The Battle for Bonhoeffer

Stephen R. Haynes

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802876010
• eBook ISBN: 9781467451062
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) has become a clay puppet in modern American politics. Secular, radical, liberal, and evangelical interpreters variously shape and mold the martyr’s legacy to suit their own pet agendas.

Stephen Haynes offers an incisive and clarifying perspective. A recognized Bonhoeffer expert, Haynes examines “populist” readings of Bonhoeffer, including the acclaimed biography by Eric Metaxas,  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. In his analysis Haynes treats, among other things, the November 2016 election of Donald Trump and the “Bonhoeffer moment” announced by evangelicals in response to the US Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage.

The Battle for Bonhoeffer  includes an open letter from Haynes pointedly addressing Christians who still support Trump. Bonhoeffer’s legacy matters. Haynes redeems the life and the man.

PART ONE

Exploring Bonhoeffer’s American Reception

CHAPTER ONE

The Man, the Myth, the Battle

IN THE MID-1990S LEON HOWELL complained that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had not yet become a household name in America. Today such a complaint seems oddly quaint, for it is doubtful whether any educated American who is mildly curious has not heard of Bonhoeffer. That is not to say that Americans are likely to know much about him, let alone be familiar with his writings. Even so, they may be aware that Bonhoeffer is among the “modern martyrs” commemorated with a statue at London’s Westminster Abbey and the first Christian whose martyrdom is officially recognized by the United Methodist Church. They may recall that in 2002 President George W. Bush called Bonhoeffer “one of the greatest Germans of the twentieth century.” Or they may have attended a church program addressing some facet of Bonhoeffer’s legacy.¹

Even if they have not encountered Bonhoeffer in one of these ways, it is likely that if they spend time online, they have come across references to the German pastor-theologian in the blog posts or social media conversations where he is invoked on one side (and sometimes both sides) of contentious religious or political questions. If so, they have met Bonhoeffer where the contest to claim his legacy is the fiercest. This book is about the battle for Bonhoeffer that is waged in these and other venues, the shapes that battle has assumed during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and the ways it influenced, and was influenced by, the 2016 American presidential election.

The habit of bringing Bonhoeffer into discussions of divisive social issues is not new. On the left, Bonhoeffer has been cited by Vietnam-era draft resisters, peace activists, and liberation theologians, while on the right he is looked to by Christian opponents of abortion and same-sex marriage. But since 9/11 the desire to harness Bonhoeffer’s moral capital for partisan ends has intensified as knowledge of his life and witness has expanded, and as American society has grown more politically polarized. Given this growing cultural divide—and the growing ubiquity of social media—Americans are now as likely to encounter references to Bonhoeffer on Facebook and Twitter as in sermons or Christian publications.

The resulting democratization of Bonhoeffer’s legacy is part of the broader story of his American reception, which I detailed in The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon (2004). In the years since that book appeared, Bonhoeffer’s legacy has suffused American culture to the point that today cataloguing it would be a full-time job. To keep up with the task, one would need to note the emergence of retail establishments such as Bonhoeffer’s Espresso & Café in Nashua, New Hampshire (which serves direct trade “coffee with a mission”), and financial services companies like Bonhoeffer Capital Management (whose “value-oriented” private hedge fund is named for the German pastor-theologian), not to mention religious organizations like the Bonhoeffer Institute (which offers one-day training conferences on “biblical values and public policy”) and the Bonhoeffer Project (a ministry of “discipleship with accountability” inspired by Bonhoeffer’s “Grand Experiment” at Finkenwalde).²

The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon described competing portraits of the German pastor-theologian that I labeled “radical,” “liberal,” “evangelical,” and “universal.” Careful attention to Bonhoeffer’s legacy since 9/11 has convinced me to add a hybrid category I am calling the “populist Bonhoeffer,” which actually preceded and anticipated the current populist moment in American politics. This populist portrait that has come to dominate Bonhoeffer’s American reception in the twenty-first century reflects not only our polarized political climate and the role of social media in the exchange of information, but also the proliferation of popular versions of Bonhoeffer’s life.

Although the populist Bonhoeffer was fashioned on the right, he has become the currency of writers across the political spectrum, if only because they are obliged to register dissent using the rhetorical forms in which the populist Bonhoeffer thrives and the media platforms where he is most accessible. Given how poorly these platforms accommodate genuine conversation, the “battle for Bonhoeffer” has become a rhetorical contest whose goal is to claim the pastor-theologian on one’s own side of the American ideological divide. Thus when the populist Bonhoeffer is invoked, it is not as an invitation to thoughtful reflection but as a stake driven into contested ground. The point is not to consider what he might have to say to us in a particular situation, but to identify the current “Bonhoeffer moment”—the cultural kairos that summons true patriots and disciples to action.

