On the evening of July 22, Hitler made a surprise radio broadcast, asking for support for Müller. The next day, with Bodelschwingh out of the way and many unfamiliar faces among the delegates, Müller drew more than 70 percent of the vote.18 In addition to electing new leadership, the church approved the Aryan paragraph.
Bonhoeffer might not have believed it, had he not seen the march to this point for himself. Three weeks earlier he had attended a public rally in the cavernous Auditorium Maximum on the campus of Berlin University. The packed house included professors, church officials, ministers, and students exchanging heady proposals for “the church’s mission in the new political order.” Advocates of assimilation and the church’s submission to the Reich dominated discussion with aggressive and virulent speeches. Only a small contingent of moderates expressed an opposing view:19 Lutheran tradition, they said, required the church to preserve its independence from the state in all times and places. But no one spoke to the plain fact that the gospel was under assault. Bonhoeffer, who had been standing quietly with some students near the back, could no longer contain his anger. Interrupting the chair, he took a step forward and shouted for attention. As the eyes of several hundred German churchmen turned toward him, he declared that if God leads the church to wage war for her soul, God will honor only those who fight for her integrity.20 “God, not human beings, makes the church what it is”—a foretaste of the perfect peace to come in the presence of Christ. The exclusion of converted Jews from the communion, Bonhoeffer insisted, meant the church “loses Christ Himself.”21
The next week students from Berlin University would gather at midnight in the plaza surrounding the Hegel Memorial to salute the new Reich chancellor with a thunderous “Heil Hitler!”
Indeed, by July 23, when the synod met in Berlin to elect new representatives, devotion to Hitler had become tantamount to godliness. The Nazi Party issued orders that every delegate had to vote the full slate of Deutsche Christen tenets. Hitler, who at the time happened to be attending the Bayreuth Music Festival—the annual celebration of Richard Wagner’s operas staged in the Bavarian Alps, featuring that year a production of Parsifal directed by Richard Strauss—took a moment to speak on live radio. In raspy and “convoluted” remarks, Hitler explained that, with God, he, as Führer, stood squarely on the side of the German Christians.22 For the fate of the church remained inseparably bound, he said, to the “rebirth of the German nation.” “Heil Hitler!” responded the audience, the whole message brought to the airwaves live and without interruption.23
When “the Bavarians and the gray old men” did finally convene, it was a showy display of martial piety. The ecclesial overlords of the German Evangelical Church processed into the General Synod in their purple vestments, the storm troopers providing a phalanx of evil vergers. The synod chair, who according to several witnesses appeared to be drunk, asked the delegates, “Who wishes to speak?,” only to bark out immediately thereafter, “No discussion!” Bonhoeffer’s attempt to voice opposition to the Aryan paragraph was “met with jeering and catcalls.”
In the course of the evening, all resolutions proposing the church’s adoption of the Aryan paragraph and other points of Nazi policy were passed unanimously. Even more astonishing to Bonhoeffer: the barrel-chested Ludwig Müller—a man of “mediocre and supercilious talents,” a “former nonentity,” and Hitler’s preening sycophant—was unanimously elected as the new regional bishop. He would be promoted to Reichsbischof by year’s end. Not allowed to vote in the election, Bonhoeffer exited the hall with his fellow dissidents.
Müller’s election set in motion the nazification of the German Evangelical Church, igniting the long but futile Kirchenkampf, and the movement of dissident Christians to protect the regional churches (the Landeskirchen) against the imposition of Nazi will.24 Enamored of his new powers, Müller summoned every available resource to further unify the German church, which would in turn confer “the monarchical title of Summus Episcopus [supreme bishop]” on the Führer.25 Müller’s docile mind, his bureaucratic fanaticism, and a raging inferiority complex would be put to good use in the coming years.
By the end of 1933, more than 90 percent of the student body of the Berlin theology department had joined the National Socialist Party. Most of Bonhoeffer’s colleagues wore the bronze Nazi badge on their lapels. The dean of the faculty, Erich Seeberg—whose father, Reinhold, had directed Bonhoeffer’s doctoral dissertation “Sanctorum Communio”—draped a swastika banner over the front entrance of the gray fortress at Unter den Linden.
