Wethouder beversstraat bonhoeffer biography

by Robert Saler

Read the PDF
from Spring 2018

When I teach Bonhoeffer seminars at my seminary, I enjoy shocking the students early on by expressing what can only come across as a contrarian’s opinion: “You know, Bonhoeffer’s participation in the plot to kill Hitler was probably the least interesting thing about his life.”

The students are generally aghast at this. Surely the romantic image of Bonhoeffer as the courageous Christian resister and martyr is too precious a treasure to diminish in this way? Well, I go on to explain, I say this because, as deeply inspiring as his courage and resistance are, for the contemporary church his theology is an even more exciting contribution. Or, more accurately, the two are so intertwined that to lose sight of the theologian in favor of some romanticized freedom fighter is to misunderstand both facets of Bonhoeffer’s life and the unstable yet unwavering integrity by which he fought to hold them together.

Bonhoeffer died on the cusp of what he saw as his own theological breakthrough: relating some of his earlier writings on discipleship, particularly the ones that framed discipleship as departure from “the world,” with the growing sense in his later writings that Christians are called to be even more worldly than the average secular person—precisely because, in Christ, God goes deeper into the world than the world is in itself. His unfinished project as found in Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison sought to bring together the poles of, on the one hand, deep formation in thick Christian practices characteristic of his time at Finkenwalde seminary and the chronicle of that experience, Life Together, with, on the other hand, a growing sense that Christians are called to be responsible by acting in the deep moral and spiritual gray areas in the world, trusting in God’s grace to forgive those whose responsibility causes them to become guilty of sin. Many of Bonhoeffer’s other activities—his pioneering ecumenical work, his engagement in youth ministry, and his ambiguous relationship to university teaching—have to be contextualized within this generative tension in order to be comprehensible. His was a Nicene-Chalcedonian christological hermeneutic of Christian formation through and through, which made him more theologically daring than most of his ostensibly more modern peers.

Thus, toward the end of his life, Bonhoeffer’s theology and his engagement in resistance to Hitler continued to merge in evocative ways. To capture the one requires elucidating the other so that a full portrait of this complex thinker can emerge. But as we know, three-quarters of a century after his death his legacy remains deeply contested. Did his longings for monastic-like community and strong doctrinal commitments indicate that he was on the verge of becoming Roman Catholic? Were his statements about “religionless Christianity” toward the end of his life signs that, as the “death of God” theologians thought, he was on the verge of some kind of atheism? Was he confessionally Lutheran through and through? Or some hybrid of multiple possibilities that he himself was only beginning to understand at the time of his death?

In the myriad biographies of Bonhoeffer available to the English-speaking church (and here I am restricting myself to those available at present in English), the ability to tell the story of Bonhoeffer’s life and his theology in an exciting way has been difficult to pull off. As we will see, a number of Bonhoeffer biographies do a good job of telling his relatively brief life story, while others are good at engaging in theological analysis of his texts. However, we are still waiting for an up-to-date biography that does both well.

This means that Bonhoeffer fans will need to read at least a few biographies in order to get a full picture of his career and, especially, to understand the import of his theological texts. Of course, interested readers would do well to consult his texts directly. Fortress Press now having recently completed the seventeen-volume translation of Bonhoeffer’s Works, including reliable translation choices and critical apparatuses, that task is now much easier to do.

What follows is one teacher’s highly opinionated survey of some key Bonhoeffer biographies, with particular suggestions about how best to mix and match them to get different angles on this crucial theologian of the twentieth century.

In many respects, the best theological biography of Bonhoeffer remains Eberhard Bethge’s Dietrich Bonheoffer: A Biography.[1] He wrote it in 1967 as an effort to rehabilitate the image of Bonhoeffer in the English-speaking world, since immediately after the war in both America and England Bonhoeffer was dually—and contradictorily—damned as both a Nazi who served in the German army and as a treasonous spy who conspired to commit the assassination of a legitimately elected leader. This lengthy examination of Bonhoeffer’s theological formation and trajectory still features a variety of sensitive and helpful readings by a man who was no theological slouch himself. Interestingly, Bethge served as Bonhoeffer’s confessor as well as his closest friend throughout his adult life, so one may speculate on how Bethge chose to disclose certain things while withholding others based on his respect for the seal of the confessional.