Betrayal
Page 18
A Call to Obedience
As Bonhoeffer's life progressed, he passed eventually through all three themes introduced in his essay of 1933. However, during the next two years, his work centered on the church's stand regarding Christian Jews. Historians are now beginning to recognize that the German church struggle, as it progressed in 1933 and 1934, took place not because Protestant church leaders repudiated the politics of the Nazi regime. It involved instead a power struggle over who would control the church. The key test concerned the application of Nazi racial policy to the personnel and membership of the Protestant churches. As the summer of 1933 progressed, Bonhoeffer took a stronger position than anyone in his church in opposition to these measures against Christian Jews. In June, before a large crowd of students at the University of Berlin gathered to debate contemporary church politics, Bonhoeffer countered the German Christian Professor Fabricius, who insisted on the need to maintain the purity of the German gospel and to resist "judaizing." Bonhoeffer responded that only those who were weak in their faith need to eject people from their congregation; the weak need a racial law, he said, the strong do not." Also in June, the Gestapo threatened to arrest Bonhoeffer and his friend Gerhard Jacobi if they would not stop canvassing for the upcoming July church elections against the German Christians and their plan to base the church on race."
After the disastrous church elections in July, in which German Christians took over leadership in Bonhoeffer's church, the Old Prussian Union, the new leaders made good on their threats and proposed that the Aryan Paragraph become church law. Bonhoeffer drafted a leaflet, circulated among pastors and congregations in his district, in which he spoke in strong language against the exclusion of non-Aryan clergy from the church and denounced the German Christian proposal to segregate Jewish Christians into their own congregations.'" Shortly after he wrote the pamphlet, the Young Reformation Movement, the association of pastors who had opposed the German Christians in the church elections, chose Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, a theology professor at Erlangen University, to draft a confessional statement for the national synod planned for later in the fall. The two met in August at Bethel, near Bielefeld. Bonhoeffer had never before visited Bethel, the most famous home in Germany for the mentally and physically handicapped, and was stunned by the experience. From Bethel he wrote prophetically to his grandmother: "It is sheer madness to believe, as is done today, that the sick can or ought to be legally eliminated. It is virtually the same as building a tower of Babel, and is bound to bring its own 1121
The purpose of this Bethel Confession, authored by Bonhoeffer and Sasse, was to force a confrontation with the German Christians over the intrusion of racist, nationalistic ideology into the traditional Lutheran theology of the church. Part of the confession would respond to the Aryan Paragraph. Wilhelm Vischer, a teacher at the Bethel School of Theology, assisted Bonhoeffer and drafted the article on the Jewish question. The confession, completed by August 25, took a strong stand against the German Christian plan to remove Christian Jews from the mainstream of the church and isolate them in their own congregations. The document called for gentile Christians to suffer persecution rather than abandon their Jewish-Christian brothers and sisters.
However, more conservative leaders of the church opposition, under Martin Niemoller's direction, edited the confession significantly, watering down the passages about Jews and even striking the section calling for solidarity in suffering with the Jews. Bonhoeffer refused to sign the version that was sent on to the synod. Thus by August 1933, before the Confessing Church had even been organized, Bonhoeffer had already begun to split from the other leaders, such as Niemoller, who were either more willing to compromise or less concerned about the plight of the Jews."
Bonhoeffer's worst fears were realized when the general synod of his Prussian church, now dominated by German Christians elected in the July church elections, voted at its meeting in Berlin on 5-6 September to implement the Aryan Paragraph. When one Young Reformation leader, Karl Koch, rose to speak on behalf of the defrocked pastors, he was shouted down from the stage. The dissenting group, which by now included Niemoller, left the hall in protest. At gatherings afterward at the homes of Niemoller and Jacobi, Bonhoeffer and Hildebrandt called for mass clergy resignations to protest the clause. Hildebrandt, who had just been ordained in July, would lose his job under the new law. Bonhoeffer wrote to Sasse and Karl Barth for advice about whether to leave the church or stay. Barth advised him to wait. On 7 September, Bonhoeffer and Niemoller drafted a statement declaring that anyone who assented to the Aryan Paragraph excluded himself from the communion of the church. An edited version of this statement became the manifesto of the Pastors' Emergency League, the first organized dissent against Nazi efforts to control the churches.
From these frantic efforts in Berlin, Bonhoeffer went in late September directly to an international ecumenical meeting to present the problems in the German church to the world Christian community. At this meeting in Sophia, Bulgaria, of the World Alliance for Promoting Friendly Relations among the Churches, Bonhoeffer explained the Jewish situation in Germany, the Aryan Paragraph, and the divisions within the German Protestant Church. Most important, he called for the ecumenical movement to withhold recognition of the new church government in Germany. As a result, the Sophia conference passed the following resolution: "We deplore the fact that the State measures against the Jews in Germany have had such an effect on public opinion that in some circles the Jewish race is considered a race of inferior status. We protest against the resolution of the Prussian General Synod and other Synods which apply the Aryan paragraph of the State to the Church, putting serious disabilities upon ministers and church officers who by chance of birth are nonAryan, which we believe to be a denial of the explicit teaching and spirit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.""
