Yet those less significant, but equally important, roles were necessary to Bonhoeffer's role: Aaron holding up Moses' arms. Someone had to change Martin Luther's diaper, or there'd have been no Reformation. Someone had to teach Mother Theresa how to read and write, or there'd have been no world-changing mission in Calcutta.
Precisely because so much has been written about Bonhoeffer, the reader risks losing him. Bonhoeffer has been made and remade, into a liberal and into a conservative, into a Lutheran and into an ecumenist, into a German and into a global citizen, into a revolutionary and into a traditionalist. When a historic individual becomes an icon, the literary world can reduce him to two dimensions, and eventually to one. A pure symbol becomes subject whichever meanings are arbitrarily attached to it.
Consider JFK and MLK as quick examples. Which vote-seeking candidate will fail to praise both of them, and yet attach his own political agenda to both of them?
Thus we need to keep in touch with the specific and concrete details of Bonhoeffer's life, or we will lose him. He will become a symbol to be misinterpreted and exploited by successive ideologies.
To this end, biographies gain their value. Were it not for this danger, one might well dispense with biography. But the physical facts of the man's life act as anchors to keep texts, written by or about him, pegged to reality. One familiar with the daily routine of the Finkenwalde Seminary cannot seriously entertain Bonhoeffer as practical atheist. One versed in Bonhoeffer's academic life cannot embrace the view that, while he explored ecumenism, he abandoned traditional Lutheranism.
Recent biographies, notably one by Eric Metaxas, merit study as companions to Bonhoeffer's writings, and companions to the huge body of literature about Bonhoeffer. Writing about Charles Marsh's biography of Bonhoeffer, Timothy Larson muses about
the sheer unlikelihood of Bonhoeffer's emergence as the boldest opponent of efforts to Nazify the German church.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was too young and too academic to offer serious resistance to the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler. He was a rich kid from an intellectual family. He enjoyed kicking around a soccer ball with seminary students. He had no real monetary income even to support himself.
But what power did Bonhoeffer wield in 1933? He was 27 years old, financially dependent on his parents, and virtually bereft of experience in the working world. His sole professional appointment was an unpaid, non-tenure-track position as a voluntary lecturer. Adjunct professors don't normally stand athwart emperors.
Yet Bonhoeffer was ahead of the curve, ahead of his peers, and ahead of the times. While many of his fellow clergymen and fellow theologians would take several years to learn exactly how evil Hitler was, Bonhoeffer seemed to sense it from the very first. And Bonhoeffer would resist it from the very first. Indeed, along with resisting Hitler, and eventually making plans to overthrow Hitler, Bonhoeffer would be faced with the task of alerting his fellow pastors to the evil and persuading them to oppose it.
Yet Bonhoeffer did. Within weeks of Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Bonhoeffer declared in public that the Führer was offering a false path to salvation — and, in private, that Hitler was an antichrist. When the Nazis called for ethnically Jewish Christians to be expelled from the churches, he alone insisted that the gospel was at stake. (Initially even Karl Barth, like other anti-Nazi dissenters who founded the Confessing Church, claimed that this was merely a question of church order, not a theological issue.) Marsh, director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, makes a convincing case that by 1933, Bonhoeffer was the most radical and outspoken opponent of Nazi church policy.
Bonhoeffer's sense of personal holiness and the strict ethical code by which he lived aided him in his opposition to evil - here again the daily routines at the Finkenwalde Seminary are worth noting: Bonhoeffer forbade seminary students from talking about anyone who was not in the room; this was Bonhoeffer's way of avoiding gossip and observing Luther's explanation of the eighth commandment. But Bonhoeffer also understood clearly that personal holiness earns nothing, and is in fact rubbish in God's sight. Yet personal ethical convictions prepare the soul for confrontation with evil.
Unlike the rumors that sometimes surround him, Larsen writes, Bonhoeffer was "so sexually innocent" that twenty-first century readers find it difficult to believe.
Even Bonhoeffer's physical relationship with his fiancée, Maria — whom Marsh says Bonhoeffer was "smitten" by — comprised only a solitary occasion when, as a prisoner, he kissed her on the cheek in the presence of the public prosecutor. In a late prison letter, Bonhoeffer observed that he had lived a full life even though he would die a virgin.
Connecting with Anglican, Reformed, and Roman Catholic teachers and friends, Bonhoeffer was willing to absorb ideas which passed his litmus test. Particularly interesting are his experiences with American Christianity: which aspects of it he rejected, and which ones he embraced. Larsen reflects on
how willingly Bonhoeffer learned from disparate ecclesial influences. He was a kind of theological hoarder. When he went to Rome, he did not react with disgust as Martin Luther had, but rather gained a new appreciation of the church's universal nature. One is supposed to have to choose between Adolf von Harnack and Barth, but Bonhoeffer managed to value them both. Indeed, to extrapolate, one might see Bonhoeffer's late musings on "religionless Christianity" as blending Barth's insight that "Jesus simply has nothing to do with religion" with Harnack's method of separating the kernel (of biblical truth) from the husk (of cultural and historical circumstance).
While wrestling with theology at the most rarified and abstract intellectual heights, Bonhoeffer was grounded by teaching confirmation classes to teenagers in gritty urban factory neighborhoods. One of his litmus tests for theological ideas was the reality of daily life for these ordinary people. Did any of those ideas help them, make a difference to them, or apply to their lives?
Bonhoeffer was disappointed by his encounters with seminary professors and students in New York in the 1930s. Dismissive of Biblical text and direct discourse about Jesus, these seminarians sought to be relevant but did so without intellectual or spiritual foundations.
Initially, Bonhoeffer was disgusted by American Christianity. He was bewildered and frustrated by theologians who did not care about doctrine and preachers who were not interested in the gospel. Everyone wanted to pontificate on social issues. In time, however, he came to learn that his fellow Germans were also half-wrong in refusing to recognize the ethical demands of the Christian faith. Moreover, Bonhoeffer found in the African American church a community committed to both gospel proclamation and social action. Why, at the tender age of 27, was Bonhoeffer the lone German minister who immediately saw the scandal of excluding Jewish Christians from the church? Precisely because his experience in America taught him to connect faith and practice.
Bonhoeffer also saw quite early on that he would probably die at the hands of the National Socialists. He absorbed this calmly and continued his work. He knew he was risking his life at least as early as 1938, when he took up contact with a broader circle of resisters in Germany, and 1939, when he chose to return to Germany from New York, aware that he was placing his life in danger.
Timothy Larsen argues that one of Bonhoeffer's main points "was that Christianity is not merely a matter of what one believes, but of how one lives." To which we might add, and how one dies.
As German Lutherans rested complacently in their commitment to faith alone, while turning a blind eye to suffering and injustice, Bonhoeffer pointedly preached a Reformation Day sermon on I Corinthians 13:13: "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love." It turns out that even an unemployed 20-something can stand against the world when empowered by the Love that moves the sun and other stars.
While much has been made of "religionless Christianity," exactly what Bonhoeffer meant by that must be understood in light of his actions and in light of the way he lived his life. The eternal Jesus was so real for Bonhoeffer that religion, as a manmade institution, was often more a hindrance than a help. Bonhoeffer, like many Christians, had to overcome the church to get to Jesus.
