Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“To think of the church as something universal would change everything and would set in motion the entire course of Bonhoeffer’s remaining life, because if the church was something that actually existed, then it existed not just in Germany or Rome, but beyond both.”

This quote, describing Bonhoeffer’s reflections upon his journey to Rome as a young adult, ties in with the theme of The Nature of Christian Identity and Practice. For Bonhoeffer, the communal dimension of Christian life is at the core of one’s identity, and that communal dimension is preeminently found in the church. His theology of the church, then, as the universal communion to which all Christians belong, sat at the center of his thought.

“Bonhoeffer would identify the church as neither a historical entity nor an institution, but as ‘Christ existing as church-community.’”

This quote also relates to Bonhoeffer’s theology of the church, this time in the context of Bonhoeffer’s academic thesis. His description of the church being Christ existing as church-community is an allusion to a metaphor commonly used in the New Testament, in which the church community is referred to as “the Body of Christ.”

“Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is, there is never loneliness.”

Bonhoeffer’s theological focus on the church revolves around the two poles of community and devotion, and both are visible in this quote. The church is a community that prays together, and both the community-element and the prayer-element are essential to its identity.

“Nearly all that Bonhoeffer would say and write later in life marked a deepening and expansion of what he had earlier said and believed, but never any kind of significant theological change. He was building on what had been established, like a scientist or mathematician.”

Here Metaxas draws attention to the consistency of Bonhoeffer’s thought. He was not a man given to wild swings from one camp to another, or dramatic conversions to a different way of thinking. Rather, he began with certain principles about God and scripture, and built up from those principles throughout his ministry career.

“Do we believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, or do we believe in the eternal mission of France? One can’t be a Christian and a nationalist at the same time.”

This quote is from Bonhoeffer’s friend Jean Laserre (referring to his own French context), and it ties in with the theme of The Nature of Christian Identity and Practice. Bonhoeffer’s association with Laserre helped him develop the idea of the universal nature of the church and its claims on Christian allegiance.

“He seemed to want to warn everyone to wake up and stop playing church. They were all sleepwalking toward a terrible precipice! But few took him seriously.”

This is Metaxas’s description of a sermon Bonhoeffer preaches at one of the leading churches of Berlin. Metaxas frequently portrays Bonhoeffer as a prophet, much as in the case of the Old Testament prophets, who tried to warn people of coming realities but who were often dismissed or ignored. Bonhoeffer's outspoken views against Hitler speak to The Interplay Between Faith and Political Action in his life.

“Two days after Hitler’s election, a young professor of theology delineated with incisiveness the most fundamental philosophical errors of a regime that hadn’t existed when he wrote the speech, but that would from the week in which he was speaking and for the next twelve years lead a nation and half the world into a nightmare of violence and misery […] There was an oddly prophetic aspect to the whole thing.”

Here again we have a reference to Bonhoeffer’s prophetic role, warning his fellow Germans about the dangers of a leader like Hitler. This quote refers to Bonhoeffer’s radio address, composed before Hitler won the election, but which in retrospect accurately diagnosed many of the dangers Hitler’s regime would pose.

“What is at stake […] is by no means the question whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the task of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the word of God.”

In this quote, Bonhoeffer pushes back against the tendencies among German churchgoers to quietly align themselves to Nazi values. Many churches had framed the conversation of the “Jewish question” as being one of the permissibility of continued fellowship, but Bonhoeffer instead challenges them to see fellowship with Jews as a nonnegotiable starting-point of what it means to be the church, not some minor issue to be debated or reformed.

“Bonhoeffer’s three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state’s victims, and work against the state, if necessary, were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.”

This quote helpfully outlines the content of Bonhoeffer’s pamphlet, issued in response to the “church struggle” with the German Christian movement. He outlines three ways in which the church should interact with the state, but his conclusions were so bold in the context of the current milieu that most people would only have agreed with the first.

“It has become ever more evident to me that we are to be given a great popular national Church, whose nature cannot be reconciled with Christianity, and that we must prepare our minds for the entirely new paths which we shall then have to follow. The question is really: Christianity or Germanism?”

Here Bonhoeffer reflects on the fact that the Nazis would soon implement their plan to have a single Reichskirche for all of Germany. One of Bonhoeffer’s strengths as a resistance leader was that he was never given to ambivalence. In the case of the Reichskirche, he openly denounced the allegiance of German churches to Nazism as non-Christian.

“[W]hen someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn’t join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn’t. ‘If you board the wrong train,’ he said, ‘it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.’”

This quote illustrates the winsome and quick-witted nature of Bonhoeffer’s dialogue, as well as his unwillingness to put up with half-measures. For him, once the truth of the matter was evident, he felt that one must simply stand with the truth, regardless of the consequences. Ironically, however, he did end up working against an institution from within later in his life—ostensibly serving as an intelligence agent for the Reich while participating in the conspiracy against Hitler, but in that case he was under the shelter of the Abwehr, which was itself a bastion of covert resistance against the Führer.

“To Bonhoeffer, because of the Barmen Declaration, the Confessing Church had become the German church, and he believed that all true Christians would recognize that the Reichskirche of the German Christians was officially excommunicated.”