Since the populist mood implies a suspicion of academic elites and other representatives of a corrupt “establishment,” it is not surprising that shapers of the populist Bonhoeffer rarely defer to credentialed scholars. As a result, images of Bonhoeffer forged in recent years often bear a rather casual relationship to history. Indeed, the more Bonhoeffer’s name proliferates in American public discourse, the more fuzzy become the details of his life and the more stubbornly errors attach themselves to his legacy.

For instance, reading recent claims for Bonhoeffer’s relevance for the American political scene, one is surprised to learn that the theologian departed Germany to escape persecution in 1933 (it was actually six years later), returned to Germany in 1939 because “millions of European Jews were being slaughtered by Hitler’s death squads” (the Final Solution did not commence until 1941), founded the Confessing Church (he was not actually present at the Barmen Synod where the group was born), was detained due to a failed attempt on Hitler’s life (his involvement with the plotters was not known at the time of his arrest), wore a purple triangle (these were reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses), and died in the “death camp at Buchenwald,” or a “Gestapo prison,” or a “Nazi torture chamber” (it was actually Flossenbürg), where he was “hung with a noose of piano wire” (a persistent myth). When the aim is to use the German hero’s gravitas to seize rhetorical high ground, the details of his life and death are simply not that important.

That such demonstrably false claims appear with regularity in appeals to Bonhoeffer no doubt reflects the absence of editorial oversight in many online forms of publication. Yet these errors could be avoided with a modicum of effort. That they are not avoided suggests the urgency with which Bonhoeffer is often carried into rhetorical combat. The same carelessness is reflected in some of the quotes that are frequently misattributed to Bonhoeffer. In the flood of sloppy attribution that has engulfed his reception in recent years, Bonhoeffer is repeatedly misidentified as the source of Martin Niemöller’s famous lament about the results of complacency (“first they came for the Communists . . .”), as well as of the oft-repeated adage that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

This “Bonhoeffer quote,” which continues to circulate widely, has been traced to two sources—a 1971 book by Robert K. Hudnut and a 1998 article describing an exhibit at the Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, now defunct. From the museum it somehow migrated to the dust jacket of Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2010), from which it made its way onto innumerable Twitter and Facebook accounts and lists of “Top 10 Best Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes,” not to mention posters, T-shirts, and coffee mugs. During President Barack Obama’s second term, the ubiquitous adage became a rallying cry for right-leaning Americans seeking to remind their fellow citizens what happens when good people ignore creeping tyranny. As such, the statement was featured in hundreds of sermons and speeches opposing abortion, gay marriage, and threats to “religious liberty,” and even showed up several times in the Congressional Record, each time in speeches by Republicans, each time attributed to Bonhoeffer.³

Predictably, given the increasing politicization of Bonhoeffer’s legacy, the quote figured on both sides of the 2016 presidential campaign. Socially liberal faith leaders utilized it in their opposition to Donald Trump’s “bigotry,” while pro-Trump forces adapted it—“not to vote is to vote,” they warned—to mobilize Christians who were tempted to sit out the election. In the wake of white supremacists’ descent on Charlottesville in August 2017, this “Bonhoeffer quote” about silence in the face of evil found new life when it was widely applied to President Trump’s failure to unequivocally condemn those who had gathered to “unite the Right.”⁴

It is appropriate that Eric Metaxas is the source for most invocations of this misquote since the details of the populist Bonhoeffer who today occupies such a large space in the American imagination were largely fashioned by him. Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer biography topped the New York Times best-seller list for e-book nonfiction in 2011 and has reportedly sold over one million copies. As we will see, the populist Bonhoeffer has other sources, but Metaxas has given it momentum by advocating Bonhoeffer’s liberation from the interpretive control of scholarly experts. In addition to disseminating the faux-Bonhoeffer “silence” quote with a posttruth nonchalance, Metaxas has sown distrust of Bonhoeffer scholars, whom he blames for perpetuating “a terrific misunderstanding” of the pastor-theologian’s legacy.

