11th August, 2006

Dr GORDON PREECE

If Protestants had saints, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred under Hitler in 1945 just days before the Allies reached his concentration camp, would be one of the first canonised. Not just his unsought martyr’s death, "hung naked with a piano wire", but his life’s movement from privilege to growing identification with those who suffer, his courageous return from the safety of the US to Germany, his work with the underground church and, more controversially, the underground resistance in the plot to assassinate Hitler, all argue his case for canonisation.

"If Protestants had saints, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred under Hitler in 1945 just days before the Allies reached his concentration camp, would be one of the first canonised."

Bonhoeffer’s books - The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, Letters and Papers from Prison and Ethics the best known - have nurtured many through a dark night of the soul. His writings have been my companion since teenage years. The congruence between his life and thought, his ‘walking the talk’, "sets him apart from most public figures in his time and our own" as Stephen Haynes says in The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint, written to coincide with the centenary of Bonhoeffer’s birth on February 4th, 1906.

But like all saints made into static statues, their portraits often tell us more about the artists and their age, than the saint and theirs, the movement of their lives and the movements they belonged to or founded. This is certainly true of Bonhoeffer and the Church of his anguished age. As Ragan Sutterfield writes in No Easy Saint : "Bonhoeffer is not a comfortable saint; his is a sainthood of contradictions. Since September 11th [or his death for that matter] no Christian figure has been appealed to so much or so broadly as Bonhoeffer. But Bonhoeffer has not been a single saint. He is now the pacifist Bonhoeffer, the just-war Bonhoeffer, the resistant Bonhoeffer, even the terrorist Bonhoeffer. We are left to ask, where is Bonhoeffer the man in all of the invocations of his name?"

Earlier on, Letters and Papers from Prison, or rather soundbites or slogans from it, was a set text for the ‘God is dead’ and ‘Secular City’ movements of the Sixties. The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together were compulsory reading material for the radical discipleship and Christian community movements of the Seventies and Eighties. Influenced by the swinging Sixties, liberal theologians such as Bishop J.A.T. 'Honest to God’ Robinson (who I once had a pleasant dinner opposite at Moore College!) and American Episcopalian Joseph Fletcher built a superstructure of sexual situation ethics on the shaky foundation of Bonhoeffer's allusive prison references to "man come of age". They, like Bishop Spong who wrongly and belatedly invokes Bonhoeffer in his A New Christianity for a New World, believed we had progressed beyond sexual rules and taboos to ‘all you need is love’. Sadly, for all their concern to reach those outside the church, and Spong’s part pastoral, part patronising concern for the Church’s ‘alumni’, who have graduated from its ‘immature’ belief system, such renegade Episcopal bishops have learnt little from the sixties or from the age of AIDS, promiscuity and pornography it helped create. They divorce the delights of sexuality from the demands and costs of discipleship Bonhoeffer was so emphatic about.

These apologists for the sexual revolution also failed to take seriously Bonhoeffer’s own words. He wrote movingly for his niece’s wedding of marriage as a vocation for life, sustained not by the flickering fire of a fragile human love, but by the hearth of promises made before God, even as he awaited his own marriage. For Bonhoeffer, marriage is a covenantal exchange of promises and a continuous calling or vocation which makes love as much as it is made by it. He noted in Creation and Fall that East of Eden we can no longer be completely naked or honest with one another as the Sixties hippies wanted and Spong and Big Brother still want to be. Fortunately God graciously clothes our nakedness. We need covenantal contexts for commitment and intimacy. Instant intimacy is a utopian quest for paradise, to get ‘back to the garden’, as the Woodstock generation sang.

Bonhoeffer’s writings are often read by both Left and Right, Liberals and Conservatives, as if they are separate fragments or contradictory - not helped by the fact that many were smuggled in pieces out of prison, or dug up. But it strikes me that the attack by The Cost of Discipleship on a distorted pietistic and privatised Lutheran ‘cheap grace’ and two kingdoms (spiritual and worldly) also fits with his attack on cost-less, comforting, therapeutic Christianity in Letters and Papers from Prison.