Bonhoeffer was uncertain about how to respond. “We are about to witness a great reorganization of the churches,” he said, and even “the most intelligent people have totally lost both their heads and their Bible.”26 He felt the growing demands of the situation bearing down like a great weight upon him, making it exceedingly difficult to concentrate on academic work, even on vacation or over long weekends in Friedrichsbrunn.
He thanked Sutz for his friendship and asked for his prayers; the thought of Sutz engaged in a quiet pastorate in Switzerland brought him joy—if also a little envy.
Though navigating the church bureaucracy and his department seemed more bewildering than ever, Bonhoeffer showed perfect clarity regarding the larger national developments, particularly the Aryan paragraph. Within two weeks of its passage, he’d completed his first written statement of protest, “The Church and the Jewish Question.” The statement, which had begun circulating in mimeographed form on April 15, appeared in print later that spring in Vormarsch, a Protestant monthly journal of politics and culture.
Bonhoeffer proposed a three-pronged rejoinder to the loathsome Nazi ruling: the church should question the legitimacy of the state’s actions; the church should assist the victims of such action “even if they do not belong to the Christian community”; and the church should take direct political action of its own “not just to bandage the victims upon the wheel,” but to break the spokes of the wheel if necessary.27 That last step, clearly the most subversive of the three, should, he stressed, be taken “only if the state failed in its function of creating law and order.” But even his first two proposals—of challenging the legitimacy of the Aryan paragraph and affirming the church’s “unconditional obligation” to all victims of society, irrespective of religion—violated the pastoral oath now required of every minister under law: that he support and uphold the laws of the Reich. In opposition to the German Christian movement, and specifically to its crusade against baptized Jews—of which there were approximately 350,0000 in Nazi Germany—Bonhoeffer pronounced that any person who refused to worship with Christians of Jewish descent “cannot be denied [the option] of leaving the church.”28 Later in the year Bonhoeffer would reiterate that position and his claim that anyone wishing to remove Jewish Christians might as well wish to remove Christ.29
It was, in context, a bold and undeniably courageous stand. Still, these criticisms were addressed to an ecclesial audience: they were not intended to be read by ordinary Germans, much less as incitement to mass protest. While he respected the rights of individuals and “humanitarian associations” to accuse the government of “crimes against humanity,” he did not regard the church as a humanitarian association. Indeed, it was not one, according to civil law. Nor were Bonhoeffer’s concerns about the application of the Aryan paragraph to the Jewish people—which is to say, to unbaptized Jews—explicitly stated in his April 15 tract.
The same week that Bonhoeffer’s three-point broadside appeared, his sister Sabine asked him to conduct the funeral services for her father-in-law, William Leibholz, who had died on April 11. In addition to his success as a textile merchant, Leibholz, a member of the left-liberal German Democratic Party, had represented the Berlin-Wilmersdorf neighborhood as an alderman. The son of observant Jews, he had raised his own children in the German Protestant Church and identified himself as a Christian, although he had not been baptized.
Lutheran church polity prohibited ministers from officia
ting at the funerals of the unbaptized, Jewish or Christian; the only exception was made when a baby of communicant parents died before baptism. But with Paula’s strong encouragement, Sabine told Dietrich in no uncertain terms that decency alone obliged him to a higher ethical standard. Neither mother nor daughter cared a wit for the finer points of Lutheran canon law. But Dietrich would not comply, deferring to the guidance of his supervisor, who cautioned against “conducting a funeral service for a Jew,”30 even one who, like Herr Leibholz, had professed the Christian faith. Seven months on, while living in England, Bonhoeffer would write to Gert and Sabine, begging for forgiveness. He had been making notes for a sermon on Remembrance Sunday when he came upon a “beautiful text” from the book of Wisdom (3:3): “But the souls of the upright are in the hands of God, and no torment can touch them. To the unenlightened, they appeared to die, their departure was regarded as disaster, their leaving us like annihilation; but they are at peace.” The “souls of the upright,” he wrote in his notes, “their leaving us [is] like annihilation; but they are at peace.”
