Fr. Larry Hart, Curtal Friar
Abstract
This essay reconsiders Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea, hope may be a more accurate term, of a religionless Christianity. Karl Barth was, of course, the first to use the phrase religionless Christianity, although he eventually dropped the term as an impossibility. Despite the liabilities of religion, Barth said, we cannot and should not be religionless “because we are not truly godless.”1 By religion Barth and Bonhoeffer both had in mind faith as understood in Europe since the Enlightenment––faith as “belief in God and the doctrines and teachings of the church. The concepts of Christianity, Bonhoeffer thought, must, therefore, be interpreted for modern religionless men and women in a new non-religious way. Bonhoeffer, unlike Barth, never explicitly defined religion in this way, but his agreement with Barth’s critique of religion would certainly imply it.2 Unlike Barth, however, Bonhoeffer left nothing showing he ever abandoned the term and very little clarifying it. Subsequently, for both liberal (mainline) and evangelical Christians in America Bonhoeffer’s highly impressionistic painting of a religionless Christianity has become something like a Rorschach Inkblot Test, in which each sees whatever comes to them. This paper seeks to contribute to a clarification of Bonhoeffer by examining his concept of religionless Christianity within the context of not only his meager writing on the subject (the little he wrote in Letters From Prison is all we have on this notion of a religionless Christianity), but also in consideration of the historical, psychological, social, and spiritual forces at work in his personal process of becoming.
Key Terms
religion, religionless, nonreligious, Christian, spiritual, Bonhoeffer, new theology,
world, come of age, discipleship, letters, prison, irreligious, Nazification, German, church
In Pursuit of Understanding
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an intellectual. The trajectory of his life cannot be traced without plotting it on an intellectual grid. Certainly, his life was one in constant pursuit of a deeper understanding of life and reality. Intellectualization can, of course, be a way of gaining emotional distance from painful and traumatic events, and one cannot but wonder if this was not somewhat the case with Bonhoeffer. This strong intellectual and academic characteristic of Bonhoeffer can leave readers with the perception that his work has to do only with academic concepts and ideas, but a closer reading will usually show that his intellectual explorations of concepts are not mere academic abstractions, but connected to real human concerns. For example, his little book on the Psalms deals with complex biblical and theological concepts; yet, the concepts are not mere academic abstractions but connect with the deeper aspects of Christin spiritual life and practice.3
Bonhoeffer had a keen analytical mind, and was a curious and interested observer of humanity, of society, and of whatever culture in which he found himself living.4 While he obviously had very deep and profound feelings, he was in every way the child of a wealthy and aristocratic German family that, while loving and supportive, held its emotions in check and provided the sort of cultured grace and intellectual development that can only be found in a family environment and immediate world peopled by multiple generations of scholars, artists, musicians, theologians, intellectuals, wealth, and elegance.5 From his family Bonhoeffer absorbed both the importance of personal humility and high expectations of himself and others. He was disciplined and liked to formulate a plan and follow it.6 He was a rather intense person who by nature and nurture dealt with questions and problems by the way of deep thought–– a more kataphatic or intellectual than apophatic or mystical spirituality. He liked to think things through within himself, in conversations with his peers, in prayer, and by writing. This is what Bonhoeffer’s “theological letters” from prison represent––a thinking through that, as far as anyone knows, was never completed. His May 8, 1944 letter to Bethge from Tegel Prison is informative in this regard: “”Forgive me for writing all this in German script; normally I do this only when my writing is for my own use ––and perhaps what I have written was more to clear my own mind than to edify you. . . but I can’t help sharing my thoughts with you, simply because that is the best way to make them clear to myself.”7
The Presenting Problem
The stated question which Bonhoeffer was asking in his Letters From Prison, the difficulty for which he was seeking a solution, was how “in a world come of age” are Christians to live and communicate? So, Bonhoeffer’s presenting problem was how can the Christian speak in such a way as to be comprehensible to nonreligious men and women. We know that up until the time he was taken from Tegel Prison and confined in the Central Security basement at Prince Albrecht Strasse, he was hard at work on this question, writing a new book with pencil and paper: A Nonreligious Interpretation of Biblical Concepts in a World Come of Age. In his last letter (January 17) he asked Eberhard Bethge to get three books for him––which Bethge did: a volume by the first century historian and middle Platonist philosopher Plutarch, a book by Paul Gerhard Natorp (1854-1924), a German philosopher and educationist, and one by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Swiss social reformer and educator, known in Europe as the father of modern education. Obviously, Bonhoeffer thought these three volumes would be helpful in thinking through how to restate biblical concepts in terms meaningful to modern men and women––the positing of a religionless Christianity for irreligious humanity. This, then, is Bonhoeffer’s presenting problem in the prison letters, the question he spent much of his time thinking and writing about during those two years first at Tegel and then Central Security in Berlin, but it is certainly not his only problem. It is just the one he was most free and inclined to present or talk about.
