Bonhoeffer for Armchair Theologians

Stephen R. Haynes, Lori Brandt Hale

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780664230104
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611642063
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

This latest volume in the ever-popular WJK Armchair series turns its sights on contemporary theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945). Born in Breslau, Germany, Bonhoeffer led quite an intriguing life. This book, with dozens of illustrations by artist Ron Hill, highlights Bonhoeffer's background and theological education; his time at Union Seminary in New York City; his involvement in the resistance movement against Adolf Hitler; and his participation in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

Written by experts but designed for the novice, the Armchair series provides accurate, concise, and witty overviews of some of the most profound moments and theologians in Christian history. These books are essential supplements for first-time encounters with primary texts, lucid refreshers for scholars and clergy, and enjoyable reads for the theologically curious.

CHAPTER ONE

Life

Many recountings of Bonhoeffer’s biography begin at the end, suggesting that the meaning of his life can only be comprehended by looking backward from his anti-Nazi resistance, imprisonment, and execution. But we will attempt to view Bonhoeffer’s life as it was lived—from beginning to end. It started in a relatively idyllic time when terms such as “world war,” “fascism,” and “genocide” were not yet part of the European lexicon.

Family Background

Bonhoeffer’s family bequeathed to him a proud heritage. In addition to a concrete inheritance that included the writings of Luther and Schleiermacher and a signet ring with the Bonhoeffer family’s sixteenth-century coat of arms, Dietrich’s ancestors—the Bonhoeffers, von Hases, and Kalckreuths—left to him a keen intellect, an impressive musical aptitude, and a comfort in his own skin.

His great-grandfather Karl August von Hase was a professor of church and dogmatic history called by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the University in Jena. Karl August’s son Karl Alfred—Dietrich’s maternal grandfather—was chaplain to Wilhelm II of Prussia. His son Hans von Hase—Dietrich’s uncle—was a rural pastor. On his father’s side, Bonhoeffer’s ancestors included respectable government officials, as well as socialists, Freemasons, and Swedenborgians. Dietrich’s paternal grandmother was Julie Tafel Bonhoeffer, a forceful woman whose independence and progressive thinking impressed the young man. He lived in her home during his first year of university studies.

Dietrich’s father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a psychiatrist who began his professional career in 1893 in the Silesian city of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), which had over 400,000 inhabitants at the turn of the twentieth century. Three years later Karl met Dietrich’s mother, Paula von Hase, whose father had recently become a church official and professor in the city. They were married in 1898 and began a family the following year. Eight children were born to the couple over the next decade, including the twins Dietrich and Sabine in 1906. The Bonhoeffers lived in a spacious house with half a dozen servants and at least as many pets; soon there was a summer home in the Harz Mountains as well. The children received their early education from their mother, who often accompanied Dietrich to worship despite the fact that the Bonhoeffers were not regular churchgoers.

Childhood and Studies

In 1912 the family moved to Berlin, where Karl Bonhoeffer had been appointed head of the psychiatric department at the prestigious Charité Hospital. The following year Dietrich began attending gymnasium (a humanities-oriented German secondary school that prepares students for university education). In addition to excelling in the humanistic disciplines, Dietrich became an accomplished pianist and was playing Mozart sonatas by the age of ten. In 1916 the family moved to a house on Wangenheim-strasse in the upper-middle-class district of Grunewald.

In 1917 Dietrich’s older brothers Karl-Friedrich and Walter were called up for military duty; within two weeks Walter was dead from shrapnel wounds sustained while marching to the front. The twelve-year-old Dietrich received his brother’s confirmation Bible and an abiding appreciation for the human cost of war. At age thirteen Bonhoeffer began attending the Grunewald Gymnasium (now Walter-Rathenau Gymnasium), from which one could hear the gunfire exchanged by communists and defenders of the fledgling Weimar Republic. Dietrich was a successful though not stellar student. His certificate of completion indicated a young man “very good” in behavior, “good” in religion, “sufficient” in English, and “insufficient” in handwriting.

You Want to Study What?

Dietrich was blessed (and cursed?) to be born into a family of successful men. By the time he began to chart a direction in life, his older brother Karl-Friedrich (b. 1899) was on his way to becoming a world-renowned physicist; before his untimely death Walter (1899–1918) had demonstrated great linguistic facility; and Klaus (b. 1901) was an accomplished cello player and promising law student. The boys’ father, furthermore, occupied the country’s leading professorship in psychiatry and neurology. How would the young Dietrich deal with the pressure to succeed in such a household? By setting into territory that was uncharted by Bonhoeffers of his generation.

