. (18)

Strasburg develops his argument in eight chapters. The first (“Spiritual Conquest”) explores the US Protestant response to the First World War. For ecumenists like Congregational minister, relief worker, and church leader Henry Smith Leiper, the German imperialism that led to war in 1914 required the antidote of US spiritual democracy in keeping with Wilsonian internationalism. But for evangelicals like the fundamentalist Baptist pastor and anti-evolutionist William Bell Riley, the problem was not German imperialism but German theological modernism, which required the solution of a return to the Bible, Christian morality, and evangelical mission (23). Strasburg explains the competing ideas of ecumenists and evangelicals by surveying groups and individuals as diverse as the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), President Woodrow Wilson, lay evangelist and International Missionary Council leader John R. Mott, Leiper, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, the 1910 World Missionary Conference, German pastors Martin Niemöller and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, The Christian Century, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, revivalist Billy Sunday, Riley, fundamentalist leaders French Oliver and A.C. Dixon, and The King’s Business. But if US ecumenists “outlined a mission to create a new international system rooted in Wilsonian principles,” to make Europe “more authentically Christian,” and to “promote a democratic spirit abroad” (42), conservative Protestants founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to combat “the doctrinal shallowness and modernist teachings of the Federal Council and German Protestantism” (44) and supported and supported “America First” Republican Henry Cabot Lodge’s US Senate faction which fought tooth and nail against the formation of the League of Nations. Racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-socialism, and antisemitism were also features of this movement of reaction against US participation in ecumenical Christianity and internationalist politics. As Strasburg explains, in the aftermath of the First World War, US Protestants were increasingly divided about global mission—caught between Christian nationalism and Christian globalism. Despite these divisions, however, Strasburg argues that “American Protestants still generally agreed that the United States was a Christian na­tion with an exceptional role to play in the world. … American Protestants worked to reshape the world through American values and outlined a vision for global spiritual conquest” (50).

In chapters 2 to 4, Strasburg describes the growth of US Protestant engagement with Germany through the economic and political upheaval of the Weimar era (“World Chaos”) and the turmoil of Nazism and its church politics (“The Lonely Flame”), and World War II and the defeat of Nazism (“For Christ and Country”). The rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement provoked alarm among US Protestants, whether because of its totalitarianism, antisemitism, and racial nationalism (ecumenists) or because its collectivist nature seemed all too similar to “Soviet communism, planned economies, and the New Deal” (evangelicals) (52). Strasburg notes that even as modernists and fundamentalists sparred in the United States, so too pro-Nazi German Christians and their opponents in the Confessing Church entered into a church struggle in Germany. American ecumenist Protestants followed these events closely, expressing concern over the unwillingness even of Confessing Church leaders to move beyond their own conservatism, nationalism, and militarism to oppose the Nazi state itself (58).

Here Strasburg discusses the ideas and views of Leiper and Niebuhr, and recounts Bonhoeffer’s experiences in the United States and the impact of his experiences at Union Seminary and among Black Christians in New York. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany “as one of the most resolute German Protestants in his spiritual and political opposition to Hitler and the German Christian crusade” (64). Likewise, American ecumenists supported the Confessing Church at ecumenical conferences and other events, such as the 1934 Baptist World Congress held in Berlin. And Leiper wrote extensively in books and articles about the menace of Hitlerism, arguing that only the universal values of Protestant ecumenism could support the democratic order that would combat Nazism and, more broadly, secularism.

In contrast, evangelicals saw the rise of European dictators as a portent of the end times. Viewing current events through an apocalyptic lens (Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations), these premillennial fundamentalists were on the lookout for the Antichrist, believing as they did that the world was indeed descending into the chaos of the end times. Here Gerald Winrod, Riley, J. Frank Norris, and Oswald J. Smith take centre stage, with their attacks on Soviet communism and New Deal America. Of note was Winrod’s 1935 pilgrimage to Germany, during which he revised his views of Hitler and the Nazi state, in part based on the virulent antisemitism Winrod now preached. So too Riley, who praised Hitler for rescuing “Germany from the very jaws of atheistic communism” and blamed Bolshevism on international Jewry (75). Other fundamentalists did raise concerns about Nazism and its persecution of Jews, including Baptist churchman John J. Rice. For all of these fundamentalists, however, Christian nationalism was the antidote to both foreign dictators and dangerous domestic developments in both church and state.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the ecumenist pastor Stewart Herman shepherded the “lonely flame” of American Protestantism in Germany at the American Church. Herman studied and travelled widely in Germany, witnessing the rise of the German church struggle in the early years of the Third Reich. He also visited Jews in Germany and understood their plight clearly. While he appreciated Nazi attacks on Communism, Herman was alarmed over political developments in Hitler’s Germany, and his own involvement in American affairs in Berlin earned him the attention of the Gestapo. Herman tried to remain neutral, but the arrest of Niemöller in 1937 pushed him towards the Confessing Church, and Herman became something of a spokesman for the Confessing Church in international ecumenical meetings, which its representatives were prohibited from attending.

From 1938 onwards, Herman’s ministry took place under the shadow of the persecution of Jews. Though he did help so-called “non-Aryan” Christians, Herman harboured anti-Judaic and antisemitic sympathies and generally refused to aid Jews. Christian mission to Jews, urging them to convert, was for Herman the answer to Jewish persecution. Only when the Nazi regime began deporting Jews in 1941 was Herman moved to aid Jews, though once the United States declared war, he was interned with American Embassy staff. Strasburg uses Herman’s story and references to Leiper and Bonhoeffer to explore diverse perspectives and levels of willingness to act among ecumenical Protestants.

The entry of the United States into the war aroused ecumenical Protestants (Niebuhr, Herman—after his return from Germany—and John Foster Dulles) to declare that America needed to responsibly exercise its power, defeat “pagan” Nazism, and establish a new global Christian democratic order. Herman went so far as to join the Office of Secret Services (OSS). He also talked up the Confessing Church as an anti-Nazi opposition movement, helping create a myth that would later serve the Allied Occupation well. During the war, ecumenists began to draft plans for a democratic and Christian order in postwar Germany, and its integration into a multilateral federation of nations.

American evangelicals also supported the war, but also “advanced their commitments to conversionary mission, liberty, and unilateralism” (104). Viewing the war from a premillennialist fundamentalist perspective, Winrod and colleagues initially opposed the US entrance into the war, promoting “America First” isolationism. Other fundamentalists stressed links between Hitler, Satan, the Beast, and the Anti-Christ, and so supported the effort to defeat them and hold evil at bay. As Christian nationalists, fundamentalists conflated God and country, piety and patriotism. It was during the Second World War that the American flag found its way into many Protestant sanctuaries (124). Prayer became a weapon of war and Christian nationalist evangelism a form of mobilization, as in the case of the 1944 “Victory Rally” organized by Youth for Christ (YFC), bringing 28,000 Chicago area youth and service members together. Fundamentalists also attacked “modernism” and the Federal Council of Churches, which it accused of “theological Hitlerism” (127). Another sign of the resurgence of evangelicals was the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942, which attempted to look forward but still opposed women’s rights and racial equality.

Chapters 5 through 8 carry the story forward, from the spiritual reconstruction of Germany (“Reviving the Heartland”) and the threat of Soviet Communism (“Battleground Europe”) to the attempt to create a new Christian world order (“God’s Marshall Plan”) and evangelistic campaigns in the time of the Cold War (“Spiritual Rearmament”). Ecumenist Protestants like Stewart Herman played an important role in postwar Germany, serving religious and political reconstruction agendas as he travelled about on behalf of the World Council of Churches, supported by the OSS and the American Military Government (AMG). With others, he hoped the German churches could serve a foundational role in the Christian and democratic renewal of Germany.

As Strasburg argues, “In occupied Germany, American ecumenists wed their ‘conquering faith’ to America’s newfound project of building the ‘American Century.’ Men like Herman and Allen and John Foster Dulles advanced religious and state interests in tandem and used their nation’s postwar primacy to build the foundations of an American-led new Christian world order” (132). They perceived an emerging “spiritual cold war against secularism and communism” and “worked to recruit German Protestants as Christian partners in their quest to establish a new democratic and Christian alliance against these perceived threats” (133). A new Reformation would transform the German churches into a democratic, voluntaristic, and activist force.

But German Protestants (including the liberated Martin Niemöller and Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm) had their own ideas about the reconstruction of their church and nation, and often opposed US Protestant agendas. German and European leaders argued that they themselves needed to rebuild their churches and spiritual life. One key battle took place over the structure of the postwar German Church. Wurm and Niemöller clashed over the formation of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), with Wurm’s traditional state church model winning out over Niemöller’s more ambitious congregational plan. Another contentious topic was the question of German guilt, and here Niemöller’s “Stuttgart Declaration” receives Strasburg’s attention. The author rightly notes the silence of the statement on the subject of the Jews. A third challenge was denazification, which German church leaders chafed against.