Here again we see the black-and-white nature of Bonhoeffer’s perception. Bonhoeffer believed that, given the theological questions that separated the Confessing Church and the Reichskirche, there could be only one true church between the two, and the other must be heresy. He was shocked when he found that others saw the matter more in shades of gray.

“Bonhoeffer saw that a large part of the problem was Lutheran theological education, which produced not disciples of Christ, but out-of-touch theologians and clerics whose ability to live the Christian life—and to help others live that life—was not much in evidence.”

This passage describes Bonhoeffer’s inspiration for the program of his underground seminary, which he intentionally designed to be different from the conventional model and its focus on academic theology. Following the theme The Nature of Christian Identity and Practice, which he viewed as consisting of discipleship lived in community with other disciples, he designed his seminary to be rich in practices of communal devotion.

“Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”

This is one of Bonhoeffer’s most frequently quoted sayings, encapsulating the duty of Christians to stand up for society’s victims, reflecting The Interplay Between Faith and Political Action. For Bonhoeffer, it was impossible to call oneself a Christian and engage in Christian worship while ignoring the gospel’s messages of loving and protecting society’s most vulnerable.

“Dear brethren, our real trouble is not doubt about the way upon which we have set out, but our failure to be patient […] And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God’s cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be ‘unsuccessful’: and yet be on the right road.”

Here Bonhoeffer writes about the challenges that his fellow Christians are facing, arguing that success is not necessarily to be equated with God’s favor. When he says “we simply cannot be constant,” he means that their problem is that they struggle to consistently hold to the realization that God’s call for them might, in fact, be a call to suffering.

“Christians cannot be governed by mere principles. Principles could carry one only so far. At some point every person must hear from God, must know what God was calling him to do, apart from others.”

This is an expression of Bonhoeffer’s view of Christian ethics, which is based on his understanding of how a believer should model themselves on the example of Jesus Christ. He argues that it is from a relationship with God, through Jesus, that one’s course of action in any given situation should be discerned. This insight helps explain why Bonhoeffer could feel that it was God’s call for him to join the conspiracy against Hitler, even though so many of Bonhoeffer’s own principles appeared to stand against the taking of a life.

“Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open.”

This quote speaks to the way Bonhoeffer believes human beings should act under suffering. Bonhoeffer views suffering as an opportunity to discern what God is doing in one’s life or in the world. Instead of papering over the wounds of suffering with platitudes and nice sentiments, Bonhoeffer insists we must simply learn to live with the reality of our wounds, and to discern what God is doing through those very wounds.

“A major theme for Bonhoeffer was that every Christian must be ‘fully human’ by bringing God into his whole life, not merely into some ‘spiritual’ realm.”

Bonhoeffer pushed back against the idea that Christianity was merely a part of one’s life, a set of beliefs which could be called “spiritual” and separated from the other, more earthly realities of daily life. Rather, he saw the true nature of Christian practice as being an offering of one’s whole life, lived in the practical, daily disciplines of learning to walk as a disciple of Jesus Christ. This belief reflects his ideas about The Interplay Between Faith and Political Action.

“One could never separate one’s actions from one’s relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking.”

This quote again relates to the theme of The Nature of Christian Identity and Practice, stating Bonhoeffer’s position clearly and concisely. For Bonhoeffer, true Christian practice was about active obedience to God, surrendering to the divine will in ways that resulted in taking real, practical action in one’s life.

“Bonhoeffer knew that to live in fear of incurring ‘guilt’ was itself sinful. God wanted his beloved children to operate out of freedom and joy to do what was right and good, not out of fear of making a mistake.”

Here Metaxas summarizes one of the key ideas of Bonhoeffer’s system of ethics, which Bonhoeffer saw as the crowning achievement of his life’s theological work. In Bonhoeffer’s view, action undertaken to follow God’s will, derived from one’s relationship with God, was always better than passive inaction, even if it meant mistakes would happen along the way. This idea helps explain how Bonhoeffer came to resolve the inner tension between his pacifist beliefs and his conviction that God wanted him to take action against Hitler, leading him to embrace Resistance Against Oppressive Regimes.

“He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action.”

This is another expression of the same idea which appears in the previous quotes, and which ties not only to the theme of The Nature of Christian Identity and Practice, but also to The Interplay Between Faith and Political Action. In the context of Bonhoeffer’s decisions, this understanding of Christian life was one of the key developments that led him to undertake the political action of joining the conspiracy against Hitler.

“That requires faith […] the faith that endures in the world and loves and remains true to that world in spite of all the hardships it brings us. Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth.”

This extract comes from a line that Bonhoeffer wrote from prison to his fiancée Maria, encouraging her to see their hoped-for marriage as an affirmation not only of spiritual truths, but as an allegory of the whole Christian life, which he believed affirms the spiritual as well as the earthly parts of daily existence. Bonhoeffer’s reflections on marriage have become some of his most quoted writings.

“Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”

At this point in the story of Bonhoeffer’s life, he is beginning to think more about the reality of death. While he has often hoped for exoneration or liberation, the likely end of his incarceration is now making itself known. For Bonhoeffer, however, his Christian faith encourages him to view death not as an end, but as a passage to life in an even truer and more vibrant sense.