DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AS A DOCTORATE STUDENT, BERLIN 1924
Completing a dissertation—that crowning achievement in every doctoral education, intended to demonstrate a command of knowledge equal to making advances in the field—is not meant to be easy for anyone. It would not be for Bonhoeffer. Despite a well-furnished mind and prodigious gifts of concentration, he’d never attempted anything of that scale. Dissertations do not get written in a single sitting. And attempting to adapt his talents to the effort would frustrate him immensely; from the outset, he repeatedly found himself crossing out large sections of work and starting over.41 Such dead ends were new to him.
In March of 1927, he retreated to the country house in Friedrichsbrunn, hoping to find inspiration in the fresh air of the Harz Mountains for what he liked to call (perhaps exhibiting the defense mechanism Freud had called denial) his “paper.” It seemed the right thing to do. Spring was already “marching headlong into the birch trees near Treseburg and along Bergrat Müller’ Pond,” he told his parents. He could never remember a time when the weather in March had felt so summery. He thought of Rome and how nice it would be to enjoy an “Est Est Est,” the popular white Italian wine, in his trattoria near the Trevi Fountain. But Friedrichsbrunn calmed his mind like no other place he knew.42 So it was vexing that even here the “paper” would not write itself; still, he relished the quiet and simple days and would remain in the country until finishing a major portion of the job.
Under Seeberg’s loose supervision, Bonhoeffer would produce a 380-page manuscript called “Sanctorum Communio”—“The Communion of Saints”—with a lumbering (but to his Lutheran readers, reassuring) subtitle: “A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church.” In the course of his research and writing, Bonhoeffer had blithely presumed that his dissertation committee would not mind his undergirding his thesis with sympathetic use of their Helvetic nemesis. The Barthian flavors in the opening sections, if not in the very first sentence, were impossible to ignore: “In this study, social philosophy and sociology are employed in the service of theology.” To be sure, ideas about God, church, and Jesus Christ have a social intention, and it is best to be clear about how doctrines take form in lived experience. But theological thinking bears a distinctive character—an inner sense, logic, and vocabulary—which must be respected and which in turn must inform the theologian’s engagement with other disciplines and realities. The liberals tended to reduce Christian doctrine to its functionality in human matters, as if doctrines were true only to the extent that they were useful. Bonhoeffer countered this trend by arguing that in “genuine Christian thought,” it is “only on the basis … of the church-community”—only in a conception of God tethered to the social body, not through individual social or ethical experience—that faith can be finally understood in its essence. Christ exists as community, Bonhoeffer would say—Christus als Gemeinde existierend. His broadest claim in the dissertation, the significant but initially bland assertion that theological commitments really matter, no doubt helped him walk a tightrope between the liberals and the conservatives on the faculty—though perhaps his cousin Hans-Christoph von Hase had a better explanation for Dietrich’s success: the dissertation, he suggested, sailed through because the theologians did not understand all the sociology, while the sociologists were perplexed by the theology, and neither camp wanted to betray its ignorance.
Bonhoeffer may not have reformed the church as he’d promised his skeptical brothers years earlier, but he was proposing significant renovations. In forthright and measured prose, he examined the rickety foundations of Germanic theology, found them wanting, and set about building sounder ones. Cutting through academic jargon and theoretical architectonics, he asked a quite remarkable question: Where within the reality of the world does the new life confessed by Christians become real? Barth had issued a defiant Nein! to Harnack, Rudolf Bultmann, and all the modernists who spoke of God merely as a mode or modulation of human experience, who sought cultural relevance at the expense of faith’s distinctive claims. But simple gainsaying was not Bonhoeffer’s intention. Rather, he hoped to bring new confessional energies to the liberal tradition, to erect a surer footing for its honest and studious attention to social existence; or, put another way, he sought to re-accommodate the liberal tradition to the greater one, the two-thousand-year tradition of Christian orthodoxy. In this manner, he hoped also to temper Barth’s dialectical transcendent and “wholly other” God by focusing on God’s immanence in the concrete relationships of Christians in community, the patterns and practices of lived faith. Bonhoeffer thus made his debut on the theological scene as a mediating force.