Evangelicals responded to the defeat of Germany and the rising threat of Communism with calls by young evangelists Torrey Johnson (YFC) and Billy Graham for a “spiritual invasion” of “Battleground Europe” (156). As Strasburg explains, they focused first on “occupied Germany, where they preached their conversionary gospel and commitments to freedom and free enterprise,” supported by American military chaplains and fundamentalist military officers (157). Once again, theological modernism, secularism, and the rejection of the Bible and of Jesus Christ were presented as important causes of the German catastrophe (and American worldliness), even as revival and return to Christ would restore Germany (and America).

But whether ecumenical or evangelical, US Protestants partnered with the US government (including President Harry Truman personally) and the American Military Government to oppose a rising Communist threat. German church leaders like Niemöller, Berlin Protestant Bishop Otto Dibelius and Berlin Catholic Bishop Konrad von Preysing also undertook speaking tours in the United States, praising the democracy and freedom of the USA and hoping to generate sympathy and support for Germany and its churches. Moreover, they supported the Marshall Plan to physically reconstruct Germany as a parallel force contributing to the spiritual renewal of Germany, alongside the efforts of US Protestants. As Strasburg puts it, “In an era when American capital, con­sumer goods, popular culture, and military platoons poured into Europe and began to remake the continent’s economics, society, and politics, this accompanying spiritual intervention sought to transform Europe’s soul” (185). One place these spiritual and economic plans came together was in the reconstruction of German churches, so many of which had been destroyed during the Allied bombing of Germany. Christian literature campaigns and educational projects were also important. So too were US Protestant relief efforts to gather material supplies for beleaguered Germans.

But even within the effort to rebuild Germany, Strasburg finds conflicts between ecumenists and evangelicals. The latter group criticized the World Council of Churches—Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri project was a fundamentalist attempt response to both liberal Christianity and secular society. Evangelicals like Billy Graham also criticized the Marshall Plan itself, arguing it was “folly” and a “give-away program” rooted in “deficit spending.” Once again, big government and collectivism were the enemy. Evangelicals also rejected Truman’s Fair Deal programs, calling the proposal for national health insurance “socialized medicine” and a pathway to “societal slavery” (209).

Evangelical Protestants responded to the problems of postwar Germany most forcefully through revival meetings. In 1954, YFC evangelist Billy Graham held meetings in the former Nazi parade grounds at Nuremberg, preaching salvation through Jesus Christ. But Graham was also trying to convince Germans to support the US Cold War effort to push back Communism and protect Europe. To that end, US evangelical Protestants also strongly supported the US military. “Led by a coalition of free-enterprise businessmen, Cold War hawks, and conservative clergy, these postwar crusades rallied God-fearing Americans to defend their values of faith, freedom, and free enterprise both at home and abroad against New Deal liberalism, Soviet communism, and postwar secularization” (212). This despite the fact that many German Protestants resisted rearmament.

One intriguing element of this spiritual campaign against Communism was the Wooden Church Crusade, a plan to build 49 chapels along the line of the Iron Curtain in West Germany which gained strong support among US political and industrial leaders. By the end of 1956, 28 houses of worship had been built, including a few synagogues.

In the book’s epilogue, the author carries the story of US Protestant engagement with Germany through to the end of the Cold War. Strasburg concludes that if US evangelical Protestants were more obviously “America First” in their orientation, US ecumenical Protestants were also “quick to serve their nation’s interests and advance its global project” (238). As they tried to build a just and peaceful world order, they promoted a particularly American combination of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity abroad. And as they worked to Christianize and democratize the world, protecting it against totalitarian and secular ideologies, they did so by attempting “to rebuild Germany as the European cornerstone of an American-led Christian world order” (238). In their own way, they too supported American Christian nationalism. Thus the line between the Christian globalism of the ecumenists and the Christian nationalism of the evangelicals was in truth rather blurry. And Strasburg carries this point into today, arguing that “the challenge for many Protestant Christians in the twentieth century involved untangling their faith from the creeds of nation, race, and empire. That struggle continues to this day” (239).

In contrast to this Christian nationalism, German and European Protestant leaders espoused a Third Way in the 1960s, as men like Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller sharply critiqued elements of American capitalism, militarism, empire, and domestic social inequality. In some cases, this proved influential among US ecumenists. For example, Stewart Herman, whose ideas and work are central to Strasburg’s account, ended up denouncing antisemitism and racism, supporting refugee work, learning from liberation theology and Vatican II Catholicism, and embracing interfaith partnerships with Jews (243). To a large extent, however, US Protestants continued to struggle with racial equality, immigration, and other challenges to (white) Christian nationalism, even as they remained susceptible to the allure of political power. Strasburg’s concluding hope is that studying this history “might play a part in helping American Protestants foster and practice theologies and a style of politics that more fully reflect the ways of a border-defying faith” (252).

This is a fine work of history—deeply and widely researched and clearly argued. Strasburg’s grasp of the secondary literature on both German and especially US Protestantism is solid, and the notes are filled with references to books, articles, and speeches by Protestant leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including the personal correspondence and papers of Henry Smith Leiper and Stewart Winfield Herman and other material drawn from church and state archives in Washington, Berlin, and Geneva, among others. With almost 50 pages of rich notes, no bibliography was included.

As for criticisms, it is not surprising that this is almost entirely the story of the men who led churches and spoke for both American and German Christianity. Women are virtually absent from this account, save for the Birmingham women who donated syrup to the German relief effort (195). Yet we know that North American women were substantially involved in relief and administrative work in the postwar era, as well as in Christian missions. Did they engage with the issues raised in God’s Marshall Plan any differently than did their male colleagues? More broadly, beyond attending conferences or rallies or subscribing to church periodicals, is there evidence to indicate how deeply engaged ordinary US Protestants were in the spiritual reconstruction of Germany? The Wooden Church Crusade is an excellent example of this. Were there others? Finally, one would wish for a little more background on some of the characters whose writings Strasburg quotes. To what extent can their ideas and statements be taken as representative of their denominations or constituencies?

Those issues aside—and some go beyond the scope of an already extensively-researched study—God’s Marshall Plan is an enlightening and challenging account of how US Protestant Christian nationalism worked itself out both abroad in postwar Germany and at home in the United States. An excellent contribution to the literature, it is also, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a cautionary tale.

 

 

 

 

 

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Review of Fergus Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance! The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Fergus Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance! The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century (London: Oneworld Publications, 2020). 273 pages. ISBN: 9781786078308.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

As one might see immediately from the title of the above-named work, the Reverend Butler-Gallie is quite clever and creative in wordplay. This is one of the most engaging books written as inspiration for those who have come to believe that Christianity was more than a willing tool of fascist regimes and genocidal projects in the twentieth century. In fact, in the brief introduction to the book, the author notes that Christianity and Fascism have been intertwined and that the complex relationship of Christian institutions with Fascist dictatorships has spawned an enormous number of works. This work is not attempting to delve deeply into the interplay of Christian Church leadership with the monumental devastation produced by fascist projects. Instead, this work serves as an attempt to underscore the rare and therefore more extraordinary acts of Christian men and women who decided that their commitment to the teachings of Christ and their understanding of Christian teaching meant that they had no other choice but to resist destructive fascist actions and the harmful ideology behind them.

The book is divided into five sections, beginning in occupied France, with stories of “resistance par excellence” focusing on the lives of Canon Felix Kir (of blanc de cassis aka “Kir” fame) and Abbe Pierre (born Henri Marie Joseph Groues). Both of these individuals engaged in acts of sabotage, rescue work (especially of persecuted Jews), and generally served as thorns in the sides of the Nazis and their French collaborators.

The next section focuses on places where resistance to fascism meant going against one’s own people and one’s own government: Germany and Italy. Here readers encounter a Catholic bishop, Clemens August Graf von Galen; a Protestant minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and finally a Catholic priest, Don Pietro Pappagallo, who engaged in forging new identities for the persecuted in and around Rome. This inspiring story of Don Pietro Pappagallo then leads into the longest section of the book; an examination of Christians resisting while living under occupying powers. This section brings in Czechs, Hungarians, Greeks, Poles, Dutch, and Danes. Some survived their acts of resistance, while others, such as Sister Sara Salkahazi, a former chain-smoking journalist turned nun, did not.

Finally, the two remaining sections of the book focus on two individuals who left the relative safety of Ireland and Scotland, Father Hugh O’Flaherty of Scarlet Pimpernel fame and the much lesser-known but no less inspiring Jane Haining, who traveled to Hungary to help orphaned girls and who died along with her charges in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. The final segment focuses on Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, who fought for integration in the deep South of the United States, and on a young seminarian from New England, Jonathan Daniels, who took a bullet intended for a young black girl attempting to attend an all-white school. This final segment on civil rights in the United States seems a bit out of sync with the rest of the work. That said, one can see the overlap in racist ideology and understand why the author decided to include these accounts in a work on resistance.

As one can see from this brief overview, the book aims to cover a great deal of ground, using individual life stories as lessons for the reader. Are saints mad? Are they fools? Are martyrs always brave in the face of life-threatening circumstances? And so on. These vignettes are also meant to inspire the reader with a sense that, even in the darkest of times, there are always good, brave people who decide that they would rather give their lives in the name of their principles and beliefs than conform to whatever the majority in society is doing at the time.