Bonhoeffer’s aristocratic family status provided him a certain amount of protection after his arrest. While he was not tortured, he was interrogated relentlessly.8 His family was able to get food packages and books to him, and to exchange letters according to a prescribed schedule and subject to the censor. Everything he wrote to his family and everything they wrote to him was written with the awareness that it would be read by unfriendly eyes. But even if he had it easier than others might, prison life was still prison life, and it was hard and lonely. With the Russians advancing on the Eastern Front and the Allies on the Western, the difficulty, danger, and pressure for him inside prison and for his family and friends outside grew in intensity. For some time after his arrest the full extent of Bonhoeffer’s involvement with the Resistance was unknown to the Gestapo. Who can imagine the pressure Bonhoeffer felt when under interrogation not to reveal details and names, that would completely end the resistance to Hitler and bring torture and death to his comrades for whom he felt genuine affection and loyalty, and some of whom were family. What sorrow and depression he must have felt with the destruction of his nation and the utter ruin of not only his Lutheran Church but the Nazi defilement of both the Protestant and Catholic church in Germany as they were left metaphorically, and often literally as well, in rubble. He painfully perceived the church as defensive of its status, money, and power, anxious to protect its position in the social order, unwilling to take the risk of being for others, full of hubris, unbelieving and hypocritical.9 What anxiety he must have felt for the safety of his family, his friends, and for the future church. How are we to interpret someone who can “hear his soul tremble and heave?”10 With what great existential angst he must have wrestled in pondering the meaning of events personal, national, spiritual, ecclesiastical. It’s all there in his poem: “Who Am I?”
Who Am I? (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a country squire from his country house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I know of myself,
restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath,
as though hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers,
for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation, tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making; faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I?
They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.11
Between the time of his military arrest and removal from Prince Albrecht Strasse Bonhoeffer wrote prolifically. He wrote letters, worked on a novel and a play, composed poetry, and produced many handwritten pages of this “new theology” on which he was reflecting. Writing obviously helped him to maintain his sanity (as did his spiritual practice) in these moments, hours, days, months of confinement, interrogation, and threats––two years of intense loneliness, anxiety, deprivation, and looking into the horror of what evil does. But what he wrote was sparse, provisional and guarded. He wrote nothing like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: From Death Camp to Existentialism, which can, perhaps, be written only after one has passed through the the shadowed valley. We probably have more in-depth knowledge of Bonhoeffer’s theology from the reports of how he lived, of how he was, in those last days when he was roughly transported across Germany from one concentration camp to another and until he was finally hanged at Flossenbürg. But when we make too much of his prison writing we are only speculating what was in the mind, heart, and soul of a man destined for the gallows. What I am suggesting is that the more we speculate on Bonhoeffer’s very conversational letters as a finished and definitive theological statement without any psychological, spiritual, historical, or lived context, the further off we are likely to be.
Karl Barth, whom many believe the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, thought the so-called “theological letters” written from prison were “immature and not worth passing on.”12 By this Barth did not mean they were childish but that they were incomplete, fragmentary, and undeveloped thoughts and ideas––something Bonhoeffer himself acknowledges. As for the book Bonhoeffer was writing, the hand written manuscript (whatever its stage of completion or incompletion) disappeared somewhere between Prince Albrecht Strasse and Flossenbürg. We have the very sketchy outline he made for the book, but much of that outline would have had meaning only for Bonhoeffer, and we have no knowledge of how closely he followed his outline, or what changes he made in either the outline or the book as his project progressed, or whether he ever finished the project. 13 The Letters From Prison are just too thin to go skating on theologically.
That Sticky If
By “world come of age” or “man come of age,” Bonhoeffer meant that in our (the 19th century Western world) humanity has learned, in matters of its scientific, political, social, artistic, ethical, and religious life, to do without recourse to the hypothesis of God. Instead, Bonhoeffer said, man has learned to take responsibility for himself and his own decisions.14 I have never really understood what Bonhoeffer was thinking in making this last assertion; that is, I am not certain, given the heaping of blame, the rationalizations, the denial, the fleeing of “responsibility” (that seems too mild a word) evident in the blood, death, and destruction of World War II, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic bomb shortly after the hanging of Bonhoeffer, could lead to the conclusion that the “world has come of age.” Here in the twenty-first century, a time of enormous problems and disasters often the result of the unintended consequences of science, a time of horrific wars in the Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Africa. Israel, and Gaza, a time of increasing sorrowful mass migrations, the growing threat of new unknown and unmanageable diseases, of overpopulation, and of random violence to say that the world has come of age seems overly optimistic. Apparently, jellyfish, although they have no brain are capable of learning from their mistakes––humanity, not so much. It makes me wonder if jellyfish are a higher life form than homo sapiens. In any case, it seems strange to speak of irresponsible man taking responsibility for “himself.”