Despite early signs of piety and the prominence of ancestors who had been pastors and theologians, it was a shock when Dietrich announced at age thirteen that he would study theology. According to Eberhard Bethge, his siblings “tried to convince him that he was taking the path of least resistance, and that the church to which he proposed to devote himself was a poor, feeble, boring, petty and bourgeois institution.” Undeterred, Bonhoeffer reportedly responded, “In that case I shall reform it!”¹ For their part, his parents feared that their son would have to endure an “uneventful pastor’s life” while missing his true vocation—which they assumed was music. Yet Dietrich was firm in his resolve. While still at gymnasium he studied Hebrew and read Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of “liberal” Protestant theology. Nevertheless, Dietrich would remain suspended for some time between theological study as a “science” (that is, a branch of knowledge) and service to the church.

Tübingen, Rome, Berlin

If Dietrich’s choice of subject matter was surprising, his choice of a university was not. In the fall of 1923, amid political instability and hyperinflation, he followed family tradition and enrolled at Tübingen University. Dietrich’s academic work during his two semesters at Tübingen encompassed logic, epistemology, music, political science, and history of religions, in addition to biblical, church historical, and dogmatic subjects. Yet he still had time to join the Hedgehog fraternity of which his father and uncle had been members, and spend fourteen days in military training. Bonhoeffer felt obligated to “perform one’s duty for two weeks” in case it became necessary to protect the republic from radical forces. It was the only time Bonhoeffer would ever be a soldier.

By late 1923 hyperinflation had made living away from home a burden on Bonhoeffer’s family. (In August he wrote his parents requesting “an additional 10 million” marks to buy food; a few weeks later he reported that “each meal costs 10 billion”). But before returning to Berlin, Dietrich convinced his parents to let him spend a term in Rome, where, he reassured them, study would be “much less expensive.” In April he and brother Klaus crossed the Alps and began what Bonhoeffer later called “a quarter of special studies.” The main focus of these studies turned out to be exploration. The brothers visited Bologna, Florence, Siena, Pompeii, Milan, and Sicily. In Libya, to which they sailed amid a “colorful throng … [of] military personnel, immigrants, Turks and Arabs,”² the Bonhoeffers encountered Islamic culture.

More than anywhere he visited, though, the young Bonhoeffer became enthralled by Catholic Rome, particularly the way it symbolized the church as a tangible, universal entity with ancient roots. On Palm Sunday 1924 Dietrich attended mass in St. Peter’s, where he would return several times during Holy Week. During a second sojourn in Rome, Bonhoeffer even had an audience with the pope. In June 1924 he finally returned to Berlin and enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm (later Humboldt) University, where he would remain a student until July 1927.

Bonhoeffer’s main professor at Berlin was theologian Reinhold Seeberg, whose work on the history of Christian doctrine became a medium for Bonhoeffer’s knowledge of the classical theologians, particularly Luther. Furthermore, Seeberg’s emphasis on the social dimension of human existence contributed to a growing sensitivity to “sociality” in Bonhoeffer’s thought. Under Seeberg, Bonhoeffer began his dissertation at the end of 1925 at the age of nineteen and completed it in eighteen months. (If you have ever been a graduate student, you will probably need to read that sentence again.) After considering other topics, Bonhoeffer decided to work in the area of ecclesiology (a subfield of theology concerned with the nature of the church). In Sanctorum Communio: A Dogmatic Inquiry into the Sociology of the Church he brought together social philosophy and the (Barthian) theology of revelation and introduced a “theology of sociality” built on a relational view of personhood. Revelation in its social form—the church—was described as “Christ existing as community.” Seeberg called it “a very satisfactory model of serious academic erudition.”³

Despite the fact that Seeberg taught Dietrich in seven classes and directed his dissertation, they were not kindred theological spirits. Seeberg represented a Protestant liberalism that was devoted to harmonizing “the Bible and the modern spirit, Luther and idealism, theology and philosophy.”⁴ In a 1930 letter, Bonhoeffer offered an assessment of this harmonizing impulse when he described one of Seeberg’s sermons as “shallow religious babble for forty-five minutes.”⁵ Increasingly, Bonhoeffer believed that the anthropological optimism of this tradition was poorly suited to the cultural and theological crises that faced European society.

Liberation: Part One

Under Seeberg, Adolf von Harnack, and Luther scholar Karl Holl, Bonhoeffer encountered the thinkers who would shape his own thought. These included Augustine, Aquinas, and Schleiermacher on the theological side, and Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Dilthey among the philosophers. But without doubt, Bonhoeffer’s two greatest intellectual influences were to be Martin Luther and Karl Barth.

From Luther, Bonhoeffer took a thoroughgoing emphasis on justification by faith (whose relationship to obedience he explored in his book Discipleship), as well as a theologia crucis (“theology of the cross”) which nurtured his conviction that God’s presence is paradoxically revealed in weakness and suffering. Luther’s centrality to Bonhoeffer’s thought is hardly surprising given Dietrich’s identity as a German Protestant who came of age during the Luther Renaissance of the 1920s and studied under Holl, the leading Luther scholar of his generation.

