Strange Glory
Page 18
In Laredo, Bonhoeffer and Lasserre boarded a train for Mexico City, to give the car a rest. For nearly a week they would explore “Mexico’s strange intermediate culture, with its Spanish Catholic and native Indian elements so curiously and provocatively combined.”107 The conference organizers invited the two Europeans to share their observations of North America and any lessons learned in the course of the year. It delighted Lasserre to hear Bonhoeffer speak of his new understanding of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’s commandment of peace. The “example of Christ,” it seems, had been much discussed over long hours on the road and under night skies in campsites. Bonhoeffer had made strong arguments against Christian pacifism. Lasserre’s impression—a correct one, no doubt—was that despite his friend’s “comprehensive knowledge” of the Christian tradition and his erudition, a “peace ethic” was “something completely new to him.” But then Lasserre’s moral imagination was fairly littered with unfamiliar and provocative notions: the limits of obedience to nation, the seductions and treacheries of the war god Mars, the subversive power of Christ’s passion.108 Bonhoeffer had answered him with counterclaims from the German war tradition. Still, in unhurried rehearsals on this journey in the “southern latitudes,” he was beginning to learn the language of peace.
There are no further dispatches from the road. The two men drove twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day, stopping only to make clumsy attempts at cooking meat over campfires, or to search, often frantically and without luck, for a motel room. Occasionally they enjoyed a hot shower and a bed, but mostly they were roughing it in the wild.
In 1971, Lasserre would recall the night he and Bonhoeffer pitched their tent in a quiet pine grove, little suspecting that they had trespassed “the dormitory of a herd of swine.” Just before dawn, Lasserre awoke to “ferocious snoring” and worried that Bonhoeffer had taken ill, only to find him “sleeping peacefully as a child.” Stretched alongside him, though, halfway into Dietrich’s tent, lay an enormous sow, also sleeping, if not as quietly.
Heading back to New York, they collected the Oldsmobile and drove directly to New Orleans, but then instead of retracing the same course home—north to St. Louis and Chicago and then back east—they took a different route. Beyond Lake Pontchartrain, Highway 11 ran straight into the heart of the Jim Crow South. Crossing the Mississippi border, Bonhoeffer and Lasserre followed the two-lane blacktop through Slidell, Lumberton, Hattiesburg, Laurel, Meridian, Tuscaloosa. Ninety-five miles outside of Birmingham, while driving through the town of Fort Payne, they would have passed the exit for Route 35 North and, had they followed this road for thirty miles, arrived in Scottsboro, the north Alabama town, where, that very month, nine young black men were successively convicted, amid an angry mob, of raping two white women on a freight train. From Fort Payne, Highway 11 sliced through the northwest corner of Georgia on toward Chattanooga and Knoxville with the Great Smoky Mountains to the east.
AFRICAN AMERICAN HOUSING, LAUREL, MISSISSIPPI; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The pair took a break in Virginia’s southwest, the hamlet of Wytheville, where any local would have recommended they try the “World Famous SKEETERDOG,” as one sign described it. They continued on to Roanoke, Staunton, and Harrisonburg and then through Hagerstown and Harrisburg. Highway 22 East took them to Reading, Newark, and home at last.
All told, they had covered four thousand miles in seven weeks, not counting the twelve hundred on Mexican trains.
