Abstract
The subtitle of Eric Metaxas’s infamous biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer uses four key words to capture the life and legacy of the Lutheran theologian: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. It may be assumed from this that Bonhoeffer cannot be properly understood in a simplistic way or from a single perspective. However, on a popular level, he is caricatured as a heroic theologian who was strongly against the violent regime of the Third Reich and was boldly involved in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This image has been strengthened as his life story has been told and retold among Christians and even non-Christians.
It is true that Bonhoeffer was an agent of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, some of whose key members attempted to remove Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo on the charge of being part of the Abwehr's anti-Nazi activities, especially helping Jews emigrate from Hitler's Germany. Bonhoeffer's death, along with other conspirators to kill Hitler, at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, seemed to confirm that he was actively involved in the assassination operation. These accounts create the impression that Bonhoeffer saw violence as a necessary tool to prohibit greater evils on the one hand, and that he became a Niebuhr-like realist in response to Hitler's dictatorship, abandoning his earlier pacifist conviction, on the other.
Depicting Bonhoeffer as a political realist, however, has become increasingly problematic. His name has often been quoted when and where Christians wish to justify the use of violence to fulfil their religious, moral, and/or national interests. Moreover, and more significantly, the publication of Bonhoeffer's collected works in German and English has led scholars to challenge a rather outdated and simplistic hermeneutical framework according to which his ethical thought underwent a change from pacifism to political realism. Among them, Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis convincingly argues that Bonhoeffer had maintained pacifism since his encounter with Jean Lasserre, a French Reformed pastor and pacifist, and his rediscovery of the Sermon on the Mount in the early 1930s. Furthermore, it forcefully illustrates that Bonhoeffer's pacifism was formed, sharpened, and strengthened by the centrality of Christ in his theology.
The author of the book, Mark Thiessen Nation, is Professor Emeritus of Theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. He is widely published, especially in relation to his work on John Howard Yoder. It needs to be noted, however, that Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship captured the young Nation's interests even before he delved into Mennonite theology and history. In 2013, about forty years after he first read Bonhoeffer, Nation co-authored and edited a book, entitled Bonhoeffer the Assassin? (with Anthony G. Siegrist and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking, Ada, MI: Baker Academic, 2013). As the provocative title indicates, the three authors intended to shake off the stereotypical reading of Bonhoeffer as the one who sanctioned killing the enemy in an extreme or borderline case. In contrast, the book shows that Bonhoeffer's involvement in the Abwehr was a cover to avoid military conscription and to continue his theological and ministerial work.
Bonhoeffer the Assassin, however, invited scholarly criticisms as to whether the authors, especially Nation, approached Bonhoeffer from an Anabaptist/Mennonite perspective. After a thorough re-reading of Bonhoeffer's collected works and an intense study of the resistance movement against Hitler, Nation published Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis in 2022, demonstrating a consistent trajectory of pacifism throughout Bonhoeffer's theological career. Nation underlines again how Bonhoeffer became an Abwher agent to avoid conscription and thus was able to maintain his pacifism. He participated in an operation to help Jews escape from Germany and utilised his international network to facilitate peace. However, saving Jews was a serious infringement of the Nazi's racial policy. Conscientious objection to war was even regarded as treason at the time. These non-violent resistances exposed Bonhoeffer to great danger. He was arrested in April 1943 as the Gestapo suspected that the Abwehr was secretly behind the rescue operation for Jews. While he was in prison, there were four attempts to kill Hitler. Eventually, the failure of the 20 July plot in 1944 resulted in mass execution of conspirators and those who were already in prison, including Bonhoeffer.
Hence, there is no evidence that Bonhoeffer was executed due to his connection with the assassination plot. Nation charges that a main source from which many people get a misleading idea of Bonhoeffer as an assassin is Eberhard Bethge's influential biography, which gives a clear impression that the mature Bonhoeffer abandoned his earlier pacifism. Demythologising Bethge's Bonhoeffer, Nation draws readers’ attention to posthumous texts and testimonies of Bonhoeffer's acquaintances according to which he was consistently in protest against violence.
Although these accounts serve as a new hermeneutical lens through which a pacifist Bonhoeffer can be seen, their earlier forms were already provided in Nation's previous work. A significant contribution he makes in the recent work, in my view, is ‘the emphasis on the practical outworking of Bonhoeffer's central theological commitment’ (p. xviii). In other words, this book is a remarkable illustration of how ‘[Bonhoeffer's] understanding of discipleship, the church, and the Scripture’ truly comes ‘from his commitment to the centrality of Jesus’ (p. 175). Each chapter of the book shows that this Christological centre directed Bonhoeffer's life and shaped his theology.
Chapter 1 directly challenges conventional accounts of Bonhoeffer's life and thought, exemplified by Bethge. Nation not only utilises textual proofs to undermine Bethge's interpretations, but also argues that it is less likely that a shift from pacifism to political realism took place in Bonhoeffer's later years, unless his Christocentric vision was abandoned. The second and third chapter undergird the claim made in the first chapter, tracing Bonhoeffer's critique of anti-Semitism and his understanding of war, respectively. Nation emphasises again that Bonhoeffer did not tackle these controversial topics in abstraction but in concrete terms, contending that Christians should understand them in light of the redemption Christ brought into the world and the command of love Jesus gave to his disciples.
