Theologian of Life

Not many theologians have been hanged. One who was is attracting a growing following among ministers and seminarians in the U.S. What makes Dietrich Bonhoeffer notable in 1960 is not the manner of his death at the hands of the Nazis 15 years ago nor anything as concrete as a theological system; he is important because of his varied Christian insights, including above all the view that the Christian must not withdraw from the world, but must live in it fully, with his faith. In the words of a new book* about Bonhoeffer, he "challenged the church to rethink its own mission to the radically secular world of the 20th century."

The Terrible Alternative. Unlike the lives of most theologians, Bonhoeffer's life was an extension of his beliefs. He was born with all advantages. His father was a leading doctor and psychiatry professor in Berlin, and his mother was the daughter of Emperor Wilhelm's chaplain.

At 21 he wrote a dissertation that Karl Earth called "a theological miracle." But, risking his teaching career, he met Hitler head on. The second day after Hitler became Chancellor, Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address attacking the trend to personal leadership. He was cut off the air, and thenceforth was a marked man.

In disgust at those who called themselves "German Christians" and toed the Nazi line, Bonhoeffer accepted a pastorate in England in 1933, but returned to Germany when his church called him to take charge of one of its near-illegal seminaries, which were frowned on by the Nazis but permitted to operate on a shoestring in private country houses. In 1937 the Nazis began to stop his work, but two years later Bonhoeffer somehow won permission to come to the U.S., where he had previously spent a year on a scholarship at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. His second stay in the U.S. was unhappy. The time was 1939; he knew that war was approaching and that, since he could not in conscience bear arms, he would surely be arrested if he went home to Germany. Still, he felt he must return. Back in Germany, Bonhoeler took an active part in the anti-Nazi underground. The Gestapo caught up with him on April 5, 1943. He spent two years in prisons and concentration camps before he was hanged, at 39, at Flossenburg in Bavaria, for plotting to kill Hitler.

World Come of Age. In the longest and best known of Bonhoeffer's books, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), he developed his idea of the essence of Christianity: the answer to Christ's call, "Follow me." Bonhoeffer's answer is neither a confession of faith nor the formulation of a doctrinal system, but instant, simple obedience in taking up the cross--"The disciple is a disciple only in so far as he shares his Lord's suffering and rejection and crucifixion." Grace is not cheap, but costly--"the treasure hidden in the field," for the sake of which "a man will gladly go and sell all that he has."

During Bonhoeffer's prison years, his thought flowered in letters and papers he managed to smuggle out. The modern technological world, he wrote, is a world "come of age," which no longer looks to God for its answers but to natural laws and science. Yet Bonhoeffer saw hope in its godlessness: "Perhaps it is for that reason nearer to God than ever before . . .

Our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation face to face with God." The nonbelieving brave men he met in the anti-Nazi underground, the stark realities of prison life, and his disappointment in the professional churchmen of Germany, all may have influenced Bonhoeffer to see real Christianity as "nonreligious" and "worldly." The opposition between sacred and secular, supernatural and natural, seemed unreal to him--the apparent opposites are united in Jesus Christ.

In the Arms of God. Pastor-Editor (Christian Century) Martin E. Marty suggests that the secret of Bonhoeffer's appeal for today's young seminarians is their disillusion with "religiousness," which often is merely a veneer, a "comfortable buffer between man and God." An equally strong appeal may lie in Bonhoeffer's opposition to the despair and pessimism of the age. For despair, he wrote, can be a temptation just as much as security or love of the flesh. When man despairs of God, he is driven "either into the sin of blasphemy or into self-destruction, like Saul and Judas"; or he may turn to a kind of sterile and secular attempt at saintliness--"self-annihilating asceticism and works or even magic. In ingratitude, in disobedience, and in hopelessness, man hardens himself against the grace of God."

Not a trace of hopelessness or ingratitude can be found in Bonhoeffer's remarkable letters from prison. "During the last year or so I have come to appreciate the 'worldliness' of Christianity as never before," he wrote. "The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus was man ... It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman, a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one.

"This is what I mean by worldliness--taking life in one's stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves utterly in the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia [repentance] and that is what makes a man and a Christian. How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this world?"

* The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Westminster; $6) by Methodist John D. Godsey, assistant professor of systematic theology at Drew University's Theological School.

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