Review: Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context

AUTHOR: ROBERT D. CORNWALL, WORD&WAY

BONHOEFFER’S RELIGIONLESS CHRISTIANITY IN ITS CHRISTOLOGICAL CONTEXT. By Peter Hooton. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic (Rowman & Littlefield), 2022. 211 Pages.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer lives on as a martyr. His death came in April 1945 at the hands of the Nazis as World War II was nearing its close. He was only thirty-nine at the time of his death by hanging. His story has been told by several biographers, and his works have been made available for all to read in English translation. Despite his relative youth, he left behind a massive amount of material, both published and unpublished. As a result, Bonhoeffer has proven to be one of the most influential theologians of the past century and a half. This is true even though his theological understandings never reached a point of completion. Perhaps it’s that incompleteness that’s lent itself to the diversity of interpretations of work over the years, as well as its use by people from across the religious and even political spectrums. For example, Conservative evangelicals, some of whom are Christian Nationalists, have appealed to his efforts to resist the Nazis as fodder for their acts of resistance, especially when it comes to attempts to outlaw/discourage abortion. At the other end of the theological spectrum, in the 1960s the “Death of God” theologians found his prison letters and essays that hinted at a world without God attractive. Then there are the pacifists who have made use of his reflections on nonviolence. Some have simply tried to turn him into a conservative American evangelical (ala Eric Metaxas).

Robert D. Cornwall

Over the years my theology and practice have been deeply influenced by Bonhoeffer’s writings. I began reading his works (Cost of Discipleship) in college and continued to read them through seminary (I took Lewis Smedes’s “Ethics of Bonhoeffer” course) and beyond. I’ve read most of the biographies and several more specialized studies. I purchased the full set of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works and keep them close at hand so I can dip into them when needed, especially in sermon preparation (the scripture index in the index volume is very helpful!). I’ve always welcomed studies of his life and works that illuminate rather than obfuscate. That is true of two recent biographies by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and Charles Marsh, which are especially good. Added to these studies is Peter Hooton’s Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context. Hooton’s book is a specialized monograph, that focuses on one dimension of Bonhoeffer’s theological explorations. While it’s written for a scholarly audience, I found it to be very accessible.

As for the author of this book, Peter Hooton is involved in the area of public theology at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture on the Canberra campus of Charles Sturt University. Before this, he was a career diplomat working in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the South Pacific. He holds a Ph.D. from Charles Sturt University and is part of the university’s “Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre.”

Hooton’s book appears to be based on his Ph.D. dissertation at CSU. In it, he focuses on Bonhoeffer’s musings about religionless Christianity. This view of Christianity is especially present in Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, as well as his Ethics. These works, all of which are to some degree incomplete, appeared at the end of his life. They suggest themes and possibilities of further exploration should he have survived the war. It was especially in his letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, that an imprisoned Bonhoeffer delved into what the possibility of a religionless Christianity. Though when he wrote of a religionless Christianity, he wasn’t embracing atheism. Rather, he was envisioning what a non-institutionalized Christianity might look like. He was not, of course, alone in this, for Karl Barth was writing about Christianity apart from religion, which Barth believed was a human venture. For Bonhoeffer, this religionless Christianity would speak to a world come of age, that is a world that in a post-war world would have lost its innocence and naivete. Bonhoeffer’s vision of such a Christianity come of age, as the book’s title suggests, was deeply rooted in Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric vision.

Hooton points out that Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion was linked to Barth’s. His older contemporary suggested that religion is a human act of seeking God, which is a futile effort as God is wholly other. However, God is encountered as an act of Grace as God reaches out to humanity. Early in Bonhoeffer’s theological career, he placed greater weight on the church as the means of encountering God. We see this in works such as Sanctorum Communio, his initial doctoral dissertation. However, by the 1940s, he was contemplating what theology might look like in this new world order outside the realm of the church. Like Barth, Bonhoeffer never suggested that anyone should separate themselves from the church. However, he began to believe that the church isn’t the cure for what ails the world. While he resonated with Barth’s critique of religion, Bonhoeffer didn’t completely embrace Barth’s view. Bonhoeffer called Barth’s views a “positivism of revelation.” Nevertheless, he agreed with the larger critique of religion, and that critique was Christological in nature.