His themes highlighted the uniqueness of his emerging vision and anticipated his life’s work. Christ, community, and concreteness—these were the key words. Still, he would test the outer limits of the Protestant imagination in his quest for a deeper integration of revelation and reality; and the phrase he coined, Christus als Gemeinde existierend, suggested something like an ethical sacrament. It was the conviction that knowledge of God begins in personal encounter—appearing in the other, through the “enigmatic impenetrable Thou.”43 Forgiveness means forgiving people, Bonhoeffer said, and apart from the dynamic of personal encounter, the doctrine of the justification of sins vanishes into thin air. As he sought to rescue the experience of Christ from metaphysical abstraction and capture the fullness of embodied life for the church, Bonhoeffer appeared to be still under the spell of his Italian journey. “There is hardly a more moving sermon on Christ’s church-community,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “than the kyrie eleison in the B-minor Mass.”
While his emotions were understandably muted, cast in a scholarly, often stilted prose, Bonhoeffer would occasionally speak directly from the heart.44 When Barth read the published “Sanctorum Communio,” he called it “a theological miracle,” using the phrase eine theologische Überraschung—which might equally be translated as a “theological surprise” or paraphrased thus: “how astounding that anything so sympathetic to me would ever come out of Berlin.” Barth applauded the twenty-one-year-old’s audacity in recasting the story of modern theology from a perspective that was, well, so Barthian. But he also detected a quality of “homesickness”—a longing for the church catholic and its tangible consolations.
If “Sanctorum Communio” is indeed miraculous, it is so no less for its imaginative virtuosity than for the breadth of its ambition. One might even approach it as a thought experiment, posing this question: How might social existence (or “sociality,” in Bonhoeffer’s terminology) be transformed if this ideal of the body of Christ became the aspiration of every Christian? There is in these pages no mistaking the longing for a more embodied, vital, and dynamic Protestantism. Barth was astute to detect as well a slightly monkish air to the exercise, and it would not be the last time he worried aloud about Bonhoeffer’s nostalgia for Rome. Aside from a young man’s infatuation with the Holy See, however, it is not immediately clear what inspired his radiant vision of Christian community. A yearning for other forms of intimacy, perhaps? In Berlin he had never shown much interest in religious practice—that is, in going to church—and even now as a student in a Lutheran theology program, he rarely appeared at his parish church on Fürtwangler Strasse. The dissertation may be an impressive display of Bonhoeffer’s intellectual powers and high confidence and it may betray perhaps even a hint of genius. Yet his “communion of the saints,” the ultimate importance of the harmonious fellowship of I’s and Thou’s, may attest to more private longings: for friendship and acceptance.
“There is a word that evokes tremendous feelings of love and bliss among Catholics who hear it,” Bonhoeffer said in one of his first sermons, preached in Berlin during the dissertation year. It is “a word that stirs in them the most profound depths of religious feeling ranging from the awe and dread of judgment to the bliss of God’s presence, although it is also a word that assuredly evokes feelings of home for them, feelings of the sort only a child feels in gratitude,
reverence, and self-surrendering love toward its mother, the feelings that come over us when after a long time away we once again enter our parents’ home, our own childhood home.” While the Bonhoeffers projected an image of the perfect family, with their music evenings, salons, madrigals, and nature outings, Dietrich often felt great loneliness. He had never really had a close friend “during his childhood and youth.”45 And now Sabine was marrying the son of a wealthy industrialist, one soon to become a judge and a professor. And so in this manner Dietrich seemed to be writing in hopes of finding a more enduring and attentive family.
