Searching for Bonhoeffer: The Journey from Myth to Man

One of the things that makes Bonhoeffer still relevant today is his deep contextual arguments

One of the things that makes Bonhoeffer somebody who died in 1945, still so very relevant today is his deep contextual arguments.

Listening generation after generation. He keeps captivating people's attention. I think part of it is his own life, which was nothing, simply that of an academic, but also of one who, because of the circumstances in which he found himself, he discovered this deals with real people and real problems and real, controversies and challenges facing christians.

We have theology sewn up nice and tight, and we fit people into it. It's the other way around for Bonhoeffer, it's the other way around.

It's life that is the issue.

Here. In the struggles, both intellectual and practical, of, this one man. There's something of what it means to be a Christian in the modern world is being pointed to. It may not always be the same thing, and people, when they read him, can read him in very different ways. But this is someone who needs to be sitting on our shoulder, so to speak, as we reflect on our own challenges to, christian faith and to worldly witness in our own times.

For 50 years, he has been, to some extent, greatly misrepresented by the Bonhoeffer scholars, most of whom have, ah, in some ways, either created a Bonhoeffer in their own image, or have participated in presenting that kind of an image, of him. It's very strange, but it was shocking to me to discover somebody who was so profoundly serious in his faith.

he had a high regard for six years.

Tripp Pugh explores Bonhoeffer through the rise of Nazi Germany

Hello, everyone. This is Tripp. And I am here with my friend and fellow theologian, Jeffrey C. Pugh. He's, not only an author of a book on Bonhoeffer, longtime member of the academic guild, exploring his works, but he's someone who's been wrestling with Bonhoeffer's story in the classroom throughout his career, and helping to invite students not just to celebrate the myth or their version of Bonhoeffer, but wrestle with the complexities of him in his own life and in his own context through the rise of Nazi Germany.

Well, the fact of the matter is, Tripp, is that I am still myself wrestling with Bonhoeffer. He is never far from my understanding of how a, Christian lives in society, what the responsibilities of a Christian are in a particular culture. And there's a way in which we think, well, you know, we don't live in Nazi Germany, and that's true, we do not. But there are family resemblances to the way that political situations develop, that societies develop, that Christianity itself responds to the orders that we create in society. While they may not be exactly the same, there are family resemblances to think about. And so that's one of the things that still makes Bonhoeffer relevant today, is because many people on all parts of the political, all parts of the theological spectrum, want to employ Bonhoeffer to justify and legitimate their particular understanding and behavior in the world.

And so what we're doing throughout this series is attempting to tell the story of Bonhoeffer in parallel to the rise of Nazi Germany and invite the listeners to wrestle with the questions Bonhoeffer was asking at that moment and at that time, which, as we'll see in this episode, he did not start out the hero. People remember, as the Nazis execute him after being part of a assassination plot. No, he's just as woven into that nationalistic fever of post world war Germany. He has to expand his imagination to get to the point of someone so many of us find admirable.

Maybe one of the most interesting places to start would be February 1, 1933. Two days after Hitler was appointed the chancellor. He gave an address to speak to the german people. And at the same time, at the Potsdammer Strasse, Volkshaus, a young, brilliant theologian by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was also giving an address to the german people on the concept of defeurite. Only one of those broadcast was cut off. Welcomed and cheered

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by millions of german Christians is a moment of hope that the decadent days of the Weimar Republic were over. Germany rejoiced in belief that God had granted them a savior to lift them up from the humiliation lingering from the First World War.

Hitler gets a tremendous ovation when leaving.

For his first cabinet meeting.

The national government will therefore regard it as its first and supreme task to restore to the german people unity of mind and will. It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests. It will take under, its firm protection, Christianity, as the basis of our morality and the family as the nucleus of our nation and our state. It will bring back to our people the consciousness of its racial and political unity and the obligations arising therefrom. It wishes to base the education of german youth on respect for our great past and pride in our, old traditions.

On the day that Hitler gave this speech in another part of Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young 27 year old theologian, was giving a different address. It was one that warned of giving a leader too much authority and too much power. The contrast given between Adolf Hitlers promise to the german people to restore their greatness and Dietrich Bonhoeffers penetrating analysis of what happens when a country gives itself over to a leader could not be more different. But they expressed between them, the trajectory that Germany and indeed the world was about to take.

You could even see it in the title, right? The younger generation's altered view. He recognizes as a member of that younger generation the kind of angst, the kind of cultural resentment, the kind of economic pressures, the kind of collective social consciousness in the wake of world War one, the economic tumult, all those kind of things that is ripe for the picking, the need for a solution, the need for an answer that's there. I and he knows the temptation and names it. Even before Hitler's come to power, he names it. And that, to me, is fascinating, where there's simultaneously a kind of cognitive empathy for the historical conditions that could generate an attraction and an allegiance to an authoritarian leader and a, recognition. Despite the kind of empathetic understanding of the conditions. This temptation is a wrong turn. It's wrong for the nation, and it's wrong as a disciple, as a person of faith.

He's very concerned about the way that authority was being defined by the youth movement, and he felt like they were creating an idol out of Hitler. This unquestioning acquiescence to one individual meant that instead of a leader, followers may be confronted with the reality that they had created a misleader.