Bonhoeffer despised psychiatric burrowing around in people’s guilt. His father was a leading psychiatrist and perhaps this represents a rebellion against him, but Bonhoeffer rejects a narrow focus on forgiveness of sins, what Krister Stendahl later called The Introspective Conscience of the West in an important article. In some ways Bonhoeffer perhaps anticipates Bishop Tom Wright and the ‘New Perspective' on Paul. His desire for a Christianity able to communicate with people who no longer pray in bunkers when the bombs are going off, but are part of a humanity ‘come of age’, a ‘mature’ humanity, is part of this also. He preferred the language of non-religious people and sought a religion-less Christianity, rather than the manipulative misuse of God’s name to make God play our game.

But Bonhoeffer still prayed, and prayed boldly, as an adult child of God, like the psalmists he loved, not in a childish way, like many Christians. He believed we are called to wait and watch with Jesus in Gethsemane, over a suffering world, for ‘only the suffering God can help’. From this arose The Crucified God theology of the former POW Jurgen Moltmann. Dietrich read his Bible, non-religiously, but finding even in Paul’s longing note to Timothy to ‘come before winter’ (2 Timothy 4:21), a direct divine word that he should return from the comfort of New York where he could have had a long life as a famous theologian, to be with his people in their suffering under Hitler. As a struggling ‘saint’, it took a confrontation with his Jewish brother-in-law for Bonhoeffer to identify with Jews in their struggle and to speak out.

Bonhoeffer’s Sermon on the Mount and Ghandian pacifism changed over time as even the Confessing Church (not the German Christians who submitted to Hitler), whose pastors he taught Life Together to at the underground Finkelwalde Seminary, could not come to a common mind or action on the pacifism issue. Consequently he stepped out of the ‘sanctuary of his private virtuousness’ as Jean Bethke Elshtain calls it in Just War Against Terror, and joined the plot to assassinate Hitler. However, unlike situation ethicists for whom the situation is all and sin nothing, Bonhoeffer never sought to justify what he did. For him killing was sinful and in need of forgiveness. He ‘sinned boldly’ as Luther said, because he believed it was the only thing left to be done to stop the maniacal Hitler driving Germany to a ruinous death. Being a bystander and praying piously for the dead was a copout to Bonhoeffer. But Bonhoeffer was left with this last resort because of the failure of the church, even the Confessing Church.

Dietrich did not, as Elshtain and other apologists for the war against terrorism in Iraq claim, decide that the ‘responsible’ violence of the nation had to replace ‘private virtuousness’. Bonhoeffer’s virtousness, even tainted by violence, is never private, but personal and public before God and his people, even when the latter lagged behind him. As he asked: ‘Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God’ (Letters & Papers 1997, 5). As Stanley Hauerwas notes in his Performing the Truth: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence, Bonhoeffer sought to bring the church out of a privatised invisibility into bold public action exemplifying the Gospel. Bonhoeffer was not a saint, hero or moral mountain-climber. As a theologian serving the church, he called all God’s people to claim their heritage as saints in Christ (1 Corinthians 1:30):"The failure of the church to oppose Hitler was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world".

Despite the church’s failure, Bonhoeffer’s prison (and other) writings were pregnant with hope. From his death new life and action was born in other prisons. Nelson Mandela was nourished by them and Eberhard Bethge’s biography of Bonhoeffer. The South African church (including John W. de Gruchy) drew on his example for its non-violent campaign against apartheid and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Korean Minjung theologians imprisoned by a dictatorial government for non-violent industrial action against grave injustice were labelled ‘the Bonhoeffer group’ by the secret police. Australians could do much worse than find in Bonhoeffer an appropriate model for living the truth in our tumultuous times. For all the contemporary confusion about who Bonhoeffer was and even his own confusion at the time, Bonhoeffer knew from the poem below that it’s not his or our knowledge of who he was, but God’s that counts.

Who am I?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equably, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself 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 voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
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 to-day 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, You know, O God, I am Yours!

Dr Gordon Preece is director of the Macquarie Christian Studies Institute and an organiser of two conferences celebrating Bonhoeffer’s birth centenary and his continuing relevance featuring South African theologian and author John W. de Gruchy. For details of the Sydney conference on 28th to 30 September or for university-accredited Christian courses, contact www.mcsi.edu.au or for the Melbourne conference on 21st to 24th September, contact http://bonhoefferconference.com. This article was first published in Alive Magazine.