Bonhoeffer Moment(s)?

Naming the Moment

Declarations of “Bonhoeffer moment(s)” began appearing in early 2015 as American evangelical Christians mobilized to resist the legalization of gay marriage. ⁴ Stephen Haynes, in a blog entry for Huffington Post, traced how the pronouncement of a “Bonhoeffer moment in America” became a Southern Baptist declaration of “a Bonhoeffer moment for every pastor in the United States” which progressive commentator Rachel Maddow interpreted as “an assassinate-Hitler moment if the Supreme Court says that gay people can be married.” ⁵

The vineyard for this right-wing rhetorical harvest was planted by the 2010 publication of Eric Metaxas’s work of literary impressionism, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. ⁶ As the United States approached the election of Donald Trump as president, Metaxas took the Protestant saint on tour, “casting,” as Charles Marsh put it, “Bonhoeffer in the role of a white evangelical family values Republican.” ⁷ In a May 2016 tweet, Metaxas made his partisan intentions clear when referring to the Democratic candidate as “Hitlery Clinton.” ⁸

When the Trump phenomenon sparked a progressive rhetoric of “resistance,” Bonhoeffer was again pressed into service. New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks sought to provide Christian models for resistance. “If,” he said, authoritarianism or “repressive kleptocracy” is the form of oppression, then “Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the form of resistance.” He surmised that “If we are in a Bonhoeffer moment, then aggressive nonviolent action makes sense: marching in the streets, blocking traffic, disrupting town halls, vehement rhetoric to mobilize mass opposition”—none of which Bonhoeffer actually did. Surmising that the United States was not in a “Bonhoeffer moment,” Brooks said that his preferred hero was a technocrat along the lines of Gerald Ford. ⁹

In August 2017, Patheos blogger Adam Ericksen was compelled by a family member’s distress at President Trump’s pardoning of Sheriff Joe Arpaio to explore whether or not Americans had arrived at the “Bonhoeffer moment.” Ericksen pulled back: “We are not in a Bonhoeffer moment, if by that we mean assassination. We are in a Bonhoeffer moment in that we need to continue to resist Trump’s racist policies.” He concluded that “We are at the Bonhoeffer moment of resisting nonviolently.” ¹⁰

As Bonhoeffer was deployed on opposite sides of growing domestic tension, Bonhoeffer scholars, both individually and as a collective, provided informed guidance on what his life and witness might contribute to the moment. In the wake of President Trump’s election and inauguration, the English Language Section of the International Bonhoeffer Society issued a statement saying that “The best way to understand Bonhoeffer’s possible message for our times is not to draw direct political analogies between his time and ours, but to understand the meaning of how he understood his faith and his responsibilities as a citizen in his own times and discern where these words might resonate for us today.” ¹¹

Writing for Sojourners Magazine in early 2018, Bonhoeffer scholars Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie Williams offered a sophisticated presentation of Bonhoeffer within the context of World War II and the Third Reich. During historic crises, they suggested, one can choose to be a perpetrator, a bystander, or a resister; this structure is supplemented by a helpful discussion of Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on Stellvertretung, vicarious representative action. In the context of a “Bonhoeffer moment,” Hale and Williams say “it is the wrong question” to ask if “this is a time that calls for violence” since it misses “the point of Bonhoeffer’s witness and signals one’s inability to hear the deep truth his life conveys.” The right question, they say, is Bonhoeffer’s own: “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” ¹²

These declarations of “Bonhoeffer moment(s)” share several characteristics. First, they most often put forth clear political opinions but are vague on Bonhoeffer. Second, they all contain allusions to Hitler, whether the object of ire is Obama or Clinton or Trump. As such, they violate the principle of internet-based debate known as “Godwin’s Law” and other forms of “reductio ad Hitlerum.” ¹³ Moreover, they focus on the United States alone, ignoring a global wave of populist politics. ¹⁴ As we will see, uses of Bonhoeffer to advance preservationist approaches to the United States or any nation-state domesticate his vision in a way incompatible with Bonhoeffer’s developing analysis.

A View from Indian Country

Assessments of “Bonhoeffer moment(s)” involve interpretation not only of where he took his stand, but also where his interpreters sit. ¹⁵ As a Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, one of the tribes ethnically cleansed out of the southeastern United States after 1830, my perspective is shaped by “Indian Country.” Indian Country is both a term defined within US law ¹⁶ and an informal designation of places where “Indians” (both literal and figurative) are, including non-US lands under US military control.