As I’ve noted Bonhoeffer’s vision was deeply Christological. For Bonhoeffer, God encounters us in Christ. While he didn’t reject his Lutheran theological foundations, he tended not to focus on the Trinity. Rather, in his view, the God who is for us will be encountered in Christ. Thus, his primary question concerned who Jesus is for us today. That leads to a question of who we are in relation to others. Interestingly he finds an anchor for his worldly Christianity in his reading of the Old Testament, which became increasingly this-world in orientation. As Hooton notes, Bonhoeffer’s theology was becoming progressively more inclusive as time passed. This more inclusive vision is first seen in his posthumously published Ethics. In this work, we see a movement in his thinking a move away from the powerful God of religion to a God of weakness who is revealed in Christ on the cross.

According to Hooton, as Bonhoeffer moves further into this nonreligious vision that is centered in Christ, he also begins to envision a nonreligious interpretation of the Bible. Bonhoeffer doesn’t abandon traditional biblical/theological terms like cross, sin, and grace, but he begins to look for other terms that are more expressive of the concerns of this new non-religious age. It’s not so much the words themselves as it is the way these concepts are understood. One of the concepts that he seeks to re-envision is repentance, which he speaks of in terms of ultimate honesty. For Bonhoeffer, “ultimate honesty” is ultimately a change of perspective about life and God, such that we join Jesus in being for others.

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A Bonhoeffer Moment finale: ‘What Christianity really is’

OPINION BILL LEONARD, SENIOR COLUMNIST 

A research paper recently submitted in my Introduction to Christian History course at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University, begins with these words:

The words took my breath away, not only because of their insightful assessment of Christianity past and present, but also because they were written by an individual pursuing a call to Christian ministry, eyes wide open about the American ecclesiastical future. No doubt a portent of Bonhoeffer moments yet to come.

If you’re counting, this is the sixth and final installment in a series focused on certain “Bonhoeffer moments,” a demand for gospel courage and action arising amid our collective national angst, generated by a life-destroying pandemic, long-festering, near irreconcilable, religio-cultural, political, and racial fissures exacerbated by a presidential election, the ticking timebomb of climate chaos, and a discordant social media ethos so pervasive and siloed as to make truth increasingly elusive.

I’ve long believed that Christians, especially now in the land of the free and the home of ever-increasing death threats, face moments when the gospel of Jesus asks more than we could have anticipated when God’s good grace initially overtook us, enacted in infant baptism and confirmation, or when we made a “public profession of faith,” wading into cold running rivers or heated fiberglass baptistries to hear the name of God spoken over us.

No, the USA is not National Socialist Germany in 1943 when Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and ultimately executed for his anti-Nazi dissent. But neither was Germany in 1935 when Bonhoeffer became director of the underground training-school-cum-seminary in Finkenwalde, Germany, initiating his original Bonhoeffer moments. Some 85 years later, the words of that Wake Forest seminarian sent me running to Letters and Papers from Prison, and this 1943 missive from Bonhoeffer to his friend Eberhard Bethge:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience — and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”

Phrases like “religionless time,” or “religionless Christianity” describe some of Bonhoeffer’s most intriguing and controversial theology, ideas later coopted by certain Death of God theologians, or various conservative Christians who denounced it as a sellout to secularism. More probably, it was Bonhoeffer’s assertion that the devastation of World War II and the capitulation of the Nazi-enabling German Evangelical Church had undermined the gospel so blatantly by its faulty witness that a “religionless Christianity” was all that remained.

For Bonhoeffer, such power-oriented connivance between church and state, historically initiated by the Roman emperor Constantine in 313, set in motion an unholy alliance that transformed Christianity from “the belief of the oppressed to a tool to oppress,” as the Wake Forest student described it. It sold its soul for a mess of state-sanctified pottage, forgetting or ignoring “who Christ really is.”

As 2020 turns to 2021, and before Christians in America start blaming secularism for the burgeoning religious disengagement of the so-called “nones,” we’d best ask how our religio-political alliances have stoked a “religionless Christianity” of persons claiming to be “spiritual but not religious,” many deserting our churches like the plague.

In a recent Washington Post essay, columnist Michael Gerson echoes this concern, writing: “When prominent Christians affirm absurd political lies with religious fervor, nonbelievers have every reason to think: ‘Maybe Christians are prone to swallowing absurd religious lies as well. Maybe they are simply credulous about everything.’”

