Barry's Blog

In April 1933, during the early months of Nazi rule in Germany, the "Aryan Paragraph," as it came to be called, went into effect. A new law banned anyone of Jewish descent from government employment. Hitler's assault on the Jews, already so evidently under way in his toxic rhetoric and in the ideological imperatives of his party-was moving into a crushing legal phase. German churches, which relied on state support, now faced a choice: preserve their subsidies by dismissing their pastors and employees with Jewish blood-or resist. Most Protestant and Catholic leaders fell into line, visibly currying favor with the regime or quietly complying with its edict. 

So begins Joseph Loconte's excellent review in last Thursday's The Wall Street Journal of the recent book on Bonhoeffer, entitled, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, and Spy, written by Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson, 591 pages, $29.99).

Loconte, a senior lecturer in politics at the King's College in New York City, observes that such ready capitulation made the views of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young Lutheran theologian in Hitler's Germany, all the more remarkable. For within days of the new law's enforcement, the 27-year-old pastor published an essay titled "The Church and the Jewish Question," in which he challenged the legitimacy of a regime that were diametrically opposite to the tenets of Christianity. The churches of Germany, he wrote, shared "an unconditional obligation" to help the victims of an unjust state "even if they [the victims] do not belong to the Christian community." But Bonhoeffer went even further: Christians might be called upon not simply to "bandage the victims under the wheel" of oppression but "to put a spoke in the wheel itself." Before the decade was out, Bonhoeffer would join a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and face execution for his actions.
 
Loconte suggests that while some of Bonhoeffer's admirers over the past fifty years have seized upon a phrase from one of his letters, religionless Christianity, to argue that he favored social action over theology, Bonhoeffer in fact used the phrase to suggest the kind of ritualistic and over-intellectualized faith that had failed to prevent the rise of Hitler. It was precisely religionless Christianity that bothered him the most. After a 1939 visit to New York's Riverside Church, a citadel of social-gospel liberalism, he wrote that he was stunned by the "self-indulgent" and "idolatrous religion" that he saw there. "I have no doubt at all that one day the storm will blow with full force on this religious hand-out," he wrote, "if God himself is still anywhere on the scene."

In contrast, Eric Metaxas tells Bonhoeffer's story and often challenges the revisionist accounts that have made Bonhoeffer more of a "humanist" or ethicist for whom religious doctrine was unimportant. In Metaxas' "Bonhoeffer" we meet a complex, provocative figure: an orthodox Christian who, at a grave historical moment, rejected what he called "cheap grace," that kind of belief separated from sacrificial action.
 
It was a bizarre role for a religious man, and up to that point, a loyal German citizen, to be involved in such activities. Metaxas notes: "For a pastor to be involved in a plot whose linchpin was the assassination of the head of state during a time of war, when brothers and sons and fathers were giving their lives for their country, was unthinkable." And yet it became thinkable for Bonhoeffer precisely because his understanding of faith required more than simple adherence to legalistic formulations about truthtelling and nonviolence.
 
Mr. Metaxas writes that Bonhoeffer drew deeply from historic Christianity, especially its emphasis on the love of God expressed in the life and teachings of Jesus. From Loconte's review, he writes: "Bonhoeffer also had an extraordinary capacity for empathy, responding with ever more horror to the plight of those around him. In his book Ethics (1949), he chastised those who imagined they could confine their faith to the sanctuary and still live responsibly in an unjust world. In The Cost of Discipleship (1937), he made unreserved obedience to Jesus-in every realm of life-the mark of authentic belief. 'If we worry about the dangers that beset us, if we gaze at the road instead of at him who goes before, we are already straying from the path.' "

After a failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested on charges of assisting Jews and subverting Nazi policies. It would be two years later, in early April 1945, after his full involvement in the conspiracy became known, that he was executed at the Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria. By all accounts he faced his death sentence with courage and serenity. He had chosen a path of radical obedience to God, a choice and thinking that is often met, as Loconte suggests, "with fear and loathing, even among the faithful."

I am struck by the last lines of Loconte's review: "In 'Bonhoeffer,' Mr. Metaxas reminds us that there are forms of religion-respectable, domesticated, timid-that may end up doing the devil's work for him."