When he visited “troops from Columbia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq,” travel writer Robert Kaplan reports that their most common greeting was “Welcome to Injun Country.” ¹⁷ The concept of “Indian Country” becomes a device through which Kaplan marks his travels rather than an entry-point for critical inquiry. “America’s imperial destiny was to grapple with countries that weren’t really countries,” he says. ¹⁸ He thus documents a discourse through which all America’s enemies—through association with America’s foundational disconfirming others—are transformed into savages deserving death. ¹⁹ In “Injun Country,” violence is accepted as a feature of a landscape in which American soldiers are protected at all costs; Natives are not just “minoritized” but made into debris. ²⁰

From the Chickasaws’ violent contact with Hernando de Soto in 1541 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 to the 1973 American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee and the militarized police response against Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, American Indian communities know what it means to face overwhelming Euro-American military force deployed to enforce bureaucratic oppression. This long-running reality remains, no matter what political party occupies the Oval Office. While the Standing Rock protests first manifested during President Obama’s tenure, his December 2016 decision to delay construction was easily reversed by President Trump. The difference between them was one of optics rather than policy.

The view from Indian Country is a horizon organically fused with the experiences of enslaved, colonized, occupied, and otherwise oppressed communities. Recognizing their general, collective experience in all who reside in “Injun Country,” American Indians can, without too much difficulty or fatalism, remember and anticipate a time when the United States does not exist. Reading Bonhoeffer from this perspective helps better comprehend the radicality of his thought while critiquing how he has been interpreted to suit the present American political moment.

Gustavo Gutiérrez was one of the first to offer an interpretation of Bonhoeffer from the perspective of “los Indios.” In “Theology from the Underside of History,” published in English in 1983, ten years following the English publication of his groundbreaking A Theology of Liberation, Gutiérrez critiqued European theologians like Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann while finding a companion in Bonhoeffer. “No one else, perhaps, has appreciated the challenge of modernity as profoundly as has Bonhoeffer,” Gutiérrez wrote. “The very depth of his posing of the question grasps the thinking of the spirit of modernity by its stalk and its roots start cracking.” ²¹

Despite this assessment, Gutiérrez follows his main essay with a shorter, more critical piece, using one of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters to demonstrate “the limits of modern theology.” In his letter to Eberhard Bethge on June 8 and 9, 1944, Bonhoeffer begins exploring the concept of modernity, the “world come of age,” and how the church may respond within new realities. Gutiérrez affirms these questions, but demurs, “we feel in our bones the limitations of an effort to respond to the challenges of the modern world without criticizing it in its economic bases, as on its social and ideological levels. For, as we shall see, no one ever vanquished the modern, bourgeois mentality while remaining at its heart.” ²² Gutiérrez is convinced that even Bonhoeffer did not break free from those constraints.

Because, according to Gutiérrez, Bonhoeffer was focused on “the Nazi phenomenon” and “its attacks on liberal society from the rear,” the German theologian “was less sensitive to the world of injustice upon which that [liberal] society was built.” Although Gutiérrez is willing to say that “Bonhoeffer’s courage led him to the mountaintop, and from that mountaintop he could discern, through the mists, other roads to follow,” he concludes that Bonhoeffer did not, perhaps could not, arrive at those destinations. ²³

Bonhoeffer the Radical

Gutiérrez’s critical reading of the German theologian—an approach complemented by Anthony Pinn’s assessment of Bonhoeffer’s theology of suffering in light of Black and womanist theologies ²⁴ —recognizes that the Bonhoeffer he encounters in prison was undergoing an ideological and theological transformation.

Recent talk of a “Bonhoeffer moment” has rarely asked what his moment may have been. Was it, for instance, his public outspokenness in 1933 regarding the “Führer principle” or the “Jewish question”? Was it his 1935 decision to take on leadership of the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde? Perhaps it is his 1939 decision to leave New York and travel to Germany on the brink of war? Or is it when he made the tortuous and principle-challenging decision to participate in efforts to assassinate Hitler? The truth is that Bonhoeffer did not have a moment—he had a life. In the same way Patrick Wolfe pointed out that, due to its ongoing “logic of elimination,” settler colonial “invasion is a structure not an event,” ²⁵ it makes more sense to think of a Bonhoeffer structure, a Bonhoeffer process, a Bonhoeffer formation.

In “After Ten Years,” Bonhoeffer makes it clear that his solidarity with the “weakest and most defenseless brothers of Jesus Christ” ²⁶ (as he euphemistically referred to Jews in his unfinished Ethics) was neither innate nor inevitable. Rather, his radical resistance resulted from a process of learning. As he wrote in 1942, “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below.” ²⁷

Many interpreters have noted that any perspective “from below” contrasts with Bonhoeffer’s family of origin—remarkable for its social class, wealth, and commitment to bourgeois culture. ²⁸ Larry Rasmussen and Renate Bethge describe the Bonhoeffer family home as both “the nest of Bonhoeffer’s patriotism” and the springboard for his “distinctive trait of moving to the edges of an experience,” ²⁹ whether those edges included Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, his pursuit of an invitation to study nonviolent resistance in India with Gandhi, or teaching poor confirmation students in Berlin. ³⁰

