Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Act and Being (published in September 1931 by C. Bertelsmann) is a defense of the numinous reality of God against the Idealist and Naturalist program to reduce all things to either subjective constructs or mere phenomena of nature. Although the prose often staggers under the weight of jargon, the argument steadily gathers force toward a stunning conclusion. More ambitious than “Sanctorum Communio,” Act and Being is rather more successful, as well; the second dissertation (out of print for two decades until 1989, when the first scholarly English edition appeared in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series) should be counted as one of the great theological achievements of the twentieth century.

  The book begins with a series of “typological sketches”: complex philosophical arguments packed into sections of six to eight pages, each representing roughly a dozen note cards of thought. In these sketches Bonhoeffer humanizes Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Friedrich Brunstäd, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Erich Przywara as each pertains to the “reality of God.” Readers looking for careful analyses of the German philosophical pantheon will be disappointed; the concentration remains theological throughout.

  Modern theology has reached an impasse, Bonhoeffer reasons, and until theologians take stock of the situation and reckon with the wrong turns, they will be forever stuck in the same place, repeating the old formulas. The author takes an almost omniscient view to tell the story of how theology went awry by imagining a visit with Kant, who is at his work desk in Königsberg, scribbling away at his new model of the human mind. In his great landmarks, The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant constructs a theory of knowledge that would dramatically influence the intellectual course of the West. He concedes the Enlightenment’s revolutionary critique of the idea of God: what was once presumed to be the truest and surest of all beliefs is in fact riddled with uncertainty, its basis unknowable. Kant, however, had intended to save God from the death to which many Enlightenment thinkers thought to put him. A pious churchgoer, he rejected atheism by relocating God from the starry heavens above to the moral law within. While the idea of God might not be empirically true—and indeed without an objective referent, transcending all experience, one must conclude that it is not true—the idea remains truthful, that is to say, beneficial to moral life: as an organizing principle of society, inspiring the pursuit of the good, warding off chaos. Kant’s Copernican revolution thus launched the signal enterprise of liberal Protestant theology: If God is not metaphysically real, then what is God? And where is God?

  Bonhoeffer surveys the two most popular responses to the Kantian tradition and to these central questions as debated in the early twentieth century. One side described the idea of God as pure transcendence; the other argued that it was the mind’s own creation. With faith’s intellectual despisers growing in number, liberal theologians of both stripes had worked hard to lodge God somewhere safer, the transcendental “I” or the transcendent “Thou” proving the most popular resorts, but never the twain did meet. What alternative did Bonhoeffer propose, then, as a way beyond the impasse of modern theology? He merged two principles: First, the Reformation’s emphatic doctrine of revelation; it is only through God’s prior utterance and action in the Bible that he can be known, and the God-idea spared from modernist reductionism. Second, he borrowed Catholicism’s expansive doctrine of the sacred, the idea that God can be known by analogies to nature of human experience. From these two, Bonhoeffer effected a new synthesis of act and being. Neither purely transcendent nor subjectively immanent, the reality of God could be experienced in the social dimension. Ultimately, “Spirit” is to be found in the particular, in relational dynamics, and “precisely not in ‘intellection.’ ”

  And so, the hard conceptual work having been done, he offers his conclusion—a theological meditation on “the child,” the idea he had been working on in Barcelona—almost as a closing benediction. The child is “the sigh of theology,” a whisper “between eternity and eternity,” a “quiet and prayerful conversation … with the father.” The child sees himself in “the power of what ‘future things’ will bring,” and he asks of God only that he might live more fully in the present. He exemplifies the “new creation,” being “born out from the world’s confines into the expanse of heaven.” On that singular note ended the lesson.16

  He submitted the work on March 14, 1930, and a few weeks later he returned to Barcelona, traveling alone by first-class train for Thumm’s wedding. He found the city in springtime as glorious as he remembered it, the lilacs in full bloom, the street vendors bringing the season’s first strawberries to market. At the Tibidabo, Bonhoeffer watched the evening sun spread “overwhelmingly beautiful” colors across the sky. His former parishioners and friends received him so graciously it “almost seemed” as if he had never left.17