The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie’s writing style makes for a rollicking read, and, despite the fact that I disagree with his interpretation of my scholarship on Bishop von Galen, I found the work to be one that I did not want to put down. There is much energy, plenty of puns, and some non-scholarly vocabulary in the work (such as saying Father Kir’s actions indicated his “sheer ballsiness,” p.14) yet this type of non-scholarly language is what makes the book so engaging. It breaks through the clutter of stale academic prose, it captures the reader’s imagination with wonderful turns of phrasing, and it radiates some of the energy that this cast of characters must have needed to draw upon in order to maintain their faith and values in the face of death.

I am certain that scholars who have spent years researching each one of these individuals might find errors or misinterpretations of the subjects’ lives, yet, in spite of that fact, many readers might then be led to follow up on the suggested readings at the very end of the book to investigate each person whose bravery and dedication to God reverberates throughout the work. If one takes the book on its face – that is, that it is meant to serve as a source of inspiration and hope for readers of all faiths much like reading a Lives of the Saints collection, I would recommend reading the book. In a time when a person’s decisions could have life-saving or life-threatening consequences, the individuals featured by Rev. Butler-Gallie reveal the power that deep faith in God can serve as a continued source of strength for us all.

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Review of John A. Moses, Anglicanism: Catholic Evangelical or Evangelical Catholic? Essays Ecumenical and Polemical. A Homage to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng, Martin Luther and John Henry Newman

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of John A. Moses, Anglicanism: Catholic Evangelical or Evangelical Catholic? Essays Ecumenical and Polemical. A Homage to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng, Martin Luther and John Henry Newman (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2019), pp.xxxiii + 155.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

John Moses is a distinguished scholar of German history, not least admired for his standard two-volume study of German trades unions from Bismarck to Hitler, published in 1982, and, more recently, his book The Reluctant Revolutionary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Collision with Prusso-German History (2009). He is also an Anglican priest, and of a kind that is getting harder to find these days. This collection of recent essays finds him entering with gusto into contemporary church debates and bringing with him a good deal of his academic experience and weight. In many respects it is tempting to sense that as a historian and as an Anglican Moses has much in common with John Conway, the founding father of this journal. But here Moses has to confront a number of distinctive giants at large in the landscapes of Australian Anglicanism. In particular, there is the question of the Diocese of Sydney.

In his foreword to the book, Mark Lindsay welcomes Moses warmly into the realm of contemporary theological angst, affirming the proper place of a historian in all such things. This may seem all too obvious, but then the authority of the historical craft, and of historical knowledge altogether, has for some years now become increasingly obscure to those who oversee the life and work of most of our Protestant churches. When a moment of vital significance turns up historians are seldom to be found in the counsels of authority. If anything, they are likely to be deliberately excluded from them, though they might now and then be recruited to write introductory paragraphs. Evidently, we are all expected to return to a vigorous state of primitive Christianity as though nothing of significance has occurred across the intervening centuries. But there may be other reasons to maintain this state of ignorance. The historian of the modern church is not quite a tame creature. The churches prefer a show of loyalty, while those in charge of them care not at all to be criticised. Historians tend to do this rather freely, particularly when provoked. The historian of the Reformation may unhelpfully point out doctrinal contradictions or emphasize acts of violence. The historian of secularization will certainly prove to be bad for morale. As for the historians of the Third Reich, it is much safer to leave them in their university departments than to invite them to observe patterns and parallels. And why should there be any, after all?

John Moses has certainly not been tamed; nor has he submitted to obscurity or been shunted unprotestingly into the pleasant groves of academe, much as he may enjoy being there. He acknowledges, generously, the influence of those who have taught him across a long and busy life. In this book he is wonderfully adamant that he has a voice for the contemporary Church and that he is, if quite necessary, prepared to raise it. He, like many other unhappy observers, observes that Anglican Sydney is a diocese ‘captured’ by a narrow, rigid – indeed, ideologized – conservative evangelicalism. Moses himself has inevitably been a casualty of this obscurantism. But he has not fallen silent, not least because he has too confident, and too profound, a sense of the traditions in which he has been nurtured. All of the lectures and essays in this volume present these qualities vividly and they make it a book well worth reading.

There are seven chapters – lectures and articles for various audiences – and an Epilogue. There are also appendices, chosen with intent (one is ‘John Henry Newman’s definition of a Gentleman’). It is important to acknowledge that while Moses is clearly eager to set about his principal adversaries, the primary purpose at work is both generous and constructive. He is devoted to pursuing a picture of what Anglicanism can still seek to offer the whole Christian Church, in ecumenical vision and in liberal, reconciling gifts. One essay is ‘The case for a renewed Anglicanism’, and another, ‘The Chaos of Anglicanism: Towards unravelling the Paradox’. There follows an attractive portrait of Father Peter Bennie, a scholar-priest who comes to embody many of the virtues to which Moses is drawn. ‘The real antithesis of the Catholic Church, warns Bennie, ‘is the sect, and sectarianism ever stunts the spirit, binds the mind, and inhibits the imagination.’ (p. 107.)

One of the most attractive qualities of the book is the freedom with which Moses writes of his own life and experiences, and of the many people he has known. This reveals a truth which he plainly acknowledges: that often what divides opinionated people is their formation and education and – above all – their ongoing patterns of reading. As a schoolboy in the far North of Queensland he was impressed by Dr Wilhelm Lorenz Rechnitz, a German Jew who had become an Anglican and was now to be found teaching Latin in St Francis College. (‘The Church of England’, Rechnitz warned the young Moses, ‘is a good thing in bad hands.’) He also encountered the priests of the Brotherhood of St Barnabas, ‘a remarkable group of young men, almost exclusively “Oxbridge” educated priests’, while the bishop, John Oliver Feetham, was a figure formed very much on the same lines.  As a student at the University of Queensland his eyes were opened still wider and then followed the almost-miracle of a period of post-graduate study in Germany. Here, in Munich, Moses was taught by Franz Schnabel, ‘a liberal-minded Roman Catholic scholar of immense erudition and humanity’, (p. 3) who had resisted National Socialism. A spell at the University of Erlangen followed under the benign tutelage of Waldemar Besson, Karl-Heinz Ruffmann and Walther-Peter Fuchs.

After all of this the young John Moses was hardly likely to spend the rest of his days poring over the works of James Innell Packer. Yet, as an honorary assistant curate in a Brisbane suburb for seventeen years, he would have to find a way of collaborating with a rector who had done exactly that – while the rector, for his part, found that he had to cope with his highly educated, internationally-minded curate. Significantly, it was not here that Moses the priest came unstuck, but later, in the diocese of Armidale, where he found he was required to affirm explicitly the inerrancy of the Bible, to repudiate the ordination of women and to disavow the toleration of homosexuals. ‘In an open society such as exists in Australia’, he reflects, ‘one does not expect to encounter people, let alone those calling themselves Anglican, who exhibit a mindset reminiscent of doctrinaire Nazis or Communists.’ (p. 12) Stinging words, no doubt, but words that he is well qualified to justify.

Moses can certainly take comfort in the company of giants from diverse traditions: the writings of Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng and John Henry Newman suffuse the book. For him the conspicuous quality of Anglicanism lies not in the brittle rigidities of denominational existence, still less in acts of intellectual iconoclasm and ‘doctrinal terrorism’ (p. 10), but in the promise of a richly creative ecumenical vision. It is still his church and he will not abandon it. In part this is because he has found too much to love and admire in it, not that there is much sentimentality here. In one essay he observes its various tribes with a caustic eye (indeed, his description of ‘Old-fashioned “Spikes”’ is hilarious). For Moses himself the Christian faith remains unique in offering to the world a radical social ethic, expressive of love, humility, tolerance and understanding – all qualities which might never have found a home there without it. In their strenuous assertions, impositions and proscriptions the fundamentalists of Australian Anglicanism have sought to bury what is essentially true, vital and enduring in it. In this sense the book is a protest, and perhaps a warning. But it is certainly not a work of lamentation, for the general character of it remains perseveringly faithful. It would be a pity to leave it in Australia, not least because we have all come to know, in one way or another, the issues of which it speaks. Moreover, few scholars of history have stepped out of their lecture rooms to deplore, declaim and insist as bravely and cogently as this fine scholar of modern Germany.

 

 

 

 

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Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019). 336 pages + 25 illustrations. ISBN 978-3-406-73137-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Wolfgang Huber is a distinguished voice in the German theological world, both academic and ecclesiastical, and a sustained treatment of the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by such a figure at once demands attention. His book is in many ways an introductory survey which seeks to unite the ‘fragments’ of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in a single coherent picture, for, as Huber remarks, at every turn in Bonhoeffer’s short life, ‘belief and life, theology and resistance closely interrelated’ (p. 9). The fertile phrases which Bonhoeffer cast upon the waters of the theological world are all here and considered in turn with authority and insight. Altogether, Huber views his primary material with poise and it may be said that every kind of source – theses and books, letters and poems –  is justly represented. As befits such a portrait the acknowledgement of other secondary studies is kept to a minimum: here they sharpen perspectives and come and go at important junctures without crowding the picture. Sometimes there is an acknowledgement of later debates which have come to define Bonhoeffer scholarship in the world at large, not least the guilt of the Christian Church, the campaign to claim Bonhoeffer as a ‘Righteous Gentile’, the two worlds of East and West Germany, and the controversies which emerged in the churches of South Africa under Apartheid. Huber clearly knows this broad ground very thoroughly indeed but here his attention is primarily claimed by Bonhoeffer himself and his voice is very much his own.

