Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Back in June, when Bonhoeffer had first been approached about spending a year in the United States, the Berlin church administrator Adolf Deißmann had promptly written to Henry Sloane Coffin at Union, saying that their young star was “very eager to study American Theology and Church life.”47 In fact, nothing could have been farther from the truth. Bonhoeffer had never expressed any interest in the history or culture of the Americas. And his level of academic training already surpassed that of nearly all American Protestant theologians and clergy. To the extent that he thought about this prospect, it was as one more jaunt in his privileged life. The fellowship seemed a quick cure for the Berlin blues, to judge by Karl-Friedrich’s tales of his own year in America. In any case, there would be no teaching obligations or degree requirements. He could take any classes that interested him, without the grim burden of grading papers.

  There is, however, one intriguing indication that he might have harbored more particular hopes for the year ahead. The clue has a rather unexpected source. As part of his second theological examination, Bonhoeffer was asked to select Bible verses on which he might someday base a preaching series. He looked to the Epistle to the Hebrews, which describes what he called “God’s path through history in the church of Christ.”48 The epistle’s author recounts a dramatic age-old narrative of keeping faith, a great sweep from creation through the incarnation to the first Christian martyrs, until, at the beginning of chapter 12, he exhorts, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

  Bonhoeffer was captivated by the verses and by their vision of the sanctorum communio, the only spiritual society that could nourish and sustain one over the greatest race of all. Some months after his arrival in New York, he would write his friend Rößler an uncommonly sober letter stating that his purposes had become clear.49 As he made his way in a new country with a strikingly unfamiliar religious culture, he was looking, he said, for eine solche Wolke von Zeugen: “such a cloud of witnesses.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  1930–1931

  ~

  “I Heard the Gospel Preached in the Negro Churches”

  On September 6, 1930, Dietrich Bonhoeffer boarded the SS Columbus in the German port city of Bremen and set sail for America. Once again in transit, he felt the weight of the previous months lifting, as the inlet at Nordenham gave onto one new horizon after another.

  “The ship is very quiet,” he told his grandmother Julie Tafel Bonhoeffer, perhaps not surprising for a 32,000-ton merchant vessel, Germany’s largest and fastest, though it had been surrendered to the Whitestar line as part of the war reparations. “The day was beautiful. Until now it’s as if we had been on the Wannsee, totally calm.”

  The first night, he watched the distant lights of the Belgian coast glistening in the east, the full moon silvering the surface of the North Sea.

  “From our deck you look about twelve meters or more down to the water, through which the ship cuts a deep furrow,” he wrote to his mother. “My cabin seems not unfavorably located. It lies deep in the belly of the ship. I haven’t actually seen my cabin mate yet. I’ve tried to get a picture of him from the items he has left about. The hat, the walking stick, and a novel by Seymour suggest an educated American to me. I hope he doesn’t turn out to be an old German prole.”1 In truth, few “proles”—proletarians—could afford any of the rooms on the luxury liner.

  Bonhoeffer shared the weeklong voyage with people of similar backgrounds. He passed leisurely days availing himself of the ship’s abundant amenities. There were convivial exchanges with Aristid von Grosse, “the chemist and atomic scientist,” who knew his brother Karl-Friedrich from professional circles and who could not stop remarking on the resemblance between the brothers.2 Bonhoeffer also met the attractive Louise Schaefer Ern and her boy Richard, on their way home to Connecticut from Switzerland, where her daughter had remained behind to be “treated for meningitis at a homeopathic spa.”3 A certain Dr. Edmund De Long Lucas, academic dean of a Presbyterian college in India (Lahore, before partition), revealed himself as Bonhoeffer’s roommate, ending the mystery; he was traveling to the States on a short furlough from his duties at the mission school.4 It pleased the dean to share with Bonhoeffer a book he had written, The Economic Life of a Punjab Village, and stories of his years on the subcontinent.

