Reclaiming the Flawed Humanity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Part 1

Stan Moody:

I turn with a heavy heart to the task at hand – consideration of the thoughts of one more theologian; one more set of parameters of the Christian faith; one more escape from the simplicity and piercing relevance of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God inaugurated by Jesus and abandoned by His Church in pursuit of its own popularity.

Through the noble self-sacrifices of Bonhoeffer in the context of the current evangelical departure from the Christian faith in America, I fear we have deified Bonhoeffer as a competitive option to Jesus. If anything, we find ourselves in a drunken lurching from side-to-side of the envelop of orthodoxy with its resultant incessant interpretations.

So, I approach this task with fear and trembling. In what respect can I possibly equate Bonhoeffer’s obedience of the commandments of Jesus, regarding love of enemy and neighbor, to His person and work. While Bonhoeffer serves as a faithful servant of this Jesus, how easily we can look to him as God’s latest substitute for Jesus in a world gone mad with its own wisdom. How easy it is to lose sight of the sovereignty of this great God we serve by setting aside servants of the faith as demigods, especially in this dreadful time of apostacy within the Confessing Church in America.

I fear the contribution I make to the diminution of my own faith by this fascination over the power of words. To the degree that I succumb to presumptions inherent in the doctrines of those who perceive history as a continuum of conspiratorial advances hostile to the Gospel, I lose sight of God’s sovereign power in every aspect of human history, including my own. Yet here we are, once again in desperate search for Truth in the words and actions of inherently flawed human purveyors thereof. 

In this continuum stands Deitrich Bonhoeffer who, true to his conviction, is the consummate “Man for others.” Within this continuum of the fall of God and the rise of man in modern history, there is a little something for everyone in Bonhoeffer, from evangelicals seeking the radical marks of grace in their own lives to the proponents of the “God is dead” theology to the “Theology of hope.” My purpose is to present Bonhoeffer as a bridge between the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and the postmodern age of the glorification of the self.

The Modernity Model:

A persuasive argument is made for the transition from modern to persuasive thought to have taken place in the mid-to-late 60’s, where the sociology of the 20^th century evolved into a cynicism over the role of God in history. In theology, this has effected a transference of the notion of a sovereign God to the notion of the sovereign self.[1] Carried over into postmodernism is the dictum that the advances inherent in modern thought must not be lost in the haste to define an antithesis that rebels against the evils of progress.[2]

It is, of course, social crisis that drives ideas in this postmodern setting. To hold firmly to universal principals, or, for that matter, settled orthodox Christian precepts, is to blunt the ability of man to bob and weave in our culture. Commonly held values are considered enemies of human progress, while diversity is perceived as more responsive to culture and thus more desirable.

The ethic of relative truth came into force in the mid-to-late 60’S with consensus that authority of any kind was no longer relevant. In America, this ethic found widespread support that the very foundation of our nation is moral and religious tolerance. As religious tolerance over time became a threat to the preeminence of Christian ethnicity, its favor became highly degraded. In order for the self to be crowned supreme, therefore, it became necessary to kill off the God who had declared “moral man” dead.

It is not accidental, I think, that Bonhoeffer, himself a living smorgasbord of religious thought, failed to come into his own until the mid-to-late 60’s. Bonhoeffer’s search for a relevant Christ in his own critical time in history spoke volumes to the rebellious American mind of that time, and curiously of the present. In fairness, however, we cannot critique his thought without at least some of his background.

Setting:

Bonhoeffer’s return to Germany as an expression of his urgency of responsibility has been well documented. Barth once chided him in a letter about playing Elijah under the juniper tree or Jonah under the gourd:

You ought to drop all these intellectual frills and special pleadings, however interesting, and concentrate on one thing alone, that you are a German and that your church’s house is on fire…you ought to return to your post by the next ship![3]

Bonhoeffer was indeed first-of-all, German. His aristocratic upbringing had not imbued him with a consciousness of sin but had, rather, given him a sense of physical, intellectual and social superiority that, according to his friend, Bethge, was often borderline arrogant.[4] A study of his biographies leaves the impression of a man obsessed with a sense of his own destiny – somewhat of a grandstander.

No-one can deny that the confessing Lutheran Church in Germany, in its insistence on obedience to state authority, had misjudged its adversary.[5] Bonhoeffer’s existential leanings[6], however, seemed to transform the longing for a “leap of faith” into a leap of revolution. Yes, he was imprisoned for helping Jews escape, but that does not make him a martyr of note. Thousands were thus imprisoned. I was once very close to an entire Roman Catholic family who had been imprisoned for the same acts of heroic kindness. Documents uncovered during his imprisonment, however, demonstrated to the satisfaction of even his staunchest defenders that Bonhoeffer was heavily involved in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.[7]

Bonhoeffer’s justification for this act of treason against his government seems to have been centered around his passion for order and unity. It is in the ethical mandates of labour, marriage, government and the church, Bonhoeffer insisted, that God demands obedience to Himself.[8] He perceiver Hitler’s power as a failure of God’s ordered unity by virtue of the transcendence of the State over other mandates.[9] The possibility of obedience to the mandates could only be restored by an act of disobedience,[10] and it fell to Bonhoeffer and others to right that wrong for an otherwise impotent God.

I was struck by a PBS interview with a Polish Catholic priest some decades ago now, who was reflecting on the effects of 40 years of Soviet repression of religion on his own sense of Christian responsibility. All those years of living under such terrible conditions had produced a vibrant faith in Polish society that had at last triumphed over man’s efforts to remove God. The point of the documentary was to marvel that the liberation of Poland had been marked by church over state. In light of falsely equating legalistic morality with salvation, we might take hope in the same destiny of America today.

This priest, who himself had lived under the entire process from liberty to totalitarianism and back to liberty again, could not recount the experience without focusing on the doctrine of sin. “Sin is a personal matter,” he said. “You must confess your sin before you can change. As you change, you can change the system. Trying to change the system without changing the hearts of men is revolution.” I wondered that this very Reformed theology had been extracted from Roman Catholic tradition. Its timelessness to this paper on Bonhoeffer accented Bonhoeffer’s impatience to “do something for God.” Surely there was in those dark days of Germany some semblance of Reformed truth in Lutheranism for Bonhoeffer to grasp!

It is important to see Bonhoeffer, therefore, not only as a brilliant apologist for the faith, but as the revolutionary he was. History, unfortunately, makes only feeble attempts to contextualize the paper trails of its subjects. While we can applaud portions of Bonhoeffer’s writings and certain of his actions that appeal to our sense of urgency, we cannot neglect that he left behind a legacy of theological ideas that have given rise to a lot of mischief.

We shall look into a number of those ideas in Part 2.

[1] Griffin et al, Varieties of Postmodern Theology, State University of NY Press, Albany. 1989, p. 31.

[2] Ibid., p. xiii.

[3] Bethge, Costly Grace, Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1976, p. 67.

[4] Ibid. p. 57.

[5] Levin, Christian Faith and Public Choices, Fortress, Philadelphia, 1984, p. 129.

[6] Hopper, A Dissent on Bonhoeffer, Westminster, Philadelphia, 1975, p. 129.

[7] Levin, p. 129.

[8] Moltmann & Weimbach, Two Studies in the Theology of Bonhoeffer, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1967, p. 72.

[9] Levin, p. 132.

[10] Ibid., p. 138