The contrast between these two speeches, given the very same day, is something that a number of historians have spent their life studying. Bonhoeffer raised to the fore, namely, his ability to read the times and name it so early on.

One of the most well known scholars of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and of the confessing church of the situation in Germany in the 1930s and forties, is Victoria Barnett. She's a general editor of the. Dietrich Bonhoeffer works for the English, translations. She was the church liaison for the National Holocaust Museum, is one of the most amazing scholars of Germany during World War two and the Holocaust. With numerous books to her credit, she says the following.

That's one of the things about him that is really striking, is this firm anti Nazism. I mean, there were a lot of people who said, well, let's wait and see what they do. You know, Bonhoeffer understood the attraction. There's something about this that is wrong. And so that radio address is talking about the principle of the so called leader and warning people that the way this leadership principle is conceived, somebody could end up being a misleader. And he's very explicit about that. And there's another, essay he writes around the same time about why the younger generation is so drawn to Hitler called the younger generation and the Fuhrer. And it's very insightful, I think, in part because he's the younger generation. He's that, generation of Germans who are really falling for this stuff. And there was, I think there was a period where Bonhoeffer understood the attraction.

Where does this particular fire, this brilliance and this pathos contained in the concept of leader as used by youth of today, come from? Those

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in their forties can assure us that in their youth, such talk of a leader was completely unknown. Does the call for a leader arise from knowledge, that power of things over people has become so great and so destructive and so chaotic that only a great figure would be able to restore order and unity? Or does the talk always necessarily turn to a leader? When given the awareness of the political necessity of surrendering the ideal of the individual and the engagement of human beings as a mess, as collective everything one was forced to surrender, it transferred onto the ideal of the leader and is rediscovered in him, magnified immeasurably. What other explanation is, therefore, the peculiar tension between a cult of personality and collectivism? To what extent is leading and being led healthy and genuine, and when does it become pathological and excessive, their generation.

And how it's just been lost by, you know, the first world war and what has happened since then and the depression, and nobody has worked. And he describes his generation as being in freefall. And it's a striking image because that's how many young Germans feel. And here comes Hitler, who's going to put everybody in uniform and put them back to work and offer them a vision of how Germany can revive itself. And so Bonhoeffer understands why that is tempting, and the fact that he immediately says, but you gotta watch out for.

This, Vicky, raises this temptation for a kind of cult of personality solution to a crisis. one of the things about Bonhoeffer's legacy is there's more than just a fascination about his ability to see it in his own time. But his kind of hermeneutic, his ability to tend to and read the times, has actually inspired scholars from other places in history as well.

One of those places was South Africa, where theologians such as Desmond Tutu and John DeGrucci understood that Bonhoeffer had a word for them in south african society with the struggle against apartheid. One of the most recent scholars of Bonhoeffer in South Africa is Robert Vosloo, professor of systematic theology at Stellenbosch University, who also weighs in on the leader principle.

The radio address of Dietrich Bonjofer, where he spoke about the younger generation's view of the Fuhrer, where he sort of warned them against this kind of cult of personality. The importance of his argument there that, you know, we should claim the roles that we have and don't transfer our responsibility to these kind of idealized figures that we think will solve the problem. So this kind of transference of responsibility should be rejected. And maybe that is something that happened a, bit in our context, that people kind of abdicated from the responsibility of their roles and thought, oh, this kind of cult personality will solve the problem, or we are waiting the whole time for a new figure to lead us. Given the rise of new populism and so on. This is a real, real temptation.

Bonhoeffer gives parallel address to Hitler's first address

So, Jeff, here we see Bonhoeffer, 27 years old, giving parallel address to Hitler's first address, noticing something that so many of, his peers and even the leaders and elders in the church didn't. And that's striking. But where did this story come from? Like, how did he get to a point to make these kind of observations?

I think if we're going to understand any person's life, probably the place that we need to start, for better or for worse, is the family.

And Bonhoeffer's family is, probably not one that gave birth to lots of political radicals.

Oh, it most definitely wasn't among the scholars that we talked to. Almost all of them included the family. But Victoria Barnett has some really interesting observations about the family dynamics. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer's growing up.

He grew up in a well off bourgeois family and had the best german culture, best education that german culture has to offer, and learn to appreciate great works of art, read great novels, that kind of thing. The family, they were very, very, very close. One of the striking things throughout this period is that they really rely on each other. And, of course, you have a number of people in the family who end up being executed. I think it's also, in many ways, a very conservative family, in terms of both its familiar structure and in terms of sort of holding on to these older values, the traditional values. And it was one of the reasons that they didn't like Hitler was that he represented something that they just thought was dreadful. I interviewed Emmy Bonhoeffer, the widow of Klaus Bonhoeffer, for my first book. I remember her talking about that, about just the family's sense of revulsion, I guess the Nazis and Hitler