The structure of the book is not unduly distinctive, but it sets out clearly the overall argument and method. Huber’s Bonhoeffer is certainly a big and complex figure. He is also one full of contrasts and the author delights in framing and exploring them. An introductory section evokes the figure of Bonhoeffer as we might first encounter him in a variety of places, not least over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. There follows a section on Bonhoeffer’s background and early formation and then another three on his early work in the contexts of university and church life, the first situating him firmly in the landscapes of German thought, the second examining a theology of grace which was deeply rooted in the precepts of Lutheranism, and the third discussing the place of the Bible in a world of maturing historical criticism. Each of these sections present dualities which already defined so much in Bonhoeffer’s work (‘Individual spirituality or Society’; ‘The Church of the World or the Church of the Word’; ‘Acting justly and waiting for God’s own time’; ‘The Historical Jesus or the Jesus of Today’). The young Bonhoeffer is certainly very much at home in the intellectual landscapes of German Lutheranism but the emerging vision is an open one and there is no knowing where it will lead.

Huber acknowledges how extraordinary was Bonhoeffer’s achievement in maintaining sustained theological study under the many pressures and dangers to which his life exposed him. An extended discussion of the development and ‘actuality’ of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism precedes an examination of his place in the history of the German resistance against Hitler and his significance there as a ‘theologian of resistance’. Here Huber acknowledges frankly that to account for the motives which lay behind the actions of any figure of resistance, whether they became fundamental to events or peripheral, must be ‘difficult, even impossible’ (p. 172). At all events, with this decisive turning comes an intensification of the discussion of Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings and a deepening emphasis on the themes of guilt and responsibility. It is in these contexts of resistance that Huber is most of all struck by Bonhoeffer’s singular, even ‘astonishing’, new steps, and even if they only reach us as fragments the sense of a coherent picture remains. Indeed, it is in ‘the extreme loneliness of a prison cell’ that Bonhoeffer finds a ‘wonderful security’ in the achievement of a unity of faith, teaching and life (p. 34). A further section, stoutly entitled ‘No end to Religion’, again shows the importance of situating Bonhoeffer’s thought securely in the intellectual contexts with which he was familiar. A final, and rewarding, section on the ‘Polyphony of life’ maintains a fascination with dualities (‘Bach or Beethoven’; ‘Music or Theology’) and offers a particularly attractive discussion of Bonhoeffer and Gregorian plainsong (provoked by the famous remark to Eberhard Bethge). An epilogue reflects at length on ‘what remains’, searching through the subsequent publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings and the accumulating studies of his many interpreters, and observing, rather nicely, the creative achievement of a ‘polycentric internationalism’. A gentle parting note occurs with a reflection on Bonhoeffer’s late poem ‘The Powers of Good’, in which Huber finds a final place of rest in a vast, unsentimental and moving trust in God (p. 298).

It could be said that of the making of books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer there is no end. In such a field many new authors labour to produce some distinctive insight or bold (even tenuous) claim, perhaps to justify the writing of another book or to address a particular audience or time. Over the years particular aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thought have certainly been placed under many microscopes. It is natural at first to wonder if a new, introductory portrait by an established scholar might turn out to be something of an academic tour of duty. We may expect a good deal of craft and even a dose of wisdom. But Huber’s book is something better than this: the encounter of author and subject is duly rigorous but it is also fresh, alert and warmly responsive. Nothing here is taken for granted; often Huber acknowledges that he finds a particular idea, or development, ‘astonishing’ and one senses that he really does. Indeed, he serves his subject and his audience very well. Such a book would make an excellent place for German readers make a start. One might well hope for an English edition too.

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Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in its Interpretive Context”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: David A.R. Clark, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in its Interpretive Context,” Scottish Journal of Theology 71, no. 3 (2018): 253–266.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s complex relationship to Jews and Judaism continues to preoccupy both historians and theologians. To give just one example, although Bonhoeffer has been lauded for his concern for Jews and calls for ecclesiastical resistance against the state on their behalf in his famous 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” scholars have also criticized other aspects of that same writing, including expressions of theological anti-Judaism and Bonhoeffer’s use of “Jewish Christianity” as a term of derision for a kind of legalism practiced by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement.

In this article, Ph.D. candidate David A.R. Clark revisits Bonhoeffer’s response to the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. Clark begins by noting that Bonhoeffer had no pulpit from which to respond to the pogrom, nor did he make a public comment. Bonhoeffer did react, though, and the evidence is in the margin of his Bible, where he wrote the date of the pogrom (November 9, 1938) beside Psalm 74:8, underlined the text, “They burn all the houses of God in the land.”[1] Clark notes that Bonhoeffer friend and scholar Eberhard Bethge described this reference to a contemporary event is unique in the marginalia of Bonhoeffer’s Bible. He adds that Bonhoeffer wrote his Finkenwalde students about a week later, explaining that he had been pondering and praying about Psalm 74, Zechariah 2:8, Romans 9:4-5, and Romans 11:11-15 in the previous few days—all passages relating to God’s special relationship to the Jews.

While other scholars have noted the political importance of Bonhoeffer’s Psalm 74 marginalia, Clark aims “to examine this annotation more thoroughly in the context of Bonhoeffer’s then-burgeoning commitment to figural interpretation of the Psalter” (255).[2] By 1935 at least, he argues, Bonhoeffer was open to drawing allegorical or symbolic meanings from biblical texts, not least because of Bonhoeffer’s conviction that the whole of Scripture was a witness to Christ and also on account of his particular interest in the relationship of Christ to the Psalms.

Clark develops Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Christ in the Psalms from two of Bonhoeffer’s writings: Life Together (September/October 1938) and Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms (1940). He finds that Bonhoeffer argued that the Psalms essentially expressed the voice of Christ, and that it was most important to understand the Psalms as the prayers of the suffering and dying Christ (259). As Clark puts it, quoting Bonhoeffer, “‘No single human being can pray the psalms of lamentation out of his or her own experience.’ Rather, Bonhoeffer advocates hearing these psalms as the prayers of Christ, who ‘has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than we have’” (260). Importantly, as Clark argues, Bonhoeffer then went further, “claiming additionally that the voice of Christ in psalms of suffering discloses the presence of Christ in human suffering today: ‘psalms of lament’, [Bonhoeffer] states, ‘proclaim Jesus Christ as the only help in suffering, for in Christ God is with us’” (260).

Based on this analysis of Bonhoeffer’s interest in figural interpretation, then, Clark reinterprets Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht annotation next to Psalm 74:8 not merely as an expression of sympathy based the similarity of contemporary and ancient cases of the abandonment of Jews, à la Eberhard Bethge, but as something more. Moving from the level of historical to christological interpretation, Clark argues “that our understanding of the Kristallnacht annotation will be enriched by attending more closely to Bonhoeffer’s figural work, which reveals the deeper theological resonance of connecting Kristallnacht with Psalm 74. As David McI. Gracie states in his brief discussion of the annotation: ‘It is important to note at the outset that Bonhoeffer taught that the psalms were to be prayed, prayed with Christ, whose prayers he believed they really were – in this case with the Christ who was being driven out of Germany when the Jews were driven out.’” (262). Clark also draws on the work of Geoffrey B. Kelly to make the point that it was as if historical distance had collapsed and Christ suffered anew in the brutalization of the German Jews.

With this Clark concludes that Bonhoeffer’s Psalm 74 annotation “entails christological presence: Bonhoeffer heard the voice of Christ praying in despair in Psalm 74:8, and – in keeping with the revelatory simultaneity of figural interpretation – he heard this voice not in the distant past of Israelite history but in the contemporary persecution of present-day Jews” (263). He closes by reminding us not to make too much of one marginal notation—it was not a public protest—but adds that it “introduces added complexities” to our understanding of Bonhoeffer’s personal solidarity with Jews (265).

Notes:

[1] Bonhoeffer also placed a vertical line and bold exclamation point alongside the following verse, Psalm 74:9, which reads: “We do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long.” (ESV), but as Clark notes, the date of the Kristallnacht pogrom is written only beside verse 8, and specifically beside the underlined words, “They burn all the houses of God in the land,” so that we cannot be sure that the marginalia pertaining to verse 9 relate to the events of November 1938.

[2] German-Jewish literary scholar Eric Auerbach defined the term in his work Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 73: “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first.”

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Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution (Wipf & Stock, 2017), 212 pp. ISBN 978-1-5326-1282-4.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The origins of Roger Newell’s book lie in a study tour to the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig some years after the tumultuous events of 1989. But the book also represents a sensitive discussion of the many strands of argument and interpretation which have emerged across the English-speaking world in response to the tides of German history across the twentieth century. In such a meeting of personal and academic dimensions does Keine Gewalt! offer something of a personal odyssey as well as an exploration of the continuing themes of Church and State, theology and society, conformity and revolution in modern Europe and beyond. The fundamental question is never far from view: how might a church that was so effectively marginalised by a dictatorial power after 1945 become a focal point, and a catalyst, for a great movement of peaceful change across the whole of the German Democratic Republic?

