COMMENTARY: The man behind the Bonhoeffer legend

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ The German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer _ who was not yet 40 when the Nazis executed him in Berlin in April 1945 _ has emerged as the dominant figure of Christian resistance to Nazism. Indeed, […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer _ who was not yet 40 when the Nazis executed him in Berlin in April 1945 _ has emerged as the dominant figure of Christian resistance to Nazism.


Indeed, in some churches and seminaries today, Bonhoeffer’s name is invoked as a mantra, but usually without real knowledge of the man and his tumultuous times. Before he is totally lost in the mist of legend, it’s important for Christians and Jews to examine Bonhoeffer’s life and legacy.

In the 1930s, Bonhoeffer opposed the “German Christian” movement _ known as the “Brown Church” because many of its pastors wore Storm Trooper uniforms and espoused absolute obedience to Hitler and murderous anti-Semitism. The Nazi church stressed belief in an “Aryan Jesus,” and called for the elimination of all “Jewish influences” from church life.

Bonhoeffer considered the “German Christian” movement heretical because it capitulated to Nazi ideology. But he later came to believe that all forms of Christianity were inadequate in opposing Nazism, because adherence to strict orthodoxy and doctrinal purity in the face of evil left the church paralyzed.

When he recognized the church was morally bankrupt in the struggle against Hitler, Bonhoeffer did what few German clergy did during those terrible years: he crossed the line from spiritual resistance within the church to overt political action against the Nazis.

It was a fateful decision for the young pastor, one that ultimately cost him his life. Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned until his execution two years later, just a month before Germany surrendered to the Allies.

Bonhoeffer’s final letters from prison reveal an emerging sense of “Christian realism” and an intriguing concept he labeled “religionless Christianity.”

Bonhoeffer understood that God’s compassion extended far beyond the narrow confines of his church. As early as 1938, he told some seminary students that “(not only religious) but secular freedom, too, is worth dying for.”

Bonhoeffer did not live long enough to evolve from a theologically sturdy Lutheran into a religious universalist. But he was definitely a pilgrim on that path. And because he lived where and when he did _ in the bowels of a gangster state _ Bonhoeffer was thwarted in his attempt to fashion a new understanding of Christian belief.


Since virulent anti-Semitism was at the heart of the Nazi darkness, Bonhoeffer’s views of Jews and Judaism reveal much about the man.

His early writings are filled with the usual negative stereotypes derived from classic Christianity. Jews are both “loved and punished by God” and are a “rejected people” because they “received the promise of the Messiah, but could not love him …”

But because Bonhoeffer was Bonhoeffer, it was never that simple. One of his most famous statements was made in 1938 following the bloody anti-Jewish Crystal Night pogrom in Germany and Austria:

“Only the person who cries out for the Jews is permitted to sing Gregorian chants.”

And later:

“An expulsion of the Jews from the West must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”

Despite these statements, Walter Harrelson, a distinguished American Christian scholar, is highly critical of Bonhoeffer’s belief that the “Old Testament” has no meaning outside of its fulfillment by Christianity in the “New Testament.”


“I find it intolerable that the Jews who went to death (in the Holocaust) were in any less favorable position to comprehend the meaning of God’s love witnessed to in their Scriptures, than were Bonhoeffer and his fellow Christian martyrs … Bonhoeffer simply removes the Bible of the Jews from their hands … This (is) entirely unjustified …,” said Harrelson.

I believe that if Bonhoeffer had survived the war he would have transcended his earlier negative understanding of Jews and Judaism, and moved to higher theological ground. But it was not to be.

He was a gallant figure in the struggle against Nazism. He could have chosen a safer path that would have spared him a prison execution. Unlike the 6 million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer, as a Christian, had a choice, and he consciously acted with full knowledge of the consequences.

Finally, Bonhoeffer understood what few of his colleagues recognized:

“… the church beheld the despotic application of brute force, the … suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred, murder without raising her voice on behalf of the victims, without … hastening to their aid.”

This searing indictment of his fellow Christians is perhaps Bonhoeffer’s greatest legacy.

DEA END RUDIN

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