Nevertheless, if humanity has come of age, if God and religion, and Christian concepts are no longer relevant, meaningful, or even comprehensible to the men and women of our age, how are we to communicate the reality of Christ and God’s presence to them? Bonhoeffer was, of course, well aware of Rudolf Bultmann’s 1941 lecture to the Confessing Church in which Bultmann famously said: “We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.”15
The conditional term “if” is the sticky word here in that many have and would deny that humanity has either the willingness or the capacity for any comprehensive taking of responsibility.16 Bonhoeffer’s idea of a “world come of age,” appears to be the product of two experiences. The first was the catastrophic moral and spiritual failure of the institutional church and its members in dealing with Hitler, followed by the failure of the Confessing Church. The second was his finding in the Resistance movement a center of fellowship, of courage, of moral action, of the sort of willingness to suffer for others that he knew Christianity, when it was actually being Christian, believed and taught.
Karl Barth, often thought to be the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, argued that the problem with all talk of humanity no longer needing God, or finding God talk incomprehensible, is that we are all modern (or I suppose now post-modern men and women) and as such are the evidence that the Christian message can be understood in this time in which we live.17 There is a story about how one of Barth’s students by the name of William Radner once asked during a lecture on certain Biblical passages how this material could be made understandable to modern man. Barth is supposed to have answered: “You are a modern man. Do you understand it.” Barth’s point was that we are all modern people and whenever we proclaim the gospel we can only do so as modern people. He said:
We cannot at all reckon in a serious way with real “outsiders,” with a “world come of age,” but only with a world which regards itself as of age (and proves daily that it is precisely not that). The so-called “outsiders are really only “insiders” who have not yet understood and apprehended themselves as such. On the other hand, even the most persuaded Christian, in the final analysis, must and will recognize himself ever and again as an “outsider.” So, there must be then no particular language for insiders and outsiders Both are contemporary men-of-the-world––all of us are.18
A crucial question generally ignored in discussing the “world or humanity come of age” is: “What is the world?” For Bonhoeffer, the “world,” or “man come of age,” seems, at times, to embrace all nonreligious people who act responsibly but independently of God. But his own present circumstances are the refutation that humanity in general is now incapable of confronting evil responsibly.19 Those who have come of age appear in actuality to be, for Bonhoeffer, the men and women of the Resistance movement with whom he had now forged a powerful bond, and who, unlike the churches in Germany, had the courage to risk their lives for others; and were, therefore, in Bonhoeffer’s estimation, acting responsibly even though they were religionless.20 In reality all he has discovered is that there are good and courageous people among both the religious and religionless.
Probing the Problem Further
On November 13, 1933, a rally of the German Christians ( the name of a movement of “fanatical Nazi Protestants,”) organized to win elections on ecclesiastical matters held a packed rally in Berlin where banners, interspersed with swastikas, proclaimed the unity of National Socialism and Christianity. The speeches all expressed pro-Nazi sentiments and proposals:
The removal of pastors who opposed National Socialism.
The expulsion of members of the Protestant churches who were of Jewish descent.
The implementation of the Aryan Paragraph.
The removal of the Old Testament from the Bible.
The removal of “non-German” elements from religious services.
The adoption of a more “heroic” and “positive” interpretation of Jesus––Jesus battling mightily against corrupt Jewish forces and influence.
The Nazi leadership vigorously supported the German Christians. Nazi propaganda urged Protestants to unite all regional churches into a national church under the centralized leadership of Ludwig Müller, a well-known pastor and Nazi Party member, who was appointed by Hitler as Reich Bishop. In a national vote by Protestants taken in July 1933, the German Christians were supported by two-thirds of the voters, and Müller won the national election to lead them. It soon became apparent that the Nazi State intended to control not only matters of church polity but of its most basic doctrines and central theological beliefs. The confessions and parts of the New Testament were rewritten so Jesus’s lineage was re-traced to German soil, and the Ten Commandments were substituted with twelve new ones with the first commandment now being: “Honor your Fuhrer.”
It is impossible to imagine how sick at heart someone of Bonhoeffer’s spiritual and moral integrity must have been with what had become of the Christian faith as now practiced by the overwhelming majority (millions) of Christians in Germany and the monstrosity the church had become.
On Thursday, January 4, 1934, a few hundred pastors and church leaders gathered in the German town of Barmen. Together, they formed the Pastor’s Emergency League. Their initial focus was on how to support those clergy of Jewish ancestry who had been deposed, and how best to respond to the “German Christian” faction. But that very Thursday afternoon their work was intensified and enlarged when they received news that the Reich Bishop of Germany, Ludwig Müller, had issued a decree earlier that morning giving himself the power to dismiss pastors and church officials who opposed the government. The Emergency League’s opposition was now illegal and dangerous.
