Bonhoeffer Speaks Today

Following Jesus at all Costs

Mark Devine

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781433672101
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Imprisoned and eventually executed for his opposition to Hitler's regime, the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer continues to fascinate and inspire Christians across the world. His life epitomizes authenticity, commitment, and sacrifice. Devine writes, "When a man willingly exposes himself to suffering and death for his faith and for others, we take notice and with good reason. While martyrdom neither proves nor produces a spiritual giant, the possibility does arise, and this piques a distinctive longing common to followers of Jesus Christ."This book is published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's birth in 1906. It allows Bonhoeffer to speak to today's believer in the following areas: knowing and doing the will of God, the importance and role of the Church, the call to witness, and the role of suffering and the path to hope.

Chapter One

AT ALL COSTS

“When Chríst calls a man,
he bíds hím come and díe.”¹

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

FABIAN VON SCHLABRENDORFF began experimenting with explosives in February 1943. The assassination of Adolf Hitler would be attempted. Schlabrendorff quickly rejected the German-made bombs because of the hissing sound they made prior to detonation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer—pastor, nonviolent resister, children's Sunday school teacher, and pacifist—prayed for Schlabrendorff's success. How had it come to this? Was the author of The Cost of Discipleship able to pursue Jesus Christ and the death of a dictator at the same time? Did the first pursuit finally compel the other? What does it mean to be a child of heaven while living on this earth? Dietrich Bonhoeffer faced such questions without the luxury of time. World-altering events demanded decision from those living within the explosive cauldron of Hitler's Third Reich.

The Silver Spoon

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born, along with his twin sister Sabine, on February 4, 1906, in Breslau (present-day Wroclaw, Poland) into an impressive aristocratic family. Among the Bonhoeffers, precociousness in children was usual, expected as a matter of course. Accomplished musicians, lawyers, physicians, ministers, and scientists punctuated both paternal and maternal family lines. His father Karl, professor of neurology and psychiatry at Berlin from 1912, was arguably among the five most prominent psychiatrists in the world. Having relocated to Berlin when Dietrich was six years of age, the Bonhoeffers’ neighbors included many noted figures, among others the famous physicist Max Planck and the celebrated church historian and theologian Adolf von Harnack, who would later become Dietrich's teacher.

As to the expected precociousness, Dietrich did not disappoint. He was playing Mozart's sonatas at the age of ten and was expected by many to pursue a career in music. As a young student Bonhoeffer immersed himself in philosophy, history, Greek, and Hebrew with unusual zeal. Much of his early education was provided by tutors at home, and Dietrich was able to skip years of school by virtue of his intellect and industry. Sports and games became outlets for his intense competitiveness, which he also expected and celebrated in others. From childhood, conspicuous seriousness and intensity characterized Bonhoeffer's approach to life in every dimension.

Dietrich also marched to the beat of his own drummer. One classmate remembered the impression Bonhoeffer made during Harnack's last seminar at the University of Berlin: “I was struck by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, not only because he outdid practically all of us in theological knowledge and ability… but because here was someone who thought for himself and already knew what he wanted and also wanted what he knew.”² Owing partly perhaps to his being the sixth of eight children with a separation of five years from his next oldest brother but, no doubt, chiefly because of his own particular constitution, Dietrich consistently asserted his independence. He was always standing for something.

Though his mother was a Christian believer and incorporated religion into the household routine, his father and brothers were largely agnostic, and the family rarely darkened the door of the church. Yet, at no later than age fourteen, young Dietrich announced that he would become a theologian. Considering the prominent ministers among his forebears, such a decision should not have come as the shock it did. His family, especially his male siblings, urged him to reconsider, begging their baby brother not to squander his life in such a “poor, feeble, boring, petty, bourgeois institution as the Church.” “If what you say is true,” Bonhoeffer retorted, “I shall reform it!”³

Bonhoeffer took immense pleasure in the benefits of his aristocratic upbringing but also felt keenly his separation from those he called “the others.” Bonhoeffer's discomfort with a purely academic life and his periodic plunges into hands-on ministry reflect a deep desire to identify with humankind in ways he suspected his privileged station in life had denied him. Still, young Dietrich discovered soon enough that, for the Bonhoeffers, cultural and material privilege did not provide escape from duty and sacrifice. When Dietrich was only twelve years old, two of his brothers, Karl-Friedrich and Walter, enlisted as volunteers in the Great War. On April 23, 1918, Walter was wounded; and, five days later, following an operation, he died. Grief gripped the Bonhoeffer household, sending the bereaved mother, Paula, into a prolonged depression and leaving a profound mark on Dietrich.

