It is obvious from subsequent events that these brave and brilliant spirits did not teach Hitler to fear theology. Nor do they seem to have rescued the honor of the church, which, in popular memory, is at least as roundly blamed as any other institution for the disaster of Fascism. The disappearance of religion in Europe, which Bonhoeffer foresaw, is in fact far advanced — despite him, and, since he has been sentimentalized as a prophet, in some part because of him. The heresies he and Barth denounced now flourish independently of even the culture and forms of Christianity, beyond any criticism they might have implied. And we have not learned the heroic art of forgiveness, which may have been the one thing needful.
It seems to me that the harshest irony of Bonhoeffer’s life and death lies in the use made of him by many who have claimed his influence. Looked at in the great light of his theology, which is an ethics from beginning to end, he is always, and first of all, a man devoted to the church, and to religious arts, forms, and occasions, especially those associated with Lutheran tradition. There can be no doubt that his clarity of purpose, his steadfastness, his serenity, were owed to his very devout habits of mind, and of life as well. Indeed, it is precisely in these habits that his mind and life are least to be distinguished from one another. He prayed and meditated and read and studied Scripture hours every day, looked forward joyfully to the events of the liturgical year, and, in prison, joyfully remembered them. He preached a sermon on the day he died.
Yet because he posed certain thoughts to his friend Eberhard Bethge about the relationship of sacred and secular, the actual example of his life is lost to an interpretation that devalues “religion” in the sense of religious art, discipline, and tradition, and the very comforts and resources of piety to which Bonhoeffer in his life and writing never ceased to bear witness. In a letter from prison in which he insists “my suspicion and horror of religiosity are greater than ever,” he says also, “I have found great help in Luther’s advice that we should start our morning and evening prayers by making the sign of the cross.” The contradiction is not at all intractable. Commenting on his aversion to religiosity he remarks, “I often think of how the Israelites never uttered the name of God.” Religiosity is a transgression against God’s otherness.
“Religion,” in the invidious sense common to Barth and Bonhoeffer, exists when, in Barth’s words, “the divine reality offered and manifested to us in revelation is replaced by a concept of God arbitrarily and wilfully evolved by man.” For Barth, though perhaps not for Bonhoeffer, falseness of some kind is a universal phenomenon of religious consciousness. In any case, the concept is not far from ideas such as hypocrisy or Phariseeism. It is not difficult to understand why this stinging use of the word “religious” would seem appropriate when most of the religious leaders of Germany were eager to embrace National Socialism. But using the word in this sense is a great source of difficulty and confusion, for example in the understanding of Bonhoeffer’s famous phrase “religionless Christianity.”
The evolution of thinking associated with his name makes Bonhoeffer himself seem an archaic figure, enthralled by that very piety we in his “world come of age” have learned to find strange and suspect. To the extent that his inspired obedience to Christ, that is, his humane devotion to justice in this world, drew from his piety, it is a resource lost to many who might earnestly hope to be like him. And yet, while the abrupt ferocity of the modern world has, for now, been epitomized in Nazi Germany, it certainly was not exhausted in it. If being modern means having the understanding and will to oppose the passions of collective life that can at any time emerge to disgrace us and, now, even to destroy us, then one great type of modern man is surely Dietrich Bonhoeffer — more particularly, Pastor Bonhoeffer in his pulpit, Pastor Bonhoeffer at his prayers.
While he never hesitated in his opposition to the National Socialist and anti-Semitic influences in the official churches, at times Bonhoeffer seems to have been uncertain how to respond to them. In April of 1933, he published an article titled “The Church and the Jewish Question” in which he said, “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” This might mean “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. Such action would be direct political action.” In June of 1933, Karl Barth attacked Nazism in a stinging public address, and sent Hitler a manifesto of protest. Bonhoeffer, with Pastor Martin Niemöller, a martyr in his own right, organized the Pastors’ Emergency League to send uncorrupted ministers to serve in parishes whose ministers were influenced by Nazism. About two thousand pastors associated themselves with these initial acts of resistance. If these tempests among the churchmen seem marginal to the events of the time, it should be remembered how alone they were. Bonhoeffer’s article was the first such defense of the Jewish people.
In October of 1933, Bonhoeffer went to England, where he had arranged to serve as pastor to two German congregations. He did not consult with Barth until he had arrived in London, though it had taken him some time to make the arrangements to leave Germany. When he did write to Barth, he very respectfully invited a rebuke, and he got one. Barth told him to return on the next ship, or the one after it. But Bonhoeffer stayed in England for two years. While he was there he made arrangements to go to India to be with Gandhi.
Only by the standards of his subsequent life do these choices seem doubtful. During his time in England he worked to establish support for the religious resistance in Germany, so he had not abandoned his homeland. And it is consistent with the openness of his views that he considered Gandhi’s political actions Christ-like and wished to learn from him. He was a pacifist. He was newly ordained into a tradition he loved deeply and could hardly have wished to attack. His leaving Germany might also be partly explained by church treatment of the Bethel Confession, which he wrote with Martin Niemöller, and which declared, “It is the task of Christians who come from the Gentile world to expose themselves to persecution rather than to surrender, willingly or unwillingly, even in one single respect, their kinship with Jewish Christians in the Church, founded on Word and Sacrament.” The paper had been watered down before it was circulated and signed by the dissenting pastors. He might reasonably have questioned the prospects of the religious resistance in Germany. And in fact, if it were not for Bonhoeffer, his writing, and especially his death, few would remember there had ever been any such resistance.
In 1935, the Confessing Church was founded, the church of the Protestant dissenters. Seminaries were established, and Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to head one of them. Later in the same year, Heinrich Himmler decreed that the church and its seminaries were both invalid and that those involved with them were liable to punishment. Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer’s seminary, was closed by the Gestapo in September 1937. Twenty-seven former students were arrested. In February of 1938, Bonhoeffer initiated contact with figures in the political resistance to Hitler.
Through all this, Bonhoeffer wrote theology — sermons, lectures, circular letters, and books. In a very great degree his writing is characterized by beautiful iterations of doctrine, a sort of visionary orthodoxy: “History lives between promise and fulfillment. It carries the promise within itself, to become full of God, the womb of the birth of God.” To understand his method, one must remember his circumstances. He is asserting the claims of Christ in all their radicalism in order to encourage and reassure those drawn to what became the Confessing Church. At the same time, he is chastising those who use Christianity as an escape from the evils of the world and from the duties those evils imply, and he is chastising those who have accommodated their religion to the prevailing culture so thoroughly as to have made the prevailing culture their religion. His object is to make core beliefs immediate and compelling, to forbid the evasions of transcendence and of acculturation. He is using the scandal of the cross to discover the remnant church among the multitudes of the religious.