Bonhoeffer returned home to Berlin feeling rather vindicated, confident that the world Christian community had heard and responded to Germany's distress. He returned just in time for the national synod meeting of the Protestant Church Federation in Wittenberg. Although he was not a delegatebecause all the Young Reformers had stormed out of the hall in protest at the Berlin synod in September, none were elected to the national meeting-he had his father's chauffeur drive him and Hildebrandt to Wittenberg to observe the meeting. They took with them a stack of handbills against the Aryan Paragraph to pass out and plaster along the streets. However, the new German Christian Reic{tsbishof, Ludwig Muller, allowed no discussion of the issue, and Bonhoeffer left the meeting feeling like an abject failure. The mass resignations from the church for which he had called earlier did not materialize. He himself did not resign, but chose flight instead."
By the fall of 1933, Bonhoeffer had emerged within the ecumenical community as the chief spokesperson for the dissenting German pastors. Within his own church, the Old Prussian Union, he pushed hardest for an active opposition to the German Christians, even advocating that dissenters withdraw into a separate free church, unencumbered by any ties with the Nazi government. Foreshadowing his future role within the Confessing Church, he found himself increasingly isolated from his peers who were more willing to compromise with the German Christian church leadership. He wrote in October to Barth: "I felt that I was incomprehensibly in radical opposition to all my friends, that my views of matters were taking me more and more into isolation, although I was and remained in the closest personal relationship with these men."'s However, while in the thick of the German church conflict and his defense of Christian Jews, Bonhoeffer made the decision to withdraw.
In October the young theologian, lecturer at the university, and leader of the clerical opposition to the new German church, left Germany for London, where he became the simple parish pastor for two congregations of German expatriates, mostly businessmen and their families. As he explained to Barth, "I simply did not any longer feel up to the questions and demands which came to me ... so I thought that it was probably time to go into the wilderness."" He remained in Engl
and until April 1935.
For the year and a half he lived abroad, Bonhoeffer stayed in constant touch with his family and church connections back in Germany and used his presence in England to keep news of the German church situation before the eyes of the world. He became especially close to the Anglican bishop of Chichester, George Kennedy Allen Bell, whom he knew from his ecumenical contacts and who became the chief advocate for the Confessing Church within the ecumenical movement. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer seemed ashamed of his decision to leave Germany, feeling that he had run away from the critical battle. He was cheered somewhat by the presence of Hildebrandt, who, now that he had been made unemployed by the Aryan Paragraph, could stay with Dietrich in the cold, damp parsonage for months at a time. Yet Bonhoeffer's flight to England at the height of the conflict at home suggests an uncertainty and ambivalence reminiscent of the contradictions in his April 1933 essay about the church and the Jewish question. This first phase in his struggle with the Nazi regime was marked by paradox: courageous fight and then a cowardly flight, a stand of solidarity with the Jewish people but then a theological profession that identified them as second-class citizens.
A Call to Buffering
The second phase of Bonhoeffer's personal struggle began while he was in exile in England, when he responded to the call to suffering in Germany. From London he watched the birth of the Confessing Church in May of 1934 at Barmen. Here, finally, was an evangelical council akin to what he proposed in April 1933, one that could call for action against the state. However, the Barmen Declaration said nothing about the Jews. Two months later, in August 1934, Bonhoeffer traveled to Fano, Denmark, to attend the annual meeting of the Life and Work Movement, one of the early ecumenical organizations under the leadership of his Anglican friend, Bishop Bell. At Fano, the ecumenical movement-under Bonhoeffer's urging and to the disgust of the official delegation from the German Evangelical Church-recognized the Confessing Church as the genuine church of Germany. Thus, despite his hand-wringing about leaving the battle by his escape to England, Bonhoeffer stayed involved from the sidelines. In the spring of 1935, he returned to Germany to lead a seminary for the Confessing Church, temporarily housed at Zingst on the Baltic Coast and then later at Finkenwalde, near Stettin in quiet, remote Pomerania. Here he met Eberhard Bethge, one of his first seminarians, and they became lifelong friends.
Bonhoeffer concentrated his energies during the next years on the practical work of running a seminary. But his broader goal was building up the Confessing Church as the true church of Jesus Christ in Germany, in opposition to the national church. However, during these years the Confessing Church found itself bitterly divided, with some of its members supporting various degrees of compromise with the Nazi regime and the German Evangelical Church. Bonhoeffer and his Finkenwalde students made up the radical wing of the church, consistently opposing the concessions made by more conservative leaders.