  After the wedding, he traveled to the medieval village of Tossa de Mar on the Catalonian coast, hoping (he told his parents) to “rest up from the events in Barcelona.” He spent his days alone, swimming or sunbathing, and enjoying the wines of the Valle del Cinca. In late afternoon, he would stroll into the village to watch the townspeople dance sardanes.18 “My solitary lifestyle once more,” he wrote.

  Meanwhile, back in Berlin, Professor Lütgert, in his university office, shuffled his way through a pile of essays and theses. Among them was Bonhoeffer’s “Act and Being.”

  Lütgert tendered a mostly positive evaluation on April 15, thus approving Bonhoeffer for the postdoctoral degree and the habilitation. No knowledgeable reader, he allowed, could fail to recognize that Bonhoeffer “understands how to preserve his independence amidst all the ideas he has adopted here.”19 As a specialist in German Idealism, Lütgert was surprisingly partial to the conclusion, which “powerfully expresses the deepest religious and theological interests of the author, and does so in a language that very clearly elevates itself above the abstract way of speaking in the epistemological part.” The professor was, however, ultimately unconvinced that a conceptual unity had been woven from the argument’s different threads.

  At twenty-four, with two dissertations to his name—the major requirements for admission into German academe fulfilled—the way ahead for Bonhoeffer nevertheless remained uncertain. Having “preserved his independence” over all adopted ideas was not necessarily a formula for collegial goodwill. And only a few modest benefits actually came with the promotion; a successful habilitation carried no guarantee of a professorship. Lütgert asked the faculty’s bursar to hire Bonhoeffer as a teaching assistant, offering a stipend of 150 marks a month.20 Until now, he had worked without pay.21 But the stipend—modest though it was—carried no guarantee of more stimulating work. The department was growing in size and with it the number of papers someone had to grade and students someone had to supervise.22 Bonhoeffer would expend some effort in helping the theology department move into new quarters on Dorotheenstrasse, but other thankless tasks tested his devotion. Classmates were impressed by his remarkable skill at avoiding menial labor, such as the distribution and securing of keys to classrooms and the rearrangement and maintenance of the faculty library.23

  Bonhoeffer was thinking about leaving Germany again. His brother Karl-Friedrich had spent two semesters as a visiting fellow in physics at the University of Chicago and spoke with bemused fascination of America’s vast landscapes and singular energies. So upon receiving a letter of invitation from Henry Sloane Coffin, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, Bonhoeffer was quick to act. On March 10, 1930, good news arrived in a telegram from Coffin; it read simply, “Bonhoeffer accepted Union.”24

  There were only a few more hurdles to clear in his race at Friedrich-Wilhelms. He passed his second theological examination with a “grade of very good.”25 He presented the required catechesis on June 29, 1930, during the children’s service at the Berlin-Grunewald Protestant Church.26 Written in the standard form of questions posed and answers expected, a catechesis—the term
rooted in a Greek word meaning “to echo”—instructs children on the basic tenets of the Christian faith.27 Bonhoeffer’s expounded on the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”28 But unlike the classic catechisms of the church, Bonhoeffer’s showed little concern for “the level of maturity of those to whom it is preached” (as he forthrightly acknowledged) and in this way produced a “tiring effect” (as his examiners forthrightly noted).29 “Individual questions are not skillfully worded,” the report read. “It is questionable whether he genuinely will succeed along the path he has taken here.”30

  On the other hand, the recitation earned rave reviews from its littler judges, who were riveted by the theatricality. The children may not have understood a word, but they sat in rapt attention listening to the mellifluous tones and “skillful presentation.” The examiners duly noted their admiration for the ease with which Bonhoeffer related to the children.31