This sense of observing and interpreting like a guest whose eyes are being opened by degrees to something new and unexpected is certainly one of the strengths of the book. It makes Newell himself something of a tourist – in the best sense – and equally an attractive introducer to readers coming to the same questions afresh. The vital presence at the heart of the story is the pastor of the Nikolaikirche himself, Christian Führer, who in 1989 opened the doors of the church to all people – and, in particular, to many who were disaffected by the Communist state – so that they could meet together, light candles, share what was important to them all and find new ways to insist upon these things in a world of repression and intimidation.

What were the roots of such a ministry and the historical and theological context in which such a moment lay? In a remark to Newell, mediated through his wife, Monika, Führer himself replied that much could be comprehended in the three names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and Karl Barth. It was here that German Protestantism found an accumulating tradition of theological understanding which was rich enough to bear fruit in a new context and age. Was the Nikolaikirche at last a realisation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of a Church that existed for others? But, as Newell finds, this is no simple inheritance and there were others who played their part in this accumulating history of ideas and experiences, particularly Albrecht Schönherr, Helmut Thielicke, Heino Falcke and Barth’s protesting adversary, Emil Brunner. He views them squarely in turn, and often sympathetically, even where doubts are obvious. To be sure, there are few villains in this book and no grinding axes – and it is all the better for it. The eirenic tone never falters.

The structure of the book responds to this agenda, offering chapters first on Bonhoeffer and then Niemöller before concentrating much attention on Barth in successive phases of his life and thought. Barth, indeed, provides a cantus firmus for the whole study, moving restlessly through the foreground or background, first of National Socialism and the Barmen Declaration, then the post-war crisis and the Stuttgart Declaration and the Darmstadt conference of 1947, and then the deepening confrontations of the Cold War and the troubled (and troubling) search for a ‘third way’ between the worldly powers of Communism and Anti-Communism. It is the two final chapters which confront the peaceful revolution itself, an escalation of principled protest and public mobilization and a deterioration of political will culminating in the disastrously misfiring fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the GDR on 7 October 1989. If pastors like Führer had once brought the people from the street into the sanctuary, now they all took to the streets clasping their candles, returning violence with piety and securing an unexpected revolution which would transform a continent. ‘We were ready for everything except prayers and candles’, reflects a rueful President of the People’s Chamber, Horst Sindermann. The story still possesses the power to move, however much it may have been trimmed, qualified and modified by sober analysis and argument.

Newell’s discussion does much to show what long years of study by western historians and scholars have made possible for a creative Anglo-American minister reflecting on the place of theology in the world. The labours of John Conway, John Moses, Charles Maier, and Matthew Hockenos are particularly conspicuous. Other striking influences also show up in the words and ideas of Herbert Butterfield and of his own teacher, James Torrance. In a well-judged Epilogue, Newell challenges triumphalism and self-righteousness and observes what the world since 1989 has all too obviously become. Yet at the last he is not desolate, finding the figure of Karl Barth waiting for him with words of assurance, ‘When the great hope is present, small hopes must always arise for the immediate future.’

There are many fine qualities to admire in this book, but in its blending of undemonstrative curiosity, personal idealism and uncomplicated intellectual honesty it presents an admirable model of a kind.

 

 

 

 

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Article Note: David Robinson and Ryan Tafilowski, “Conflict and Concession: Nationality in the Pastorate for Althaus and Bonhoeffer”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Article Note: David Robinson and Ryan Tafilowski, “Conflict and Concession: Nationality in the Pastorate for Althaus and Bonhoeffer,” Scottish Journal of Theology 70, no. 2 (May 2017): 127-46.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum*

Paul Althaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are generally understood to be at opposite ends of the theological and political spectrum during the Nazi era. Althaus interpreted Lutheran theology to support a volkisch understanding of church, leading him to welcome the rise of the Nazi state. Bonhoeffer’s early opposition to such interpretations was the beginning of the path that ended with his resistance and execution by the Nazis.

There were some interesting parallels between the two during the late 1920s, however, and that is the focus of this article. At a historical moment when Germans were searching for a new kind of national community, both Althaus and Bonhoeffer wrote works about the nature of the church as community: Althaus’ Communio Sanctorum: Die Gemeinde im lutherischen Kirchengedanken (1929) and Bonhoeffer’s dissertation Sanctorum Communio: Eine dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche, which was published in 1930. Bonhoeffer was preparing his dissertation for publication just as the Althaus book came out, so he could not have read it, and in any case, the two drew different conclusions about the community of the church in a way that presaged their subsequent divisions during the Kirchenkampf. For Althaus, the church had to be an expression of the national community and its traditions. In contrast, Bonhoeffer understood the community of the church theologically and Christologically, as the place where the risen Christ was proclaimed in the world, an understanding that was inherently transnational.

Both also served pastorates in the late 1920s in expatriate German settings (Althaus in Poland; Bonhoeffer in Spain). The authors contend that their respective experiences in these expatriate settings led each man to a deepened sense of national German identity and the development of a “competitive philosophy of history that would come to form a fundamental element of National Socialist ideology.” There are some problems here, the main one being the attempt to draw extensive comparative conclusions despite the relative paucity of evidence about this aspect in Bonhoeffer’s thought. While the development of Paul Althaus’ nationalist theology is well-documented, the primary evidence in the case of Bonhoeffer consists of one 1929 lecture, “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,” delivered when Bonhoeffer was serving the parish in Barcelona.

That lecture is indeed nationalistic, speaking of the inevitability of conflict between different peoples, describing ethics “as a matter of blood and a matter of history,” and declaring that there is a “German ethic.” I would add there were other signs during the 1920s that Bonhoeffer was drawn for a time toward nationalism, joining a conservative nationalist (and antisemitic) fraternity and briefly participating in military exercises in the Schwarze Reichswehr. One lecture does not constitute an “expatriate theology” of nationality, however, and there are enough critical texts by Bonhoeffer during that same period to suggest caution. As the authors acknowledge, by the early 1930s Bonhoeffer was espousing pacifism, giving anti-war lectures in the United States, and criticizing the increasingly nationalist theological tone among German theologians, including their misinterpretation of Luther’s concept of “orders of creation” to justify ethno-nationalist policies. Notably, in 1931 Bonhoeffer directly challenged Althaus when the latter attacked the ecumenical movement.

The authors also note the “troubling ambivalence” of both thinkers with regard to the 1933 debates about how the church should respond to the “Jewish question.” They provide a comparative analysis of Althaus’ 1933 Erlangen Gutachten in support of a church Aryan paragraph and Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essays “The Church and the Jewish Question” and “Theses on the Aryan paragraph in the Church,” which opposed the Aryan paragraph. While Althaus and Bonhoeffer arrived at opposing conclusions about the acceptability of the Aryan paragraph, both treated the “Jewish question” as a problem that the state and church would have to address, and Bonhoeffer’s anti-Jewish paragraph in “The Church and the Jewish Question” is particularly problematic. Clearly their respective understandings of the church’s relationship to state and nation shaped how both Althaus and Bonhoeffer addressed the 1933 debates, and just as clearly at this stage, Bonhoeffer was still working through his theological approach to these issues.

Despite what to my mind are some over-generalized conclusions, this article is worth reading. As the authors correctly note, Bonhoeffer scholars have tended to dismiss the nationalism of the Barcelona lecture as well as the problematic aspects of Bonhoeffer’s 1933 “Church and the Jewish Question” and his “Theses on the Aryan paragraph in the Church.” These difficult texts, however, pose challenges that need to be addressed historically and theologically, and for that reason it is useful to compare and contrast Bonhoeffer with figures like Althaus. Since in recent years there has been a revived interest in understanding Bonhoeffer’s approach to Lutheran theology, this article opens up some important areas for further examination by scholars, particularly with regard to where and why Bonhoeffer disagreed with the pre-eminent Lutheran scholar of his day.

* The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

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New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: David A. R. Clark

By David A. R. Clark, University of Toronto

From time to time, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly invite a young scholar to profile his or her work. Here we are pleased to introduce you to David A. R. Clark, a PhD candidate in Theological Studies at the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology.

Broadly, my research examines the intersection between theology, biblical interpretation, and Christian responses to Nazism and the Holocaust. More specifically, my dissertation, “Jewish Scriptures in Nazi Germany: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Old Testament, 1932-1945,” examines Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the Old Testament during the Nazi period, particularly in the context of antisemitic efforts by the “German Christian” movement to discredit and decanonize these Jewish Scriptures. Centrally, this three-part dissertation considers whether Bonhoeffer’s exegesis presented a theological alternative or protest to the claims of the “German Christian” movement.