  Christened in 1924, Columbus was not only the largest and fastest but also the most lavishly appointed commercial vessel on the high seas. The handsome fare promised palatial luxury. A dozen crystal chandeliers and murals by the German artist E. R. Weiss graced an exterior ballroom for nighttime dancing. Massive double pillars holding the bronze busts of classical poets opened onto a “wainscoted Library” with built-in cedar bookcases and comfortable leather chairs. Bonhoeffer could take his meals in any of the ship’s four dining halls, swim in the outdoor pool, or nap in the sun on the observation deck. His letters and notes are cast in the familiar tone of his earlier travel writings—florid and expectant.

  The sea journey was “perfect” and “fabulously beautiful,” he said. He did not know “where to begin writing about it all.”5

  On September 15, 1930, the New York City skyline emerged on the western horizon, a marvelous panorama punctuated by the 102-story Empire State Building, nearly completed. He had never seen a city so vast and imposing. He was met at Chelsea Harbor by his aunt Irma and uncle Harold Boericke, on his mother’s side, who whisked him home to Philadelphia for a five-day visit. His yearlong sojourn began in a comfortable house in Drexel Hill, his cousins Ray, Betty, and Binkie showering him with attention, and his aunt and uncle treating him like royalty. There were mornings in the city clubs, excursions to museums and parks, and board games in the evening. “You can hardly believe you’re so far from Europe here, so much is so similar,” he said. The exception was golf, not a sport popular among Germans of his ilk, but he did spend a day trying to play. The Boerickes amused Bonhoeffer with stories of their new life in America—they still possessed the Berliners’ wit—and when he was leaving they made him promise to come see them again.6

  It was in the third week of September that Bonhoeffer moved into his dormitory at the corner of 121st Street and Broadway. He marveled at the George Washington Bridge glistening over the Hudson, the building crews then working around the clock on its latticework of beams and cables in the final weeks of construction. The city was full of such wonders. The art deco Chrysler Building, with its steel gargoyles and thousand-foot pinnacle, had just been completed in May. Bonhoeffer came to feel excited about the year ahead.

  In 1930 Union Theological Seminary was the proud flagship institution of liberal Protestant theology in North America. Students were there to become pastors or pursue some other ministry. A few became professors, but it was all in a spirit of service to humanity. Most seminarians still hailed from the Northeast, though the student body was now more diverse than at any time in its hundred-year history, including African Americans, Asian Americans, women, and poor whites from the rural South.7 Henry Sloane Coffin, the seminary’s president since 1926, charted a steady course triangulating his old-money connections, Ivy League erudition, and infectious Protestant optimism. Formerly minister of Madison Avenue Church, Coffin was a self-described “liberal evangelical.” He got his start serving a Bronx mission, preaching hope to the destitute “over a meat market with a chopping block for a pulpit.”8

  In the twelve courses he took as a Sloan Fellow at Union, Bonhoeffer focused on philosophy of religion, theology, and social ethics; the subject matter was familiar but the institutional context altogether unlike anything he was accustomed to.9 When he had written in the fellowship application that his aim was to better understand his “own particular scholarly discipline, systematic theology, as it has developed under completely different circumstances,” he had no way of knowing that his discipline as practiced American styl
e would be entirely unrecognizable. He was decidedly underwhelmed by a religious culture in which people fashioned their beliefs the same way a man ordered a car from the factory—according to taste and preference.

  For this reason, Bonhoeffer arranged a special tutorial on the philosophy of William James, meeting every other week with Eugene W. Lyman. He considered Lyman, a graduate of Yale Divinity School who had also studied at the universities of Halle and Marburg, to be “a genuine representative of pure American philosophy”; in addition to the tutorial, he also attended Lyman’s lecture course on the philosophy of religion, following a hunch that pragmatism explained much about Protestantism in the New World.10 In the assessment he would file with his German supervisor, Bonhoeffer claimed to have read “almost the entire philosophical works of William James” as well as the major writings of John Dewey, Ralph Barton Perry, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, George Santayana, J. B. Watson, and Albert Knudson, along with the “behaviorist literature.” But it was in James, especially The Will to Believe and Varieties of Religious Experience, that Bonhoeffer said he “found the key to modern theological language and conceptual forms of liberal enlightened Americans.” This, he believed, was the intellectual source of the local compulsion “to hasten past difficult problems and to linger inordinately on things that are either self-evident or that without additional preparation cannot possibly be adequately addressed.”11 He would confide to Karl-Friedrich that he had “come to know American philosophy quite thoroughly,” despite not having “gained much more faith in the whole business.”12 Truth is “essentially teleological, aimed at serving life,” Dietrich remembered.13

