Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a blank canvas on which many paint him in their own image. Admirers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 -1945) portray him as a Protestant Saint. His critics expose him as a German liberal theologian—most respect Bonhoeffer as a martyr at the hands of Hitler’s antisemitic Nazism.
So many different views of Bonhoeffer
Evangelicals like to refer to Bonhoeffer’s denunciation of “cheap grace” as prevalent in the Protestant Church, which was backing Adolph Hitler. Bonhoeffer decried this compromise in his The Cost of Discipleship (1937): “Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession.”[1] His defense of life in the womb in his Letters and Papers from Prison is also celebrated: "To kill the fruit in the mother’s womb is to injure the right to life that God has bestowed on the developing life .... God wills to create a human being and that the life of this developing human being has been deliberately taken. And this is nothing but murder.”[2] In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer declared: “Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life.”[3]
Most sides respect Bonhoeffer for resisting the murderous regime of Adolph Hitler. Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth founded the Confessing Church, which opposed Nazism.[4] Barth took a decisive stand against Nazism and penned the Barmen Declaration, which was the manifesto for the Confessing Church.[5] Bonhoeffer became a double spy in the German Secret Police, joined a plot, and became complicit in a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging to death with a piano string by the Nazis in 1945 for his part in the "officers' plot" to assassinate Hitler. This conspiracy was led by Von Stauffenberg (who was the protagonist in the movie Valkyrie). Bonhoeffer’s last words as he faced execution were: “’This is the end for me, the beginning of life’ .... On 9 April, Bonhoeffer, after kneeling and praying, was led to the gallows to be hung. The prison doctor who witnessed the executions described Bonhoeffer as brave and composed: ‘In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.’”[6] Bonhoeffer is among the ten most important modern martyrs on the west front of Westminster Abbey, in London.
Bonhoeffer, who was a pacifist because of the horrors of the racist genocide against innocent Jews, aided the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer concluded the German Nazi regime was beyond any legal or political hope. The totalitarian Nazis controlled the corrupt government, courts, and press. Winston Churchill refused to help the resistance.[7] Even then, Bonhoeffer thought if it was ethically wrong to assassinate Hitler, it was even a greater evil not to. “He thought of it this way: If he were walking along the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin or Oxford Street in London, and he saw some lunatic plowing his car into the crowd, he could not stand idly on the sidewalk. He would not say to himself, ‘I am a pastor. I’ll just wait to bury the dead afterward.’ In whatever way he could, he would try to stop the lunatic driver.”[8] Hitler was that madman. Still, Bonhoeffer described himself as an “accomplice conscious of his guilt.”[9]
Another angle on Bonhoeffer was displayed by a Presbyterian minister, Paul Hill, who murdered an abortionist in Florida in 1994. Hill claimed that his violence was the same as Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazi regime.[10] This is an unjustified analogy. America today is not the same as Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Our country is not beyond remedy. Our situation is fundamentally different; we have recourse to the courts, elections, and laws, for example, which reversed Roe v Wade.[11] Because Bonhoeffer spoke against the German Führer, Bonhoeffer was forbidden to preach, teach, and write. We have freedom of speech, assembly, and the press in America. We can participate in a Pro-life movement.
Theological issues with Bonhoeffer
The greatest difficulty many Bonhoeffer scholars struggle with, however, is his theology. This is despite the doctrinal whitewashing some authors have provided Bonhoeffer. For example, Eric Metaxas told Christianity Today: "Bonhoeffer is more like a theologically conservative evangelical than anything else. He was as orthodox as Saint Paul or Isaiah."[12] This false view contradicts how Bonhoeffer described himself: A “’modern’ theologian who still carries the heritage of liberal theology within himself.”[13] Even Death of God advocates like “William Hamilton, drawing on the World War II experience, found initial inspiration for his theological project in the later work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer explored the idea of a religionless Christianity and contemplated a world come of age,’ which Hamilton interpreted as a world that had matured and no longer needed the transcendent God avowed by neo-orthodox Christianity.”[14]
How can such diverse groups from evangelicals to liberals to abortion doctor murderers to Death of God advocates claim Bonhoeffer as their hero? Admittedly, Bonhoeffer is not easy to figure out. He has been described as a puzzle with half the pieces missing.[15] I think a better depiction of Bonhoeffer is a 1000-piece puzzle of midnight. The pieces are all there, but it will take arduous work to locate them and assemble the picture of Bonhoeffer. There are two possible reasons, Bonhoeffer is misunderstood.