The question of Bonhoeffer’s “patriotism” is central for assessing both conservative and progressive “Bonhoeffer moment” declarations within American politics. Not limited to involvement in assassination plots, Bonhoeffer’s relationship with his country is manifested in his 20 June 1939 decision to leave the relatively safe haven of New York to return to Germany on the eve of war. As Eberhard Bethge says, the cause of this decision was not mysterious: “It was simply his readiness to recognize that he was and would have to remain a German, fully accepting of guilt and responsibility.” ³¹ Any discussion of Bonhoeffer’s patriotism, therefore, must consider his approaches to responsibility and collective, national guilt.

Bonhoeffer’s transition from what I have called a “preservationist” impulse toward national ideals and existence toward a radical vision of the future takes on new urgency with his return. In a letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, his chief sponsor for open-ended time in the United States, Bonhoeffer shared his decision in stark terms:

I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people … Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. ³²

The theme of guilt and responsibility intensifies upon Bonhoeffer’s return to Germany. In late 1942, following a failed coup attempt, Bonhoeffer wrote of “a Christendom enmeshed in guilt beyond all measure.” ³⁴ In 1943, Bonhoeffer visited Willem Visser ’t Hooft and others in Zurich. During an evening conversation, Visser ’t Hooft asked Bonhoeffer, “What do you really pray for in the present situation?” Later, Visser ’t Hooft recalled his response: “If you want to know, I pray for the defeat of my country, for I think that is the only possibility of paying for all the suffering that my country has caused in the world.” Bethge immediately notes that “this was a statement people did not like to hear repeated in postwar Germany.” He interprets it as a moment “when the true patriot had to speak unpatriotically to show his patriotism.” ³⁵ Rasmussen and Renate Bethge echo this anxious pronouncement of patriotism. In a letter from late 1943, Bonhoeffer assures Eberhard “that not for a single moment have I regretted my return in 1939, nor anything of what has then followed” and considers “the fact that I am now sitting here … my participation in the fate of Germany, to which I was committed.” ³⁶ While Rasmussen interprets the letter to mean that Bonhoeffer is one of those who “risk death for their country at the moment it is destroying itself and being destroyed,” ³⁷ this reads a different ideology into Bonhoeffer’s words. Bonhoeffer’s commitment to “being involved in Germany’s fate” recognizes that he is part of the collective; no matter his special knowledge or insight, he does not stand apart from it. He is participating in the “fate” of his country—its downfall, not its redemption.

The continuities between his 1939 letter to Niebuhr and his 1943 statement to Visser ’t Hooft are striking, as are the divergences. In both cases, Bonhoeffer evokes the necessity of willing and praying for the defeat of one’s own country. It is a short step from willing and praying to acting. The divergences are found mostly in what he seeks to preserve. The first speaks mostly about the need to preserve and restore Christianity within Germany, not Germany as such; in the later, the concern for “Christian civilization” is dropped. All focus is on the defeat of the country, Germany. We see, therefore, a movement from preservation of the subgroup (Christianity) to collective responsibility, concomitant with a shift from individual to collective, guilt for “suffering” unleashed upon “the world.” It is for this reason Germany will suffer its “fate,” a fate from which Bonhoeffer did not seek to escape. This is not patriotism; it is recompense.

By the time Bonhoeffer writes “After Ten Years” at the turn of 1943/1944, he is a person for whom both country and God have been stripped away. He is a stateless enemy of the state. He is religionless, waiting only for that articulation to manifest. He is without foundations, without mooring—without certainty and security. In short, he has been made poor. It is here that Gustavo Gutiérrez and other representatives of “Indian Country” find Bonhoeffer and recognize in him a companion, even if elements of his thinking and writing leave them wanting more.

The most refined example of Bonhoeffer’s “public theology” is his May 1944 sermon, “Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge.” Frits de Lange describes the essay as a “crucial text in the development of his theology.” ³⁸ There, Bonhoeffer tells the child of “the old middle-class [bürgerlich] tradition represented by your mother’s home … a world that will have vanished by the time you grow up.” ³⁹

What de Lange finds striking is “how little Bonhoeffer, in his description of the loss of his own culture, indulges himself in self-pity and embitterment.” ⁴⁰ When that defeat occurs, Bonhoeffer tells his nephew,

We can give up our privileges without a struggle, recognizing the justice of history. Events and circumstances may arise that take precedence over our wishes and our rights. Then, not in embittered and barren pride, but consciously yielding to divine judgment, we shall prove ourselves worthy to survive by identifying ourselves generously and selflessly with the whole community and the suffering of our fellow human beings. ⁴¹

