Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church that would not bow to the Reich

Everybody loves Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That is the problem.

Quote him in a sermon, a speech or a protest sign and you will find that every faction in the country thinks he belongs to it. Pastors who want to defy a tax rule cite him. Activists who want to defy the opposite tax rule cite him. Politicians of every stripe have found in him a handy certificate of moral seriousness, which is a strange thing to do with a man who was hanged by a government for what he did. A figure that everyone can claim is a figure that almost no one has read.

So let us do the unfashionable thing and look at what he actually did, in order, with the dates. The story is simple to state and hard to live: a young German pastor saw earlier than most what Nazism was, said so in the church and out of it, built a seminary the government wanted closed, and was executed at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945, a few weeks before the war in Europe ended. What his life asks of us is narrower and harder than the posters suggest.

Who he was

Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau, into a prominent, cultivated German family; his father was a leading psychiatrist and neurologist. He studied theology at Tübingen and Berlin, earned his doctorate young, and spent a year as an exchange student at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930 and 1931. There he worshiped in the Black churches of Harlem, an experience that he said opened his eyes to a living Christianity. He was ordained in the Lutheran church of Prussia and taught at the University of Berlin.

None of that suggested a martyr. It suggested a promising theologian with a secure career. The point is worth making because the temptation, in retelling his story, is to treat his courage as a given. It was not a given. It was a series of choices, each of which cost him something, and which he could have declined.

The premises of resistance

Let me set out the argument the way Bonhoeffer's life makes it, in steps, because the steps are what a believer today can actually use.

1. The state has a legitimate sphere, and a legitimate state deserves obedience. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran, and Lutheran tradition, drawing on Romans 13, taught obedience to governing authorities. He did not begin as a rebel. His resistance had to overcome his own training.
2. A state that persecutes its own citizens by law has left its sphere. The Nazi regime, which took power when Adolf Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, began within weeks to remove Jews, then political opponents, from public life by statute.
3. The church has a duty to say so. If the church is silent when the state breaks the law of God against its neighbors, it has made itself a department of the state.
4. Saying so costs something, and the cost is the test. Words are cheap in a free country. In the Third Reich they were not.

Bonhoeffer did not invent these premises, but he followed them further than almost anyone in his church, and that is the whole story.

1933: the Aryan paragraph

Two days after Hitler became chancellor, Bonhoeffer gave a radio address in Berlin on the idea of leadership, warning of a leader who made himself an idol. The broadcast was cut off before he finished. The detail is a small one, and the sources differ on the exact circumstances, but it shows where he stood in the first weeks.

The decisive clash came over the law and the church. On April 7, 1933, the regime issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Among its provisions was an "Aryan paragraph" that removed people of Jewish descent from public employment. The law did not apply to churches, since churches were not part of the civil service. But a movement within German Protestantism called the German Christians wanted to apply the same principle to the church: pastors of Jewish descent would be removed, and baptized Jewish Christians would be treated as a lesser class.

Bonhoeffer wrote an essay that spring, "The Church and the Jewish Question," which set out three possible responses of a church to a state that was acting unjustly. The church could ask the state whether its actions were legitimate. It could help the victims of the state's actions, whoever they were. And in the last resort it could do more than bandage the victims under the wheel: it could jam a spoke in the wheel itself. The essay is a careful and uncomfortable document, written when many Christians were still hoping the new government would settle down. He argued that the church could not allow the state to dictate who was a Christian.

That was the heart of the matter. The German Christians were asking the church to accept that a racial category, set by the state, decided who could be a pastor. Bonhoeffer's answer was that baptism, not blood, made a man a Christian, and that the church had no authority to drop its own members at the state's bidding. In September 1933 the church of the Old Prussian Union adopted the Aryan paragraph, and Bonhoeffer and others saw that the line had been crossed.

The Pastors' Emergency League and Barmen

The resistance took shape quickly. Martin Niemöller founded the Pastors' Emergency League in the fall of 1933, and the movement it started became the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer was one of its early voices, though in October 1933 he took a pastorate in London, where he served two German-speaking congregations until April 1935. He did not sit idle there. He worked with ecumenical contacts to build support abroad for the Confessing Church.

The founding moment of the movement was the Barmen Synod of May 1934. Its text, the Theological Declaration of Barmen, was drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. Bonhoeffer was in London at the time. The Declaration is short, six theses, and it did something plain and brave. It said that Jesus Christ, as attested in Scripture, is the one Word of God that the church must hear, trust and obey, and that the church rejects any teaching that sets other events, powers, figures or truths beside that Word as a source of its proclamation. It also rejected the notion that the church might hand over the shape of its message and order to the leaders of the state.

Notice what Barmen did not do. It did not call for a political revolt. It did not endorse a party. It was a statement about who is Lord, and its political force came from the fact that the Reich demanded to be Lord. That is the theology of resistance in one sentence: the one who says that Christ alone is Lord has no room left to say it of anyone else.

I would add a caution, one that serious historians insist on. The Confessing Church was never a united front against Nazism. Most of its energy went into defending the church's own independence and its own members, not into a general protest against the regime's crimes. Some of its leaders were nationalists who initially welcomed Hitler. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, pressed for a church that would speak for the Jews, and was often disappointed with his colleagues. Honest history includes the failures of the faithful.

Finkenwalde

In April 1935 Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to lead an illegal seminary of the Confessing Church, first on the Baltic coast and then at Finkenwalde, near Stettin. For about two and a half years he trained young pastors, in a community of shared worship, prayer, study and common life. The regime considered the seminary unlawful, and in September 1937 the Gestapo closed Finkenwalde.