One reason Bonhoeffer is hard to interpret
One reason Bonhoeffer is difficult to decipher is because his writings appear on the surface to be evangelical, even though Bonhoeffer was a neo-orthodox theologian who endorsed German liberal theology. For example, Bonhoeffer wrote, “I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that we need only to ask insistently and with some humility for us to receive the answer from it.”[16] That sounds evangelical. Yet, Bonhoeffer was sympathetic to liberal Rudolf Bultmann, who rejected the historicity, authority, inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility of God’s Word. Bonhoeffer wrote of Bultmann: “He distinguished the early Jesus from the kerygmatic [preaching of] Christ. The Christian faith which is relevant for us did not begin until Christ’s resurrection into the kerygma, that is, into the preaching after Easter.”[17] According to Bultmann, the message of the Bible about Christ is legend created by the early church and incorporated later into the Bible. Bultmann wrote, “I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist.”[18]
We need to remember the context in which Bonhoeffer lived. Bonhoeffer was trained in the University of Berlin under German liberal theologians like Adolph von Harnack (who was a neighbor and family friend). Harnack denied the historical account of Jesus found in God’s Word:
What a severely Greek idea this is we can see ... the redeemer must himself be God and must become man .... They explain why Athanasius strove for the formula that the Logos-Christ was of the same nature as the Father, as though the existence or non-existence of the Christian religion were at stake. They show clearly how it was that other teachers in the Greek Church regarded any menace to the complete unity of the divine and the human in the Redeemer, any notion of a merely moral connexion, as a deathblow to Christianity.”[19]
A. H. Strong refuted what he called “The Development-theory of Harnack .... This holds Christianity to be a historical development from germs which were devoid of both dogma and miracle. Jesus was a teacher of ethics ... Greek influence ... added to this gospel a theological and supernatural element, and so changed Christianity from a life into a doctrine ... We object to the Development-theory of Harnack.”[20]
Bonhoeffer displayed the influence of German liberal theology in his rejection of the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible. “To take the statement that Christ is risen and present it as an ontological proposition would destroy the unity of scripture .... To say that Christ is risen and present would then be understood as a generally valid proposition with an independent ontological status which could be set critically over against other ontological propositions.”[21] When Bonhoeffer refers to the resurrected Christ, and sounds evangelical, he is referring to Bultman’s kerygmatic Christ, the Christ created in the preaching of the early church, not to the real existence or ontological historical resurrected Christ found in Scripture. Bonhoeffer employed the vocabulary of evangelicals, but he used the dictionary of German liberal theologians.
Another reason Bonhoeffer is hard to interpret
Another reason Bonhoeffer is considered evangelical is his views' evolution. Richard Weikart divides Bonhoeffer’s life into three periods:
(1) Pre-1931, during which time he studied under liberal theologians at the university of Berlin embraced Barth’s dialectical theology and wrote his first two theological works .... In his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio (1927), and Act and Being (1930), Bonhoeffer draws on a multitude of sources to develop his theology, especially German philosophy and sociology. Scriptures are only one authority among others.
(2) 1931-1939, the period including the Church Struggle, during which he published The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together .... provide a marked contrast, since in them Scripture is paramount, and philosophers are rarely if ever mentioned.
(3) 1939-1945, the time of Bonhoeffer’s resistance activities, imprisonment, and work on Ethics and his prison writing [Letters and Papers from Prison]. A noticeable change can be detected in Bonhoeffer’s attitude toward Scripture from one period to the next.[22]
Eberhard Bethge was a writer, pastor, theologian, Bonhoeffer’s close friend, and colleague. Bethge collected Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers from his two-year imprisonment in Tegel Prison in Berlin before his execution on April 9, 1945. Bonhoeffer wrote his prison letters and his prison theology, which was a departure from earlier writings. Richard Weikart observed that in Letters and Papers from Prison: “Although there are lines of continuity from his earlier works, these should not obscure that Bonhoeffer was making new departures in theology.”[23]
Bonhoeffer writes to his friend Eberhard Bethge 30 April 1944 in his Letters and Papers from Prison and reveals his change of theological views on Christianity and Christ. Bonhoeffer notes that to Eberhard, “You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to .... What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.”[24] Bonhoeffer’s Christianity had become “religionless.” Bonhoeffer asks, “What is a religionless Christianity?”[25] Bonhoeffer answers this question differently.
First, religionless Christianity rejects the supernatural.
He writes, “How do we speak of God - without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics.”[26] In other words, a religionless Christianity rejects the presuppositions of the supernatural. His following elaborations reveal this rejection of the supernatural.
Next, religionless Christianity rejects the need for individual or personal salvation.
A few more words about ‘religionlessness’ .... What does it mean to ‘interpret in a religious sense’? I think it means to speak on the one hand metaphysically, and on the other hand individualistically. Neither of these is relevant to the biblical message or to the man of today. Hasn’t the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all? Aren’t we really under the impression that there are more important things than that.
Bonhoeffer was again concerned how his altered views would sound to his closest friend.
I know it sounds pretty monstrous to say that. But, fundamentally, isn’t this in fact biblical? Does the question about saving one’s soul appear in the Old Testament at all? Aren’t righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and isn’t it true that Rom. 3.24ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous?[27]
Paul wrote the book of Romans to explain the doctrine of personal salvation (Rom 1:15-16). Paul revealed his motive in Romans 10:1: “My heart’s desire and prayer for Israel is that they might be saved.”
Additionally, religionless Christianity reject core doctrines of Scripture.