  Bonhoeffer preached the mandatory trial sermon on July 20, 1930, at the Teltow Lutheran Church in southwest Berlin. This requirement tended to be a rather formal, artless exercise. Members of the ordination committee sat in the front pew with their pens and notebooks. In this case, they noted certain (unexplained) “text-critical problems” but were impressed by Bonhoeffer’s manner of speaking, which they found dignified and confident. His oration showed appropriate emphases and was, at times, punctuated with “lively but not exaggerated gesticulation.” While they thought he might want to “strengthen his voice in the lower registers,” the judges praised Bonhoeffer for memorizing the entire script.32

  Beyond satisfying the committee, however, something unexpected seems to have happened.

  Bonhoeffer’s sermon was based on three verses from St. Paul’s letter to the churches in Thessalonica—to be exact, I Thessalonians 5:16–18. “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing,” the epistle reads, “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

  Max Diestel, the church superintendent in Berlin, who had been observing the performance with concern for the nuts and bolts—pitch and posture, delivery and design, and all the elements of the discipline called “homiletics”—allowed as how an experience of profound joy broke through the strictures of the occasion.33 Bonhoeffer had preached with uncommon intensity and clarity. This was the message of the gospel, he said: “an abiding happiness, one that lasts a lifetime, one that does not dissipate when the happy times are over”—a “foundational” happiness.34 “Go outside and see how children play and rejoice and are happy; see how the birds of the field fly high up to heaven and are joyous in the sun. Watch them, and then watch them again and again, and then rejoice with them, become like them, like a child that is joyous in its father’s garden.”

  The sermon’s “first imperative”—“rejoice always”—had stirred Bonhoeffer’s imagination for years. Joy (Freude), as he rendered it in an essay contributed to a 1926 Festschrift for Harnack, sparkled to life as an “objective power,” let loose by the resurrection, permeating creation with “unheard-of energy” and “turbulent impatience.” Life animated by the Holy Spirit “effervesces in joy!” But four years later, in his trial sermon of 1930, he struck a different note: gospel-joy reaches into human experience from a “distant, unknown land,” one far removed from the manly Germanic piety of “work and duty and seriousness and nothing else.” The abiding joy and strange light of Christ is a light whose source lies always and everywhere in another country.35 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.

  There were two requirements remaining—the trial lecture and the inaugural lecture—both scheduled for July. “I have my hands full,” he told Rößler.36 The end was in sight, but the next two weeks would feel like an eternity.

  “Right now through my open window,” he said to Sabine, “I am listening to dance music at the Weigerts’. Solitary couples are walking about in the garden—just as in the old days!—And I long for nothing more than to join the dance!”37

  The trial lecture was a ritual peculiar to German academe: the candidate presented his advisers with three possible topics, from which the advisers picked one. No one attended but the theological faculty. The Probevorlesung, which he would deliver before that elite audience on July 12, 1930, would be the penultimate exercise in the long slog of his theological education before the final public lecture.38 He proposed these three topics: the significance of the sociological category for theology; the possibility of a dogmatic system; and the concept of dialectic in so-called dialectical theology. He had already covered the first in painstaking detail in “Sanctorum Communio.” The second he’d explored in “Act and Being,” only to conclude that dogmatic systems quashed the personal dimension. Anyway, the faculty selected the third topic, the “concept of dialectic,” or, put another way, the recent writings of Karl Barth. The manuscript of the Probevorlesung has not been preserved. It is possible that it resembled the lecture Bonhoeffer would give months later in New York on the “Theology of Crisis,” explaining in mostly uncritical fashion the basic themes in Barth’s theology and sounding, for the first time, like an apologist for Barth. More likely, though, Bonhoeffer mined his recently completed thesis, with its stinging criticisms of Barth, to reassure his professors that he had not truly crossed the Rubicon.