The words from scripture tore into his conscience, as his mind was flooded with memories of that cruelest of Aprils. What a perfect choice the verse would have been for Gert’s father, Bonhoeffer wrote his brother-in-law. And he confessed, “I can’t think what made me behave as I did. I am tormented by the thought that I didn’t do as you asked as a matter of course.”
Bonhoeffer wondered, how could he have been so frightened at the time? “It must have seemed equally incomprehensible to all of you, and yet you said nothing.” The decision would burden him into the small hours of the night, the shame remaining with him until his death. From that time he understood that his refusal was “the kind of thing one can never make up for.”
“All I can ask then,” Bonhoeffer said, “is that you forgive my weakness. I know for certain that I ought to have behaved differently.”31
Bonhoeffer’s grandmother Julie had set a different example. On an afternoon in mid-April, she was met by a cordon of SA brownshirts standing at the entrance of the Kaufhaus des Westens—the “department store of the West.” They’d been dispatched to enforce a boycott of Jewish businesses, the posh store being the property of a prominent Jewish family of the Grunewald. Without hesitation, or thought for polity, ecclesial or otherwise, the ninety-one-year-old walked past the brownshirts and did her shopping.
Toward the end of the month, Bonhoeffer wrote for a second time against the Aryan paragraph: “The Jewish-Christian Question as Status Confessionis.” The phrase, which in Latin means a “confessional situation,” denotes a moment in which the church, “in order to be true to itself and its message, must distinguish as clearly as possible between truth and error.” The issue of whether the Aryan paragraph constituted such an occasion for the German Evangelical Church figured centrally from the beginning of the Kirchenkampf, and would bitterly divide moderates from those radicals who would eventually form the breakaway Confessing Church. Christians may inevitably disagree on the application of doctrine to particular public policies or social practice, “[b]ut there are some issues so fateful that no dissimulation or compromise is possible, and there is no longer a basis for negotiation.” Bonhoeffer believed that the Aryan paragraph presented just such a fateful issue.32
The matter of excluding Jewish Christians from communion and worship challenged the very identity of the church as a Christian body, imposing a test of conscience on its leaders.33 “How can he who holds a church office administer that office knowing that there are in the communion brethren of lesser rights to whom such office is not open because of their race? Will he not then best safeguard his Christianity and his churchliness by preferring to be where the most despised brethren are, and no longer at the head of the table, ‘among those who would be first’?” Bonhoeffer emboldened his earlier formulation of the church’s sine qua non, arguing that a racial prerequisite for Christian fellowship tears the church away from her “sole foundation” in Jesus Christ.34 “It is therefore an ecclesiastical impossibility to exclude,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “as a matter of principle, Jewish Christian members from any offices of the Church.” Put another way, the church, insofar as it bars Jewish Christians, ceases to embody Christ, without whom it is no church at all.35 Aryanism was thus not merely a heresy but a kind of deicide.
As reports of the April boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses circulated in the international press, religious leaders abroad fully expected their German brethren to denounce the Nazi laws.36 For more than a decade, ecumenists such as Visser ’t Hooft, Pierre Maury in Geneva, and Henry Smith Leiper had met periodically with the German church leadership to discuss confessional unity, to exchange ideas, and to worship together. But German Protestants fell into line behind the Berlin church superintendent, Otto Dibelius, who defended the boycott and asked defiantly why foreign Christians had suddenly taken such a keen interest in protecting “Judaism in Germany.”37 Bonhoeffer was alone in denouncing the National Socialist captivity of the German Protestant Church.