When the group reassembled later in the afternoon Karl Barth said he thought that their focus needed to rest squarely on the revelation of Jesus Christ since this centered on the question of authority, which was supremely found in the Word of God. Barth concluded that anything added by the Nazi movement or otherwise, especially when brought to the same level of authority or reliability as Scripture, ought to be rejected. Niemöller, who later would be imprisoned by Hitler for nearly eight years, mirrored Barth, “When bishops err,” he said, “we must not follow. . . We must obey God.”
Many of these pastors met back in Barmen a few months later to daft a statement drawing a bold line between Christianity and Nationalism. The final part of the Barmen Declaration captured the spirit of both gatherings in the powerful phrase, “Verbum Dei manet in aeternum,” or, “The Word of God will last forever.” This declaration marked the beginning of the Confessing Church which claimed to be the true Protestant Church of Germany in that it held to the historical creeds and confessions of the Christian Church. The young theologian and pastor, Bonhoeffer, was a central figure and driving force in this effort.
Bonhoeffer saw to it that the entire text of the Barmen Declaration was printed in the London Times. His hope was that it would gain the attention and rouse the passionate support of the global l Church. By this megaphone he hoped to catch the attention of the Church worldwide. Sadly, it was largely ignored. Not long after an ecumenical Church conference was held in Fano, Denmark. Leaders of every denomination and from all over the world were there to confess the basics tenets of the Christian faith. Bonhoeffer saw this, even though leaders of the German Christian movement were invited to participate, as an opportunity to show the stark contrast between the philosophy of the Nazis and the historic faith of Christianity. Bonhoeffer, in his speech called on those attending to be courageous in the face of evil, but his call for action was met with a discouraging silence. Perhaps even more disheartening for Bonhoeffer was that the Confessing Church was willing to compromise with the Nazi program in ways that seemed to him a betrayal of the faith itself.
The Confessing Church attempted to follow a fine diplomatic line that seemed to Bonhoeffer to deny the radical teachings found not only in early Christianity, but throughout the entire Bible. He didn’t think that most German Protestants, even in the Confessing Church, recognized the depth of danger confronting them in Hitler’s project of Nazification. Many of them did not object to most elements of Nazism, and some within the Confessing movement itself were Nazi Party members. In fact, the disagreement between the Confessing Church and Hitler was centered mainly on how much influence, or control, the state should have over the church. Martin Niemöller, the most prominent leader of the Confessing movement, and two Protestant bishops met with Hitler and his top aides in January 1934 to work out a compromise. The religious leaders reaffirmed their support for Hitler’s domestic and foreign policies and asked only for the right to disagree on religious matters; however, it became clear that Hitler had no intention whatsoever of compromising. At the end of the meeting the two bishops signed a loyalty oath to Hitler. Niemöller did not sign and was eventually arrested and held by the Gestapo in solitary confinement until liberated by the allies after the war––more than seven years later.21
The Confessing Church was, then, for Bonhoeffer who supported it, far too anemic in its response to the threat of Nazification. The Confessing Church was never a large or highly influential movement or communion. Germany in 1933 had a population of 65 million, the majority of which, supported Hitler’s policies. This included not only the Catholic Church which had signed an agreement to stay out of political matters and to support the Nazi regime, but most of the 45 million Germans who were Protestants. Out of 18,000 Protestant Pastors only 3,000 were aligned in some way with the Confessing Church, which as just noted, attempted to work out a compromise with Hitler. During 1935 seven-hundred of these pastors were arrested by the Secret Police. Bonhoeffer’s aristocratic and elitist upbringing had instilled expectations that were far higher and deeper than what he saw in the diplomatic game playing and ineffectual ecclesiastical leadership of the Confessing Church.22
The Fellowship of Resistance
In the Resistance movement Bonhoeffer found fellowship with men and women radically committed to a cause greater than themselves, who possessed a willingness to be there for the oppressed and suffering, and who were already acting decisively and with courage on their convictions. There is good reason to think that it is his comrades in the resistance that Bonhoeffer had in mind when he wrote of humanity as having come of age, the world come of age, taking responsibility for acting morally against evil forces, identifying with the weak and suffering. In his biography Eberhard Bethge wrote of Bonhoeffer:
In Tegel he had not yet abandoned all hope for the cause (the resistance); on the contrary, the trial itself seemed to have become part of the fight for Hitler’s overthrew that was being conducted outside the prison. This hope had enabled Bonhoeffer to hold out in his relative isolation. He had known that those outside––his family, Perels, the indefatigable Dr. Sack, and his fellow conspirators––were all working for the cause. His particular task was to divert the attention of the enemy away from their activities. As a result, his sense of powerlessness had been limited. Almost to his last day in Tegel the tenuous connection he had been able to maintain with his friends had acted as a lifeline.23
In his April 30, 1944, letter from Tegel Prison Bonhoeffer revealed something of the questions haunting him:
I often ask myself why a ‘Christian instinct’ often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I do not mean in the least with any evangelizing intentions, but I might almost say, “in brotherhood.”24
This is all, from the point of view of Family and Organizational Therapy to be expected in that as one moves closer in a new relationship he or she will move further away from previous relationships. Much of Bonhoeffer’s writing from prison, then, his theological correspondence, can be read as a theological (we might even say “religious”) justification of his involvement with the Resistance and its assassination attempt.