  While the pragmatic standard, he acknowledged, had no doubt produced an industrious society of inspired efficiency, the consequences for serious Christian theology were fairly devastating.

  “The students—on the average twenty-five to thirty years old—are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions.” They become easily “intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases”; they talk a “blue streak,” but often without the “slightest substantive foundation,” blithely indifferent to the two thousand years of Christian thought. Railing against the Christian fundamentalists seemed to be the Union students’ favorite pastime, Bonhoeffer said, “and yet basically [they] are not even up to their level.”14 Everyone “just blabs away so frightfully.”15

  “There is no theology here,” he concluded flatly.

  He noted with astonishment that he occasionally heard students—seminarians preparing for the ministry—ask “whether one really must preach about Christ.”16

  It was not that Bonhoeffer missed German theology. As his friend Franz Hildebrandt assured him with a homegrown irreverence, “There’s nothing to report about Berlin theology that’s any better.” He recounted how “Dr. Dr. Dr. DeißmannDeißmann, Rector Magnificus, spent one and a half hours amid the constant applause from students (though at the end, the balcony was half empty) describing the fate of the New Testament.” And what’s more, Professor (Gerhard) Schwebel was “markedly inferior with his completely muddled discourse on the prospects and struggle of the church, authorities, school, and the merits of the Hohenzollern [imperial dynasty] and on the spirit of obedience in faith and of discipline.”17 Only in their correspondence could he and Dietrich hope to find “an oasis in the desert.”18

  Bonhoeffer was in fact less vexed by the theological modernism at Union than by the pervasive, willful (it would seem), if not blissful, naïveté that pervaded. In “Act and Being,” his criticisms of the liberal tradition had in fact been restrained compared with the harsh judgments on Barth’s “theological schizophrenia” and “over-determined” view of divine revelation—wherein Barth’s “wholly other” God rode roughshod over his nature as a “socially and historically located” person in Jesus. No, the problem with Union students was not that they were liberals but that they were sloppy ones. In contrast to the German variety—“which in its better representatives doubtless was a genuinely vigorous phenomenon”—America’s intellectual inheritance from the nineteenth century “has been dreadfully sentimentalized, and with an almost naïve know-it-all attitude.” The Protestant liberalism professed at Union seemed but a friendly tweaking of the “Jamesian notion” of God, the old pragmatism slightly recast for progressive churchmen.19 A case in point: during a class presentation on Martin Luther’s “bondage of the will,” his classmates laughed out loud. The spectacle of an educated person taking seriously the ruminations of a neurotic sixteenth-century monk struck them as comic.20 The seminary “has forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for,” Bonhoeffer complained.21 To be the virtuous man meant hardly more than to comport oneself as a “good fellow.” Class discussions sounded like the blather of “first-semester freshmen!” Dogmatics was in “utter disarray.”

  In noting Bonhoeffer’s reactions to Union, one should, of course, not forget how peevish he’d been about graduate school in Berlin, too. “I’m supposed to be intellectually creative and grade excruciatingly dumb seminar papers!” he had written of that airless realm overseen by the imperious air faculty of Dorotheenstrasse. Eventually, as the weeks passed in New York, he would learn to be amused and not merely appalled at his surroundings. After all, his notes and letters written on the eve of his journey suggest he expected just another fine jaunt in his charmed life. Still, just a few months earlier, while reflecting on Hebrews, he had expressed the hope of finding a spiritual community, having identified Hebrews 12:1—“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses”—as “the verse that culminates the saga of faith from creation to the first martyrs.”22 By the end of the fall semester at Union, he would still feel “bitterly disappointed.”