Part I of the dissertation builds on historiographical research by Doris Bergen and Susannah Heschel in order to analyze the place of the Old Testament in Nazi Germany. I recently presented on this research area at the Canadian-American Theological Association interdisciplinary conference, “Peace and Violence in Scripture and Theology”: my paper received the conference prize, and is now a forthcoming article in the Canadian-American Theological Review entitled “Antisemitism, Violence, and Invective against the Old Testament: Reinhold Krause’s Sportpalast Speech, 1933.” Part II of the dissertation examines the significance of Bonhoeffer’s christological interpretation of the Old Testament in the political and theological context of the Nazi period, focusing especially on Bonhoeffer’s approach to the Psalms. My article in this research area, “Psalm 74:8 and November 1938: Rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kristallnacht Annotation in Its Interpretive Context,” was recently published in the peer-reviewed Scottish Journal of Theology, an imprint of Cambridge University Press. (For readers without institutional access to the journal, a read-only version can be accessed here.) Part III of the dissertation considers the implications for post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations of Bonhoeffer’s Nazi-era exegesis. Within the scope of the dissertation, I can only begin to trace these wide-ranging implications; accordingly, I intend a fuller treatment of this topic as a postdoctoral project.

My research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Additionally, in 2017, I was a Seminary Fellow with Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. For more information or to contact me, readers can visit www.davidarclark.ca.

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Theology in Uncertain Times: An Interview with Bonhoeffer Scholar Victoria J. Barnett

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

“Theology in Uncertain Times: An Interview with Bonhoeffer Scholar Victoria J. Barnett”

By Collegeville Institute

This article was originally published in Bearings Online, July 17, 2018. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the Collegeville Institute. You can view the original interview here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Victoria J. Barnett is a scholar who has served as a general editor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the English translation series of the theologian’s complete works, published by Fortress Press. She is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1999).

Barnett recently wrote a new introduction to Bonhoeffer’s essay After Ten Years. In this interview, the Collegeville Institute spoke with her about the resulting book, “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times (Fortress Press, 2017). 

You’ve written the introduction to a new edition of Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. In the past that essay has usually appeared as a preface of sorts to Letters and Papers from Prison. Why a new edition of that particular essay now?

This is my favorite Bonhoeffer text, and I’ve thought for several years that it deserved to be published as a stand-alone edition. It’s so eloquent and powerful. As I wrote in my introduction, it is timeless—which is interesting, because it has such a concrete historical context. I don’t think it’s accidental many of the most-quoted passages from Bonhoeffer are from this essay. But to your question, why now?: We’re living in a time where many of us are wrestling collectively and individually with issues of conscience and our responsibilities as people of faith and as citizens. This essay goes to the heart of those issues.

Bonhoeffer addresses a wide range of issues in After Ten Years including the failure of German institutions, moral passivity and civic cowardice on the part of its citizens, the susceptibility of Germans to the influences of propaganda and group think, and more. Have you underlined a passage in the essay that you think is particularly worth highlighting? If you have, why does it catch your attention?

My favorite sentence in the essay comes from the section on “Some statements of faith on God’s action in history”: “I believe that our mistakes and shortcomings are not in vain and that it is no more difficult for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.”

It’s simultaneously a reminder for humility and against hopelessness—a reminder that while we may fall short and we don’t know what the outcome of our actions will be, that’s no reason to lose hope and it’s certainly no reason not to act. That perspective—don’t lose hope, take responsibility for whatever you can do, and don’t become paralyzed by doubt or your own failings—is the subtext of so much of this essay. Many other passages touch on it—think of the section “Are we still of any use?” It’s the aspect of the essay that moves me the most personally.

Bonhoeffer’s emotions seem unusually close to the surface in After Ten Years, even more so than in the letters he writes from prison. Do we learn anything about Bonhoeffer from this brief essay? 

This kind of relates to what I was just talking about. I wouldn’t quite describe this essay as “whistling in the dark,” but he wrote it at a very uncertain time, and I get the sense that he was trying to clarify and strengthen his own resolve. The day-to-day pressures of those years must have taken their toll. In my own research I’ve found several accounts by people who knew Bonhoeffer who describe a certain emotional fragility (and of course Bonhoeffer himself wrote about his struggles with depression). I personally believe that’s one reason for his frequent trips out of Nazi Germany; he just had to get out and breathe free air for a little while. By late 1942 things were closing in—everywhere, not just in Bonhoeffer’s circles. Both for the victims of National Socialism and those who opposed it, the atmosphere in Berlin was grim on so many levels.

I’ll add another interesting note: last fall I happened to meet a US physician who had a long friendship with Eberhard Bethge (Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer) and his wife Renate. This doctor shared with me an interview he did with Bethge, and I learned for the first time that Bonhoeffer’s father Karl read this letter to the entire family at Christmas 1942. That was news to me. After Ten Years has been understood as a confidential letter to his closest friends in the conspiracy, although Bethge does note in his biography that Bonhoeffer gave a copy to his father. It’s interesting if Bonhoeffer’s father shared this with the family—and this was an extraordinarily close family—and that makes me think more about the emotional undertone you mention.

I would add that Bonhoeffer wrote this between November 1942, when Maria von Wedemeyer’s family had asked him not to write her, and January 13, 1943, when she wrote to say that she would marry him. While there’s been a lot of speculation about their relationship, his January 17 response to her letter and the subsequent love letters between them do indicate some genuine emotional attachment—it’s as if their relationship opens a new door for him and he begins to envision a personal future in a way that he hadn’t before. So I agree with you; I think there’s a lot going on here.

In your introduction to the new edition you warn readers about the hazards of drawing simplistic historical analogies in general, and about the period of National Socialism in particular. Yet, aspects of political life in Bonhoeffer’s Germany seem to help many to gain insight into our own political situation, and, as you have said, you think a new edition of the work is timely. Are you, nevertheless, resistant to pointing to Bonhoeffer and his times as a useful historical analogue to our own? If so, why?

I think Bonhoeffer’s reflections in this essay hold many insights for us today, but I stumble over the phrase “useful historical analogue.” I don’t mean at all to minimize the significance of the xenophobia, hatred, and nationalism that we’re seeing in some parts of our society (and internationally as well), and threats to civil liberties and the free press should be taken very seriously. There are clearly people in our country and elsewhere today who draw inspiration from the history of Nazi Germany and that’s extremely disturbing. Frankly, however, I think we’re wrestling more with the demons of our own history than with German ones, and any response or solution we come up with has to address those demons.

The level on which historical analogies may be most useful is at the level of ordinary human behavior—and of course, to some extent that’s what Bonhoeffer is writing about in After Ten Years.The level on which historical analogies may be most useful is at the level of ordinary human behavior—and of course, to some extent that’s what Bonhoeffer is writing about in After Ten Years. I wrote a book several years ago about the issue of “bystanders,” in which I argued that the political and social dynamics by which certain groups are “otherized,” for example, or the processes by which ordinary people start out as “bystanders” but end up becoming complicit in evil, or the processes by which we rationalize such complicity, or the processes by which bureaucrats and institutions get co-opted, tend to be very similar, whatever the political circumstances.

My biggest concern is that a focus on comparisons to Nazi Germany may deflect our attention from the very American roots of much of what we’re seeing. This is hardly the first time in US history when racism, xenophobia, isolationism, nativism, and nationalism became powerful political forces. The Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence during the 1920s, and the antisemitism, racism, and anti-Catholicism of that era led to a dramatic rise in hate groups during the 1930s. Last summer Neo-Nazis and white supremacists convened in Charlottesville because of the city of Charlottesville voted to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee—a Confederate monument that was commissioned—like many Confederate monuments—during the Jim Crow era (the Lee statue was commissioned in 1917 and dedicated in 1924).

In addition to our ongoing struggles with racism and the legacy of slavery, we’re wrestling with other issues, like deeply clashing philosophies about centralized government vs. states’ rights, about regulation of corporations and businesses, about distribution of wealth. All that sounds very wonkish but these things have consequences not only politically but for our values as a civil society. Should the federal government be run like a corporation, and what does that mean for the ideals of public service or foreign policy? Should we privatize and outsource certain agencies (as has already happened with much of our prison system)? Do we want to live in a society where the rights of women, or immigrants, or gay or transgender individuals, or the poor, vary from state to state? Do we believe in having some kind of social safety net? Do we believe in having free access to information?  All those things are on the table.

We could also draw on the long and rich tradition in our history of resistance by people like Elizabeth Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, etc.—people who didn’t just fight against injustice but articulated a new language and vision for what our society can be.

So I think the key here is not to impose Nazi Germany as the template by which we measure what’s happening, but to bring Bonhoeffer’s insights into conversation with those voices in US history who have spoken to similar issues in our context. That’s why at the end of my introductory essay for this edition of After Ten YearsI mention Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Abraham Heschel’s No Religion is an Island. Those texts, like Bonhoeffer’s essay, acknowledge the reality of social and political evil but in a provocative and challenging way that appeals to our better selves.

Sorry this has turned into such a long answer, but as you can see I think a lot about these things.

As an editor of the English translation of Bonhoeffer’s complete works, the editor and reviser of the first unabridged English edition of Eberhard Bethge’s monumental biography of Bonhoeffer, a historian of the German church under National Socialism, and as a Bonhoeffer scholar in your own right, you must have read nearly every known word the man wrote. Can you point to some ways that this prolonged and detailed exposure to Bonhoeffer has affected you?