But the year was 1927, by which time the chickens hatched at Versailles had already begun coming home to roost. With further national calamity in the near future, the patina of Weimar liberalism appeared to be thinning even for this scion of the Grunewald. Beneath the surface of Bonhoeffer’s idealized community lurked an all-too-easy recourse to nationalism, a naive but firm attachment to the venerable tradition of German martial theology. Beneath his “four conceptual models of social basic-relation,” the altruism of “vicarious representative action,” and the lofty sentiment that “Christian love knows no limits,” one finds dark and alarming ruminations. For all of Karl Barth’s admonitory insistence in his Epistle to the Romans that the God of Christian revelation refuses alignment with any human culture, it may even appear at times in “Sanctorum Communio” that das Reich Gottes—the Spirit-infused fellowship of “the Kingdom of God”—exists finally for the glory of the German Reich.
In one most unsettling passage, Bonhoeffer draws a connection between the Israelites’ self-understanding as the “people of God”—a people called by God, as it is written in the Old Testament (Exodus 19:5), to be a “peculiar treasure unto me above all people”—and the fate of Germany. Where a people “submitting in conscience to God’s will” goes to war to fulfill its historical mission, the nation should proceed in the certainty, Bonhoeffer writes, that “it has been called upon by God” and “that history is to be made.” In such circumstances, Germanic Christians must be reassured that “war is no longer murder.”46 Reading this, even the hawkish Seeberg would jot in the margins, “Ambiguous!”47
There are hints of Bonhoeffer’s uneasy conscience, if only in the inescapable conflict between the “new creation”—which punctuates the dissertation of every reference to St. Paul’s letters the new transnational identity of Christ’s body—and the author’s unexamined prejudices. At least Bonhoeffer rejected the popular idea that killing for the fatherland might be affirmed as an act of love—little comfort though that omission would be to Germany’s neighbors. Unlike Harnack, Holl, and Seeberg, each of whom remained loyal to the proud tradition of German war theology, Bonhoeffer at least acknowledged the clashing differences of “the New and the Old Adam, and the authority of the gospel over the state in issues of war and peace.”
Five years hence, Bonhoeffer would feel “disgust and shame” at these passages, confessing as much before an international audience of concerned churchmen: “War today, and therefore the next war, must be utterly rejected by the church.”48 But the weight of German exceptionalism and the spiritual veneration of military valor were not easy inheritances to disown. In nineteenth-century Protestant Prussia, no less a philosopher-patriot than Hegel resolved that his beloved Machtstaat (the “power state” that was the German imperium) had been chosen by God to rule the nations by example, fiat, or force.49 It was God’s nature to manifest his will in superior and powerful nations, which demonstrated their providential purpose by imposing their will on their neighbors, as the ancient Hebrews had done. By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of Germany as such a “world-historical nation” had become as hallowed as the historicity of the biblical narratives.
In August 1914, ninety-three German theologians and religious leaders had proclaimed their support for the war policy of Wilhelm II, with the Berlin faculty leading the charge. The revered Harnack promoted a genteel nationalism in his felicitous Lutheran amalgam of church and state. The ideal of citizenship, he believed, remained “a high-spirited disposition … very closely akin to religion.” He would even be proud to ghostwrite Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1914 public address “To the German Peoples” calling for war mobilization. This was the point, too, at which Seeberg, who’d sought to make Luther more accessible to modern believers, showed himself a zealous “annexationist,” quite certain that the seizure of Belgium and northern France would strengthen the German soul.50 Seeberg believed he was fulfilling his spiritual vocation by helping the German people discern the powerful hand of God in the new forces gathering to propel Germany to greatness. Among the professoriate there were precious few willing dissenters from this conviction.51 German Protestant theology from Schleiermacher to Harnack and Seeberg presumed the providential blessings of the warrior God.52 Later, after Versailles, they would take comfort in imagining that the nation’s defeat resembled Christ’s humiliation on the cross. In this way, the God with whom they kept faith would resurrect the fatherland from the ashes, restoring it to its former glory.