Less predictable in the development of the young Berlin theologian was the role of Karl Barth (1886–1968), the Swiss pastor-turned-theologian who announced the bankruptcy of Protestant liberalism and proffered a theology of revelation whose starting point was not human religious experience but the word of a wholly other God. Barth assailed the theological establishment in part by drawing attention to the vapidity of liberal optimism in a Europe devastated by war. “One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice,”⁶ Barth wrote in an observation that was characteristically both clever and penetrating. He was speaking of Schleiermacher, but he had in mind the tradition of cultural Protestantism that had dominated the universities, the Protestant church leadership, and German culture since the end of the nineteenth century.

After his first semester in Berlin, Bonhoeffer was busily reading Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and Edmund Husserl, scholars whose ideas were then being appropriated by academic theologians. Around the same time he encountered Barth, a writer conspicuously absent from the reading lists of his Berlin professors. At the end of 1924 Dietrich discovered Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans (2nd ed., 1922) and The Word of God and the Word of Man (1924) and obtained notes from lectures Barth would publish as Prologomena to Christian Dogmatics in 1927. This encounter with Barth’s theology was “like a liberation,” according to Bonhoeffer. Among other things, it determined the sorts of questions that interested him. Dietrich’s first student paper in systematic theology, written during the summer of 1925, explored whether one can “distinguish between a historical and a pneumatological [spiritual] interpretation of Scripture”—a question thrust before the attention of continental theologians by the success of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. In this paper Bonhoeffer sought to pass beyond the historical-critical studies that guided academic biblical interpretation to a place where humans enter what Barth called the “strange new world of the Bible.”

The impact of Barth’s “dialectical theology” (so called because the infinite distance between the human and the divine means that our knowledge of God is paradoxical in character) became more evident after Bonhoeffer left Berlin. In 1928 he offered a Barthian assessment of “religion” as sinful self-justification, the antithesis of “faith.” “Religion and morality,” he wrote in a sentence that could have come from Epistle to the Romans, “is the most dangerous enemy of the Christian message of good news.”⁷ At Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930 Bonhoeffer became known as an apologist for Barth’s “theology of crisis” (another term for dialectical theology). And when he lectured on the history of twentieth-century systematic theology at Berlin in early 1932, Bonhoeffer offered a detailed presentation of the Barthian “revolution” in which the object of theology is the revealed Word, and God is no longer confused with religion.⁸

Yet Bonhoeffer always remained a critical Barthian. In his dissertations of 1927 and 1929 he carried on a conversation with Barth regarding “the problems of ethics”; specifically, Bonhoeffer wondered whether Barth’s conviction that no finite historical moment was capax infiniti (capable of the infinite) ruled out concrete ethics and proclamation since, as Bonhoeffer read Barth, “empirical human activity—be it faith, obedience—is at best a reference to God’s activity and in its historicity can never be faith and obedience itself.”⁹ Despite such lingering questions, there is no doubt that Bonhoeffer’s discovery of Barth represented his first great liberation from the thinking of his Berlin professors and infused his academic work with a newfound joy.

The two men’s personal relationship began after Bonhoeffer’s return from America in July 1931. Traveling to Bonn, Bonhoeffer anonymously attended a 7 a.m. lecture (where he heard some of what would become Church Dogmatics vol. 1, part 1), caught Barth’s attention with a timely quotation from Luther, and was invited to the professor’s home for dinner and conversation. Barth was impressed with the twenty-five-year-old theologian, and the two met and corresponded regularly over the ensuing years.

Barth may have become Bonhoeffer’s most important theological mentor, but their relationship was not immune to tension or misunderstanding. This was particularly true in 1933 when Bonhoeffer left for London at the height of the German church struggle without consulting his older colleague. In a scolding letter, Barth wrote, “You were quite right not to seek any wisdom from me before [leaving]. I would have advised against it, unconditionally and certainly bringing up the heaviest artillery I could muster.” He added (though it probably wasn’t necessary), “Just be glad I don’t have you here in front of me.” Barth assured Bonhoeffer that if he did not matter so much to him he would not have taken him “by the collar in this fashion,” but it must have been a stinging tongue-lashing nonetheless.¹⁰

Although Bonhoeffer was often referred to “a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter One: Life
• Chapter Two: Christ Existing as Community
• Chapter Three: Costly Grace
• Chapter Four: Stellvertretung and Ethics as Formation
• Chapter Five: Religionless Christianity
• Chapter Six: Legacy
• Notes
• For Further Reading
• Index