Any competent therapist or spiritual director would want to raise a number of issues with Bonhoeffer for consideration:
(1) His understanding of how being a good person is not dependent upon being aligned with a particular, or for that matter any, religious faith at all.
(2) How Scripture itself recognizes hypocrisy and superficiality as symptomatic of the blind self-will afflicting the community of God; and, in some way difficult for us to grasp, also part of the transcendent journey.
(3) How negative feelings of failure, frustration, depression, and anger affected his writing. Did he ever feel, as have many of God’s deepest and greatest saints and prophets like Elijah––”I only alone, remain a prophet of the LORD” (I Kings 18:22).
(4) Was it possible that he was mistaking desperate political action at the risk of one’s life as the equivalent of self-sacrificing love––confusing it with suffering in “weakness” with Christ for the good of others.25
(5) How did he discern the difference between acting out of willingness and acting out of willfulness? Finally, the question must be asked, and asked without denying and admiring either the intellect or spirituality of Bonhoeffer, whether his participation in the attempted assassination of Hitler was an act of willfulness or willingness in the Spirit of Christ.26
(6) Did it ever occur to him that when he wrote, as a prisoner, honestly and simply of his feelings, experiences, faith, and prayer he was communicating his theological concepts in nonreligious language?
(7) Had he considered that he might be confusing a biblical understanding of the world and of religion with a cultural understanding?
(8) Did he think the ills of the world are simply due to a failure to communicate?
What I am now suggesting is that what Bonhoeffer wrote regarding humanity come of age and religionless Christianity should be considered less definitive of Bonhoeffer than it has been, that it should be weighed, along with everything else, in the context of his psychological and spiritual process in an hour of anguish and turmoil at multiple levels. Had Bonhoeffer escaped execution at the last minute and survived the war, what sort of theology would he have written?
What Is Religionless Christianity?
I have read a number of theological books and academic articles on Bonhoeffer’s “new theology” of “religionless” Christianity––few that I would recommend. Most of them are lengthy academic discussions freighted with esoteric language whose conclusions, whether they own it or not, can be summed up in three words “I don’t know.” The truth is that Bonhoeffer himself didn’t really know how to describe a religionless Christianity. He uses “religion,” “religionless,” and “world” in idiosyncratic ways that are often confusing and even contradictory.27 He simply never worked out and put down on any surviving paper either a clear theological or popular definition of these terms. His hope was that in writing and thinking he would be able, as a scholar, to make sense of his raw experience, conflicting emotions, and philosophical questions; and, no doubt, to salvage some hope and meaning in a world which was at that very moment being devoured by evil. In his Letters From Prison, he provides only glimpses into the direction of his thinking at the moment of his writing in that lonely cell. He does say in a letter to Bethge dated May 5, 1944, that religion concerns itself with interpreting life and history in individualistic and metaphysical terms, which is no longer meaningful to modern men and women. He then illustrates like this:
Hasn’t the individualistic question of personal salvation almost completely left us all? Aren’t we really under the impression that there are more important questions than that question (perhaps not more important than the matter itself, but more important than the question!)?28
In this same letter he wrote:
It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled and restored. What is above this world, in the Gospel, is intended to exist for the world. 29
But I think it is a May 1944 letter written from Tegel to his nephew, “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” that provides the greatest clarity.
Our church, which has been fighting in these years for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to the mankind of the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christian will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organizing must be born anew out of tis prayer and action. By the time you have grown up, the church’s form will have changed greatly. We are not yet out of the melting pot, and any attempt to help the church prematurely to a new expansion of its organization will merely delay its conversion and purification. It is not for us to prophesy the day (though the day will come) when men will once more be called to utter the word of God that the world may be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming––as was Jesus’s language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with men and the coming of his kingdom.30
So, what do we have here: Notice Bonhoeffer correctly sees the church’s focus on self-preservation as a colossal mistake. Specifically, he has in mind the German Church (both Protestant and Catholic, in its struggle for survival under Hitler, but the application is far deeper and broader than that compromising alone. What Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was to discover relatively soon after Bonhoeffer’s death in the dehumanizing cruelty of the Gulag, was that spiritual transformation could occur even in that brutal setting, but only when the prisoner had given up the desire to survive at any cost. Whether Bonhoeffer’s insight went this deep I do not know for sure. I rather think it did the closer he approached the end. I do know that it is a universal spiritual principle and is as true for the contemporary global church as it was for the German church in 1933-1944. Notice, also Bonhoeffer has no prescription for what the church must do beyond this spiritual principle, but only an unclear vision, a shimmering hope, of a church free of shallow jargon and doctrines that have become mere clichés31 rather than lived realities––a church in which God’s power and grace is perfected in weakness,32 simplicity, humility, and suffering with and for others. It is really not a “new theology” at all, rather it is, I think, the theology and vision seen and practiced by saints, prophets, and mystics from the beginning.33
Religionless As Classical Christianity
After living with Bonhoeffer’s Letters From Prison for just a little while now I find myself with a renewed appreciation for the depth of his spirituality as expressed simply, clearly, repeatedly in one form or another as he hopes to be of some help to future Christians and to the future church. I am thinking of sayings like these as I imagine Bonhoeffer living in a small cell with a bucket for a toilet, lonely, hard pressed, with bombs falling, and the menacing Gestapo in his face:
It is only when one knows the unutterability of the name of God that one can utter the name of Jesus Christ; it is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world; it is only when one submits to God’s law that one may speak of grace.