Bonhoeffer submitted “Sanctorum Communio” to Seeberg and his other examiners on July 4, 1927. He had turned twenty-one years old in February, and while academic degrees at the time were conferred much earlier by comparison with today’s standards, a doctorate at the age of twenty-one was, even then, extraordinary.53
Seeberg’s official response was blandly favorable. “From beginning to end,” he wrote, the thesis “is in accordance with its purposes.” While praising Bonhoeffer’s gifts in “systematic thinking” and his “intelligent discussion” of social philosophy and doctrine, he remarked that Bonhoeffer seemed determined “to discover his way on his own.” In the brief written evaluation, Seeberg further noted mild “insufficiencies” without specifying them, but they were nothing to detract from the “many good qualities,” including “the ingenious particularity of its view” and “inner concentration,” and the author’s “critical ability to cope with other views” and his “enthusiasm for Christianity.” The allusions to Barth in “Sanctorum Communio” had been “neutralized by others” and in any case did not determine the whole. Seeberg did express a slight worry that Bonhoeffer’s criticisms of Troeltsch and German liberalism lacked careful attention to the sources.54
In December 1927, Bonhoeffer successfully defended the dissertation in public, as required; the forum convened in the great hall on Unter den Linden. He passed the doctoral examination summa cum laude and, following routine deliberations by his faculty advisers, was awarded a doctor of philosophy degree from the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin.
Walter Dress was asked for one more favor: to take care of the final paperwork and administrative logistics pertaining to the doctorate. In celebration of his accomplishment, Dietrich had planned a holiday on the North Sea island of Sylt and was eager to leave town.55
CHAPTER FOUR
1928–1929
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“Greetings from the Matador”
He had never been a stranger to restlessness: life had fairly bristled with rousing tests and luxurious enchantments. Adventures always seemed to present themselves, and he was happy to pursue them, especially if they led him to new locales. But even a life full of diversions can, over years, reveal itself to be subject to unsuspected routines, until, at long last, even the challenges and delights become predictable. And so it was that, at the age of twenty-one, with a doctorate already in hand, on the verge of a brilliant career, Dietrich Bonhoeffer discovered boredom. He needed to try something very different.
One day in the early fall of 1927, he received a telephone call from Max Diestel, superintendent of the Lutheran Church in Berlin. Diestel offered Bonhoeffer the post of assistant vicar of the German congregation of Barcelona. Bonhoeffer was intrigued by the opportunity as a way of completing his practicum, feeling his wish had been granted “to stand on my own feet for an extended period, completely outside my existing circle of acquaintances.”1 And though he had spe
nt the spring of 1924 in Italy, returning there for a summer holiday in 1926, he still felt as if he had never traveled on his own. “It was simply necessary for me to start from the beginning,” he wrote. The actual work of parish ministry would remain a prospect he didn’t relish: aside from two required courses in practical theology with Friedrich Mahling, Bonhoeffer had never given much thought to pastoral service.2 His dissertation may have focused on the church community, but he had been reluctant to spend much time in church himself. But without even fully understanding what was expected of him, Bonhoeffer accepted Diestel’s offer. He really wanted to see Spain and saw no “persuasive reasons not to go.” He would “just let the decision resolve itself over time.”3
Pastor Fritz Olbricht, a forty-five-year-old harried, heavyset Bavarian, was desperate for help. Ministering to a growing expatriate population in Barcelona, he had already appealed for an assistant several times to the church authorities in Berlin. Finally, in the first week of December 1927, he learned that he would be sent a young man who had recently finished his doctorate. Olbricht knew nothing of Bonhoeffer, let alone his distinguished Berlin relations. He was happy just to know that help was meant to arrive very soon.4 Bonhoeffer, however, did not share Olbricht’s sense of urgency.
In his first letter to Barcelona, Bonhoeffer asked advice on assembling his new wardrobe. He’d heard that the weather in Barcelona could be fickle. He was particularly keen to know what style and weight of suiting Olbricht recommended—these choices must matter greatly in the temperate zone. And would he need special athletic wear at the clubs? He also enquired whether he might proceed with scheduling some vacation time; he wanted to tour southern Spain with his brother Klaus.5 All this was in a letter he posted shortly before Christmas.
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