Letters to London

Bonhoeffer'S Previously Unpublished Correspondence With Ernst Cromwell, 1935-36

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780281066704
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

In the autumn of 1933 the 27-year-old Bonhoeffer accepted a two-year appointment as a pastor of two German-speaking Protestant churches in London. It was during this time that he began his friendship with Ernst Cromwell, one of his confirmands - a friendship that is now documented in these letters published for the first time here in this book (most of which are dated between 20 March 1935 and 27 March 1936). Seventy-five years later, the publication of these letters throws light on several aspects of Bonhoeffer's life and thought, including: the development of his views on the practice of silence; his practice of catechesis and confirmation; the impact on his personal relationships of his involvement in the Church struggle; his understanding of friendship, and in particular friendship that values the potential contribution of young people to living out the 'truth-telling' of Jesus Christ.

1

A friendship to be grateful for: Bonhoeffer’s letters to Ernst Cromwell

That I got to know your father and mother and all of you has become very important to me, especially in these times. I really think of you as good friends, for whom one must forever be grateful.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Ernst Cromwell, 27 March 1936)

NB: On joining the British Army in 1941 Ernst Cromwell changed his name to Ernest Cromwell, which was not only permitted but also encouraged for members of the armed forces serving in combat zones in order to protect them in case of capture. In this chapter we therefore refer to Ernst when discussing him before 1941 and Ernest thereafter.

Bonhoeffer, confirmation and ‘mentoring’ the young

The friendship begins with a request that Bonhoeffer confirm Ernst Cromwell as a baptized member of the Christian Church. The importance for Lutherans of catechetical training for Christians has its origins with Martin Luther himself. In 1529 Luther published his Large Catechism intended as a manual for clergy in the practice of Christian initiation. Following a pastoral tour, in 1551 Luther published a second, Small Catechism in response to what he took to be widespread ignorance of doctrine among the ‘common people’ – and among the clergy who were supposed to teach them. Though Luther identifies the want of theological knowledge as the problem, in point of fact the Small Catechism is concerned at least as much with moral formation, recognizing, as does the Lord’s Prayer, that the duty of Christians to God is in balance with their duty to their neighbours.

Given the importance of catechesis to Luther it is perhaps unsurprising that in 1931 Bonhoeffer and his friend Franz Hildebrandt wrote a catechism together titled ‘As You Believe, So You Receive’¹ that tried to express simply ‘what the Lutheran faith is saying today’. The catechism is carefully structured. Even here, however, a handwritten addition to his copy hints at the approach Bonhoeffer would take with Ernst: questions and answers challenge ‘confirmands to independent reflection. The confirmand today needs someone to expect to make something of him’.²

The theological origins of the new catechism lay for Bonhoeffer in the dissertation he had written to qualify as a university lecturer. In the closing section of Act and Being, his demandingly technical study of revelation, Bonhoeffer considers what Christians can learn about their faith from the insight that children have their whole future ahead of them:

Baptism is the call to the human being into childhood, a call that can be understood only eschatologically … Faith is able to fix upon baptism as the unbreakable Word of God, the eschatological foundation of its life …³

That Bonhoeffer had this ‘problem’ in mind as he approached the issue of the training of those who would, as young adults, confirm the promises made on their behalf at their infant baptism is suggested by the jokey inscription he wrote on the front cover of the complimentary copy of Akt und Sein that he gave to Hildebrandt: ‘And will a catechism come now from this!?’⁴

There is no evidence of the extent to which Bonhoeffer put his jointly written catechism into practice when he was instructed to lead a confirmation class at Zionskirche in the Mitte district of Berlin⁵ from November 1931 to March 1932, but it must surely have contributed to his approach. Bethge reports that the class was out of hand when Bonhoeffer took it over. The boys, 40 of them, threw things at him as he climbed the stairs to meet them and reacted to his name by chanting ‘Bon, Bon, Bon!’⁶ He dealt with this by quietly telling a story about his time in New York and the class became silent in order to hear him. He rented a room nearby and instructed the landlady to leave it unlocked so the boys could use it. He also rented nine acres of land on the Berlin outskirts with a wooden house to which he could take his class, and took a group of them on a walking tour of the Harz Mountains. Before the confirmation service itself, Bonhoeffer distributed cloth to make new clothes for those being confirmed. Richard Rother, one of those confirmed in this group, reports that Bonhoeffer took care to choose a Bible text to give to each of them for their confirmation.⁷ Bonhoeffer’s work on a catechism and his experience of preparing a large group for confirmation meant that when he came to prepare Ernst Cromwell for confirmation he had a wealth of theological and practical wisdom to draw on.

How Bonhoeffer came to London

Bonhoeffer’s decision to seek an appointment as a pastor to German-speaking Christians in London was by no means straightforward. In Germany in the twentieth century, and largely still now, individuals who have studied theology must decide whether they want to serve in pastoral ministry or pursue an academic career. Already in 1935 Bonhoeffer felt torn between these two directions. He had qualified as a university lecturer in 1930, receiving his ‘habilitation’, the certificate needed to teach in the German university system, when he was only 24 years old. Members of his faculty in Berlin spoke of him as the most promising theologian of his generation. Yet Bonhoeffer had also enjoyed a year as an assistant minister in the German-speaking congregation in Barcelona and had made the most of some challenging pastoral work not only at Zionskirche but also, from October 1931 to 1933, as chaplain at the technical college at Berlin-Charlottenberg. Bonhoeffer’s decision to take up a pastoral appointment in London did not altogether close off the possibility of a future career in the university, but it did put a brake on it and indicate the earnestness of his sense of calling to serve the Church.