  Not that there weren’t individuals who intrigued him—one in particular. From among a faculty of nearly forty, no one more fully embodied the ideals and energies of American social theology than the indefatigable Reinhold Niebuhr. Bonhoeffer had never met anyone like this excitable theologian-activist, a “dramatist of theological ideas in the public arena.”23 Validating Bonhoeffer’s intuition, Niebuhr professed that the question of how to be in the world—how one analyzes the contemporary social situation and responds to its needs and conflicts—mattered more to theology than all the parsing of sacred doctrines.24

  According to Niebuhr’s concept of “Christian realism,” which he’d been developing in seminars and lectures, all persons, believers or not, must never forget their extensive entanglements with the broken—indeed, he would insist, sinful—structures of the world. This realism began with the sober acceptance of there being no “final escape in historic existence from the contradictions in which human nature is involved.”25 Niebuhr’s clear-eyed understanding of the dynamics of power and justice spoke to those searching for a way beyond liberal idealism and Victorian quietism, beyond utopianism and resignation.

  REINHOLD NIEBUHR, “DRAMATIST OF THEOLOGICAL IDEAS IN THE PUBLIC ARENA”

  Bonhoeffer took Niebuhr’s courses during both semesters, and while he enjoyed the material—especially in the team-taught “Ethical Viewpoints in Modern Literature,” which examined current events “in light of the principle of Christian ethics” and introduced him to the writings of James Weldon Johnson, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois—he found Niebuhr’s views positively bewildering. The man seemed to talk about everything but God.

  One day, after a lively class discussion, Bonhoeffer approached Niebuhr and asked in exasperation, “Is this a theological school or a school for politicians?”26

  Niebuhr was equally perplexed by the theological prodigy from Berlin and not shy about saying so (or much else). When Bonhoeffer claimed in a term paper that the “God of guidance” could be known only from the “God of justification,” Niebuhr responded sharply that this conception of grace was too transcendent.27 In vigorously Lutheran fashion, Bonhoeffer had been arguing that grace
admitted no human effort to reach God; “man in all his ways” is ever “a sinner”—and one who cannot but offend the “glory that is God’s alone.” Niebuhr pushed him to think in more practical terms about the “God of guidance” in human reality. “In making grace as transcendent as you do,” Niebuhr said, “I don’t see how you can ascribe any ethical significance to it. Obedience to the will of God may be a religious experience, but it is not an ethical one until it issues in actions which can be socially valued.”28

  The son of a Lutheran minister from a midwestern immigrant community, Niebuhr had been thoroughly captivated by the Social Gospel movement since his first encounter with it while a student at Elmhurst College. That spirit had seized his slender frame and animated his piercing blue eyes, and he would remain ever ready to stand up for a righteous cause. Only two years out from his ministry in inner-city Detroit, he brought an “explosive sort of thinking” to the classroom. This effect, to quote one seminarian who would go on to become a labor organizer in the South, “kind of blew your mind.”29 Testimonials to Niebuhr’s charisma and generosity spread rapidly among the rising generation of progressive churchmen. He was not only “young and radical and full of enthusiasm,” but genuinely “interested in human problems”—in all, “a stimulating teacher, speaker and explorer.”30

  By the time Bonhoeffer arrived in New York in the fall of 1930, Niebuhr had started to rethink many of his fundamental convictions. In the 1920s, while still a pastor in Detroit, his preaching had been inspired by a robust blend of Social Gospel, Christian pacifism, and populist devotion to the underdog. But with his 1932 landmark Moral Man and Immoral Society, a book of “icy, aggressive and eerily omniscient” tone, there came an end to his idealistic ruminations on the Kingdom of God in America; he had concluded that human goodwill and effort would never be enough to usher in an age of perpetual peace.31 While individuals (Moral Man) might be capable, on occasion, of altruistic and compassionate action, all groups and collectives (Immoral Society) remained, contrarily, unmoved by the mandates of love, or appeals to reason.32