On our way to and through 2021 and beyond, dare we confront Bonhoeffer’s question for ourselves. Do we know “what Christianity really is?” It’s an interrogative worth confronting even — no, especially — if we think we already know the answer.

We might ask that question within the broader American culture. Are we defining and living out Christianity in ways that lead individuals to distance themselves from Christian churches?

We might ask it in our churches. Have we supposed that those who attend our various congregations know “what Christianity really is?” How can we be so sure, particularly in COVID America when Christian community is essentially virtual?

Whatever else, we must ask it of ourselves. In, or for, our own lives, “what is Christianity really?” Where will our renewed response to that question take us in the days and years ahead? Is our initial entry into Christian faith a simple transaction that settles everything in this world and the next, no muss, no fuss, or is that only a beginning?

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Theological Resistance: Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By Marcia Pally January 8, 2021

Monument to the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hamburg, Germany (mauritius images GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo)

Reading the work of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth often feels like intellectual sparring. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, best known in the United States for his participation in the plot to assassinate Hitler, had a very different authorial voice; even at its most unflinchingly prophetic, his work rarely feels as confrontational. Wolf Krötke, a close reader of both theologians, is able to hone in on the brilliant essentials of their work and to prod the reader to reexamine her thoughts about the relationship between us and God in light of their claims—to ask again and again: Is this what I believe? 

Krötke, a pastor in Communist East Germany, shares a foundational intention with his subjects, who were also pastors: to speak intelligently and honestly to the way both scholars and non-scholars think about God. Krötke’s description of his own reliance on Barth and Bonhoeffer to build a “theological resistance” when political resistance was largely futile elegantly echoes his investigations into their troubled efforts to do the same during the rise of fascism. Beginning in 1934, with the Barmen Declaration’s theological argument against the totalizing state, Barth, like Bonhoeffer, came to the conclusion that violent political resistance was sometimes necessary. For his own part, Krötke is unsure about the church’s “appropriation of the violent instruments of our sinful era. War, even a so-called just war…offers no general paradigm for Christian resistance to inhumanity, racism, and genocide.”

Krötke lays out the grand structure of Barth’s thought, from his early work on Paul in Epistle to the Romans (1919) through the thirteen volumes of Church Dogmatics (1932–1967). “Barth liked to say,” Krötke notes, “that the church and theology have the task ‘to begin anew at the beginning’ ‘every hour.’” This is certainly true of Barth’s work: you can’t grasp any point without “beginning anew” by retracing it to its premises.

In Krötke’s account, the main girders of Barth’s thought are these: God is, from the beginning, even before creation, “the God who encounters us in Jesus Christ, and is understood in terms of the history of God’s grace with humanity.” This encounter and its manifestations among us are the “history of a partnership in which the God who is friendly to humans comes among us and makes us capable of being his free partners and of leading lives that deserve to be called truly human.” Finally, “because our fundamental orientation is relationship to God, we realize our freedom most fully by corresponding to the call of God.”

Krötke cites critics who think Barth’s view affords too little space and agency to humanity. Yet the encounter with a God who elected to grace us with friendship remains Barth’s starting point. All roads begin there. Readers must decide for themselves whether this sets God in the thick of human living, as Barth believed, or whether, as his critics say, Barth’s account of our encounter with God is too uniform—too dependent on German idealist notions of Spirit working through history, and tone-deaf to the particulars of any real person’s relationship to God. Is it a “take it or leave it” doctrine as Bonhoeffer described it? Or does it allow one to feel embraced in partnership with God?

Having established Barth’s fundamental theological outlook, Krötke goes on to explain Barth’s ideas about the nature of sin, the relationship between Christianity and other faiths (including atheism and the covenant with Israel), the importance of our flawed efforts at reconciliation (with God and other people), the role of pastoral care in enabling encounter with God (and the role of exegesis in understanding it), and, most importantly, the nature of the divine-human “partnership” granted by grace—what Barth called “the sum of the Gospel.” 

Krötke begins his section on Bonhoeffer by noting that he, too, anchored his work in the encounter between the human person and God. “Faith is God’s gift,” Krötke explains, “whereas religion is always a relationship to God shaped by humans.” Bonhoeffer’s realism can help us see the manifold relationships among people, God, faith, and religious institutions. In this he differs from Barth, who held that all people are “fated” to have religion. This idea of “Fatedness,” Bonhoeffer believed, denies the freedom through which people come to God. In Krötke’s fine summation, “Humans as distinguished from their religion are God’s beloved creatures whose freedom for encountering God contains far more possibilities than any particular form of religious behavior.” 