Two books came out of that period. The Cost of Discipleship (1937), which warned against what Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace," meaning grace as an idea without obedience. And Life Together, which he wrote in 1938, a short and beautiful account of Christian community. Both are worth reading for their own sake. Cheap grace is a sharp phrase: the forgiveness of sins offered with no demand for repentance. It is an indictment of a faith that costs nothing, and it is as relevant to a comfortable suburb as it was to Berlin.

After Finkenwalde, he trained pastors in secret, in small groups in the Pomeranian countryside, under constant surveillance. Understand what that meant. A man with a doctorate and an offer from Union Seminary in America was teaching in barns because the state forbade him to teach in a classroom.

The decision to come home

In June 1939, with war close, Bonhoeffer's friends arranged for him to go to the United States for a lecture tour and a safe place. He went. Within weeks he was back. He wrote that he had made a mistake in coming, that he would have no right to take part in the rebuilding of Christian life in Germany after the war if he did not share the trials of this time with his people. He sailed home in July.

That decision is the center of the case. A man chose, with his eyes open, to return to a country he knew was about to go to war, because he believed that a pastor's place is with his people when they are in danger. It is hard to find a clearer example of what faithful resistance looks like at the level of a single life.

Arrest and execution

During the war, through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer became involved with the Abwehr, German military intelligence, which sheltered a circle of officers and officials who opposed Hitler. He traveled abroad on the Abwehr's behalf, using the journeys to meet churchmen and to pass word of the resistance to the Allies. He also took part in efforts that helped a small group of Jews escape to Switzerland. He was arrested on April 5, 1943, and held at Tegel military prison in Berlin.

He wrote in prison, and the letters and papers, published after the war, are a remarkable record of a mind under pressure. In the autumn of 1944, after the failure of the July 20 plot to kill Hitler, the Gestapo found documents that tied the conspirators, including Bonhoeffer's circle, to the resistance. He was moved to the Gestapo's cellar prison in Berlin, then to Buchenwald, and in the final weeks of the war, to Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria. He was sentenced to death on April 8, 1945, and on April 9 he was hanged at Flossenbürg, along with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and other conspirators. Hitler died by his own hand on April 30. American troops liberated Flossenbürg on April 23.

Let me draw a line here that matters for what follows. Bonhoeffer's involvement in the conspiracy has been argued over for eighty years. It is a hard case: a pastor, bound by Lutheran obedience, who concluded that a regime committing mass murder had forfeited its claim on obedience. The ordinary circumstances of a free republic are nothing like that. We have courts, elections, a free press and a constitutional order for the redress of wrongs, and none of those existed in the Third Reich. Anyone who cites Bonhoeffer to justify illegal action against a government that is merely mistaken, or merely disliked, has misunderstood him. His own writings treat the extreme case as extreme, and he spent years first using every lawful and ecclesiastical means before anything else. He is not a license. He is a measure of how far it must go before a believer's duty changes.

The misuse of his name

Which brings us to the problem we started with. Because Bonhoeffer is the most admired Christian of the twentieth century, he has been recruited by everyone. A few examples of the mistake, without naming anyone:

• The all-purpose analogy. Whatever policy someone dislikes becomes the "Nazi" regime and whoever opposes it becomes Bonhoeffer. That cheapens both the victims and the man.
• The Bonhoeffer of one sentence. A line about speaking up gets pulled out of context and pinned to a cause the writer never imagined. Some of the best-known quotes attributed to him are not in his writings at all. If you cannot find the sentence in a published work, do not use it.
• The Bonhoeffer without Christ. Strip out the theology and you have a general hero of conscience. But the reason he resisted was that he believed Jesus is Lord, and that the state is not. Take that out and you lose the engine.

The corrective is to read him. The man who wrote about cheap grace was demanding costly obedience first of himself.

The strongest objection

A fair critic will raise an objection to all this. If Bonhoeffer is so useful, why did the churches fail to stop the regime? The Confessing Church's courage was real, but it did not prevent the catastrophe, and most German Christians did not resist. Is his example an inspiration or a rebuke?

It is both, and I would not soften either half. The answer to the objection is that resistance is judged by its fidelity, not its success. Bonhoeffer did not know that the war would be lost, or that his death would come about a month before the war ended. He acted because he believed it right. A faith that is only valuable when it wins is a faith about winning. The rebuke falls on the majority who did nothing, and the lesson for us is to ask, while the questions are still small, what we would refuse to do.

Other prisoners of conscience tell a similar story. Christians under modern regimes that jail pastors for unregistered worship, as How China's Communist Party licenses churches and jails pastors describes, face versions of his choice every week. The 1998 law that put religious persecution on America's foreign agenda and 1915, the Armenian genocide and the Christian peoples who perished with them cover other chapters of the same long record, and Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident explains why such regimes target churches and families first. At home, the quiet courage of pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement shows what resistance by lawful means can accomplish in a free country. And the Founders' own reasoning about the limits of obedience, in The Boston sermon of 1750 that taught colonists when to resist a king, belongs to the same tradition.

The case in brief

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor born in 1906, opposed Nazism from the first weeks of 1933 and refused to let the church adopt the state's racial law.
2. The Barmen Declaration of 1934 and the Confessing Church affirmed that Christ alone is Lord of the church; Bonhoeffer's illegal seminary at Finkenwalde trained pastors until the Gestapo closed it in 1937.
3. He chose to return from America in 1939, was arrested on April 5, 1943, and was hanged at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945.
4. His example is an extreme case, set in a regime without courts or elections, and it does not license illegal action against ordinary political disagreement in a free republic.
5. Every faction cites him; the honest course is to read him, and to ask what we would refuse to do before the stakes are high.

What you can do: read The Cost of Discipleship or the six theses of the Barmen Declaration this month, and ask your own congregation what it would decline to do if a government demanded it.