This certainly wasn’t planned! When I wrote my first book on the Confessing Church I deliberately focused on the “non-Bonhoeffers” because I felt that there was already enough literature on Bonhoeffer. Oh, well.

I’d say that for all the differences between his world and perspective and my own, I’ve come to see him as a reliably thoughtful conversation partner, especially with regard to how we Christians think about our role as citizens. We tend to read him only as a theologian, but like all of us, he was a complex person who was shaped by many factors, one of which was the humanism and sense of public responsibility that characterized much of his family, and that resonates with me. This may sound odd, but I also feel almost a tenderness about the poignancy of this young man and his brief life.

There were moments throughout the Bonhoeffer project, often in one of his letters, when I would suddenly get a deeper glimpse of the person and that was always moving. When you spend years looking at the close-up, sometimes daily, record of someone’s life, you’re reminded constantly how short our life on this earth is, and how little control we have over much of what happens to us.

Just as various divergent Christian theological camps claim Reinhold Niebuhr as their own—there’s the conservative Niebuhr and the liberal Niebuhr—there is now a struggle over Bonhoeffer. Is he to be seen through the lens of evangelical Christianity in the US, or is he more appropriately placed in the tradition of progressive Christianity? What do you make of this tug of war?

First, I think this is a very US-specific phenomenon, and it’s been part of the Bonhoeffer story from the beginning. When Eberhard Bethge arrived at Harvard in 1958 to work on the biography, he commented that “everyone here has his own Bonhoeffer.” That’s partly due to the drama of Bonhoeffer’s life story and partly due to his ability to write about the meaning and challenges of Christian faith in the modern world in a language that speaks to Christians, whether they are evangelicals or liberal mainline Protestants. So everyone likes to claim him but they take the story and his theological significance in different directions.

Politically, his attitudes are pretty clear. He was very outspoken during his time in the US about our problems with racism and horrified by the treatment of African Americans, including the lynchings of that era. In February 1933 when the new Nazi government started targeting its political opponents he wrote Reinhold Niebuhr that Germany needed a Civil Liberties Union. He urged his church to speak out for those who were targeted and powerless. He offered an immediate and unambiguous critique of the Christian nationalism that was embraced by so many German Protestants.

Theologically, he’s complex and doesn’t fit neatly on one side or the other of our American religio-culture wars. There are certain texts that resonate more for mainline Protestants and others that resonate deeply among evangelicals. Bonhoeffer writes about the daily practices of faith, and he also writes about the centrality of social justice as a core part of Christian discipleship. But you know, all these texts were written by the same man, and I wonder whether we might be able to have a different kind of conversation about Bonhoeffer if we acknowledged that and tried to read him on his terms, not ours. The fact that Bonhoeffer’s words resonate with so many people from very different Christian backgrounds should tell us something.

One of the biggest problems however is the hagiography. There’s a popular picture of Bonhoeffer as the leader of the Confessing Church, the one person who spoke out consistently against the persecution of the Jews, and the primary example of Christian witness against National Socialism—a general tendency to portray Bonhoeffer as the central figure in a clear-cut tale of good against evil. In fact, he was on the margins of his church and often struggled with what he should do. There are other Confessing Church figures whose record of resistance, especially during the 1930s, is much clearer than his. The wartime resistance circles in which he moved were a very complicated group. That’s one reason why I tried to give some critical historical details in my introduction to After Ten Years, including the fact that the German resistance included some people who would have been tried for war crimes had they survived. These weren’t all heroic figures who rose up against a system they had always hated; many of the high-ranking generals and bureaucrats who were in a position to overthrow the regime had been very much a part of the Nazi system.

Is there anything important, in your view, that biographers and commentators on Bonhoeffer are missing?

I think we need to recover the person behind the hagiography.We’ve been sifting and re-sifting the same material for decades now, and the time has come to step outside the material in the Bonhoeffer Works—that is, outside the Bethge narrative—if we really want to discover something new. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not going to get new biographical or historical insights into Bonhoeffer unless we do that, and I suspect that such research might also give us some new insights into his theology.

There’s now this vast literature about Nazi Germany, the role of the churches, the Holocaust, and many fascinating but overlooked contemporaries of Bonhoeffer. Exploring Bonhoeffer’s life through that broader lens might give us some new information, and it could also be a corrective to some of the things we’ve gotten wrong. As full disclosure, I should add that I’m writing a new book on Bonhoeffer in which I’m attempting to explore his significance from that outside perspective. And I’ve come across quite a bit of new material, some of which has surprised me and is leading me to rethink my own assumptions. So I guess I’m not done yet.

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Review of Victoria J. Barnett, ed., The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 2

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Victoria J. Barnett, ed., The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). Pp. xvi + 253. ISBN: 978-1-5064-3336-3.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Victoria Barnett, general editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, has ably selected, edited, and introduced 28 Bonhoeffer messages in this the second volume of his collected sermons. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom has made him famous as a theologian and member of the German Resistance, but as Barnett points out, he was educated for careers in both academia and ministry. Indeed, one of the consistent features of Bonhoeffer’s “fragmentary life” was the writing and preaching of sermons (xi-xii). This collection of sermons and meditations, written between 1926 and 1944, certainly touch on many of the theological themes for which he is known in works like Discipleship, Life Together, Ethics, and Letters and Papers from Prison. More importantly, however, they demonstrate Bonhoeffer’s warm pastoral heart and deep personal piety. As Barnett observes, Bonhoeffer followed the lectionary, convinced that “Scripture, preached correctly, revealed the word of God to the listener” (xiii). At the same time, he believed that preaching should speak to the contemporary world. What is perhaps most interesting, though, is the way that these sermons open up a window into Bonhoeffer’s own inner life.

Three themes run through these sermons: the seriousness of Bonhoeffer’s Christianity, the insight of his responses to the social and political crises of the late Weimar and Nazi eras, and the resolution of his engagement in the Kirchenkampf (German Church Struggle).

From the beginning of his preaching career, Bonhoeffer proclaimed an uncompromising brand of Christianity. In “A Sermon for His Contemporaries” (1926), he describes God as “absolute holiness and absolute duty,” and declares that “God’s word always commands the fulfilling of this absolute duty” (5). Indeed, God’s authority overshadowed all others: “When we do not recognize all earthly authorities as being dependent on that one authority, we make them our idols, be they state, church, reason, or genius” (6). Paradoxically, it is in obedience to God that the Christian finds freedom: “when you are bound to God in obedience, then you have become truly free. You are free from everything from which you should be free; free from people and powers, because you are bound to God” (8).

The authority of Christ is echoed in “Seeing the World through the Eyes of Christ” (1927/8), in which Bonhoeffer pronounces:

Jesus Christ is looking for lodging. He is looking for entrance into our spirits and our hearts. Do we really understand what this means? Jesus Christ is a controlling, willful guest. He wants our hearts completely. He will not tolerate competition, even if the competition only wants to dispute Jesus’s right to the least bit of his possession. Jesus Christ is a discomforting, imperious guest. He will rule whoever invites him in, and whoever invites Jesus in must serve him. (19-20)

Typical of the “both-and” way of Bonhoeffer’s thinking, however, he goes on to proclaim that Jesus comes not to destroy but to comfort, promising to give sight and to bring love into the life of the Christian. In the end, all these ideas come together: “The act of Christian love is to manifest Jesus not as a religious genius, an ethical thinker, or a philosopher, but as the Lord of death and of life; as the Word of God made flesh, for whom command and promise are the same” (22).

Dependence on God’s grace emerges time and again in Bonhoeffer’s preaching. In “The Human Yearning for God,” he asserts that the way to God is through purity of heart, even though it is impossible to attain:

The most distressing realization in the life of every Christian is that we cannot remain pure, that day by day we fall down anew and night by night must cry out to God anew: Lord, I cannot do it alone; if you make me pure, then I am pure. May God create in me a pure heart. I want so much to be pure. I want so much to behold God. (46)

Bonhoeffer’s piety manifests itself once more in “Approaching the Day in Faith: Morning Devotions” (1935), written as a reflection on his experience with his Finkenwalde seminary students. “Each new morning,” he begins, “is a new beginning for our lives. … It is long enough to find or to lose God, to keep faith or to fall into sin and disgrace” (154). Each day is created by God. Each day is an opportunity to find new mercy. In each day, we require our daily bread. Bonhoeffer goes on to describe the practice of the Finkenwalde community—their habit of beginning each day with private and communal devotions. As Bonhoeffer put it, “One hour must be put aside each morning for quiet prayer and worship together. Truly, this is not wasted time. How else are we to face the tasks, tribulations, and temptations of the day?” (155).