Bonhoeffer held to the Augustinian idea that, in the encounter with God, we discover new possibilities of experience we could not otherwise have imagined. And who is this God? Not a deus ex machina who saves us in time of need, and not only the weak and crucified Jesus, but the God discarded from modern life: “God is for the world only by stepping back from it and in this way giving it time and opportunity to be itself.” Bonhoeffer wrote of the “madness” of the invisible God, yet “God’s mystery sets humans free to allow God to come to them.” God is encountered in prayer and meditation on Scripture, and Krötke offers an eloquent chapter-length analysis of Bonhoeffer’s moving Prayerbook of the Bible: Introduction to the Psalms. The potency of this God, close by when we can do nothing, became more important as the efforts to stop Hitler failed and Bonhoeffer, condemned to prison, could do nothing more. “Sharing” in this God’s suffering in a godless world is a source of guidance and consolation. It is how we identify “ourselves generously and selflessly with the whole community and the suffering of our fellow human beings.”

Krötke’s discussion of these ideas prods the reader into a dialogue with Bonhoeffer on the role of divine and human suffering, God’s mystery and invisibility, and Jesus’s visibility (“Bonhoeffer’s God is the God who becomes nothing other than human”). While the German Christians who followed Hitler believed God manifested himself in German history, Bonhoeffer held that God manifests himself only in and through Jesus Christ. Yet Krötke also remarks on Bonhoeffer’s “openness to other religions,” which “like his understanding of religionlessness, arises from his faith in God in Christ.” Our many religions and varieties of faith are part of human living, where God meets us. 

Krötke’s penultimate chapter on Bonhoeffer explores his political work, the “first concentrated effort in the German theological world…to frame the question of state order in terms of Christology.” Bonhoeffer held that the Incarnation and Resurrection do not destroy the world but rather affirm it. Thus, Christ’s Kingdom “is the foundation of the [worldly] state too, which wards off the power of death, preserves the ‘order of the community, marriage, family, and nation [Volk]’ against the isolated individual, and restrains the thirst of selfishness.” In Bonhoeffer’s view, as in Luther’s, there is no right to revolution. Krötke explains the nature of the divine-human “partnership” granted by grace—what Barth called “the sum of the Gospel.”

But this doesn’t mean the state has carte blanche; on the contrary, the state is obligated to further the other orders of society—church, family, the economic sphere, “culture, scholarship, and art.” And the church must seek to limit state power, which, in its use of sanctions and force, distinguishes itself from Christ’s kingdom of love. 

As the Third Reich maintained a minimum of social order, Bonhoeffer hesitated to demand that the church identify it as an aberration that “comes forth as ‘the beast from the abyss’” in denial of Christ. But Bonhoeffer did believe that individual Christians could find that Nazism had abandoned the obligation to work with—and be limited by—other orders of society, placing itself above them as a kind of an idol. In his 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “the state is to create ‘law and order’ for all its ‘subjects.’ The state therefore illegitimately constricts its office when it refuses order and justice to a particular group of people—in other words, the Jews…. The church must stand up without exception for all ‘victims of any societal order’ and first and foremost the Jews.” 

Because of the German state’s refusal of justice to the Jews, Bonhoeffer found himself in “an extraordinary situation”…

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Prison, Solitary Confinement, Hermitage, and Social Distancing

BY JAMES F. MCGRATH

People in religious traditions with major holidays in April this year are experiencing disruption. To some it seems surreal, but to others (as I’ll explain more about below) it may seem eerily familiar. While some clergy contemplate when and whether to put themselves in harm’s way to comfort those who are suffering and dying, other clergy have shown themselves willing to put others in harm’s way in order to ensure that the weekly offering is not impacted too detrimentally, and/or to depict themselves in a self-aggrandizing manner as culture warriors persecuted for their faith. Some politicians have done likewise.

As someone who has studied and/or been connected in some way with the history of a genuinely persecuted church and its leaders, the latter sorts of actions sadden me immensely, and all the more so because of the irony. People have been put in solitary confinement or imprisoned as a group cut off from others because of their faith. Yet some, when asked to do something much less restrictive in the interest of the welfare of others, refuse to do so, and respond with much less grace and kindness than many have when experiencing actual persecution.