  For the inaugural lecture, the young scholar’s public debut, he was free to choose any topic within his field.39 “I would like to speak on ‘The Anthropological Question in Contemporary Philosophy and Theology,’ ” Bonhoeffer told his examiners.40 And so he did, in a wooden rehash of “Act and Being.”41 It was perfunctory exercise, hurriedly fulfilled, and its chief excellence was in making “Act and Being” read like a page-turner by comparison. The lecture, which he gave in the great hall of the university, is the least-inspired piece in Bonhoeffer’s extensive body of work, yet it was received enthusiastically by his professors. The argument he developed in “Act and Being”—that real personhood originates always outside the self, in the contingent act of divine revelation—is recast in such a way as to expose its greatest weakness. The dynamic of faith, its sunlight and music and open skies, is squeezed into an empty formalism. “Every individual theological problem not only points to the reality of the church,” he said in conclusion, but “in its entirety also recognizes itself as something that belongs solely to the church.”42 In his mind and heart, Bonhoeffer had already moved on.

  Harnack died that summer at the age of seventy-nine. After a memorial service in Heidelberg, where he’d been living at the time of his death, the venerable professor’s body was cremated in Berlin and his ashes interred in the Old Church Yard of St. Matthew’s parish in Schöneberg, in a quiet grove near the marble crypts of the Brothers Grimm. On his headstone there was simply this: “Who hopes in the Lord cannot but rejoice.” It was, said Bonhoeffer, the “great petition under which [he] lived his entire life.”43 With Harnack and Holl dead and Seeberg in retirement, the reign of Bonhoeffer’s Protestant liberal forefathers was drawing to a close.

  There was, naturally, also a Berlin memorial service for Harnack, this one held in one of the city’s great cultural centers, the Goethe Hall, near the Alexanderplatz. Bonhoeffer spoke effusively of the “master”—of “Wirklicher Geheimrat,” “Your Excellency, Professor Harnack”—who inspired his students “in the struggle for truth” and to “a reverence for a life led in the spirit.” At no point in the tribute was there to be heard even an echo of the theological controversies in which Harnack had been embroiled, not a word about the fateful exchanges with Barth that had left Protestantism a house divided. Of course, a memorial service is hardly the place. Still, Bonhoeffer’s remarks ran to five typewritten pages, and the extant manuscript reveals copious handwritten notes and underlining for emphasis. Harnack, he truly felt, exemplified the ideal that “everything must be completely truthful and completely simple.” Truth, freedom, and simplicity—a scholar’s holy trinity.

  In Augu
st 1930, Bonhoeffer spent three weeks in Friedrichsbrunn, basking in the fresh mountain air and freedom from deadlines. He still managed to work on his English for an hour each day, in preparation for his upcoming journey to America. But he would not resist the many sweet diversions offering themselves on the eve of his departure. “You really can’t imagine a more restorative vacation,” he told his parents. He awoke to birdsong, wandered the familiar hiking trails, and collected wild mushrooms in the glens beyond the village church. “There are an enormous number of mushrooms,” he reported. “You could easily have a plate of them at every meal, as indeed, we often do.” He took runs twice a day with his cousin Hans von Hase.44 At sunset he went into the forest to watch for the deer. “It’s incredibly nice being outside day after day. Being up here we always resolve to move to the Harz permanently.” While he noted that times seemed tough for most local people, with so many unemployed and suffering material hardship, he remained grateful for the long, languorous days. “We are living an unbelievably lazy existence up here,” he said.45 Apart from practicing his English, he remained happily “disinclined” toward productive work.

  When his brother Klaus asked him to preside at his wedding, he sent regrets. Having already agreed to serve as the master of ceremonies at the Polterabend, the festive gathering on the wedding eve, he insisted he could not do both. Now, even Klaus had joined the ranks of the betrothed, along with so many friends and acquaintances; he and Emmi Delbrück would be married on September 4, 1930, theirs a perfect match of strong wills and fierce minds.46