Sixty-five years ago this summer, on July 27, 1945, a remarkable
memorial service was held in one of London’s great churches, Holy
Trinity Brompton. It was in honor of a then obscure German pastor
and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His life’s story, as outlined
by Bishop Bell of Chichester in the sermon, was the absolute
antithesis of the populist slogan that had been on many British
lips during the war that had ended just a few weeks earlier: “The
only good German is a dead German.” For Bonhoeffer was not just a
good man. He was one of the moral and spiritual giants of the 20th
century.
Bonhoeffer’s historical reputation has been rising steadily. It
will be further enhanced by an excellent new biography (the first
in 40 years),
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy — A
Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich. The author is Eric
Metaxas, and the publisher Thomas Nelson.
This is a fast-paced portrait of a life lived courageously as
well as theologically. Although Bonhoeffer’s spiritual classics
such as The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and Letters
and Papers from Prison are given ample attention, it is the
power of the narrative material so well researched and presented by
Metaxas that makes this book a page turner for the general reader
as well as an essential resource for scholars.
Certain as Bonhoeffer was of his theology, he was sometimes
confused about his own identity. This complexity is movingly
captured in his poem “Who Am I?” written in his prison cell shortly
before his execution for his involvement in an unsuccessful plot
against Hitler. The last lines reflect both the
ambivalence and the authenticity of his journey:
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!
Bonhoeffer was never a “woebegone weakling.” Whenever
he came to a high hurdle he jumped it fearlessly. The outstanding
example of his moral courage came in 1933 when as a rising
27-year-old scholar he published an essay, “The Church and the
Jewish Question,” which challenged the German religious
establishment’s acquiescence in Hitler’s persecution of the
Jews.
At a time when most Catholic and Protestant churches were
dismissing their pastors and employees of Jewish blood, Bonhoeffer
not only denounced them for their cowardice, but also called for
outright opposition to a regime that was breaking the commandments
of Christianity. He argued that the churches of Germany must
support Hitler’s victims “even if they do not belong to the
Christian community.” For good measure he added that Christians
might be called upon not only “to bandage the victims under the
wheel” of oppression but “to put a spoke into the wheel
itself.”
Such opposition to the evil philosophy of Nazism set Bonhoeffer
on the path that would lead him to the gallows. But his audacity
preceded Hitler’s rise to the Reich chancellorship. A year before
the notorious “Aryan Paragraph” (the law banning anyone of Jewish
decent from state-funded employment) was enacted, Bonhoeffer was a
revolutionary young voice crying out in the wilderness of the
German church. When he preached to Berlin’s most important and
influential Protestant congregation on Reformation Sunday in 1932,
he told the congregants that they were a disgrace to the memory of
their church’s founder, Martin Luther.
When and where did this fire start in the precocious Pastor
Bonhoeffer? He came from a privileged background, and there were
few clues in his early years of traditional theological training at
Tubingen that he would become a challenger of the established
church’s stultifying hierarchy. This is where Metaxas’s biography
breaks new ground.
In a fascinating chapter, “Bonhoeffer in America,” Metaxas
tracks his subject’s journey through New York’s Union Theological
Seminary and various liberal churches such as Riverside and Park
Avenue Baptist. “There is no theology here” was the conclusion of
the 24-year-old German observer, as he wrote home complaining of
never having heard the gospel of Jesus preached in fashionable
Manhattan.
But then Bonhoeffer went to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in
Harlem, whose 14,000-strong congregation made it the largest
Protestant church in the United States of the 1930s. He was
inspired by the preaching of Dr. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. and by
the friendships he formed with his African American contemporaries
in the church. Of these the most important was a fellow Union
student, Frank Fisher, who traveled to Washington, D.C., and other
cities with Bonhoeffer, introducing his German friend to “Negro
spirituals” and “Negro literature.”
There is little doubt that Bonhoeffer’s American experiences,
especially the appalling racial prejudice he encountered, laid the
foundation for what Metaxas calls “The Great Change” in his
subject’s character. The aloof, patrician intellectual who had
arrived in New York departed a committed churchgoing Christian on
fire with the gospel and despising what he called the “religionless
Christianity” of the German church. Metaxas speculates that
Bonhoeffer was “born again” in his Harlem period. The book’s new
material suggests that a major personal and spiritual
transformation took place as a result of his attendance at the
Abyssinian church. Without that transformation it is unlikely that
Bonhoeffer’s most influential theological ideas on “cheap grace”
would have been formed.
One of the most poignant sentences ever written by Bonhoeffer
was “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” For him
this was no abstract theological metaphor. It summed up the outcome
of the sacrificial action Bonhoeffer took to join a group of
conspirators, led by Admiral Canaris, who began plotting to kill
Hitler in 1942.
Metaxas provides a fascinating description of the mounting
pressures on Bonhoeffer and his deepening Christ-centered
commitment during the last three years of his life. Ambivalence and
deception were needed for a pastor of the Confessing Church who was
covertly supporting the assassination of the head of state. But
Bonhoeffer was too fearless to cover his tracks. So eventually he
was arrested and after a painful prison journey (which produced
some of his finest writing), he was executed at Flossenburg
concentration camp in April 1945, just one month before the war
ended.
Metaxas concludes his powerful account of this martyrdom with
the words of the camp doctor who was moved by the spiritual courage
of the unidentified figure he watched going to the scaffold: “At
the place of execution he [Bonhoeffer] again said a short prayer
and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed.
His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost 50 years that I
worked as a doctor I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely
submissive to the will of God.”