I’m thinking that perhaps the appropriate series of studies, whether for on this blog, other blogs, a collaborative multi-blog series, individual congregations, or all of the above, might be the history of Christian isolation. It could include things like Richard Wurmbrand’s sermons and meditations in solitary confinement, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, but also things written by monastics such as those in the ancient church who withdrew to live isolated lives in the desert. Here’s an example of one of the many brief stories from the latter tradition:

A brother came to visit Abba Sylvanus at Mount Sinai. When he saw the brothers working hard, he said to the old man, “Do not work for food that perishes, for Mary has chosen the good part.” Then the old man called his disciple, “Zachary, give this brother a book and put him in an empty cell.” Now when it was three o’clock the brother kept looking out of the door to see if someone would call him for the meal. But nobody called him, so he got up, went to see the old man, and asked: “Abba, didn’t the brothers eat today?” The old man said, “Of course we did.” “Then why didn’t you call me?” he said. The old man replied, “You are a spiritual person, and do not need that kind of food, but since we are earthly, we want to eat and that’s why we work. Indeed you have chosen the good part, reading all day long, and not wanting to eat earthly food.” When the brother heard this he repented and said, “Forgive me, Abba.” Then the old man said to him: “Mary certainly needed Martha, and it is really by Martha’s help that Mary is praised’.

That one grabbed my interest because of its connection with a book I’m writing. But others might be even more generally interesting in the present context. I think for instance of what Bonhoeffer wrote about “religionless Christianity.” When isolation or imprisonment intervene in one’s life, they interfere with “religion,” and so it is natural to ask what Christianity means in the absence of those things.

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In a Religionless World, People Of Different Faiths Must Band Together

People of faith will always be sidelined. That is part of the promise, but we can look to one another to figure out how to engage a secular world.

By Charlotte Pence

People of religious faith carry a burden of belief around with them. In recent years, Americans have witnessed a rise in the maligning of Christians and dismissals of their faith and practices. I have come to believe this burden isn’t constrained to time or shifts of culture.

Some argue that the past few decades have resulted in a more secular society where citizens substitute a pursuit of moral truths for selfish endeavors. However, I don’t think the 21st century is the culprit for people of faith being put on the defense for their beliefs.

Religious groups felt isolated long before Twitter was an idea in anyone’s mind, and they will continue to. The call to a life of religious belief is a lonely one; it will set you apart, but it promises to give back much more. Separation is an anticipated sacrifice. It is a companion to the decision to live for a purpose higher than the mere physical world.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor active during Hitler’s regime, repeatedly put his life at risk to decry injustices happening within Nazi Germany; he even lost his life doing so. But just like Christians today, he grappled with questions of how best to engage.

Examine Bonhoeffer’s concept of “religionless Christianity.” While he was imprisoned in Germany, he wrote letters to his friend, Eberhard Bethge, asking, “What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world?” He wanted to understand how people of faith should interact in the world without getting bogged down in inaccessible theology or swayed by non-religious values.

To be “religionless” while still religious means to engage with the secular world while maintaining one’s cherished belief system. This shouldn’t lead to religious doctrines being replaced with more world-friendly ideas. Instead, Bonhoeffer told Christians they ought to meet non-religious people where they were—all while sharing the love of Christ.

It isn’t only Christians who are at risk of being sequestered by the louder voices of the culture. Religionlessness is a complicated concept and best broached alongside people who share the desire to live a life of faith, even when their specific beliefs differ from one another.

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A Review of “The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump” (by the Weekly Standard)

The Uses of Bonhoeffer

Philip Luke Jeffery

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), photographed in 1939.

Ullstein Bild / Getty

November 24, 2018

How the murdered theologian came to be a symbol in American politics.

The Battle for Bonhoeffer
Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump
by Stephen R. Haynes
Eerdmans, 208 pp., $19.99

You can tell a lot about people by their heroes. After all, people model themselves after their heroes—and sometimes model their heroes after themselves.

That’s the basic premise of Stephen R. Haynes’s The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian executed in 1945 at the age of 39 for joining a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, lives on today as a hero for American Protestants across political and confessional boundaries. Different readers and biographers of Bonhoeffer have made different things of him—so strikingly different that in 1964 theologian Harvey Cox famously called Bonhoeffer “a veritable Rorschach test.”