God let’s himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. . . Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.
It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the suffering of God in the secular life.
These theological thoughts are always occupying my mind, but there are times when I am just content to live the life of faith without worrying about its problems. . . . 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.
Suffering is a way to freedom. In suffering, the difference consists in our being allowed to put the matter out of our own hands into God’s hands. In this sense death is the crowning of human freedom.
God is not a religious concept. . . . Encounter with Jesus Christ. The experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that “Jesus is there only for others.” His being there “for others” is the experience of transcendence.
The church is the church only when it exists for others.
All that we may rightly expect from God and ask him for, is to be found in Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with what God, as we imagine him, what he could do and ought to do. If we are to learn what God promises and what he fulfills, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus. It is certain that we may always live close to God and in the light of his presence, and such living is an entirely new life for us; that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God. . . and that danger and distress can only bring us closer to God.34
Bonhoeffer’s presenting problem was how to communicate Christian concepts to a non-religious world.35 Here in these words he does that with more simplicity and power, not as an academic theologian but as a theologian in the ancient sense of the desert fathers and mothers who thought that Christian doctrine could only be understood by one who knows how to pray in spirit and truth. Evagrius the Solitary, the fourth century Christian monk from Asia Minor said, “If you are a theologian you truly pray, if you truly pray you are a theologian.”36 Even in prison Bonhoeffer followed a daily regimen of prayer, meditation, and Scripture reading and memorization.37 If religion is thought of as faith or belief in certain concepts, doctrines, or theological ideas then Bonhoeffer was certainly religionless. If religion is held in its original Latin sense as that which continuously connects us to the mystery of God, then he was very religious. He was, in fact, religious in the spiritual tradition of classical Christian spirituality.38 When asked what he thought of what Bonhoeffer had written from Tegel, Karl Barth replied that, “the lonely prisoner might very well have peeped around some corner and seen something that was true but that it was too enigmatic and that it was better to stick with the early Bonhoeffer.”39 This apparently led many people to read his earlier work and discover that there was more continuity between the Berlin and Tegel period than what was at first thought. Certainly, the same spiritual trajectory can be traced from Berlin to Flossenbürg where Bonhoeffer was martyred––a martyr being, in its original Greek meaning a “confessor” or “witness.” When all the academic jargon and esoteric philosophy are stripped away what remains is someone who lived and died as a true Christian and faithful pastor to the people of God.
The End––Beginning of Life
Bonhoeffer’s family was surprised but accepting of his decision to become either a minister or theologian at about the age of fourteen. He wrestled with which up to about the time his studies ended when circumstances developed in such a way that he could pursue both. Although Bonhoeffer never said what determined his decision to enter the ministry it is obvious that the death of Walter Bonhoeffer, his oldest brother, who was killed in action in World War I when Dietrich was twelve, was of crucial significance. His mother gave Dietrich the Bible that had been given to Walter at his confirmation. Dietrich used it throughout his own life for his personal meditations and worship. Eberhard Bethge wrote that “the death of Walter and his mother’s desperate grief left an inedible mark on the child Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”40 Undoubtedly Walter’s death was an end and a beginning for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an end and a beginning he would recognize his final night. Seen from this perspective Bonhoeffer’s whole life is immersed in religion, not in the false popular or enculturated religion he found abhorrent and to which the meaning of the literal term simply does not apply, but religion as lived by the great patriarchs, matriarchs, prophets, saints, mystics, sages, and Christian fathers and mothers of our faith––religion as taught and lived by Jesus of Nazareth. Religion as bequeathed to the Apostles and is the inheritance of every Christian.