While Bonhoeffer, as we have seen, kept no journal of the trip, he seems to have jotted down some notes along the way. Impressions of the South, with studied observations of race relations, appear in the year-end report to his supervisor in Berlin. At times they are quite arresting, these terse remarks on blood laws, mob rule, sterilizations, land seizures. Bonhoeffer lamented a world “darker than [a] thousand midnights” and Scottsboro’s “terrible miscarriage of justice.” He had previously observed racial animus in New York City: once, while waiting for a table at a Manhattan diner, he and Fisher had been rudely shooed off by the owner. But “the way the southerners talk about the Negroes,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is simply repugnant … and the pastors are no better than the others.”109 The report also reveals that on a Sunday morning in May, somewhere east of New Orleans and south of Knoxville, Bonhoeffer and Lasserre worshipped in a rural black church. With an “enormous intensity of feeling” the gospel was preached with conviction and power and interrupted by cries of joy. It was proof that “one really could still hear someone talk … about sin and grace and the love of God and ultimate hope.” And beyond the preaching, Bonhoeffer felt churched deep in his bones, in the spirituals, in the “strange mixture of reserved melancholy” and the ecstatic joy “in the soul of the Negro.” It was as if these rural folk, by some synthetic power and spiritual genius, had earthed emotion, intensity, and feeling in the sorrowful joy of Jesus. Bonhoeffer awakened to fresh spiritual energies in what he called “the church of the outcasts of America.”110
RURAL BLACK CHURCH, CIRCA 1930
Back in New York, he reexamined “The Black Christ,” Countee Cullen’s poem from 1929, which Niebuhr had assigned in his spring course. It was now with a new comprehension that Bonhoeffer read of a black man tortured and hanged by a southern mob. What is his crime? He has loved the earth and its delights, and he has defended his lover, who is white, from the wrath of a white man. For this he pays with his life. This death by hanging from a tree is brutally reminiscent of “Calvary in Palestine” and the many trees on which God “should swing, world without end, in suffering.”111 When Bonhoeffer writes of “the black Christ” being led into the field by a “white Christ,” he refers to the astonishing paradox of Cullen’s poem: the black man, lynched for his love of worldly pleasure, becomes, in his suffering, the Anointed One.
In America, Bonhoeffer’s quest for a true Christian fellowship led him to a place where he was—to borrow from C. S. Lewis—“surprised by joy.” (Lewis, who at fifteen had pronounced himself “very angry at God for not existing,” would become a Christian that very spring, following a late-night walk with J. R. R. Tolkien.) In Karl Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man, which years earlier had awakened Bonhoeffer from his liberal slumber, the author ponders the prospect of ever hearing the gospel anew after the era of religion—of hearing, amid the din and clutter of modernity, as if for the first time, the Eternal Word. Written in the aftermath of the Great War, a century of hopes for enlightened self-expansion lay in ruins. The world turned with “disquiet, disorder, and distress in forms minute and gross, obscure and evident.”112 Those keepers of the old order might take refuge on eternally green islands of security, pitching their tent in lands of self-righteousness, of man-made morality and religion and nation. But true Christian hope was elsewhere to be found. “We must take the trouble to go off far enough to hear the Word again,” Barth implored.
Bonhoeffer now knew himself able to go that distance, for, as he said, “I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches.”
When, on June 20, 1931, Bonhoeffer embarked on his return to Germany, it was with a new perspective on his vocation as theologian and pastor. He was ready at last to put away childish things, foremost his professional ambitions, and begin to search the Christian and Jewish traditions for inspiration to peacemaking, dissent, and civil courage. The technical terminology faded steadily from his writing, giving way to a language more direct and expressive of lived faith, animated by his own will to discern God’s in “the anxious middle.” “It is the problem of concreteness that at present so occupies me,” he wrote upon his return to Berlin—this from the young theologian who ten months earlier had found American pragmatism such an affront to Germanic exactitude.113
Far from another careless jaunt in a different culture, the American year would prove itself a forcing shed for a season of immense growth. Made alert to “a new kind of moral passion,” Bonhoeffer could now see his way to a more demanding and complex faith.114 His sojourn in an unfamiliar wor
ld, “an uninterrupted assault of new experiences,” had furnished him with courage “to loosen boundaries between inner and outer, between emotion and reason, between thought and action.”115 “I don’t think I’ve ever changed so much,” he wrote, “except perhaps at the time of my first impressions abroad and under the first conscious influence of father’s personality.”116 Beyond any expectation, this year had set his “entire thinking on a track from which it has not yet deviated and never will.”117 And how his understanding of the Lutheran doctrine of justification shifted in dramatic ways. No longer would he speak of grace as a transcendent idea but as a divine verdict requiring obedience and action. The American social theology, which had seemed so devoid of miracle, had remade him into a theologian of the concrete.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1931–1933
~
“Under the Constraint of Grace”
Here I am sitting in the park in front of the University,” Bonhoeffer wrote to Erwin Sutz, his Union classmate traveling companion, now back home in his canton of Zurich. Bonhoeffer was not at home, having gone to Bonn with a special purpose. “Barth lectures this morning. I took a short talk with him [a while ago]. This evening there is a discussion at his house with [monks] from Maria Laach. I’m looking forward to it immensely.”1
It was indeed with immense anticipation that Bonhoeffer had traveled to the birthplace of Beethoven to meet Karl Barth for the first time. The Swiss theologian had moved from Münster a year ago to assume Bonn’s post in Reformed Theology, which was being funded by American Presbyterians eager to promote Calvinism in the land of Luther.