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just almost on class grounds. So that's part of it. Bonhoeffer seems to have had both a wild side and an extremely pietistic side. During the 1920s, Sigmund Schultz noted that. And he talks about that pietistic streak rigidly pietistic streak that Bonhoeffer had in the 1920s. And while we know that his family wasn't that religious, Maria Holmes, the nanny for the governess for the Bonhoeffers, was a very devout Moravian, and she was the one who taught the children prayers and hymns. And so I think he would have gotten that from her probably. But in any case, by the late 1920s, I mean, he definitely has moved in that direction. That's a side of him, even as he apparently likes to go, out and party and do other things like that. There was a, a rigid structure to the family. I mean, there were certain expectations on the children. They all learned to play an instrument, they all read, they studied and the rhythms of the day in the family. You know, you didn't, you didn't sort of sleep in and show up late for breakfast. Everybody was ready to come down to breakfast. You read a devotion before breakfast. Often it began with a prayer or a song together. When you gathered in the evening, it was a similar kind of thing where it wasn't just that everybody went off in their rooms and did something. The, family came together and this was, I mean, I think this was something that really informed him and it was something that he tried to replicate in the Finkenvaldi years.

Andrew Root explores how family relationships shaped Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life

In some ways, all families are different. Some ways, all families are the same. I'm sure that's true of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's family. But, you know, if your father is occupying the position of the chair of neurology and psychology at, Friedrich Wilhelms University, and he's one of Berlin's most accomplished psychiatrist, it's probably an interesting family to grow up in. It has its own particular challenges.

Yeah, a psychologist's kid is similar to a pastor's kid. It comes with baggage.

Absolutely.

But despite this different cultural context of kind of bourgeois german culture, that Bonhoeffer's, in, the intimacy of relationships in the family, especially between his siblings, play a huge role in coming to understand Bonhoeffer's faith, his relationship to suffering and anguish. And that's something Andrew Root has spent a lot of his time in his academic research at Bonhoeffer, attending to. And in our conversation, he spent some time introducing us to Bonhoeffer's family and the way some of the tragedies and deep relationships that were formed there shaped his entire life.

For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the importance of community comes through family

If you want to know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer you have to know him inside of his family. His family is a, ah, very important Berlin family. His father, as an academic, he really runs the research hospital in Berlin, and that's what brings the family to Berlin in the first place. So his father is kind of new money, new standing, and his mother's family is an old family. Old standing. They're clergy people. Dietrich's grandfather and great grandfather, Paula's father and grandfather, preached for the Kaiser at the Kaiser's court. So these are old aristocrats. And so this is a connection of new prestige and old prestige in the Bonhoeffer family. What's really important know about Dietrich Bonhoeffer is that he comes from a large group of siblings. So with Dietrich included, there's eight of them. Dietrich is one of the younger ones. So he has an older brother named Carl Friedrich, who will become a very important scientist, physicist, will be back and forth to Harvard. Harvard will try to get him to come teach there for a while. A very important person. His oldest sister is Ursula. And Ursula will marry a man named Rudiger Schleicher, who will be part of the resistance and will be killed in the last days and will be very close to Dietrich. The Schleicher's will live right next door to his parents when they downsize their house. And the only child who will live in that house is Dietrich. And Dietrich will go over to the Schleicher's house right before he's arrested. When the black limousine shows up in front of his parents house, he sneaks out the back door, goes to his sister's house, has a meal, tries to call his brother in law to see what's going on before his father finally calls him and tells him he needs to come home, that these men have already rifled through his room and he needs to come talk to them. His next brother is Claus. He's a lawyer, and he'll be important in the resistance as well. He'll be killed in the last days of the Third Reich. His next sister is Christina, and she marries a very important man, maybe the most important for the resistance, a man by the name of Hans van Dahani, who, of course, is up pretty high as a legal voice within the aver, which is the secret service of this time. And the aver, of course, which is supposed to be doing military intelligence for the Third Reich, eventually flips and the coup d'etat happens through the avair.

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So those are the older siblings, and they are all very close to Dietrich, but Dietrich is one of the younger ones. So the next siblings are the three younger ones. I think it's very important for Bonhoeffer's theology to know that he's a twin and to really know how in the importance of relationality. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the importance of what it means to be in community is to know him through his family. But it's also to know the mystical connections with a twin. And his sister Sabine is very important to him. I think one of the great prides of Dietrich's life is that it's Dietrich's connections in London that gets Sabine and her husband out of Germany. And they need to get out of Germany, because Sabine's husband is a man by the name of Gertz Liepolz, who is, at least in nazi law, is jewish. I'm not sure if he's a practicing jew, but he loses his teaching position because of this. And eventually, in the late 1930s, things become very dangerous for them. And it's Dietrich's ecumenical connections in London that is able to get his sister out through Switzerland. When Sabine immigrates to England, Dietrich goes in Sabine's empty house. Dietrich goes there with Eberhard Baca, his good friend. One biographer says that at least one version of life together was written in that empty house. And they had to leave the house as if they would be back at noon. Butter's still on the table. Everything's still set up, because they couldn't have any suspicions that they were gone. And in that kind of haunted house is where Dietrich writes at least one version of life together. And then he had a sister whose name is Susanna. when the older ones were having parties and courting and doing the things that you would do in Berlin in the early 20th century, the younger ones would be shooed off. And Diedrich became the leader of the younger ones and would do very strange things with his siblings, like, they would get together and contemplate their death, which is just really a man after my own heart.