The word “religion” comes from both the Old French and Anglo-Norman meaning respect for, or sense of what is right, a consciousness of moral obligation, a reverence for what is sacred. It can be traced further back to the Latin term religiō, which Saint Augustine, following the definition of Lactantius in Divinae Institutiones, understood as having been derived from religare: re (meaning “again”) + ligare (“bind,” “rebind,” “connect,” or “reconnect”). Religion in this sense is that which connects, reconnects, or binds us in, what AA calls, “conscious contact with God.” Until the very end Bonhoeffer engaged in those classical Christian disciples meant to maintain his consciousness of the presence of God (which one would suspect he discovered when Walter was killed) ––prayer, reading and memorizing the sacred text, meditating on it, worship, trusting, living the two great precepts as fully as he knew how.
Payne Best, a British Secret Intelligence agent who had been captured by the SS, met and became friends with Bonhoeffer at Buchenwald. Best wrote of Bonhoeffer:
Bonhoeffer was all humility and seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. There was something dog-like in the look of fidelity in his eyes and his gladness if you showed that you liked him. He was one of the very few men I have ever met to whom his God was ever real and close to him.41
Best told of how most prisoners complained about their lot and then said of Bonhoeffer:
Bonhoeffer was different, just quite calm, and normally seemingly perfectly at ease. His soul really shone in the dark desperation of our prison. . . [we were] in complete agreement that our warders and guards needed pity far more than we and that it was absurd to blame them for their actions.42
At Schöneberg Bonhoeffer spent a great deal of time with his cellmate Wasily Korkin, a young Russian atheist, learning Russian and teaching Korkin the fundamentals of Christianity. Korkin said of Bonhoeffer, “He did a gret deal to keep some of the weaker brethren from depression and anxiety.”43 The Sunday after Easter Bonhoeffer’s fellow prisoners asked him to hold a Sunday morning service. He was reluctant do so considering that the majority of them were Catholic and Korkin was an atheist, but they all, including Korkin, assured him they wanted him to hold the service. The texts were Isiah 35:5, “With His wounds we are healed,” and 1 Peter 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father Jesus Christ, by his mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” After the service some other prisoners wanted to smuggle Bonhoeffer into their room to hold a service there. But before that could happen the door opened and two men dressed in civilian clothes called out: “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready, and come with us.” When Bonhoeffer, knowing what this meant, said good-by to Payne Best he told Best: “This is the end––for me the beginning of life.”44 The journey to Flossenbürg lasted until late in the night. Between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning Bonhoeffer and three others were taken from their cells and their verdicts read to them. In the gray dawn of that Monday morning, the camp doctor saw Bonhoeffer through a half open door of one of the huts. He later wrote:
I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this unusually loveable man prayed, so devout and certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer, and then climbed the steps to the gallows, prayed and composed himself. His death ensued a few seconds later. In the almost fifty years I worked as a doctor I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.45
Now, I think I get what Bonhoeffer meant in his criticism of religion and hope for a future religionless Christianity. But as exciting as terms like “new theology,” “religionless Christianity,” and “man come of age,” or “world come of age” are, and they do indeed get one’s theological juices flowing, I do not think that at the end of the day they are helpful.46 At best they say nothing substantial or concrete and can create confusion––especially when used in ways which contradict their actual definition, or the common understanding of their meaning. At worst they can be rather misleading and may even distract one from living the cruciform life with the sort of basic honesty, courage, faith, hope, and love with which Bonhoeffer sought to live it.
References & Footnotes
1 Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, trans. Garrett Green (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2006). This is a new translation of §17 in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 280–361.
2 While Barth critiqued religion as “faithlessness,” he also said that humans were always and unavoidably religious. Barth described religion as the human effort to have and to possess God as opposed to real faith which is a gift of God. Religion is therefore actually faithlessness. For Barth religion is an immature expression of faith, for Bonhoeffer it is more than simply immature, it is, he thought, an inauthentic expression of faith. While acknowledging Barth’s priority in using the term “religionless,” Bonhoeffer criticized Barth for not having offered non-religious language for interpreting Biblical concepts, and for having substituted a positivism of doctrine in place of religion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison, May 5, 1944. 286.
3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, translated by J. H. Burtness (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Book, 2022).
4 This characteristic is particularly easy to discern in the letters he wrote during his visits to Rome, Spain, and America. See: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Barcelona, Berlin, New York 1928-1931, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 10, ed. Clifford J. Green and trans. Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008). Also: Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer A Biography, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, trans. Eric Mosbacher (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000) 59.
5 Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer A Biography, xviii, 909.
6 Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer A Biography, 3-20, 13.
7 Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison, 287.
8 His older brother Klaus was tortured and executed by hanging not long after Dietrich’s execution.
9 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison, 381-382, 387. Bethge, Bonhoeffer A Biography, 875.
10 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison, 349.
11 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison, 347-348.
12 Bethge, Bonhoeffer A Bibliography, 859.
3 We know that he expressed the hope that he would have the peace and strength to complete his manuscript, but whether he did or not we simply do not know. What we know is how he lived and how he died.
