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When I first became acquainted with Dietrich Bonhoeffer back in the 1970’s at Bethel College (now Bethel University) in St. Paul, MN, I was both fascinated and confused about his involvement in the resistance movement in Nazi Germany since he made it clear earlier in his life that he was a pacifist.
I have learned since that there was no contradiction in Bonhoeffer, but rather development of his original thoughts on living for Jesus in an evil society. Bonhoeffer’s varied responses corresponded to the three possible responses of the church he outlined in his address, “The Church and the Jewish Question” in April of 1933.[1] In the early years, Bonhoeffer’s response resembled “something of a ‘pacifist.’” [2] But as the historical conditions changed, Bonhoeffer reacted accordingly.
For example, Bonhoeffer eventually was involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany. He was a civilian member of Abwehr[3] from 1938 until his arrest in 1943.[4] This was the German Intelligence Service. Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, a staff member of Abwehr, recruited him as a front for exemption from being drafted into the military.[5] This gave Bonhoeffer an appearance of loyalty to the Nazis.
Bonhoeffer’s involvement with a movement to smuggle Jews out of Germany again corresponded with his essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question”. In it, Bonhoeffer appealed to Galatians 6:10 as support to bandage the wounds of the Jewish people: “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” He argued that “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”[6]
There was a biblical mandate for Bonhoeffer to risk his own life to save others. This risk became more apparent as conditions worsened in Germany. Kuhns writes that the “need was sharper, more urgent.”[7]
A demonic government was dragging the German people into destruction and ripping open Europe at the same time. What the world needed most now was not peace, not a quieting of the havoc, nor even primarily an effort to rescue the victims of the havoc. “The third possibility,” Dietrich had written in 1932, “is not just to bandage victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.”
The historical moment made that third alternative for Bonhoeffer an imperative…In terms of the historical moment, then, Bonhoeffer’s transition to conspiracy against the government is not a total reorientation…What Bonhoeffer did when he became involved in the Abwehr circle makes sense in terms of what he always believed and hoped in. For he believed more deeply in relating to the present, in identifying the concrete needs of the moment, than in simple pacifism.[8]
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Bonhoeffer for the Twenty-First Century
February 3, 2006
by Robin W. Lovin
Foremost among the theological influences on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s generation was the development of the Confessing Church. German Protestant Christianity was not a particularly likely place for resistance to develop. There was a traditional Protestant deference to secular authority — the enthusiastic nationalism of the old Prussian “union of throne and altar” — along with the lack of a natural law understanding of the world that could provide a critique of tyranny in moral terms. Nevertheless, for Bonhoeffer and his contemporaries the church was the place where their resistance started. The key to their thinking was the idea of a church that would be faithful to the historic Reformation confessions and resist the incursions of Nazi organization and ideology. In 1934, a gathering of Protestant pastors, led primarily by Karl Barth, met in the German city of Barmen and announced that they were organizing themselves as a Confessing Church, outside the framework of the state churches Hitler was trying to control. For them, they declared, this was not a matter of creating a new church. They were the true church of the Reformation. Bonhoeffer was not present at the Barmen gathering, but he quickly became one of its younger leaders, and he spent most of the rest of the decade of the 1930s as director of a Confessing Church seminary, operating under increasing scrutiny and constraint by the Nazi authorities. It is to this period that we owe two of his most accessible and popular works, LIFE TOGETHER and PRAYERBOOK OF THE BIBLE. The Confessing Church maintained a courageous resistance to Hitler’s decree that every German institution had to reorganize itself in conformity with National Socialist policies. Simply by its continued presence, the church defied the ideology that every person and every institution exists to serve the nation at the command of the Fuehrer. “The Body of Christ takes up space on earth,” as Bonhoeffer put it in THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP. “That is a consequence of the Incarnation.”
Bonhoeffer remained a loyal pastor in the Confessing Church through the years leading up to the war and, indeed, through his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler and his arrest and imprisonment. But he was increasingly clear that the Confessing Church’s stance was not sufficient to answer all of the questions he was facing in his own life. He struggled with ideas of Christian pacifism and Gandhi’s nonviolence. He considered the possibility of exile, returning to his teaching career in the safety of an American seminary. In the end, as we know, he became a part of a conspiracy against Hitler at the highest levels of the German government, using his role as a civilian agent in military intelligence as a cover for ecumenical connections that allowed the conspirators to make tentative contacts about a peace settlement with the British government. |
In Bonhoeffer’s context, insisting that the church takes up space was a political statement, susceptible to interpretation along classical Lutheran lines in which the secular ruler is entitled to obedience in everything except matters of faith, which may be interpreted in such a way that they take up very little space, indeed. By 1938, most Confessing Church pastors had taken some form of loyalty oath to Hitler.
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