Conclusion

Recent “Bonhoeffer moment(s)” have focused primarily on the preservation of preferred visions for the United States. The debates reference little political theory, history, or, in any substantive way, Bonhoeffer himself. ⁴² This is true of conservatives, via Metaxas, but also of progressives who have any even longer history of bending Bonhoeffer to their ideological will. ⁴³

Those who live on what Gustavo Gutiérrez calls “the underside of history”—those in “Indian Country” either in the United States or under US control—have little time for such intra-American debates. Since liberal North Atlantic theologies preserve the interests of bourgeois capitalism, the “modern bourgeois world” will “be confronted and overcome” only by effective challenges “from within the world of poverty and exploitation that the bourgeois world produces.” ⁴⁴ Although Bonhoeffer came close to this perspective, Gutiérrez concludes, he was ultimately (and understandably) too distracted by the immediate threats of fascism to pursue a broader reordering of the modern world.

I suggest, however, that Bonhoeffer may have gone further along that path than Gutiérrez realized. Bonhoeffer’s allegiance to the Christian community alone, his recognition of sharing in the “fate” of Germany for the suffering it had unleashed upon the world, and his counsel to “give up our privileges without a struggle, recognizing the justice of history” all indicate alienation from the nation-state, a condition placing him in radical solidarity with human communities living on the underside of modernity, whether within Germany or throughout the world. As one who experienced the lethal bureaucratic violence of the state, he willingly stood with all who have been lynched by those emboldened by privilege and power. ⁴⁵

While this reading opens up new possibilities for interpreting and expanding Bonhoeffer’s thought within a global horizon through the challenges posed by liberative modes of theology—including those perspectives directly critical of Bonhoeffer—Bonhoeffer’s interpreters may not fare as well. Indeed, there are indications in Gutiérrez’s essay on Bonhoeffer that the ultimate target of his critique was not Bonhoeffer himself, but those who would claim him alongside Gutiérrez and other “edgy” theologians.

Robert McAfee Brown (1920–2001) is a case in point. Brown supplied the preface to Gutiérrez’s The Power of the Poor in History. His title, “After Ten Years,” joins Gutiérrez and Bonhoeffer in an interpretive horizon. “The example of Bonhoeffer is particularly telling,” Brown says, “since Bonhoeffer was a bourgeois of the bourgeois, nurtured in an affluent, comfortable, untroubled home and culture. If he, with every reason to cling to all that was a part of his formation, could so radically challenge all that and begin to see things from what he called ‘the view from below’ (not too far from what Gutiérrez calls ‘the underside of history’), then there is hope for all of us.” ⁴⁶ By reducing Bonhoeffer’s hard-won final perspective to a person’s ability to transcend his social location, Brown produces a glib distortion of both Bonhoeffer and Gutiérrez. Rather than answering the call to participate in an ongoing revolution, Brown “Riversides” Bonhoeffer, making him into the very “discreet, opulent, self-satisfied,” religious thing—a saint—the German theologian despised. ⁴⁷

Summoning Bonhoeffer to aide in a political debate is exciting, with a whiff of danger—tyrannicide and assassination lurk nearby. This is true of Metaxas and his acolytes and of liberals as well. The difference is that progressive Christians appear deeply uncomfortable with this facet of Bonhoeffer’s life and witness. Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie Williams chastise those who invoke Bonhoeffer while asking if this is “a time that calls for violence,” saying that to do so “is to miss the point of Bonhoeffer’s witness and signals one’s inability to hear the deep truth his life conveys.” “Violence,” they intone, “is not the answer.”

Demanding that others refuse to ask questions regarding the possible necessity of violence is not true to Bonhoeffer’s life. As Clifford Green said of Metaxas’s apparent inability to comprehend the concept of “religionless Christianity,” “A lot of nonsense has been written about Bonhoeffer’s prison theology, but the answer to that is good interpretation, not pretending that the prison theology is a dirty little secret.” The same must be said of Bonhoeffer’s complicated relationship with pacifism and responsible action. Such complexity, as Green says of the prison theology, “can’t be forced into a conservative evangelical mold—or a so‑called liberal one either.” ⁴⁸ Whether from conservatives or progressives, directives for how oppressed groups should resist injustice take on a paternalistic tone.

Any “Bonhoeffer moment” in the United States would be characterized by action informed by the “experience of incomparable value,” a process of learning “to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.” ⁴⁹ The suffering: those in the sweatshops, hunched over on plantations, living under military occupation, carrying the weight of intergenerational trauma, serving unjust sentences, targeted for their religion, their ethnicity, the color of their skin, those in Indian Country. There, where bourgeois preservationism and partisan pretension melt away, theologians in the United States may find their prayers echoing Bonhoeffer’s own: “If you want to know, I pray for the defeat of my country, for I think that is the only possibility of paying for all the suffering that my country has caused the world.”