Bonhoeffer wasn’t always a hero for American evangelicals. For two decades after his death, his legacy was the near-exclusive domain of liberal theologians attracted to the concept of “religionless Christianity” that Bonhoeffer developed while on death row. For those so-called “death-of-God” theologians, he was a prophet of a happy future in which Christianity would outgrow many of its traditional beliefs and practices. Needless to say, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians were unamused.

But as death-of-God theology started to, er, die out, the growing evangelical movement began to claim Bonhoeffer as one of its own. New interpretations of Bonhoeffer and his ideas emerged in the 1980s and ’90s. Haynes sorts these into four types: Bonhoeffer as a “Critical Patriot” showing liberal Protestants how best to critique their own government; Bonhoeffer as a “Righteous Gentile” whose advocacy for Jews models Jewish-Christian relations to this day; Bonhoeffer as a “Moral Hero” whose ecumenical battle for conscience transcended particular religious traditions; and the “Evangelical Bonhoeffer” whose Bible-believing Christianity can be weaponized in today’s cultural battles.

Each new Bonhoeffer has required more abstraction than the last—and because each has relied heavily on the broad outline of his life (and, more importantly, the story of his death) for symbolism of heroism and holiness, the actual details of his life and his writings have taken a back seat. It wasn’t Bonhoeffer’s theological ideas but the model of his self-sacrifice that demanded emulation, asking of every American, as Haynes puts it, “What are you doing to arrest this ongoing assault on innocent life?” As for which “ongoing assault,” well, that’s up to the reader. In recent decades, Bonhoeffer’s example has inspired right- and left-leaning Americans alike, all insisting that if Bonhoeffer lived today he would be on their side. Haynes documents Bonhoeffer’s postmortem crusades against abortion, the Iraq War, President Bush, President Obama, and finally, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

In this back-and-forth deployment of Bonhoeffer’s legacy, Eric Metaxas’s bestselling 2009 biography Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy has a special place. Metaxas’s book and his subsequent attempts to employ Bonhoeffer to critique the Obama administration are significant not so much for changing anyone’s view of its subject but for amplifying the “Evangelical Bonhoeffer” in its public role. Dismissing prior Bonhoeffer scholarship as “a terrific misunderstanding,” Metaxas made a Bonhoeffer from scratch, one who (as evangelical reviewer Andy Rowell put it) “looks a lot like an American evangelical—an extraordinarily courageous American evangelical.”

Thanks in large part to Metaxas, the phrase “Bonhoeffer moment” became a powerful call to arms, especially for politically conservative Protestants. And as Bonhoeffer’s symbolic importance grew, the need for facts, either about him or about present realities, diminished. In the battle over religious liberty, for example, Haynes notes that evangelical leaders used the phrase “Bonhoeffer moment” almost without context. “Elaboration was unnecessary,” he explains, “because these leaders shared with their audiences an intuitive understanding of the expression.” The fact that the real Bonhoeffer might have disagreed strenuously with any number of the uses to which his name was being put doesn’t matter in the least.

At this point in the book, it looks like Haynes is about to ask why: Why do we still tie our political disputes today to the (usually far more dramatic) struggles of the last century? Why do the real details of those times matter so little to those who invoke them today? Why do our causes need to piggyback on the credibility of older ones?

But Haynes doesn’t ask. Instead, his narrative and argument collapse into the very misuses of Bonhoeffer that he criticized in the first half of the book. His analysis of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision about same-sex marriage struggles to retain scholarly neutrality, and the closer the story gets to the 2016 election, the more it relies on personal views and anecdotes.

By the end, Haynes’s scholarly project is altogether abandoned.

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The Church in Crisis: The Religionless Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 30 September 2016 | Ronald Osborn

In the final two years of his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote several letters from Tegel prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge in which he spoke of the need for what he referred to as a “religionless Christianity.” “I shall not come out of here a homo religiosus!,” he declared vehemently in a note dated November 21, 1943.  “My fear and distrust of ‘religiosity’ have become greater than ever here.  The fact that the Israelites never uttered the name of God always makes me think, and I can understand it better as I go on.”  On April 30, 1944, Bonhoeffer offered one of his most famous and controversial statements on the meaning of discipleship in what he elsewhere called a “world come of age.”  “What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today,” he wrote. “We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.”