THE RADICAL THEOLOGIAN KARL BARTH
Bonhoeffer’s parents had hoped he would join them for a short holiday at their country house. He’d been back only a few weeks from his eventful nine months in America, which encompassed not only the academic year at Union Theological but more than five thousand miles of additional wandering by car, train, and ship. The Bonhoeffers were naturally hoping to spend a little time with their globe-trotting son.
But Bonhoeffer was on a pilgrimage of sorts, and as much as he adored his parents and the house in the eastern Harz Mountains, nothing could have been more compelling now than the prospect of a rendezvous with Herr Professor Barth.
Bonhoeffer was much taken aback when the two finally met. In photographs, Barth was the picture of refinement, with his lean and elegant face. But on his first entrance into the lecture hall, “he looked dreadful,” according to Bonhoeffer. He was disheveled, evidently paying little attention to his dress, and he had a hacking cough from a recent illness, aggravated further by his pipe smoking. He made an altogether sickly impression for such a lively mind. “Does Barth always look so bad?” Bonhoeffer asked Sutz, who, having studied at Göttingen, had arranged Bonhoeffer’s visit.2
There are several good reasons why the answer was likely no. Barth was still recovering from a bout of diphtheria when the seven a.m. seminar began meeting. And having recently begun work on the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, he was beginning to grasp the enormity of the effort that lay ahead. Rebuilding the crumbling edifice of Christian orthodoxy was the work of a lifetime, and Barth had already turned forty-nine earlier that year.
Barth’s summer course had been announced as “Prolegomena to the Study of Dogmatics.”3 He had a wry sense of humor, and may have considered the pseudo-Kantian title a little joke of sorts. There is no doubt that he found the habit of theological throat clearing tiresome in the extreme. Dogmatics required the twin virtues of audacity and precision in its aim to speak of the righteous and holy God. “[I] abhor profoundly the spectacle of theology constantly trying above all to adjust to the philosophy of its age,” he had said in a heated exchange with Adolf von Harnack.4 His methodology went something like: “Get to the point.”
And so, at seven o’clock sharp, five days a week, following a short reading from scripture and a hymn, Barth got straight to work on the doctrines themselves, although he could rarely make short work of getting to the point. He’d lecture for three hours every morning from manuscripts on which he’d labored meticulously, often into the wee hours. Once, after moving to Basel, Barth had agonized all night over the doctrine of divine sovereignty only to cancel class that day, finding himself still unable to state the matter to his satisfaction. He lectured on Christology, the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection, and the divine attributes. But his acts of will were ultimately empirical, not subjective: his intent was to stand inside “the strange new world of the Bible” and let its “wild and crooked tree” grow freely, without constraint.5
Bonhoeffer, customarily a late riser, didn’t mind the early hour, so eager was he to hear Barth. And if Barth was slightly off his game, Bonhoeffer did not notice. The performance was riveting: “He really is all there. I have never seen anything like it before.” Barth’s grand aura colored his exchanges with the students, who were both territorial and uncommonly deferential to the master.6 For his part, Bonhoeffer—despite his two doctoral dissertations where Barth (like Niebuhr) had none—felt a sudden fear of being exposed as a “theological bastard.” Among the Berlin faculty, Bonhoeffer’s eclectic views were benignly tolerated. He was the scion of the Berlin intelligentsia and its encouragement of youthful exploration of unfamiliar landscapes. Such exploration was deemed essential to humanistic learning. Then, in America, where Christians ordered up their theology à la carte, he found that all potentially useful ideas remained on the table until pragmatically rejected. Having expected to find in the New World a parallel order to which he might compare his learning, Bonhoeffer had found a tabula rasa, at first unsettling but finally thrilling.
