September 2011 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Jewish Question

Stumbling on a life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer stoked my curiosity to understand this German pastor/theologian who resisted Nazism until his death, having never read his classic: The Cost of Discipleship. Craig J. Slane, a professor of Theology at Simpson College has written Bonhoeffer as Martyr, an in depth study of the man. The book follows the evolution of a courageous, Christian struggling to respond to the desperate plight of the Jews in his native Germany. The time span is the years 1933 till his execution on April 9, 1945, in Fosenburg concentration camp, three weeks prior to Hitler’s suicide and the end of World War II.

Bonhoeffer in the eyes of the Gestapo was guilty of two heinous crimes: (a) participating in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler along with his brother and two brothers-in-laws among others, (b) as a religious leader, orchestrating an outspoken defense of the Jews of his native land. In entering deeply into the Jewish question he walked where many of his co- religionists feared to tread, given the fearful consequences.

The churches of Germany, Lutheranism, Catholicism, and other denominations, had a long history of anti-Semitism which Bonhoeffer sought to eradicate from his thinking and writing. He contended with his own heritage; Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran. Slane alludes to Martin Luther’s tract “The Jews and Their Lies”, 1536, where he articulated a set of charges: that Jews are poisoners, ritual murders, usurers, parasites on Christian society, worse than devils, …doomed to hell etc. To pleas from German bishops in regard to the persecution of the Jews, Hitler replied, I am only carrying on what you have been doing for the past two thousand years.

Bonhoeffer came from a highly respected Berlin family, with a very comfortable, bourgeois life style. As a young man he read the French novelist Georges Bernanos’ Dairy of a Country Priest. The fictional priest operated in virtual poverty wholly dedicated to his flock who were not aware of his premature, impending death from cancer and his innate holiness. Bonhoeffer felt called to such a simpler life style and early on had a premonition that his life, as well, would be brief.

Bonhoeffer’s theology always elicits the question – what does faith in Christ demand of me? Early on in his studies, he focused on the Sermon on the Mount and writes to a friend; finally I’ve become a Christian. Over and over for Bonhoeffer, reality is defined by the imitation of Christ as crucified and risen. The resurrection is not so much breathing eternal life, as entering into this life with all one’s being steeped in hope. Reality can be elusive in any age. We do need a compass other than the N. Y. Times and the charade of the nightly news. Without a profound faith, how does one stay afloat amidst the chaos?

In 1939 Bonhoeffer returned from a visit to the U.S. after only a month of theological presentations. Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant scholar, tried to persuade him not to return to Germany, fearing a perilous fate awaited him. Bonhoeffer could not abandon his flock quoting Isaiah, “The one who believes does not flee.” The quest was always, what does God want of me!

He posed this question to his fellow countrymen. “The real question is between Germany and Christianity and the sooner the conflict comes out into the open the better.” The Nazi attack on the Jews was demonically anti- biblical. The Genesis story affirms the unity of the human family, emanating from one man and one woman. The Nazis called the universal unity of the human family a fiction created by Jewish religion. The Jews were a blight, a race apart, genetically destroying Aryan Germany. Bonhoeffer’s response: “An expulsion of the Jews from the west must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Jesus Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”

Bonhoeffer’s Christology matures from love of neighbor to Christ’s redemptive love of all mother earth. He sees a Christ who loves the earth by drinking the “earthly cup to the dregs.” Whereas the Nazis had idolized and eroticized death – including the death of Christ - along the lines of an extra- biblical redemption myth, Bonhoeffer points to Christ’s resurrection as the decisive factor for Christianity. It is the religion of life.

He was merciless in his criticism of the Church: “The Church confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder; and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers of Jesus Christ.”

This brief article doesn’t begin to address the profundity of Slane’s analysis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life. It is a brief prelude to Scott Fina’s CPF article about on-going non-violent civil disobedience of religious, American women and men protesting the U.S.’s immense weaponry, its unjust wars, its upgraded nuclear weapons on hair trigger, its use of torture. Many of these unsung heroes are presently incarcerated for weeks, months, years in U.S. prisons.

After WW II, The Lutheran Church refused to recognize Bonhoeffer as a martyr for his participation in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote the protection of Jewish life would produce martyrs. He was clear. “The Incarnation is the reason for Christians to love every human being on earth as brothers and sisters.”

I am not clear on Bonhoeffer’s rational for assassination. He had great admiration for Gandhi and in the 1930’s considered traveling to India to visit Gandhi to better understand his non-violent revolution. Slane affirms that Bonhoeffer at his death is a courageous martyr steeped in the love of God and his people who died for the faith. I say AMEN!

Joe Bradley

Joe is a member of CPF