The seriousness of Bonhoeffer’s Christianity is matched by the thoughtfulness of his responses to the rapid social change and political turbulence of his day. In this, his preaching is a model of pastoral care in times of trial. For example, “The Soul’s Silence before God” (1928) asks hard questions which speak not only to Bonhoeffer’s day but to ours:

Is there still something like the soul in an age such as ours, an age of machines, of economic competition, of the dominance of fashion and sports; is this nothing more than a cherished childhood memory, like so much else? It just sounds so strange and peculiar amid the confusion and loud voices extolling themselves, this little word “soul.” It speaks such a gentle, quiet language that we hardly hear it anymore amid the tumult and chaos inside us. Yet it speaks a language full of the greatest responsibility and of profound seriousness: you, human being, have a soul; beware, lest you lose it, lest you awaken one day amid the frenzy of life—in both work and private life—and find that inwardly you have become empty, a plaything of events, a leaf before the wind, driven to and fro and blown away—that you have lost your soul. (33)

His answer is to cultivate silence: “My soul becomes silent before God, who helps me. God’s hours are hours of succor and comfort. God has an answer for every distress of our soul, and this answer is always one and the same … the enticing words: I love you” (35-36).

Other sermons illustrate Bonhoeffer’s ability to take the long view in the midst of upheaval. In “At the Turning Point: Waiting for God” (1931), he references the instability and chaos of the late Weimar era. In an age of clashing world views, the popular expectation is that the human being should “hold his own,” “remain master of the world, master of the future” (61). Bonhoeffer notes the way in which the Bible sets out a different response to the future—a posture of waiting on God. The sermon closes with a prayer: “God, come into our waiting. God, we are waiting for your salvation, your judgment, for your love and your peace” (66). Similarly, in “Following Christ through the World to the Cross” (1932), Bonhoeffer explains how Christ rejected the temptation to be king of the world, forsaking worldly power in obedience to God. Christ’s path was the path of love for humans, the path of the cross. “And we walk with him, as individuals and also as the church. We are the church under the cross … our kingdom is not of this world” (70). Perhaps the most powerful sermon in this vein is “Staying Grounded in Turbulent Times” (1932). In the midst of (again) instability and competing world views, Bonhoeffer takes up the prayer of 2 Chronicles 20:12: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (74). As is so often the case, Bonhoeffer’s preaching points to the mercy of God expressed in Christ’s saving death on the cross.

One of the surprising elements of these sermons is Bonhoeffer’s ability to find hope in the midst of trial. For instance, in a Christmas meditation written in 1940, Bonhoeffer explores the jubilant prophecy in Isaiah 9, detailing the wisdom, power, authority, love, and justice of Jesus and his kingdom. Concluding with the words of Isaiah: “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this,” Bonhoeffer proclaims:

The holy zeal of God for this divine kingdom guarantees that this kingdom will remain for eternity and will reach its final fulfillment despite all human guilt, all resistance. It will not depend on whether we participate. God brings his plans to fruition with or despite us. But God desires for us to be with him. Not for God’s own sake but for our sake. God with us—Immanuel—Jesus—that is the mystery of this Holy Night. But we cry out with joy: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us.” I believe that Jesus Christ—a true human being, born of the Virgin Mary, and true God, begotten of the Father in eternity—is my Lord. (208)

A few of the sermons in this volume reference more directly the state and church politics of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The most forceful of these is “… In the Eleventh Hour of Our Church” (1932), which Bonhoeffer preached in Trinity Church, Berlin, on Reformation Sunday, just after the November 1932 Reich election. Here Bonhoeffer contrasts the triumphal celebration of the Protestant Reformation and the noisy invocation of Luther with the actual state of the church, which he argues is losing its way.

We … keep saying over and over those same self-confident words with all their pathos, “Here I stand—I can do no other.” We fail to see that this is no longer Luther’s church, that Luther was distressed and agitated, pushed all the way to the wall by the devil and in fear of God when he said, “Here I stand,” and that these are hardly suitable words for us to speak. It is simply untruthful, or unforgivable heedlessness and arrogance, for us to take refuge behind these words. (93)

Again and again in the sermon, Bonhoeffer repeats the words of the Scripture text from Revelation chapter 2: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (92). As he unmasks the crisis of German Protestantism, he declares:

Let us lay the dead Luther to rest at long last, and instead listen to the gospel, reading his Bible, hearing God’s own word in it. At the last judgment God is certainly going to ask us not, “Have you celebrated Reformation Day properly?” but rather, “Have you heard my world and kept it?” (95).

Bonhoeffer dissects the lack of prayer, love, grace, and devotion in his church, calling on his hearers to repent. His closing words?

And now, when you leave the church, don’t think about whether this was a fine or a poor Reformation service, but let us go soberly and do the works that came first. God be our help. Amen” (100).

Two sermons bring together these three themes of serious Christianity, timely advice for troubled times, and decisive engagement with the political and church-political issues of his day.

The first of these is “Of Priests and Prophets in the New Germany” (May 1933). In the context of the dismantling of democracy, the rise of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, and the early signs of what would develop into the Church Struggle, Bonhoeffer preached a sermon based on Exodus 32, the story of the High Priest Aaron and the impatient Israelites building the Golden Calf—an idol—rather than waiting for their prophetic leader Moses to return from his meeting with God on Mount Sinai. Applying the text to his own day, Bonhoeffer complains that “The church of the world, the church of the priests, wants something it can see. It doesn’t want to wait any longer. It wants to go ahead and do something itself, take action itself, since God and the prophet aren’t doing so” (110). Later, Bonhoeffer describes this “worldly church” as a church,

which doesn’t want to wait, which doesn’t want to live by something unseen; as a church that makes its own gods, that wants to have a god that pleases it rather than asking itself whether or not it is itself pleasing to God; as a church that is ready to make any sacrifice for the sake of idolatry, the glorification of human ideas and values—as a church that presumes divine authority for itself through its priesthood—it is as such a church that we come again and again to worship. And it is a church whose idol lies shattered to pieces on the floor, as a church that has to hear anew, “I am the Lord your God.” (112-113)

The cross, Bonhoeffer declares, will put an end to all idolatry. We encounter the God who will tolerate no other gods, but also the God who meets us “in boundless forgiveness” (113).

The second, and the last sermon examined in this review, is “The Peace of God in Affliction” (1938), printed and sent out to the now scattered Finkenwalde seminary students for their encouragement. Based on Romans chapter 5 and the Apostle Paul’s message of peace with God through Jesus Christ, the sermon contains Bonhoeffer’s reflections on suffering: “Whether we have truly found the peace of God will be proven by the way we deal with the afflictions that come upon us” (188). He continues:

Whoever hates affliction, renunciation, crisis, slander, and imprisonment in his life might otherwise talk about the cross with big words, but nonetheless he hates the cross of Jesus and has no peace with God. But whoever loves the cross of Jesus Christ, whoever has found peace in his cross, also begins to love the affliction in his life. And finally he will be able to speak with Scripture: “but we also boast in our afflictions.” (189)

For Bonhoeffer, “Affliction produces patience, then experience, then hope. Whoever avoids affliction discards along with that God’s greatest gifts for his creatures” (190). Through affliction comes hope, and the love of God “poured into our heart” (192).

The sermons and meditations chosen by Victoria Barnett for The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 2 ably demonstrate both the pastoral heart and spiritual depth of Bonhoeffer in ways that readers of his more famous works would do well to discover.

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Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

Review of Michael Heymel, Martin Niemöller: Vom Marineoffizier zum Friedenskämpfer (Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2017), 321 pages, ISBN: 9783650401960.

Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Victoria Barnett (Minneapolis: Augsburg fortress, 2016), 141 pages, ISBN: 9781506408446

By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College

These two biographies by Christiane Tietz and Michael Heymel offer introductions to the life and thought of the two most celebrated leaders of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). Trained as theologians, Tietz and Heymel add to our knowlege of Bonhoeffer and Niemöller’s intellectual development and theological orientation, although neither significantly alters our current understanding of their place in the history of the church struggle or (in the case of Niemöller) postwar German history. Tietz does a better job of avoiding hagiography but both authors give short shrift to anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in their subject’s life and thought.

Whereas a new biography of Martin Niemöller is long overdue, one might ask: do we need another on Bonhoeffer? Continue reading →

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Conference Report: “Re-Forming the Church of the Future: Bonhoeffer, Luther, Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, April 7-9, 2017

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: “Re-Forming the Church of the Future: Bonhoeffer, Luther, Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, April 7-9, 2017

By Katie Day, United Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia

On this spring weekend marking the 72nd anniversary of the execution of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer by the Nazis in their last, bloody, days, scholars gathered to consider his legacy in light of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation as well as current political shifts. Over 130 scholars and church leaders gathered from the U.S., Germany, the U.K. and South Africa as part of the annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics, held alternately in Germany and North America, a partnership of Union Seminary and the International Bonhoeffer Society (English Language Section). This year’s event was sponsored by Union’s Bonhoeffer Chair in Theology and Ethics, and coordinated by its scholar, Dr. Clifford Green. It was appropriate that reflections on Bonhoeffer take place within the spaces where the young theologian’s thought had been significantly formed in stays in 1930-31 and briefly in 1939: Union Theological Seminary and Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

The diversity and credentials of the presenters was impressive and included historians, theologians, ethicists, church leaders (including Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm) and even the former Prime Minister of Australia, the Honorable Kevin Rudd. Together they brought the life and theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer into engagement with five different historic contexts: Continue reading →

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