Bonn was different.
“No Negro passes ‘for white,’ ” Bonhoeffer said. Images of his road trip through Mississippi and Alabama returned to him as an apt description of his life among the Barth epigones. In Bonn no less than in Birmingham, the keepers of the gate will “examine your finger nails and the soles of your feet,” he said. The Barth circle kept vigilant guard over its dominion. “Up till now they’ve still shown me no hospitality as the stranger,” he noted.7
And for the first week, as the morning seminar concluded at ten o’clock (normally his waking hour) and the other students hurried off together, Bonhoeffer found himself at loose ends in a city he found rather bland. He filled the time reviewing class notes; reading “some really interesting and lucid books”—works of economics he may have picked up in New York; checking the proofs of his book Act and Being, reading Barth’s Ethics II; strolling about; and writing letters.8
“I am all alone here,” he confessed to Sutz.9
“How nice it would be if you were here!” he told his New York friend Paul Lehmann. “I am completely alone … and waste the day quite fruitlessly.… In the meantime live —[in hope].”
One day, after class, Bonhoeffer locked horns with Barth, if only a bit.10 Over tea in the professor’s office, the two were discussing the proper relationship between theology and ethics. The disagreement turned on issues similar to those that had sparked Bonhoeffer’s lively exchanges with Reinhold Niebuhr in New York, but the way Bonhoeffer was discussing them now gives further evidence of his theological transformations during the American year.
Barth was explaining his understanding of theology’s peculiar place among the academic disciplines: theology is the science that ventures to speak a word about God … the second-order reflection on the church’s primary speech and practice, the writing that seeks to capture the bird in flight, to speak the impossible. Bonhoeffer asked what this had to do with reality.
The student agreed with the master on most of the basics: the theologian must be a servant of the church, and the basis for thinking truthfully about God is Jesus Christ. But Bonhoeffer was now living with the conviction that theologians must be willing to speak clearly and have a personal stake in their claims. He found Barth impervious to the ethical and social dimensions of doctrine—in fact, irritatingly so.
&n
bsp; Barth responded with equal candor. Christian theology bore no responsibility to change society, he said. Theology makes nothing happen in the ordinary sense, and that’s as it should be. He accused Bonhoeffer of “turning grace into a principle” and “thereby bludgeoning everything else to death.”11
In New York, Niebuhr had criticized Bonhoeffer’s exposition of the doctrine of justification in a term paper. The young scholar’s formulation was certainly familiar to Niebuhr from his own Lutheran upbringing, but he was now convinced—as he told Bonhoeffer in no uncertain terms—that without ethical content the doctrine remained inert and lifeless. Bonhoeffer’s conception of grace was altogether transcendent, Niebuhr had complained.12 It was godly mercy devoid of ethics.
Indeed in America, in the company of radical Christians, Social Gospel reformers, and African American churchmen, Bonhoeffer had felt, for the first time, the vitality of theology practiced closer to the field where the seeds are sown. The light of the world, he now believed, must illumine the heart to intervene with hope of repairing the world in all its brokenness.
Now, in Bonn, Barth was attacking him from the other direction: Bonhoeffer was too eager to apply the doctrine of grace to ethics, to make the social connection. His view was, Barth explained, not transcendent enough!
Over tea, Bonhoeffer bit his tongue, but later that evening he wondered to Sutz, “[J]ust why should one not bludgeon everything else to death?”13