Bonhoeffer wrote: Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his really great merit; but he put in its place a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That isn’t biblical.[28]
Bonhoeffer stated that core doctrines like the virgin birth and the Trinity are unbiblical tenets of Christianity. Bonhoeffer was simply revealing his German liberal theological training.
Adolph von Harnack, Bonhoeffer’s teacher, in What is Christianity? advocated both the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of man or that all people are the children of God:
The whole of Jesus' message may be reduced to these two heads—God as the Father, and the human soul so ennobled that it can and does unite with him ... Jesus Christ calls to every poor soul; he calls to everyone who bears a human face: You are children of the living God.[29]
The Fatherhood of God is equal to universalism with Harnack: “A man may know it or not, but a real reverence for humanity follows from the practical recognition of God as the Father of us all.”[30]
Bonhoeffer also advocated Harnack’s universalism in 1949. Weikart writes that “Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the relationship of the church to the world in Ethics reveals that even his statements in The Cost of Discipleship which seemed to restrict salvation to those in the church did not necessarily imply that the world was excluded from salvation This is because Bonhoeffer argued that all the world is included in the church.”[31]
Bonhoeffer wrote in Ethics: The New Testament statement concerning the incarnation of God in Christ testifies that all men are accepted, enclosed, and bone within the body of Christ .... Not separation from the world is intended here, but rather the allying of the world into the fellowship of this body of Christ to which it in truth already belongs.[32]
Concluding thoughts on Bonhoeffer
I agree with Richard Weikart’s evaluation of Bonhoeffer:
What then should we make of Bonhoeffer? While recognizing his many admirable traits—compassion, courage, commitment, and integrity—we should be wary of many elements of his theology .... His theology reflected Barth’s neo-orthodox theology, which called Christians to get back to Scripture as the source for religious truth, but without believing that Scripture is historically true. Bonhoeffer always considered himself a follower of Barth, though most Bonhoeffer scholars rightly consider Bonhoeffer more liberal than Barth.[33]
Albert Mohler provides another helpful assessment of Bonhoeffer: I think it’s important that evangelical Christians be able to understand that history presents us with many complex issues and with many complex persons. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of those complex persons. I think there’s some evangelicals who want to, I think rather recklessly and wrongly, simply repackage Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an evangelical like us. I don’t believe he was. I don’t believe that can be squared with much of his theology and a good many of his writings .... But it’s another reminder that the confrontation with Nazism presents this with a huge moral fact and quite frankly, with a huge historical fact that is a very compelling story, which is why now well over a half century after his death at the hands of the Nazis, we’re still talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the likelihood is that Christians are going to be talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer long into the future.[34]
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 4, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001, 44.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Clifford J. Green; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998. 206).
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, New York: A Touchstone Book, 1949, 174.
[4] As a Swiss academic, Barth was an outsider to the German plotters, but that would not keep him from expressing sharp criticisms of the resistance, as he became aware of their plans [to assassinate Hitler] (Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 328).
[5] Richard Weikart, Scripture and Myth in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, University of Iowa, 1993, 12.
[6] Richard Weikart, The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Is His Theology Evangelical? San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1997, 24.
[7] From the Allied perspective, the very idea of altering, let alone suspending, their intricately laid military plans to place their hopes with a band of disaffected former Nazis was nothing short of ludicrous. Neither the Americans nor the British would ever seriously consider the option. That much became clear in January 1943, when, at the conclusion of the Casablanca Conference, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a joint announcement: the Allies would accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender (Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 329).
[8] Ibid., 346.
[9] Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, 234.
[10] Jeffrey Pugh, Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times (London: T and T Clark, 2008), 7.
[11] Albert Mohler, The Briefing 11-30-15.
[12] Interview by Colin Hansen with Eric Metaxas, “The Authentic Bonhoeffer” in Christianity Today, 2010.
[13] Bonhoeffer to Bethge, August 3, 1944, in Widerstand und Ergebung, 257.
[14] Lloyd H. Steffen, “Is God still dead? The legacy of 1960s radical theology” in The Christian Century, July 27, 2022.
[15] C. Fred Alford, “What is Religionless Christianity? #2 in godblog.
[16] Bonhoeffer to Rüdiger Schleicher, April 3, 1936, in Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990), 448.
[17] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 206.
[18] Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner, 1958), 8.
[19] Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity? Book Tree. Kindle Edition, 232-234.
[20] A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology, Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1907, 162-163.
[21] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Discipleship, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989, 206).
[22] Richard Weikart, The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Is His Theology Evangelical? 28.
[23] Richard Weikart, The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Is His Theology Evangelical? 57.
[24] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Touchstone. Kindle Edition, 279.
[25] Ibid., 280.
[26] Ibid., 280.
[27] Ibid., 286.
[28] Ibid., 286.
[29] Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity? Book Tree. new material in 2006, 63 and 67, Kindle Edition.
[30] Ibid., 70.
[31] Richard Weikart, The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Is His Theology Evangelical? 79.
[32] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 53-54.
[33] Richard Weikart, “The Troubling Truth About Bonhoeffer’s Theology” in Christian Research Institute, September 4, 2024.
[34] Albert Mohler, The Briefing, Dec 6, 2024.