There's eight Bonhoeffer siblings, including Dietrich

If you've been counting, I've missed one sibling in this rundown. I've said he has. There's eight of them, including Dietrich, and I've only given you seven. And the reason I've only given you seven is because major tragic story in the Bonhoeffer family is the second son. Walter and Karl Friedrich are around the same age and in 1918. So if you know your dates here, the great War, World War one is going on, and Carl Friedrich and Walter are of age now to go to the front. And the story goes that Paula Bonhoeffer, Saw them to the train station as they would go off to the front, and as they left on the train, she ran, waving goodbye to them. Now, I think as Americans in the 21st century, we think that's just what good parents do. That is not what a woman from an aristocratic background does in a kind of, if you can think of this, a late victorian age. But she very much loved these boys and loved her children and said goodbye to them with great emotion. For the most part, for the Bonhoeffer family, it had been nothing but success after success, bigger house after bigger house, promotion after promotion, children growing and doing well, going to gymnasium and advancing and university on the horizon. And then a letter comes home in the midst of the great war, m and it's from Walter, and he talks about troop movements and asks how his family's doing, and mentions towards the end of the letter that he's been wounded. A few days later, a letter comes to the house and he has died of his wounds. When the news came and Paula heard it, she screamed with grief, screamed and screamed with heartbroken grief. Her grief was so heavy, she had to leave the family. She went to a neighbor's house and a neighbor nursed her back. And it's the first real rupture in the Bonhoeffer family. The story goes that a son, essentially Carl Bonhoeffer, went to his office and never came out. And he did, but emotionally never came out. He used to keep a family journal of, the successes of the family, and particularly a long entry on Christmas Day. He didn't keep it for about a decade after Walter died. The grief was too heavy. Dietrich, he was twelve years old when this great rupture happened. He'd already been a young person who had deep thoughts, but this really encased in him that you must always respect children, you must always respect the journey they're going through. In many ways, it brought Luther's theology of the cross home to him. So the theology of the cross never left Dietrich because of his experience as a twelve year old Boyden.

We're going to hear more about this notion of the theology of the cross. It is a lutheran sort of theological standard,

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but it acquired a particular kind of shape in Bonhoeffer's life, given the suffering that he had endured and the grief that he had known, not only through the loss of his brother, but in some ways through the loss of his entire country. We'll return to that in later episodes.

Join Jeff Tripp and Andrew Root for a unique Bonhoeffer travel experience

Hey, friends, I want to invite you to come with me and Andrew root this June to Berlin, Germany, for the rise of Bonhoeffer travel learning experience. You'll be able to explore theology, culture, and faith through the lens and story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It will weave together an integrative mix of lectures, tours, conversation, experiential learning, and guess where our classroom is at Dietrich Bonhoeffer's very own home. So if you've loved thinking about his life, then consider joining us for this once in a lifetime opportunity perfectly constructed for anyone seeking to have a deep encounter with Bonhoeffer and wrestle with his piercing insights about faith for the modern world. We're gonna explore these themes in Bonhoeffer's family home, visit various museums and sites, get to see his neighborhood, tell the story, and do it all in a small group of people, right? Just the number of people that fit in the man's living room. So come join me, Andrew Root, and it's gonna be a good old time. For m more information, head over to bonhoeffertrip.com bonhoeffer Tripp with one pkd not like my name.com dot. You're listening to the rise of Bonhoeffer. If you want to get to know even more about Dietrich's life, read a little bit of him, hear long interviews with these Bonhoeffer scholars throughout the series, and have live conversations and q and a with Jeff and I. Then head over to riseofbonhofer.com and you can join up for our parallel online class. This class is donation based, including zero. So if you just want to dig a little bit deeper, nerd out a bit more about Dietrich, learn even more about his own struggle and the way he wrestled with his time in history. Head over riseofbonhofer.com dot this experience of.

Grief was felt throughout Germany as sons left and never returned. It was shortly after Walter died that Bonhoeffer proclaimed to his family that he would become, a theologian of all things. That decision shaped the rest of his life. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's best friend and biographer, talks about this moment in Bonhoeffer's life.

The Christianity he inherited from his family was a type that sees Christianity as the background furniture one sits on because it shaped the world they lived in. Surely there was no surplus of piety in the Bonhoeffer household, which led Bonhoeffers brothers to be more than a little amused when he proclaimed to them at the tender age of 13 that he decided to become a theologian. His brothers retorted that they could not think of a more useless institution than the church. Bonhoefer, ever the confident soul, responded. In that case, I shall reform it.

After the deep grief at twelve. Within the next year, he's making this declaration to be a theologian, despite the tension he has with his brothers and his father's image of where he needed to be. And it's not just I'm going to be a theologian, but one with that kind of confidence, the arrogance he says he has to repent of regularly in prayer. he's going to go reform it. So, Jeff, when you think of this direction right there at 13, what happened to, like, how did Bonhoeffer go from a little adolescent german boy deciding he's going to reform the church into the academy?