In September 1935 the state enacted the harsh Nuremberg Laws, which laid the basis for so many later state actions against Jews. Shortly thereafter Bonhoeffer learned from Hildebrandt that leaders of the Confessing Church from the Old Prussian Union were preparing a statement for their upcoming regional synod in the Berlin suburb of Steglitz. According to Hildebrandt, although the leading committee planned to reaffirm the Confessing Church's rejection of the Aryan Paragraph, as a concession it would recognize the state's right to legislate in the political realm about the Jewish question, thus seeming to condone the Nuremberg Laws. In response, Bonhoeffer brought the entire population of the seminary to Berlin to pressure the Steglitz assembly to take a public stand against the Nuremberg Laws. As a result of Bonhoeffer's efforts, the synod chose not to adopt the offensive clause. Instead, as Bonhoeffer had done in his essay of 1933, the synod called for missions to the Jews.27
The next year, Bonhoeffer strongly supported a memorandum to Hitler, drawn up by the Provisional Church Administration of the Confessing Church. Hildebrandt had helped draft the letter, which expressed concern, among other things, that Nazi ideology forced people into the hatred of Jews. Around this time, while he was the leader of the Finkenwalde seminary, Bonhoeffer apparently uttered his oft-quoted words, "Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants."Z"
Of all the parties within the Confessing Church in the mid-1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close associates pushed hardest for Christian solidarity with the suffering Jews. Yet in his own writing from these years, Bonhoeffer remained strangely silent about the Jewish question itself. While at Finkenwalde, he wrote the now famous book, The Cost of Discipleship; in fact, his seminary lectures of 1935-37 formed much of the book. Although it does not speak directly of the Jews, this book presented the theory underlying Bonhoeffer's call for a strong stand by the Confessing Church. In it, he argued that the call of Christ summons true disciples to suffering, to communion with the crucified. He emphasized the costly, the radical, the dangerous side of Christian discipleship, not an acquiescent, easy, guarded, and safe Christian life.
However, even with this focus on the call to suffering, Bonhoeffer did not yet depart from the traditional Lutheran political philosophy. Luther had called for Christians passively to disobey a government that required acts inconsistent with God's law, pointing out that they must be prepared to accept the consequences of such a stand. For his part, Bonhoeffer emphasized the challenge in this difficult teaching, rather than the more conventional Lutheran preoccupation with grace and forgiveness. The Cost of Discipleship, with its call to suffering, was Bonhoeffer's answer to the events since 1933.2w
Soon after the publication of The Cost of Discipleship in 1937, authorities closed down Bonhoeffer's seminary at Finkenwalde. The state stepped up its actions against the Confessing Church in the summer of 1937, arresting Niemoller and forbidding German church delegates to attend the ecumenical meeting coming up in Oxford. Several of Bonhoeffer's former students, who by now had scattered throughout northern Germany, were arrested and interrogated, their houses searched, and so on. To replace the Finkenwalde Seminary, Confessing Church leaders worked out a system of "collective pastorates," whereby students were assigned to different parishes as assistants to the pastors but lived communally in two vicarages. Bonhoeffer divided his time for instruction between these two sites.
For most of the years 1938 to 1941, Bonhoeffer lived in remote Outer Pomerania trying to conduct his pastoral training under increasingly difficult circumstances. For him this period was similar to late 1933 and 1934, a time of uncertainty and soul-searching. He began to lose confidence in the Confessing Church, as it became stymied by internal divisions and held to a conservative, defensive strategy, refusing to take risks. The willingness of most Confessing pastors, around 85 percent, to take the loyalty oath to Hitler in 1937 and 1938 greatly disheartened him." Bonhoeffer seemed not to know what route his life should take.
All this occurred just as the state stepped up its persecution of Jews. As formal and informal restrictions against Jews tightened in 1938, the Bonhoeffer family decided that the Leibholzes should leave Germany. Hildebrandt had already fled to London. Dietrich and his friend Bethge accompanied Gerhard and Sabine and their children on a "visit" to Switzerland in September, and from there the family traveled on to England. Bonhoeffer used his friendship with Bishop Bell, who had recently been appointed to the House of Lords, to secure Gerhard a position at Oxford University. The flight of his twin sister's family from antisemitism affected him deeply."
The Leibholzes arrived in England just in time to read in the newspapers about the savagery of Kristallnacht in November. The violence reached the small village world of Bonhoeffer's Outer Pomerania; the synagogue in Koslin, one of the two towns between which Bonhoeffer divided his time, was burned. As soon as possible he made a trip to Berlin to survey the situation there for himself. According to Bethge, Kristallnacht marked a turning away for Bonhoeffer from some of the views he had expressed in 1933. No longer did he connect the suffering of Jews to a punishing curse
. When some of his seminarians uttered this view after watching the Koslin synagogue burn, he corrected them saying, "When today the synagogues are set afire, tomorrow the churches will burn." In a circular letter sent to former Finkenwalde students in the week following the violence, Bonhoeffer pointed them to Scripture verses about which he had thought much, he said, in the last few days: Psalm 74, Zechariah 2:12, Romans 9:3f;11:11-15. All these passages referred to Jews not as potential converts, as in his language of 1933, but as God's special people, the apple of God's eye. In Bonhoeffer's own Bible, Bethge notes that he had marked verse 8 of Psalm 74: "They say to themselves: Let us plunder them! They burn all the houses of God in the land," and had written in a marginal notation: 9 November 1938, followed by an exclamation mark."