4 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison, Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison, April 30, 1944, 278-282; June 8, 1944, 325-327; July 8, 1944, 345-346; July 16, 1944, 359-361.
5 Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology & Other Basic Writings, ed., and trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984) 4.
6 Existentialism, which Bultmann said is what is left to preach after demythologizing the New Testament, says a praiseworthy moral, or authentic existence, is one in which we acknowledge and own up to our freedom, take full responsibility for our choices, and live in such a way as to help others realize their freedom.
7 Karl Barth Church Dogmatics Vol IV, The Doctrine of Reconciliation Part 3.2, eds. G.W. Bromily and T.F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromily (New York: T & T Clark, 1961[rep. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010]) 735-736.
8 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas, and Thomas Wiesner (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1960) 58 -59.
9 Edwin Friedman, pioneering family systems therapist, leadership consultant, and rabbi, thought that a pathogen cannot gain ground in a host without the host being somehow complicit. See: Friedman’s Fables (New York: Guilford Press, 2014) 24-28, 223.
20 Bethge, Bonhoeffer A Biography, 893.
21 Bonhoeffer was to have met with Niemöller and arrived at Niemöller’s church just after Niemöller has been taken away by the secret police.
22 The closure of the Finkenwalde Seminary by the Secret Police must have been one more heavy weight on Bonhoeffer. In 1935 the Confessing Church created an underground school at Finkenwalde on the Baltic Sea. Bonhoeffer was asked not only to teach but to become the seminary’s director as well. Rather than being called Herr Direktor he preferred, in keeping with the “new monasticism” character of the seminary, to simply be called “Brother Bonhoeffer.” Himmler declared the seminary illegal and order the Gestapo to close it in September 1937. More than two dozen of its former students were arrested and sent either to prison or the Eastern front.
23 Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, 893.
24 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison, 281.
25 A spiritual director working with Bonhoeffer might well have questions involving faith as “ultimate concern:” See: Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row 1958). Also: Lawrence D. Hart, Hells Abyss Heaven’s Grace: War and Christian Spirituality (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2006).
26 Gerald May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (New York: Harper Collins, 1982).
27 The Cal Tech physics professor, Feynman was widely known and appreciated as a great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain the most profound ideas and problems to beginning students. Once, his fellow professor and friend, David L. Goldstein, said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Feynman promised to prepare a freshman lecture on the topic., When they met again a few days later Freyman told Goldstein, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.” Freyman thought that if we can’t explain something simply it is because we don’t really understand it.
28 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison (May 5, 1944), 286.
29 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison (May 5, 1944), 286.
30 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison (May 1944), 300.
31 Bonhoeffer himself had already demonstrated the distinction between a doctrine which is a lived experience and one which is a cliché in emphasizing the difference between “cheap” and “costly” grace in his The Cost of Discipleship.”
32 Bonhoeffer with his emphasis on mercy, humility compassion and cruciform spirituality stands in unambiguous opposition to the Nazis who, appropriating the ideas and words of Friedrich Nietzsche despised Christianity as weak and glorified instead power and dominance.
33 William Barry, S. J., Paying Attention to God: Discernment in Prayer (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1992) 55-69.
34 Bonhoeffer, Letters From Prison (December 5, 1943, and July 16, 1944-August 21, 1944), 157, 360-361, 361, 369, 375, 382-383, 391 respectively.
35 Since, as Bonhoeffer himself said, God is not a concept, I would prefer perhaps life principle or precepts.
36 Larry Hart, A Grammar of Holy Spirit: Classical Christian Spirituality (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023) 48-49.
37 Bethge, Bonhoeffer A Biography, 831.
38 See: Larry Hart, A Grammar of Holy Mystery, 2023. Also: Lawrence D. Hart, Alleluia Is the Song of the Desert, (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 20004).
39 Betge, Bonhoeffer A Biography, 889.
40 Bethge, Bonhoeffer, A Biography, 28.
41 Bethge, Bonhoeffer, A Biography, 920.
42 Bethge, Bonhoeffer, A Biography, 920.
43 Bethge, Bonhoeffer, A Biography, 924.
44 Bethge, Bonhoeffer, A Biography, 926-927.
45 Bethge, Bonhoeffer, A Biography, 927-928.
46 Viktor Frankl, the young Jewish psychiatrist who survived four years in Auschwitz, wrote, in my opinion, with greater depth of psychological and spiritual insight than Bonhoeffer, and did so in a way easily comprehensible to modern men and women by using less enigmatic and confusing terminology. From his death camp experience Frankl even developed a new psychotherapy while continuing to embrace religiousness as meaningful after his liberation. He eventually remarried. His second wife was Roman Catholic. She attended a Jewish Synagogue with him each Sabbath, and he a Catholic church with her on Sundays. See: Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: From Death Camp to Existentialism, trans. Ilse Lasch (Washington: Bacon Press, 1959).