Metaxas has expressed the hope that his biography would set the record straight, once and for all exploding legends perpetuated by the “secular Left.” While it is natural for biographers to seek to revise the received portrait of their subject, Metaxas has effectively dismissed a generation of scholarly engagement with Bonhoeffer’s life and thought, ignoring works that had hitherto been regarded as the starting point for serious reflection. Into the vacuum created by this summary rejection of mainstream Bonhoeffer scholarship, Metaxas has introduced assertions of “spectacular parallels” between Hitler’s Germany and Obama’s America.⁵

Metaxas repeated these claims so persistently in the months and years following Bonhoeffer’s publication that use of the phrase “Bonhoeffer moment” as a clarion call to conservative activism cannot be understood apart from his influence. The expression, in fact, was first uttered by Metaxas in his keynote address at the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast. Three years later it was being intoned by a variety of Christian leaders as the US Supreme Court prepared to rule in Obergefell v. Hodges on the constitutionality of state laws banning same-sex marriage. The proclamation of a “Bonhoeffer moment” in 2015 reflected not only Metaxas’s usage but his vision of an American political landscape dominated by totalitarian threats analogous to those faced by Bonhoeffer himself. As we will see, however, Metaxas’s most influential work as champion of the populist Bonhoeffer was still to come.

Just as the populist Bonhoeffer is not the sole creation of Eric Metaxas, neither is it an inevitable result of the rise of social media nor a direct reflection of posttruth sensibilities. Although affected by these forces, the populist Bonhoeffer has deeper roots in the interpretive diversity that has always defined Bonhoeffer’s reception in America, as well as in the tendency for competing perceptions of the German pastor-theologian to be weaponized for interpretive battle. These trends are explicated in the chapters that make up the rest of part 1. Chapter 2, “Rorschach Test: American Bonhoeffers from Cox to Koehn,” describes the diverse, sometimes incompatible, ways American interpreters have portrayed Bonhoeffer. Chapter 3, “Gradual Embrace: The Evangelical Bonhoeffer before Metaxas,” offers an in-depth analysis of American evangelicals’ engagement with Bonhoeffer prior to the publication of Metaxas’s biography.

Before exploring the distinct portraits of Bonhoeffer that are the focus of these chapters, we should note the remarkable array of sources Americans have drawn on in developing them, which include critical editions of Bonhoeffer’s works, biographies, historical novels, dramas, films, and devotional compilations. The richness of these scholarly and popular resources is evident even if we limit our focus to the past thirty years. For most of that time, scholars were at work on a seventeen-volume critical edition of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English (DBWE) that was finally completed in 2014. Meanwhile, dozens of biographical accounts of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought were appearing as well.

Those seeking a scholarly perspective on Bonhoeffer have been treated to two recent biographies of the pastor-theologian—Friedrich Schlingensiepen’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906–1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance (2010) and Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2014). Both authors possess the knowledge of German religious and cultural life required to present a fully contextualized portrait of Bonhoeffer. But these well-regarded biographies have had to compete not only with Metaxas’s best-selling Bonhoeffer but with briefer biographical studies such as Michael Van Dyke’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Opponent of the Nazi Regime (2001) and Susan Martins Miller’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2002), books whose hagiographical character is indicated by their appearance in evangelical publishers’ “heroes of the faith” series. Less hagiographical, but also less demanding of readers, than the biographies by Marsh and Schlingensiepen are Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God, by Elizabeth Raum (a college librarian who also writes children’s books), and Till the Night Be Past: The Life and Times of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Theodore J. Kleinhans (a retired pastor and air force chaplain), both published in 2002.⁶

Several authors of historical fiction have paid tribute to Bonhoeffer in recent years. Mary Glazener’s The Cup of Wrath (1992), Denise Giardina’s Saints and Villains (1998), and Paul Barz’s I Am Bonhoeffer: A Credible Life (2008) are fictionalized accounts that apply a novelist’s imagination to the raw materials of Bonhoeffer’s biography. Saints and Villains received wide critical acclaim, and the paperback edition included a “reader’s guide” designed for use in the book groups so popular in the United States. Authors of “Christian fiction” have also taken up the challenge of portraying Bonhoeffer for American audiences. In Michael Phillips’s The Eleventh Hour (1993), Bonhoeffer plays an important secondary role, as he does in Suzanne Woods Fisher’s Copper Fire (2008).⁷

For those seeking more succinct accounts of Bonhoeffer’s vita, many catalogues of modern “saints” feature entries on the German pastor-theologian. These texts devoted to Christians who lived remarkable lives include Robert Ellsberg’s All Saints, which devotes April 9 to “Dietrich Bonhoeffer theologian and confessor”; James C. Howell’s Servants, Misfits, and Martyrs, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Charles Marsh
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE: EXPLORING BONHOEFFER’S AMERICAN RECEPTION
• PART TWO: BONHOEFFER AND HOMEGROWN HITLERS
• PART THREE: TRIUMPH OF THE POPULIST BONHOEFFER
• POSTSCRIPT: Your Bonhoeffer Moment: An Open Letter to Christians Who Love Bonhoeffer and (Still) Support Trump
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index