The decision also had in it several more ‘human’ elements. Bonhoeffer loved travel: while a student in New York, for example, he took the trouble to travel both to Cuba and to Mexico. London, then as now one of the world’s truly great cities, appealed. It also meant he would have his own house instead of squatting with his parents. Finally, Bonhoeffer and his distant cousin Elizabeth Zinn had, by mutual consent, ended the ‘understanding’ they had had about their relationship; this really was the perfect moment to try something new. For all these reasons a move to London looked like the perfect course to take. What made the decision to leave Germany vexing was what it could be taken to suggest about Bonhoeffer’s participation in the German church struggle.

Following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, the Nazi government moved swiftly to neutralize potential church opposition and to conform the churches, along with every other significant previously independent group, to Nazi organization and control. On 20 July 1933, the Nazi government signed a concordat (a treaty) with the Holy See that included provisions to disband the Catholic Centre Party, the only remaining effective political opposition to the Nazis. At the same time they began the process of imposing unity upon the Protestant Landeskirchen or regional churches. On paper, this might have looked like a reasonable thing to do: one nation, one Church. But the 32 regional churches in existence in 1933 each had long independent histories. Moreover, though Protestant, they did not all belong to the same confessional tradition: a majority was Lutheran, some were Reformed (i.e. Calvinist), and some were unions of both Lutheran and Reformed traditions. As early as 1931 pressure groups began to form to influence the political direction of the German Protestant churches. The Deutsche Christen (German Christians), a strongly nationalist group with anti-Semitic characteristics, welcomed Hitler and campaigned for one national Church. In opposition, a Pastors’ Emergency League coalesced around Martin Niemöller, pastor of the suburban Dahlem parish church in Berlin. Bonhoeffer was one of the first to join and was one of the league’s most indefatigable campaigners. The Pastors’ Emergency League attracted a sizeable membership but quite quickly gave way to the Bekennende Kirche, the Confessing (or sometimes Confessional) Church.

The issues dividing these two church parties were more complex than might at first appear and two distinct sets of issues were inter-woven in their disputes. Certainly politics had something to do with it; yet by no means all Deutsche Christen were Nazis and by no means all members of the Confessing Church were anti-Nazi. Many who were committed nationalists opposed the formation of one Reichskirche on strictly theological grounds. To understand this, we need to recall the foundations of Lutheran political theology: according to Luther religious leaders had their authority from God, but so did secular rulers. These two authorities were not intended by God to compete with, but to complement and even to support, each other. Key to the theological health of this symbiotic relationship was that neither authority interfered in the divinely given authority of the other so long as it was doing its job properly. Luther conceived circumstances in which it was appropriate for the state to intervene in church life, and for the Church to intervene in secular matters if such intervention could be justified by a clear failure of the state to govern wisely in its ‘realm’ or of the Church to govern wisely in its. A Reformed political theology was not identical to a Lutheran, but was similar on many essential points. The question facing Protestant Christians in Germany from 1933 was therefore: ‘Has the state exceeded its divine authority in the case of insisting upon a single national Church governed by a single Reichsbischof ?’

To an extent Martin Niemöller embodied some of this complexity. A former U-boat commander, Niemöller was a committed German nationalist and, though not anti-Semitic, was instinctively sympathetic to many Nazi policies. Yet theologically he held strong views that the Nazi state should keep out of the affairs of the Church unless the Church had failed in the exercise of its duty. By contrast Bonhoeffer was both politically opposed to Nazism and theologically convinced that this particular intervention by the Nazi state was improper. To Bonhoeffer, Niemöller was certainly an ally, but he was also a ‘starry-eyed idealist’ because he thought he could outdo the National Socialists in nationalist fervour.⁸

In August 1933 Bonhoeffer, together with another Lutheran theologian, Hermann Sasse, was commissioned to draft a theological basis for the nascent Confessing Church; it was named the Bethel Confession after the place where they undertook the work. They drafted two versions that make bold theological statements concerning the Christian Church.⁹ Though Bonhoeffer and Sasse’s statements on Church/state relations were in keeping with Lutheran orthodoxy, in the context of the church struggle they proved explosive. After stating the Lutheran view that worldly government is ordained by God, they continued that ‘[t]he church can never be absorbed by worldly government, that is, it can never be “built into” the structure of a state. The content of its proclamation always places it over against all worldly authority’.¹⁰ This ran directly counter to the policy of Gleichschaltung, the bringing into line or conformation of all aspects of German society to the Nazi Party.

Also included in the drafts submitted by Bonhoeffer and Sasse was a clause on ‘The Church and the Jews’. From the perspective of Christian theology after the Holocaust/Shoah this section of the draft Bethel Confession contains disturbing elements; for example, it maintains the historic Christian claim that ‘The place of the Old Testament people of the covenant has been taken not by another nation but rather by the Christian church, called out of, and within, all nations’.¹¹ Though intended to militate against Nazi claims that Germans were now God’s chosen people, the assertion that the Church has superseded Israel as God’s chosen people with hindsight theologically underwrote the anti-Jewish thinking it was intended to oppose. Yet the two theologians resisted firmly a racist approach to what was commonly called ‘the Jewish problem’:

[t]he fellowship of those belonging to the church is determined not by blood, therefore, by race, but by the Holy Spirit and baptism … We object to the attempt to make the German Protestant church into a Reich church for Christians of the Aryan race.¹²

What even their draft failed to do was to advocate – as Bonhoeffer did later – that the Church must stand not only with baptized Jews, but also with non-baptized victims of Nazi injustice. When Confessing Church leaders got hold of the draft confessions they emasculated them by removing clauses likely to create controversy. Bonhoeffer’s dismay at the eviscera...