Bonhoeffer the Student and Scholar

At age seventeen Bonhoeffer matriculated at Tübingen to study theology. There he concentrated especially on philosophy and textual criticism and earned a reputation as a brilliant, competitive, and independent soul possessed of sharp wit—poised to tease but also ready to make himself the object of his own pointed humor. He joined the Swabian fraternity Hedgehog, which later accepted the insertion of the Aryan Clause into its constitution, prompting Dietrich's withdrawal. During this time Dietrich apparently gave little attention to the fierce public debate raging in the pages of the widely circulated periodical journal Christliche Welt (The Christian World) between the Bonhoeffers’ famous neighbor Adolph von Harnack and Swiss theologian at Göttingen, Karl Barth. Within a year, Bonhoeffer's encounter with the theology of Barth would permanently set him on a course opposed to the liberalism of Harnack and toward a more dogmatic, more conservative, biblical trajectory in his thinking.

Rome

After his first term at Tübingen, Bonhoeffer sustained a serious injury while ice skating. Following his recovery, he spent the next term in Rome where, for the first time, Roman Catholicism made a deep and lasting impression on him. The antiquity and universality of the church impressed him as he explored Catholic Rome and Vatican City. A certain weightiness and sense of the permanence of the church extended in time and space, along with an exalted spiritual unity, seemed to inhabit the place. The Protestant church appeared narrow and provincial in comparison. The following excerpt from a sermon preached four years later to an expatriate German community in Barcelona captures something of the effect Rome had on the young Bonhoeffer:

There is a word that when a Catholic hears it kindles all his feelings of love and bliss; that stirs all the depths of his religious sensibility, from dread and awe of the Last Judgment to the sweetness of God's presence; and that certainly awakens in him the feeling of home; the feeling that only a child has in relation to its mother, made up of gratitude, reverence and devoted love; the feeling that overcomes one when, after a long absence, one returns to one's home, the home of one's childhood.

And there is a word that to Protestants has the sound of something infinitely commonplace, more or less indifferent and superfluous, that does not make their heart beat faster; something with which a sense of boredom is so often associated, or which at any rate does not lend wings to our religious feelings—and yet our fate is sealed if we are unable again to attach a new, or perhaps a very old meaning to it. Woe to us if that word does not become important to us soon again, does not become important in our lives.

Yes, the word to which I am referring is “Church,” the meaning of which we [Protestants] have forgotten and the nobility and greatness of which we propose to look at today.⁴

Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer's encounter with Catholicism did not strip him of his critical faculties. Amazingly, he gained an audience with the pope, who proved to be a keen disappointment. Moreover, Bonhoeffer engaged in spirited theological debate with a Catholic priest. Still, this brief stay in Rome stoked the fires of interest in things ecclesiastical, which would account for a good part of Bonhoeffer's enduring contribution to all believers longing for rich fellowship within the church.

Bonhoeffer and Barth

Bonhoeffer never willingly surrendered to strong personalities. The only mentors to whom he granted real authority over him were Professor Karl Barth, and Dr. Bell, the bishop of Chichester. His discovery of Barth took place between the summers of 1924 and 1925, after his trip to Rome but before he commenced work on his thesis. Prior to his move to Münster in October 1925, Barth had been lecturing at Göttingen where Bonhoeffer's cousin Hans-Christoph von Hase became so smitten with him that he transferred to the school of theology. A bitter debate between Barth and Harnack had been carried on in the periodical Christliche Welt in 1923. In the end Bonhoeffer would find himself increasingly alienated from the liberalism represented not only in his supervisory professor, Reinhold Seeberg, but also in his neighbor, Harnack.

Barth's 1919 theological commentary on Romans, the so-called bomb dropped into the playground of theologians, marked the beginning of a major attack upon Protestant liberalism and the attempt to recover Reformation theology for the modern world. While concern for the church captivated Bonhoeffer's attention, the Barthian revolution centered on the recovery of the revelation of God and the Bible. Nevertheless, certain insights found in Barth emerge again and again in the Bonhoeffer corpus. One was dogmatism, that is, the rejection of felt relevance as the starting point of theology. Bonhoeffer's embrace of strong Reformation doctrine of sin led to suspicion of essentially apologetic approaches taken by, for example, Rudolf Bultmann and eventually by Paul Tillich. The God of the Bible not only prescribes medicine for sin-sick souls and congregations but diagnoses as well. Another was the centrality of the Bible for the church as its guide and authority both for preaching and for congregational life.