Well, the decision at 13 shaped the rest of his life. He had a classical education in german schools. After that, he headed to the University of Tobigen, studied philosophy and history of religions, worked in a trip to Rome, which had a significant impact on him, because in this sort of embodied space, he became fascinated by the phenomenon of the actual living church. And this particular emphasis of the embodied, concrete church of Jesus Christ would become a theme that would occupy him for the rest of his life. He returned to Berlin to study in 1924, and he studied with Adolf von Harnack, famous church historian and Bonhoeffer's neighborhood. He had loomed large at the university of Berlin. Bonhoeffer knew he wanted to pursue his interest in the church embodied. And so Harnack was one of his central guides in the church history.

Bonhoeffer is constantly influenced by travels that he takes

One of the things that I find fascinating about Bonhoeffer is

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his ability to metabolize and then reflect on the form of life other people have. And now that's one thing that maybe a theologian or philosopher does when they get older, but here he is, 18, with his brother in Rome, and, it's holy week, and he comes in with all the kind of lutheran, german protestant prejudice against Catholicism, the kind of thing that could generate a reformation. And yet, when we read his diary, when we look at the letters and the places he reflects on this experience, it's like he is able to realize there is a whole other form of life, there's a whole other way of being christian, represented in these rituals and doctrines and things that he has, all these intellectual critiques. But there's something beautiful that's taking place, noticing the sincerity of people in line for confession, being shocked by the emotion that's coming out of people with liturgical dress, going through the streets on the Good Friday procession. Those kinds of experiences, one where you encounter the other and don't let the prejudice you internalized shape your judgment of them. It's important to note that happens right there. And he's 18.

I mean, it's almost like going from baptist youth camp to an episcopalian church.

I know. And who would do something like that?

All of the pomp, but none of the guilt. Fact of the matter is, is that this is, I think, a very striking aspect of Bonhoeffer's journey is that he is constantly influenced by the travels that he takes.

Yeah. And I know you mentioned this earlier, but we know where he ends up ten years in the future. He's thinking of, how do we have alternative communities that can build up the moral and theological backbone of a church facing Nazi Germany? These early experiences with liturgical communities, with rhythms of life, with spiritual practices that you see him observing here as a spectator in his diaries, then become really the engine thinking about what does faith look like under this kind of threat?

And this goes back to one of the earlier comments made at the beginning of our session about how he has a strong pietistic streak. It's a streak that actually, I think, stays with him for pretty much his whole life. But you will see it reflected in future episodes when we talk about life together. Discipleship, his examination of monastic and spiritual communities in England, for instance, his interest in Gandhi and wanting to visit Gandhi's ashram. Now, these are things to talk about into the future. But I want to say that at that point, he's internalizing his experiences in Rome and also in northern Africa, where he has experience with islamic culture.

You know, it's interesting to me, after going to North Africa, he tells his sister, don't tell mom and dad until after we get back. But he goes and he realizes, yes, Rome's completely different than what I thought it was going to be as a Lutheran from Germany. But North Africa, going into a muslim culture is a completely different experience altogether, where the form of religious life and just the daily life was completely integrated. He comments that it's like going back to biblical times and what it must have been like, and how he'd like to spend more time there just to see how religion takes a whole different way of shaping society. That recognition that there's different forms of life that humans exist in, that they encounter the divine in, really transforms and challenges that natural tendency for us to equate contact with the divine, with our own place of contacting the divine.

A lot of people would maybe experience defensiveness or rejection when, they encounter the other. But this is another thing that marks, Bonhoeffer's life. He wants to understand he and Klaus have these experiences in Rome. He actually wants to stay there for a semester. He's not sure his dad's going to be on board with that. But anyway, he does come back to Berlin. He starts at the University of Berlin, studying with Adolf von Harnack, who is his neighbor. And he enters into that world of german protestant theology, history of religion, school, as he starts his first dissertation, sanctorum communio. And he's probing how is it that the human being gets created, how is the human person shaped form created in the social reality in which they exist in? And it is in this dissertation that we find one of Bonhoeffer's most enduring questions. He asked continually, right up until the last days, where in the reality of this world, this life, is Christ made real? And in what way is a community shaped around the name of Christ different? So how is Christ existing as community, specifically the church community made manifest in the material world? And then in turn, how does that shape us as persons?

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He's not so concerned with how doctrine functions as a church, but how God's presence might be discerned in the midst of a very human institution. And that may be a question that we still struggle with, but you can't escape the fact that he's still doing this in a german theological, liberal theological context. So maybe we need to think a little bit more about what that context was giving him as he's thinking about this.

And I think understanding the kind of relationship of the german state, the university and the church is important because it's just so different than ours. It's different than ours historically, that this kind of tight wedding, cultural privilege, prestige doesn't really exist anymore in the west. But even as Americans, a church and state relationship that you see in Germany, so foreign to us, it's hard to kind of put ourselves in his position to see what's going on.