Piety and religiosity had not vanished from German society in Bonhoeffer’s day (any more than they have from American society in the present, confounding the secularization theories of several generations of sociologists of religion).  Yet this very fact, Bonhoeffer concluded, was itself ironically symptomatic of the irrelevance of religion to the problems facing most men and women. “Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it,” he wrote, “and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’” Under these circumstances, what did it mean to be a follower of Christ?  In the aftermath of the failure of the institutionalized churches and self-professing believers in Europe to withstand the onslaught of totalitarian ideologies—indeed, in the light of the church’s own authoritarianism and its ability to carry on uninterrupted even as the ground fell out from under it, with hymns being sung and sermons preached without pause amid the march to war—the question that now confronted Christians was one of first things.

Did the very language of spiritual inwardness, of evangelism, of apologetics, and of churchly authority that had marked Western Christianity from its beginning still make any sense? Was it the task of believers to somehow refill the vessels of a failed Christendom project that had been thoroughly corrupted by political evil with lost or forgotten meanings?  Or were believers now called to bear witness to Christ in a secular age in radically new ways, and not as “religious” persons at all?  Did “religion” itself need to be left behind as a historical stage, a human construct and sociological phenomenon, that was in no sense synonymous with the presence of the living Christ in the world and in history?  But if so, what would such a “religionless Christianity” even begin to look like?

“Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world,” Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge on July 18, 1944.  Three days later, after learning of the failure of the Officer’s Plot to assassinate Hitler—a plot in which he had been complicit and for which he would be executed at the age of 39 when his role was uncovered by the Gestapo—Bonhoeffer wrote of the “this-worldliness” of the Christian faith:

“During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity.  The Christian is not ahomo religiosus, but simply a man, as Jesus was a man…I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one.  By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.  In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian.”

We do not know how Bonhoeffer might have developed these highly allusive ideas had his life not been cut short. His enigmatic and provocative words have often been pressed into the service of agendas Bonhoeffer himself would have resisted, from liberal death-of-God theologies to highly conservative forms of evangelical Protestantism. Yet there are perhaps a few lessons we can learn from Bonhoeffer’s witness as we face the abuses of power, the smallness of heart and mind, and the betrayals of leadership that have led to mounting crises in our own day—both inside and outside of the church.

How can we be faithful disciples of Jesus in the midst of unsettling new realities, in which by faith we trust that God is still at work? How can we be certain of Christ and speak meaning into the lives of our fellow human beings when we can no longer put our trust in church officialdom or attach our confidence in the Holy Spirit to the outworn habits of religious thinking and speech that mark our church structures?  How can we testify to the living Christ when “religion” itself turns the Word of God into a dead letter and takes on the marks of dehumanizing “kingly authority”?

For Bonhoeffer, the answers to these questions lie not in any nostalgic retreat to the past.  He ultimately refused the path of shoring up decaying institutions and exhausted forms of piety.  Rather, Bonhoeffer insisted, believers must now repent of the power and control game that they have been playing for far too long.  They must instead enter with fear and trembling into the dangerous drama of Christ’s kenosis—his self-emptying and co-suffering identification with all of humankind.

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MICHAEL GERSON: God Secretly Revealed as Love

Michael Gerson

Posted: Sunday, January 3, 2016 9:00 am

MICHAEL GERSON: God secretly revealed as love

The current ferment of American politics has brought comparisons to Europe in the 1930s, with echoes of leaders who stoke anger against outsiders and promise a return to greatness through the application of a strong man’s will.

The analogy is hardly exact. Lacking the economic chaos and fragile institutions of Weimar Germany, America has fewer footholds for fascism. But the reaction to fascist darkness in the 1930s produced a figure, a bright light, who should guide us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian who resisted the Nazis and the influence of Nazism in his own church. He spoke out on behalf of German Jews, was implicated in a plot against Adolf Hitler’s life, was imprisoned, wrote and ministered for years from confinement, then was led naked to the execution ground and hung with a noose of piano wire, just weeks before the end of World War II.

As a theologian, Bonhoeffer was farsighted. Modern Western societies, he argued, were becoming “radically religionless.” It is not possible to re-impose this consensus, and mere nostalgia is pointless. But religion – in Bonhoeffer’s view, a changeable form of “human self-expression” – is not the same as faith. “If religion is only the garment of Christianity – and even the garment has looked very different at different times – then what is religionless Christianity?”

It is a question that could occupy a theologian’s entire career. Bonhoeffer’s was cut short at age 39. But it is worth noting one thing he did not find outdated. He believed that Advent and the story of Christmas speak directly to the modern world.

