Sixty-five years ago today (April 9, 1945), German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hung in the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp for his participation in an assassination plot against Hitler. With this anniversary in mind today, Thomas Nelson Publishers released the first new biography of Bonhoeffer in forty years — Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas.
(((If you missed it, click here for my earlier post/pics on my recent visit to the Bonhoeffer home in Berlin.)))
Fox News did a story today on this newest Bonhoeffer book:
“There were many German churchgoers, whether they were Christians or not I don’t know, but they went to church and somehow they made peace with the Nazis,” Metaxas says. “They thought there was nothing wrong. Bonhoeffer had such a devoted faith he knew without any question that the Nazis were anti-Christian and they were evil, and if he didn’t stand against them he would have to answer to God.” Bonhoeffer believed he was called by God to help those who wanted to assassinate Hitler. “Bonhoeffer was not a pacifist,” Metaxas says. “And that will be news to a lot of people who think of Bonhoeffer as their hero, as some kind of pacifist.” He was willing to be involved in a plot to kill Hitler. “He wasn’t helpful as a gunman; he was helpful with contacts all around Europe,” Metaxas says. “He had the ability because he had ecumenical church contacts to work as a double agent, and that is what he was, he was a double agent.”
Read that first sentence again, the part about church-going “Christians” making peace with evil. Bonhoeffer was a prophetic voice to a church paralyzed by false grace, cheap grace. Metaxas writes:
What was left in its wake was the murder of 6 million Jews and a legacy that has tarnished the Christian faith in Europe. But the legacy that Bonhoeffer leaves future generations is of the untold dangers of idolizing politicians as messianic figures. Not just in the 1930s and ’40s, but today as well. “It’s a deep temptation within us,” says Metaxas. “We need to guard against it and we need to know that it can lead to our ruin. Germany was led over the cliff, and there were many good people who were totally deluded.” Bonhoeffer, says Metaxas, was a prophet. He was a voice crying in the wilderness. He was God’s voice at a time when almost no one was speaking out against the evil of the Nazis.
Good church-going people in Germany were deluded and led over a cliff,,,, by four hundred years of a Lutheran theology of non-engagement with society. As I say in my earlier post:
Bonhoeffer criticized Luther for two things; 1) focusing the Reformation only on the church (whereas Zwingli sought to influence – salt and light – all of society). Bonhoeffer believed Luther’s views on this set the stage for the German Church of the 1930’s to stay out of Hitler’s business. In the 1000+ plus pages of Reformation history I’ve read this month, I’ve had the sense that had Zwingli been in Germany and not in Switzerland, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. Bonhoeffer also was one of the earliest voices in the German Lutheran Church to renounce 2) the anti-Semitism and treatment of the Jews.
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April 9, 2010 at 8:19 pm
And you thought I was a politically engaged pastor
[...] Sixty-five years ago today (April 9, 1945), German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hung in the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp… (read full post here.) [...]
April 9, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Bob Ellis
I’ve read a fair amount about Bonhoeffer, and he’s a real hero–of the faith, and anywhere else in society.
His story has some terribly important lessons for our society today. Unfortunately, few in secular society will probably ever grasp them, and precious few within the Church.
So much of the Church as a whole has made peace with evil, has adopted a policy of appeasement, hoping evil is the alligator that will eat them last. So many more have become sympathizers and decided to embrace “just a little evil” so they can fit in.
Men like Bonhoeffer put us all to shame. He was a man who was willing to not only speak his faith (as dangerous as that was), but was willing to put legs on it…and get his hands dirty doing it–real dirty. And it cost him his life.
If I’m ever in a situation similar to Bonhoeffer’s, I pray to God I can be that faithful.
Thanks for sharing this.
April 12, 2010 at 12:18 am
Stace Nelson
Bob, very well said. Too many see the role of the church as to change with the times and to accept all that society offers as progress… Too many reasons to list why our culture seems to evolve downward instead of towards higher purposes. God bless…
April 10, 2010 at 8:28 am
CA Heidelberger
Bob, drop your personal exceptionalism. I’m an uber-secularist who deeply respects Bonhoeffer as an ignored hero of the 20th century whose story is at least as educationally valuable as Gandhi’s or King’s.
Also worth noting: Luther was no deluded fool or wimp. He triggered the Reformation that made both your and Steve’s churches (not to mention my wife’s) possible under a truly repressive political regime. He labored under threats of death from church and secular leaders. The suggestion that Luther somehow set the stage for the Holocaust is shaky. Bring him forward four centuries, show him what Hitler was doing, and he may well have come to the same conclusions at Bonhoeffer.
Also, if Metaxas read so much, he would know Bonhoeffer was a pacifist. he came very reluctantly to his decision to participate in the assassination plot. He recognized Hitler was wrong right away, but he wrestled with whether violence was the appropriate response for over a decade, and he didn’t throw in with those conspirators until well into the war.
My Lutheran friends appreciate your advocacy of the original Protestant faith that Bonhoeffer fought for. And we all hope you’ll apply Fox News’s text about idolizing political figures equally to President Obama and TV star Palin.
April 10, 2010 at 9:40 am
Steve
Cory, you and Bob are really going at it these days.
You are right in that Bonhoeffer spent the bulk of his professing days holding up non-violence, particularly, as I detail in my forthcoming Sermon on the Mount book, the turn the other cheek, loving our enemies types of texts we see in the Sermon on the Mount. But, at the end of the day, he did not see those passages as teaching pacifism. He saw the greater evil was to sit silently by while evil prevailed.