It's very difficult for an american to understand what a church state relationship would look like because we essentially exist in a free church situation. Whereas, for instance, in Germany, the world that Bonhoeffer exists in, the state is collecting taxes to support the church, the state supports the theological schools that train the pastors and the ministers. And this is true for even the reformed traditions, the lutheran traditions, and that sort of reformed, Lutheran Catholic tripartite mix there, they were very connected to the fortunes of the state. So there's a certain sense in which if the state is actually paying your salary, you have a, strong impetus not to be too prophetic about the state and to sort of understand that the state itself is part of God's ordering of the world. You know, you never want to get to the point where you become an anabaptist and the state is the whore of Babylon. You're more in the situation where the state is an order of creation, as the church is an order of creation. God establishes these things. God has certain rules for these things, which we'll hear about later on when we talk a little bit more about the two kingdoms theology of Luther and how that influences bonhoeffer. He has a particular theology where God and culture are sort of connected, constituent entities, which is very different, for instance, than what we have now. Maybe a little bit more about the, sort of liberal theology, how that gets constructed in terms of authorities.

Gary Dorian gives us three points to reflect on about liberal theology

Yeah.

Ah, because we actually got to talk with Gary Dorian, who's the Reinhold Niebuhr chair at Union theological seminary and one of the leading historians of liberal theology. And I asked him, what is liberal theology? And he gave us three points to reflect on.

Well, I have operated all these liberal theology books I've written with, basically a threefold definition of what it is. But the first one is the principle of intellectual freedom. And here you can read it straight into the kantian argument that enlightenment, if it means nothing at all, it means having the courage to use your own reason that an external authority cannot be allowed to compel or establish the truth of anything, that whatever we believe religiously, credibly, has to be able to pass the muster of our own reason and critically interpreted experience. And that is the main thing. And that's a revolution that had not happened in theology before. But all theologies did operate within a house of authority or another, until you get this movement in theology where they're just quite explicitly saying that no external authority can compel or establish what we believe about anything. We've got to proceed on some other basis. And so, therefore, it's not to say that scripture can't still be authoritative. It can still be authoritative within liberal theologies, but it's authoritative within christian experience. It's not as something from without, where just because something is stated in the Bible, therefore you have to believe it. That is now out, and you have to be able to operate in some other basis. And then the second thing is the principle of mediation between two things, where all these liberal theologians, they're all members of churches, the problem of the church is ongoing for all of them. They're all in context. They're having to deal with the problem of over belief. People who just believe too much believe people who believe something, ah, just on the basis of dogma or literalism or the like. And so the problem of dogmatic overbelief in the churches is always one side of what they're having to deal with in speaking to it. Being in context where you're trying to pull the churches to a place where people realize, oh, no, we can relativize this top heavy authority

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and still be, okay, we can still live the faith and be christian, follow Jesus and all of it, believe in God on some other basis. So that's always a front. But then on the other side is indeed the cultured despisers the culture of disbelief. The thing about this whole liberal theological tradition, you can see it going on for 300 years. It's always been like this. We're in these church traditions where we're in context, where often we're dealing with folks who are, you know, very conservative and needing to operate on the basis of external authority and have issues with, you know, if that's sort of taken from them, we actually spend more of our, time dealing with these cultured disbelievers. These people who don't believe anything or believe almost nothing, end up setting so much of the agenda and maybe even divining so much of the ethos, they're always kind of mediating between these two things. In liberal theology, you always have that dynamic that's always going on, this argument that for the faith to have a future, it has to operate between these two poles. And then the third thing is the kind of bundle of things that come from these two things. For example, they're going to let science explain the physical world. We don't get ourselves in, conflict with how natural science explains the physical world, or indeed, we accept the historical critical approach to the Bible. And there's a certain kind of concern about relevance, got, to make it relevant to the modern world. So there's that sort of bundle of things that come in. The third thing, the explicitly sort of liberal tradition of theology is the one that always has these markers.

Bonhoeffer completes his first doctoral dissertation in 18 months after entering the University of Berlin, finishing in August of 1927. He was 21 years old. So eight years after he decided he was going to become a theologian, he had his first doctorate in hand.

That is, a little faster than normal.

much faster than normal, yeah.

So on top of being committed and knowing where he's going at an early age, you can see the kind of intellectual gifts and the, kind of tenacity in his pursuit and not just in the academic sense, but this fascination with what does religious life look like on the ground. You have his neighbors, von Harnack, legendary german liberal theologian. And after World War one is when the kind of movement of revelational theology shows up, where a figure like Karl Barth, a generation ahead of him, begins to reframe the task of christian theology for the modern world.

So in Bonhoeffer's context, this sort of notion of liberal theology results in an understanding where God's transcendence is found in the imminent world, in human experience, not just the orders of creation, but the way that we can know God. sort of begins from the human experience, even something, say, for instance, like the scriptures, they're authoritative because they're the account of human religious experience in the particular cultural context in which they're written. Bonhoeffer is working on sanctorum communo. He's working out of this liberal tradition. He's also being exposed for the first time to a name that will factor large later on in his life, and also in these podcasts, Karl Barth. And he's reading Karl Barth's works in the middle twenties. As he's doing this work, he's kind of excited about this radical turn to God's transcendence. But Bonhoeffer still shares the kind of fundamental flaw that liberal theology can often suffer from, a too eager desire to see God's providence being enacted in one's own history. In a fascinating section of sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer connects Israel's consciousness of being chosen and subsequent actions with a particular nationalist version of manifest destiny. So the inherent connections between a culture and divine will that Bonhoeffer writes about are going to become a central aspect of hitlers theology. Because Hitler has a theology, the theology of Providence, with a capital p. Whatever happens is God's will. I mean, you know that it's a crappy theology, but it's a theology. Yeah, but the young Bonhoeffer was not yet at the stage of questioning everything at this point. In Sanctorum Communio, he writes, where peoples.