Operating from the assumption that Bonhoeffer was always a pacifist, the next three chapters offer informing introductions to, and pacifist interpretations of, Bonhoeffer's main writings. The fourth chapter contextualises The Cost of Discipleship within the risky political situation of the Third Reich. Linking discipleship with Jesus’ radical call for peace-making, the chapter distils the main thesis of the entire book. Chapters 5 and 6 show how Bonhoeffer's commitment to pacifism penetrates his Ethics and theological reflections from prison, respectively. Because these writings remained unfinished, they have been open to various interpretations. Unfortunately, in Nation's eyes, several passages in these texts were wrongly understood as sanctioning violence. That kind of reading is grounded in and mutually strengthens the hypothesis that the mature Bonhoeffer was a Niebuhrian realist. Against that, Nation proposes an alternative reading of problematic passages from a pacifist perspective.
These intriguing chapters are followed by the epilogue and four appendices. The epilogue confirms again that Bonhoeffer's pacifism is rooted in his Christocentric theology and is inseparable from the ecclesial life. The first appendix is a response to criticism towards Nation's pacifist reading of Bonhoeffer in his earlier work. Providing a short biographical account on how he was influenced by Bonhoeffer and became a pacifist, this appendix helps readers to understand the book's overall thesis better. The second appendix, co-authored with Stanley Hauerwas, offers a condensed summary of why Bonhoeffer has to be understood as a pacifist. The third appendix was written by Scot McKnight, whose expertise in New Testament studies provides a wider theological background against which Bonhoeffer's view on discipleship and pacifism can be examined in relation to God's new creation. The final appendix is Nation's review of a movie, A Hidden Life. It is about the struggle and resistance of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic conscientious objector, during World War II. Nation draws parallels between Bonhoeffer and Jägerstätter, both of whom opposed the Nazis’ inhuman power not with power but with patience and perseverance in faith.
Before concluding this review, I would like to underline two theological points that drew my attention. In Nation's reading, firstly, Bonhoeffer shaped the basic presuppositions of his pacifism in critical dialogue with Karl Barth, including the centrality of Christ. His pacifism flows from the commitment to begin theological reflection not from principle but from reality as revealed by the incarnate God, listening to God here and now through the Bible, and then through the critical role of the church in the secular world, and so on. As a result, this book not only allows us to see a link between Barth and Bonhoeffer more clearly, but also exemplifies a Christocentric method for pacifist theology. However, considering the well-known fact that Barth was against pacifism, it would be helpful if Nation had shown the difference between these two great theologians more explicitly.
Nation's approach, secondly, seems to resonate with recent scholarly efforts to rediscover the importance of peace ethics or pacifist conviction in Bonhoeffer, as notably shown by Clifford Green, Stanley Hauerwas, Sabine Dramm, and Matthew Kirkpatrick. Despite different interpretations and emphases, they seem to agree that Bonhoeffer's involvement in the assassination plot cannot be a dominant framework in which his life and thought are interpreted. Nevertheless, Nation's preference for the term ‘pacifism’ may remain in dispute. Some may argue that it may risk resulting in another one-sided reading because any ‘-ism’ can easily turn into a principle by which reality is abstracted. Others may say that Bonhoeffer utilised about a century ago the term ‘pacifism’ in a traditional sense, whereas its meaning has become more nuanced and diversified nowadays. Nation himself briefly mentions that there are diverse forms of modern pacifism, which helped me understand why he sees Bonhoeffer as a pacifist (see especially p. 173). Calling Bonhoeffer a pacifist without careful qualification, however, may result in an anachronistic, if not Anabaptist, caricature of Bonhoeffer.
In short, Bonhoeffer was not a systematic theologian in a conventional sense. His sudden arrest and death prohibited him from completing his primary works. Thus, Bonhoeffer's theology remains open to different interpretations. Nation's Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis offers a provocative reading of Bonhoeffer as a pacifist. It cogently illustrates that the reality Bonhoeffer looked at was neither the world broken by war, nor the world in power competition, but the world reconciled with God in Christ. Otherwise expressed, what permeates Bonhoeffer's political resistance and theological writings was the question of how to respond to the living reality of Christ, not a Niebuhrian political realism. In this way, Nation introduces ‘A Rather Different Bonhoeffer’ (p. 21) based on Bonhoeffer's primary texts and previously unpublished memos and letters. The contributions of notable pacifist theologians, Hauerwas and McKnight, enrich and complement Nation's retelling of Bonhoeffer's life and thought. The book certainly demands readers to shake off a familiar image of Bonhoeffer, bringing them to rethink Bonhoeffer's true legacy and challenging them to practise discipleship in a world full of political realists.