Every summer tempest begins as “a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand,” as it says in I Kings 18. Few indeed were those Elijahs who could see it before “the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.”38
As the non-Nazi church movement gathered momentum, the international churches and ecumenical bodies (most of them associates of what would after the war become the World Council of Churches, the WCC) were forced to reckon with an urgent and—as it turned out—surprisingly controversial matter: “whose version of events in Germany was to be trusted. Was it the official account of the German Evangelical Church, “represented ecumenically abroad at the time by Bishop Theodor Heckel,” an outspoken and unapologetic Nazi, or that of the Young Reformation Group—soon to be renamed the Pastors’ Emergency League, and within only months after that to become the Confessing Church?39
Absent Bonhoeffer, the ecumenical movement might have reached different conclusions. He communicated the German situation in detail to the churches abroad, delving into ecclesial matters, political events, and perceptions of Hitler’s ambitions. His purpose “was not just to convey information … but to encourage and in some cases orchestrate foreign protest against Nazi policies.”40 Yet even Bonhoeffer’s reports and the knowledge that the German Protestant Church was aligning itself with the Nazi regime would fail to inspire the WCC and its affiliates to cut their ties or affirm the churchly authority of dissident pastors. Ecumenical leaders would repeat the same sorry excuse over the next five years: that the German Protestant Church, despite its swift and unapologetic pledge to Hitler, remained the legitimate representative of German Protestantism.
As to Bonhoeffer’s denunciations of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies, one sobering fact bears repeating: his response to the events of April 1933, though forthright and courageous, applied strictly to Jews who had converted to Christianity—and more specifically to Jews baptized in the German Evangelical Church.41 His April memoranda even allowed certain exceptions to the full communion of Jewish Christians, contradicting St. Paul’s canonical teaching on the unity of all believers—“you are all one person in Christ Jesus … there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor master, male nor female.” The apostle is, nevertheless, invoked in one rather bizarre formulation alluding to Paul’s instruction of the Christians in Rome “to consider your weaker brethren.” Where Paul has in mind Christians who cannot manage certain ascetical disciplines, who carry on drinking alcohol or eating meat, Bonhoeffer quite awkwardly applies the wisdom to the presence of Jewish Christian pastors in a “predominantly ‘German Christian’ parish.” Germans who felt uncomfortable around Jews, who “found them disagreeable,” might themselves become spiritually “distracted” by their presence, thereby requiring the special consideration due a “weaker brother.”
Bonhoeffer seemed to be seeking balance between the ecclesiastical principle of congregational freedom and the hope that gentle pastoral persuasion might a
waken the desire for reconciliation in segregated churches. But in the meantime, for the sake of the gospel, one might need to indulge an anti-Semite in his prejudices, his weakness. Whether a Jewish Christian pastor, teacher, or leader was to be tolerated was a matter to be decided by each congregation for itself.42
Such equivocations notwithstanding, Bonhoeffer never wavered in his view that such feelings about converts born Jewish “violated” the church’s essential nature; the sincerity or well-intentioned efforts of individual members could not alter the fact of their having “forfeited the blessing of God.” He seems to have been playing for time, wishfully trying to keep the communion together long enough for all the laity to see the light. But as to the German Protestant establishment, their perdition seemed a foregone conclusion. The church was not only corrupt and corrupted; it had severed its ties with historic Christianity. An avalanche of confrontations and conflicts emboldened Bonhoeffer’s ties to the ecumenical movement and his critical perspective on the German situation.43
In May, Bonhoeffer delivered what would prove his last lectures as a member of the theology department. His position as Privatdozent—untenured and not eligible for tenure—had not changed since 1931, although Professor Wilhelm Lütgert had eventually arranged a modest monthly stipend. At eight a.m. sharp on Wednesdays and Saturdays (not quite as early as Karl Barth’s Bonn seminar but still challenging for a late riser), more than a hundred students would gather in the great hall in Berlin Mitte to hear Bonhoeffer speak with unexampled excitement on what it means to encounter Jesus Christ.44 The instructor advanced a provocative claim: Christology—the doctrine of Jesus Christ, the historic and creedal affirmation of the Son as the second person of the Trinity—was the last truth separating the churches from barbarism. The truth concerning Christ’s nature and person placed moral demands on humanity and the individual. Such was the inevitable consequence of God’s having taken flesh to dwell among the rest of humanity as an outcast, reviled and rejected. And it was Bonhoeffer’s hope that this Christological understanding would expose the heresies of the German Christian movement with the effect of subverting it. All this was part of his larger effort to preserve the mysteries of the faith from profanation and misuse.45
Strange Glory Page 22