Are called God's will for their purpose in history is at work, just as where individuals are called, they experience their history. There is a will of God with a people, just as with individuals, where a people, submitting in conscience to God's will, goes to war in

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order to fulfill its historical purpose and mission in the world. Though entering fully into the ambiguity of human sinful action, it knows it has been called by God that history is to be made here. War is no longer considered murder.

So the great theological mistake of merging God's will into parochial national destiny later on, that's recognized by Bonhoeffer as a thing to be utterly rejected. But when he's here in his mid twenties, he's experiencing that sort of, full on acceptance of that notion of providence that God's acting, God's view in history, no matter what the, horrors that's visiting on other human beings, m even to the point of war.

And I think it's important here to make a brief observation that within Germany, the liberal theological tradition, its emphasis on experience and the way that played out in german history led for Harnack and so many of, the leading theologians as Bonhoeffers, entering the world, revealing just how much projection can take place in your relationship to God by supporting the first world war, where there's this inability to differentiate the story of history and God's work to justice and love in it from the triumph of your own particular tribe or nation. And that gets called out by Barth. And we can see what Barth ultimately calls out. What comes later to shape Bonhoeffer's own theological imagination right here in the early work of Bonhoeffer, that same kind of challenge of, confusing one's own historical, nationalistic or ethnic identity with the priority of divine blessing is the very thing later that Bonhoeffer is calling out in the german church.

You know, it's interesting because in many segments of the german church, when Hitler escapes his assassination attempts, a lot of the german christians, the first thing they do is say it's God's providence, that he delivered Hitler from the assassination attempt. So you see here again, that kind of connection between, whatever happens, happens in God's will. But often the projection that you were talking about happens because my particular view is the one that's actually being privileged or being favored.

In this early years of Bonhoeffer, we have the grief of his family, the theological intellectual journey where he's excelling, finishing PhD way too early, all that kind of stuff. We also have these travels to Rome, North Africa with his brother that are expanding his imagination because he finished that so early. He ends up in Barcelona because he's too young to get ordained, can't find a job, can't find a job. And so perhaps by a, stroke of Providence, he ends up serving a church in Barcelona, Spain. That again, becomes one of those moments where he has to start expanding his vision for the world. So when you think of that Barcelona period, what are the main features that comes to mind.

Well, it's interesting. One of the things that impacts him is the climate.

Oh, yeah.

It's a very different climate in Barcelona than Berlin. Right. He does experience an entirely different culture. Once again, he doesn't experience it in a judgmental way. You know, he is serving a german speaking church, but he does have time to go out and experience. He loved bullfights. He doesn't have time to go out and experience that culture. But even so, he's still captivated a little bit by this kind of gravity of german patriotism, of national identity. I don't want to judge Bonhoeffer for any of this. He's like 21 years old, right? I thought a lot of different things when I was 21 than I do right now. But his sense of german exceptionalism even shows up in the midst of his time in Barcelona as a youth pastor. And he does get a little judgmental about the other minister there. But he delivers a series, of lectures in Barcelona as a young assistant pastor, and he's still struggling, even after he finishes this first dissertation, with what a christian ethic looks like. And he ends up taking some very nationalistic perspectives, because it's the nation that contained his true family, his true neighbor, his authentic volk. It's the nation in which the person, the concrete person, is being formed. that's the sociological entity that he sort of thinks about, you know, what's forming the human being in sanctorum communio. And he sees in all of this clearly the horrors of war.

Bonhoeffer writes that no Christian can go to war

He writes, war is nothing but murder. War is crime. No Christian can go to war. This case for this seems entirely clear and convincing, yet it suffers

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at the central issue. It is not concrete and as a result, does not look unto the depth of christian decision. It invokes the commandment not to kill, and believes that commandment to be the solution.

So we see some interesting things here. Bonhoeffer is not committed necessarily to a strong, hard and fast rule about anything. He's willing to understand that theology itself, ethics, can also be very contextual, depending on the concrete situation in which someone finds himself. And we'll see this later on in his life.

One of the things about Barcelona, this tension that exists there about national identity, that's, showing up in this space, is this is a time where the german people are experiencing such shame after the loss of world War one. And in the letters that he's sending to family and friends from Barcelona, he talks, yes, about the shift of weather, but also the shift of soul that the kind of ever present economic oppression, cultural shame, reminders of the grief of loss and the death and loss of people around you. It's like those clouds lifted. And then what does it mean, right, to be the world war losers in another people's land and to be their minister and to be a part of the lives of these people in this different context? that to me, provides a kind of setting for hearing this very complicated wrestling that takes place in the lectures.