Ministry

Bonhoeffer advanced along the path toward a teaching career with exceptional speed, and yet, increasingly, he questioned whether his true calling centered upon academic life. From very early on, Bonhoeffer harbored deep interest in active ministry. At the tender age of twenty-one, while under the extraordinary demands of his doctoral thesis, Bonhoeffer sought to satisfy the qualifications prerequisite to parish ministry. This process included not only theological examinations but also proof of practical ministry experience. Accordingly Bonhoeffer accepted responsibility for the children's Sunday school at Grunewald. Bonhoeffer invested himself completely in the lives of these children, entertaining them frequently at his home, organizing many extracurricular outings and Bible studies for them. Surprisingly, he became alarmed when the children became so quickly attached to him and the influence he had on them. Not unlike the experience of Karl Barth during his pastorate at Safenwil fourteen years earlier, Bonhoeffer felt keenly the responsibility borne by one received as a minister of the Word of God.

Periodically, for the rest of his life, Bonhoeffer underwent similar experiences. Often, when some recognition or success came to him, he found himself confronted with his black heart, the sin of pride he knew to be present just beneath the surface of consciousness, and he contemplated with horror the thought that others looked up to him. How like Luther! And how incompatible with the optimistic anthropology so prevalent among his teachers, with the notable exception of Barth. This disgust with himself that assaulted him throughout his life had much in common with the temptations (anfechtungen) suffered by Martin Luther. No doubt, such tangible, experiential acquaintance with one's sinful heart and mind fueled Bonhoeffer's lifelong clinging to salvation by grace alone.

In order to fulfill the two-year parish ministry requirement, Bonhoeffer made his way to Barcelona, Spain, to serve the expatriate German community there. Though the congregation consisted mainly of business people, Bonhoeffer's ministry also brought him into contact with, in his words, “the strangest people, with whom one would not normally have exchanged a single word: bums, vagabonds, criminals fleeing from justice, many foreign legionaries, lion-tamers and animal-trainers who have absconded from the Krone circus on its Spanish tour… . We are constantly arranging passages home for Germans, even though we know the situation is no better there.”⁵ Bonhoeffer claims not to have had a theological conversation for an entire year.

Here lies a key to Bonhoeffer's emerging ministerial identity; these plunges into active ministry were not viewed as distractions but as the true testing ground for whatever one thought one knew from books. For Bonhoeffer, theory must prove itself in practice. And yet such serious respect for lived-out Christianity never suggested an empty-headed ministerial ideal. After returning to Berlin to join the theological faculty there, Bonhoeffer continued to reflect on his future: “I feel that academic work will not hold me for long. But I do think that as thorough an academic grounding as possible is all-important.”⁶

In 1930 Bonhoeffer traveled to New York for a year as an exchange student. His experiences there left an indelible mark on him. Once again Bonhoeffer found himself pulled in two directions at once—toward academics and toward the worshipping congregation. Germans tended to patronize American seminaries because of their neglect of historical theology in favor of ethics. Classmates at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan found Bonhoeffer's reference to a passage on sin and forgiveness from Luther's Bondage of the Will funny. Students seemed wholly ignorant of the theology running from the apostle Paul through Luther, Kierkegaard, and Barth. Still, Bonhoeffer was favorably impressed with the this-worldly focus and particularly of the distinct brand of Christian pacifism and nonviolence he encountered.

As to concrete engagement with the church, Bonhoeffer found himself enthralled with the African-American congregations in Harlem and moved by the special struggle for racial equality he witnessed. Bonhoeffer left New York more politically alert and more interested in ecumenical concerns. He returned to a Germany just beginning to grapple with the landslide victory of the National Socialist Party in elections held during his absence. German politics would hold Bonhoeffer's attention for the rest of his days.

Between 1931 and 1936 Bonhoeffer served as a university lecturer at the University of Berlin. But his teaching duties accounted for only a small portion of his labor. Bonhoeffer threw himself into ecumenical activity, preaching, and various conference work with amazing zeal and abandon. Bonhoeffer's ecumenical interest was more an expression of loyalty to Christ and his followers above allegiance to Germany; it certainly did not arise from any latent doctrinal latitudinarianism or indifference.

Upon his return to Germany, Bonhoeffer finally initiated the first of many meetings with the most important theological teacher of his life, Karl Barth. After the first personal encounter in Bonn, Bonhoeffer wrote of his impressions to a Swiss friend

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