The appeal of Christmas to a prisoner, from one perspective, is natural. Christmas upends the normal calculations of power and influence. “He takes what is little and lowly,” said Bonhoeffer, “and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly. … He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”

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Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity: Engaging a Post-Christian World

By Ryan Nelson

Today’s guest post is by Prayson Daniel. Prayson, who blogs at With All I Am, has been using Faithlife Groups since 2012, and created the Natural Theology group. Prayson is from Tanzania, and he earned his BA at Harvest Bible College. He is currently pursuing his graduate studies at Aalborg University in Denmark. Prayson’s greatest desire is to inspire others to admire God through critical thinking.

“What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words—whether with theological or with pious words—is past, as is the age of inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether. We are approaching a completely religionless age; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ aren’t really practicing that at all; they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We have approached a “religionless” age. Some call it a post-Christian world. Ethics and politics are no longer directly influenced by religious beliefs. For many self-describing Christians, their lives show no visible difference from unbelievers.

“What is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” was the question that persistently bedeviled Bonhoeffer during his solitary confinement ward at Berlin-Tegel Military Detention Center. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for his participation in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Tegel was where he spent his last eighteen months in the world he saw coming of age. He was executed on April 8th, 1945.

During his time in Berlin-Tegel, Bonhoeffer wrote his final letters to those closest to him, and explored the most pressing questions in his final days. These writings are available to us as Letters and Papers from Prison. In his letters and notes, the question arose, what is Christianity today? In his correspondence with his best friend, Eberhard Bethge (April-July 1944), Bonhoeffer offered some of the most bewildering and exciting questions and ideas to help Christians faithfully engage with a “post-Christian” world.

Bonhoeffer asked, “How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well?” and, “Is there such a thing as a religionless Christian?” He answered these questions with “the nonreligious interpretation of biblical concepts.”

What is religionless Christianity?

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Kevin Davis on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Religionless” Christianity (Part 2)

Bonhoeffer on “Non-Religious Interpretation,” part 2

See part one. See the comments in part one for some good thoughts and questions from others.

This is the second and final installment of my exploration of Bonhoeffer’s “non-religious interpretation” of Christianity, found in his prison letters. I am more critical in this post — certainly, more questioning. Some of the footnote comments may be of interest, to alert those who ignore footnotes.

Bonhoeffer acknowledges that Barth was the first to recognize the mistake of “making a space” for religion in modern life, illustrated by the apologetic theologies discussed in the previous post. But, according to Bonhoeffer, Barth failed to guide us in the “non-religious interpretation of theological concepts,” which is necessary for a responsible theology today. Bonhoeffer bemoans Barth’s “positivism of revelation.” What does this mean? As far as I can tell from Bonhoeffer’s brief comments, Barth failed to carry through his criticism of religion. He stopped at his criticism of these false apologetic strategies, but in their place he offered the received dogmatic material of the church’s faith. “Positivism” was sometimes used as a label for any conservative theology that subordinated itself to a given and stable authority, namely the Bible and derived confessional standards. Thus, the theological task is the explication of this material, the enterprise known as dogmatics, often valuing precision of expression and analytical rigor. We do not know exactly what Bonhoeffer has in mind, but he is clearly not happy with this turn in Barth. And he uses Barth as an example of neglecting the task at hand. (We have to leave to the side whether this is fair to Barth.) This task is to interpret Christian concepts into non-religious concepts, thereby rendering them more truly faithful to Christ. Why does Bonhoeffer see this as such a pressing matter? Because only in this way can modern man encounter God again, confronted with the demand of love in every situation. Thus, it is ultimately an ethical concern for Bonhoeffer, as we would expect from his previous writings. And as such, these prison letters on “religionless Christianity” can be seen as having strong continuity with his prior treatments of ethics as encounter and decision, not law and duty.

But, what are we to make of this “non-religious interpretation of theological concepts”? It is here that criticisms can emerge. In many (not all) of these statements, the “non-religious” appears to be a norm and authority for Bonhoeffer – a norm and authority derived from the world as such. So, as we see, Bonhoeffer has been discussing his impression of reading a book on physics, realizing that, as he later states, “Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God.’” He will elsewhere describe this as “the world come of age.” That is true, of course, insofar as it goes — for a large segment of European society, and we would not want to recover the various defensive theologies that have attempted to deal with this.

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