And that's got to be one of the things, right? That starts to sort of penetrate a little bit, that ethnocentric shell, that he is understanding his own culture from the eyes of another. He still can't escape his own concrete situation. For Bonhoeffer, one social location relativizes God's command. At this point, that may look very different when he gets to the sermon on the mount, but one's own must be protected. And so he still has a little bit of defensiveness because he's dealing with the lord of history. And the Lord of history gives me my nation, and that means horrible decisions can be made. So he also, in this lecture in Barcelona, he says, I will take up.

Arms with a terrible knowledge of doing something horrible, and yet knowing I can do no other. I will defend my brother, my mother, my people, and yet I know I can do so only by spilling blood. But the love for my people will sanctify murder, will sanctify war.

So he's responding to the shame of Versailles. He's responding to the difficulties of Germany in the 1920s. He's responding to the shame of all of that, in some ways by learning from the external world about his own people, but also by responding that if I have to kill others, well, God will sanctify this because I'm protecting my bulk. This is kind of a liberal theology connection between one's own identity, one's own national identity, and the sovereignty of God. And we don't often think about that in America as a liberal theology. But at least in the context of Bonhoeffer, we're understanding that the connection between the person in the concrete reality in which they live very often gets interpreted on the basis, if you're thinking, in terms of divine will or whatever, very often gets interpreted on a basis of unreflective acceptance of certain things about being the divine will or certain things not being the divine will. And that's going to look very different for Bonhoeffer later on in his life. But even at the end of his time in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer is. And maybe there's no other way of putting this still strongly german nationalist. And it will take other visits and it will take exposures to other theologians, a, deeper exposure to Karl Barth, to sort of break apart this constituent connection between the world that he lives in as a assumed order of creation and the world of the gospel, which is a world that overcomes parochial allegiances to something larger, the universality of grace.

How liberal theology plays out in Germany is different from how it plays in America

I think that's really important, especially here at the beginning of our telling of Bonhoeffer's story, in catching that contrast of just how the liberal theological tradition plays out in Germany is so different than the one in America. When you think of liberal theology in America, you'll think of someone like Martin Luther King Juniore. That context of how those same theological commitments play out in a multireligious, multiethnic democracy is really different

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than how it plays out in Germany.

It is interesting, right? So in a free church kind of situation, the liberal theology can tend to become more prophetic. As witness, you think about Walter Rauschenbusch or some of, Dorothy day, or some of the people in the social gospel movement, you know, the things that were happening in America, there's a certain kind of side that liberal theology ends up taking. But this is actually just not the case in the context that Bonhoeffer is dealing with. And it's one of the things that the critics of liberal theology, like Karl Barth, who we'll hear more about later, were willing to sort of attack because of the very fact that our understanding of providence may not always be God's.

Bonhoeffer finds himself in his nation, the theological tradition

I find the early Bonhoeffer is really helpful for me because we find someone who is so shaped by the world. He found himself in his nation, the theological tradition where, the people that happen to end up being his teachers or neighbors, his moment in history, and the impact of losing a brother and the country, bearing the guilt and shame of a war that he's so formed by his context, expressing it in ways that the later him obviously problematized, the, later him recognizes the threat of nationalism. We heard it right at the beginning of this episode, calling it out same day from the radio as Hitler. And yet that's not who he started out, his life. He's an unfinished hero. We see him trying to figure out what is it like to be a faithful person in the context and situations he finds himself in thinking of where we're going and I, where we're moving. It's important to note that we just heard a german theologian say something like, war is not murder, it's okay, to kill for my homeland. And that came out of the mouth of someone who's gonna write cost of discipleship life together and find the sermon on the mount as a compelling invitation for true Christianity amidst the rise of Nazi Germany.

And so the interesting part then is to continue that journey with us in the next episode to see how some of those parts of his pilgrimage were trod.

Hey, we should go to New York because it seems that traveling always helps Bonhoeffer grow a bit.

That sounds great, but before we go to New York, we probably need to mention that Bonhoeffer returns to Berlin from Barcelona and ends up completing his second dissertation, which sets him on a path to a kind of theological vocation. But this doesn't satisfy him, and so he finds himself still a little bit restless and ends up taking a stallone fellowship in New York City at, ah, Union Theological Seminary, which is where his life will change significantly.

M thank you for listening to the first episode of the rise of Bonhoeffer

M thank you for listening to the very first episode of the rise of Bonhoeffer. If you enjoyed it, I'd love for you to tell someone. Share it around. If you want to dig deeper, consider joining the class. This entire thing's based on where you'll get to have access to long interviews with the scholars that were a part of building this project. Youll be able to get different reading selections from Bonhoeffer and then join, live streams with Jeff and I where we can answer questions, unpack it, reflect, and think out loud together. This online experience is donation based, including zero. So if you go to riseofbonhoffer.com comma, you can join up. If youre digging this and havent subscribed yet, consider doing it. Just subscribe to the podcast, leave us a review, and if you're looking to subscribe, just go to bonhoefferpodcast.com dot. It's right there. Thank you so much, so much for listening to this very first episode. We've put tons and tons of hours into this entire project, brought together some amazing scholars, and this is just the beginning. Just the beginning. So we'll see you for episode two very soon.

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