Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Bonhoeffer’s brother Karl-Friedrich was already in America, working in a physics department, and Bonhoeffer had a few other friends and family he visited while there. The theological environment at Union Theological Seminary, and in America more generally, was far from the vibrant intellectual engagement that Bonhoeffer had experienced in Berlin.

American Christianity was split between liberals and fundamentalists. While Bonhoeffer appreciated the liberals’ devotion to serious study of history and textual criticism, he felt that they failed to ask all the important questions. He believed they seemed content to latch onto any skeptical new idea that cast the fundamentalists’ arguments in a bad light. “There is no theology here,” he wrote to a friend. “They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence or criteria” (101). Bonhoeffer soon found the theological vibrancy he was looking for in the pulpits and spirituals of African-American churches, not the elite seminaries. He became a weekly attender and a Sunday School teacher in an African-American church.

Also during his year in America, Bonhoeffer saw the film version of All Quiet on the Western Front, which changed his views of World War I and likely initiated his journey toward pacifism. These pacifist sentiments were reinforced by his new friendship with a French theologian, Jean Laserre, with whom he undertook a road trip to Mexico. From Laserre, Bonhoeffer developed a deep appreciation for Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7 in the New Testament), the text which would form the basis of his most famous work, The Cost of Discipleship.

By mid-1931, Bonhoeffer was back in Berlin, but he didn’t stay long, as a friend had arranged a meeting for him with the eminent neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth. The two men were impressed and encouraged by one another, forging a connection which would lead to several more meetings in the following years. Back in Berlin, Bonhoeffer worked as a university lecturer, and was sometimes invited to speak in public forums and at churches. He showed remarkable courage in directly addressing the crisis of German society, as in a sermon given at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church: “He seemed to want to warn everyone to wake up and stop playing church. They were all sleepwalking toward a terrible precipice!” (122).

During these years, it was evident that Bonhoeffer had undergone a change, partly from his ongoing theological reflections and partly from his trip to America—not a sudden change, but a gradual growth toward a deeply devoted piety. As a teacher, Bonhoeffer’s way of treating the Bible contrasted with the liberal traditions usually dominant at Berlin University. He presented the Bible as a living text through which one could encounter the work of God in one’s life, to which his students responded with interest. He not only painted a vivid picture of Christian discipleship in his lectures, he also invited his students to experience it with him, through visits to his family home, discussion groups, music, and time in the countryside.

Bonhoeffer also remained active in pastoral work, teaching a confirmation class in a rough, working-class neighborhood, where most of the students were required to be there against their own wishes. Even here, however, Bonhoeffer presented his students with a vision of Christianity as a lifestyle of discipleship lived in community with others, not merely as a religion.

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler won the election as Germany’s new chancellor. Just two days later, Bonhoeffer gave an address over the radio that was quickly and dramatically cut short. It was a talk planned out well before Hitler’s victory and so likely did not have Hitler in view as a specific target, but it did target the quasi-mythical attachments in German social life that Hitler sought to personify. Foremost among these was “the Führer Principle,” the idolization of a sought-for leader, which Germans clung to in reaction to the inefficient and ruinous democracy that had been thrust upon them in the wake of World War I. Bonhoeffer cautioned that the dream of a Führer was a dangerous one, which could be used by an ambitious and unscrupulous leader to do great evil in Germany. Why Bonhoeffer’s address was cut short on the radio remains an open question; one theory is that the newly-in-power Nazis simply had it turned off. Even though Bonhoeffer may not have planned the talk with Hitler in mind, it was prescient: “There was an oddly prophetic aspect to the whole thing” (140).

After Hitler’s election, Bonhoeffer continued to be outspoken, insisting in a sermon at Trinity Church that ultimate authority only belongs to God, and one must not bow to or hail any other authority. Bonhoeffer, like all of his family, was dismayed by Hitler’s victory and wary of the man’s populist, demagogic power. No one quite knew how quickly troubles would develop, and events moved so swiftly that many Germans did not even realize the full extent of what was happening. The Reichstag was burned, the Communists blamed (though it was almost certainly a Nazi ploy), and all the emergency powers of the state were signed over to Hitler. Karl Bonhoeffer was called upon for a psychological assessment of the accused arsonist, and though Dr. Bonhoeffer resisted the pressure to declare the man’s guilt, the matter was already effectively over, and power was in Hitler’s hands.

One of the pressing issues facing the German church in 1933 was the “Jewish Question.” Authorities had passed a new stipulation called the Aryan Paragraph, which would preclude non-“Aryan” workers from holding state positions, including as clergy working for the state church. This imperiled anyone with a Jewish background, including Bonhoeffer’s friend Hildebrandt.

Some authorities in the church, calling themselves “German Christians,” saw the new moves as patriotic, and set out to make racial purity a feature of the church. Bonhoeffer led the opposition by writing and distributing a pamphlet on the subject, which outlined three ways in which the church may act towards the state: First, to be a dialogue partner for the state, asking about its actions and their motivations; second, to aid the victims of state policies and actions; and third, to work to undermine and overturn a state that had ceased to lawfully occupy its proper role. Bonhoeffer was too much of a radical in his conclusions for most of the pamphlet’s audience, but it was a prophetic work, speaking out for the church’s defense of the Jews at the first sign of trouble.

The Nazi regime sponsored a boycott of Jewish businesses while it also aimed at restructuring the church itself. It hoped to create a new German state church, a Reichskirche headed by a new supreme cleric, a Reichsbischof. They nominated for the post Ludwig Müller, a coarse and unreflective man whose highest ecclesiastical post had been as a navy chaplain. This was part of a push, widely supported by many in Germany, to bring all of German society in line with the values of the Nazi Reich.

Bonhoeffer and his family stood united against all these actions, but some of the violence and repression was starting to hit close to home, especially since his twin sister Sabine had married into a Jewish-background family.