It would be fascinating to see what Luther would be like if moved four centuries forward into the 1930′s and 40′s. I suspect you are correct as, in his Larger catechism on Thou Shalt Not Murder, he wrote: “…Under this commandment not only he is guilty who does evil to his neighbor, but he also who can do him good, prevent, resist evil, defend and save him, so that no bodily harm or hurt happen to him, and yet does not do it.” But even so, he rebuked my guy Zwingli (Swiss Reformer) for wanting to take the reformation out into society – he was adamant to reform the church and not mix the two spheres.
In any case, I will say with great certainty that he’d have a major issue with many who congregate under the banner of his name today.
If not 400 years of Lutheran theologies of non-engagement and anti-semitism, what else explains a State Church that sat quiet? Don’t tell me it was fear of death. 2000 years of church history make clear that persecution only emboldens the church. Only compromised theologies result in compliance with evil. Bonhoeffer rebuked the Lutheran church and said the church is not just to tend the victims run over by the wheel but the church is to jam a spoke in the wheel. That was not some sort of late-in-the-war compromise of ideals for him.
In any case, know that I do have high regard for Luther and all the reforming tenets which he boldly brought forth in his generation. On my sabbatical last summer (seven weeks of which were in Europe) I dove again, and at a deeper level, into the depths of the Reformation because I believe God is again going to change the face and expression of Christianity in one generation. He did it through Luther 400 years ago. However, the Reformation didn’t go far enough. God is underscoring today what it means that the leaven of the Kingdom must permeate the whole loaf (society).
And thanks for your concern, as I write and speak I’ll do my best to keep in check any messianic overtones with regard to Sarah Palin.
April 11, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Steve
A couple additional posts around the region now popping up in response to this one.
http://madvilletimes.blogspot.com/2010/04/dietrich-bonhoeffers-lessons-twisted-by.html ((Cory, I don’t get pingbacks from your blog??))
Then this from Professor Blanchard up at Northern State…
http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com/south_dakota_politics/2010/04/dietrich-bonhoeffer-pacifism-evil.html
Good to see so much wresting with Bonhoeffer this weekend. Thanks for the interest!
April 11, 2010 at 7:20 pm
caheidelberger
[No pingbacks? Don't worry, it's nothing personal; I have them disabled so spam doesn't creep in. I've got some French pirates doing translations. Sacré bleu!]
You certainly won’t catch me defending anti-Semitism in any church in any historical period. And I’ll check with my in-house seminarian on Luther’s beef with Zwingli and resistance to broadening the Reformation from church to society. We’ll consider whether 400 years of Zwinglian theology would have produced a more activist church ready to take a more active stand against the Nazis (though my wife generally disdains my passion for such alternative history questions).
I recognize your high regard for Bonhoeffer in what I read in your post from last summer about visiting the Bonhoeffer home. Quite a trip! I take you at your word on Luther as well.
“He saw the greater evil was to sit silently by while evil prevailed.” Again, important to remind people that Bonhoeffer never sat silently by. Bonhoeffer publicly denounced Hitler and the Führer cult from day one (o.k., maybe it was day two). He exhausted perhaps every other avenue of non-violent resistance before reaching the conclusion that the situation was so dire as to warrant compromising his pacifism. I think we can still offer a pretty robust resistance to evil via Bonhoeffer’s/Luther’s/Jesus’s ethics without jumping to the conclusion that we ought to take up the sword.
I wonder: can we say that mankind’s problem is not too much pacifism, but too much of pacifism’s opposite? Can we from that conclude that it is thus more important for us to emphasize the example of Bonhoeffer’s long-standing pacifism than the example of that final exception?
April 12, 2010 at 12:48 am
Stace Nelson
The irony of persons claiming to be good Christians all the while adhering to anti-Semitic ideas has never ceased to amaze me.
I would argue that apathy is more a problem in America then aggression. I do not believe that the Good Lord intended us to adhere to abject pacifism. I subscribe to “who can do him good, prevent, resist evil, defend and save him, so that no bodily harm or hurt happen to him” belief that God intended us to be a good shepherd to our fellow man.
Minimizing one aspect of Bonhoeffer’s life over the other is a disservice to his beliefs and to those that would learn from his life’s example.
April 11, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Steve
Cory – A hearty yes to your last paragraph! Here’s a short Zwingli post/pic from me if you are interested – http://stevehickey.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/i-cant-escape-it-its-like-it-finds-me/
And, here’s a post for your seminarian wife and you to debate – I think you’ll both enjoy it… http://stevehickey.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/the-hunt-for-karl-barths-grave/ Here’s one my kids liked… http://stevehickey.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/creepy-pics-of-luther-in-death/ Here’s another… http://stevehickey.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/luthers-inkwell-spiritual-warfare-on-wait-mountain/
There are a few other Luther posts with pics from last summer. Maybe you aren’t interested in these but this has caused me to review them and they are still interesting to me. And, I’m still getting gobs of hits on all of these and people write and tell me they are interesting.
Here a post on a guy who you would very much like and the topic is non-violence – with two hands holding a candle, you can’t pick up a stone. http://stevehickey.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/christian-furher-prayer-and-the-fall-of-berlin-wall/ Someday I may get him here.
I’m enjoying following all the dialog on Brother Dietrich.
PS- Luther’s main beef with Zwingli was over the meaning of the word “is” in Jesus statement… “this IS my body which is broken for you.” Because Zwingli held a slightly different view on this than Luther, Luther wouldn’t shake hands with him or consider him a fellow Christian. It grieved Zwingli.
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