Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  As Bonhoeffer had intuited long before reaching adulthood, theology matters. From its very origins, Christianity had been a theological faith, obliging men and women to seek and affirm the Godhead, such as one could comprehend the incomprehensible. And the God one sought to know was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, no less than it was Christ. Christianity was rooted in the theological traditions of ancient Israel, which was unified by its historical credos and affirmations of faith. To refuse the purposes of theological understanding, and its attendant mandate of self-examination, was not merely to neglect the distinctive claims of the faith and tradition but to turn one’s back on revelation itself. The true Christian was obliged to possess a reasoned understanding of the faith, and to express it in a manner honoring the mystery of the triune God; this was incumbent upon every person who assents to the truth of the gospel, and never more so than in such a moment of crisis.

  “No pretheological era has been discovered in the New Testament or in the history of the Christian community,” wrote the historian John Leith. But it was precisely a “nontheological Christianity” that was on offer from the German church in the attempted fusion of Christianity with racial sentiment, which they called, with unintended perversity, positives Christentum—positive Christianity.46

  The Christology lectures show Bonhoeffer at his most dexterous in articulating the elements of the faith. But they belie the intensity with which he applied himself to the task; he spent more time in preparation for that course than for any other he had taught. That effort was not wasted. As the biographer Ferdinand Schlingensiepen correctly observes, Bonhoeffer’s work “from this point forward was ever nourished by these lectures,” and “Christology became the mystical center of his thought.” Faced with the ruins of German Protestantism, he could not have understood more clearly that the way Christians imagine Jesus Christ determines the totality of their worldview.47

  As the German church marched to the clashing strains of Nazi war anthems, both pagan and pseudo-Christian, the orthodox understanding of Christ, which “begins in silence,” directed Bonhoeffer onto a different path—one of recognizing dissent as a spiritual discipline. Indeed, the potential for treason in his doctrinal meditations did not go unnoticed by most listeners in the large hall. Departing from traditional debates concerning the nature of Christ, with their metaphysical accounts of divine-human commingling and speculations on how Christ could be both divine and man, Bonhoeffer began with the question, Who is Christ? Christology exists as a field of study first and foremost in response to the personal encounter of the other; the “I” as it meets the ultimate “Thou.” In these lectures he did not draw explicitly from the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, though he’d now read Buber’s I and Thou with admiration, citing it elsewhere. Buber’s emphatic concern for the living dialogue, and for the freedom it confers from tyranny, nevertheless fed Bonhoeffer’s distinctly Christian view of revelation. Who is Christ? The question arose not out of some human will to power, but from humility and silence. Who is the Christ who encounters us in word, sacrament, and suffering? To speak faithfully of Jesus Christ and to obey his teachings is to embrace the idea of “God who was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn.”

  “We have the Exalted One only as the Crucified,” Bonhoeffer said, “the Sinless One only as the one laden with [our] guilt, the Risen One only as the Humiliated One.”48 It was just such an essential and stark duality toward which Paul had directed the Corinthians when he resolved to know nothing “except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”

  During his year in America, Bonhoeffer had found the presence of Christ to be most palpable among those living on the margins. But it is not until these Christology lectures of 1933 that the “outcast Christ” enters his scholarly vocabulary, as he speaks of the “Christological incognito.” With the swastika replacing the cross in the “great and glorious holy storm of present-day Volk happenings,” Bonhoeffer was drawn to the Christ who sojourns in the world as a beggar among beggars. In places of exclusion and distress, there is Christ, he said, as friend, brother, savior.49 “Christ enters the world of sin and death of his own free will,” Bonhoeffer said. “He enters it in such a way as to conceal himself in weakness, not to be known.… He goes incognito, as a beggar among beggars, as an outcast among the outcast, a figure to despair among the despairing, dying among the dying … a sinner among sinners.”50 The Christological incognito offends the “magical picture of the world” no less than the self-sufficiency of bourgeois Protestantism.

  Christ is the center of reality. The same Christ who is present in “Word, sacrament, and community” is the center of “human existence, history and nature,” Bonhoeffer said.51

  On April 21, 1933, the philosopher Martin Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg. He assumed the post the following day and ten days thereafter became member #312589 of the Nazi Party.52 On May 27, he delivered his Rektoratsrede, his inaugural address, entitled “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (“Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität”), heralding the National Socialist triumph as a glorious revolution of spirit, and an epochal turning point in the history of Being.53 “As a nation of singers, poets, and thinkers,” Heidegger said, the Germans dream of a world of purity and inner fullness—of autumn suns of the Black Forest bathing the mountain ranges and forests in glorious clear light; and yet only “when misery and wretchedness dealt them inhuman blows” (read: the defeat of World War I and the humiliation of Versailles) did there well up in their ranks “the longing for a new rising, for a new Reich, and therefore for a new life.”54 He esteemed hardness and force as virtues, despised Weimar democracy, and fairly worshipped Hitler as the inauguration—or “instantiation”—of some long-anticipated ethnic renewal.55 Heidegger would resign the rectorship on April 23, 1934, though he’d remain a member of the Nazi Party until the end of the war, never to apologize, discuss, or otherwise explain his support of Hitler, taking his reasons to the grave.

  In the year of Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede, Bonhoeffer—on his way to becoming the nation’s most notorious theological dissident—told his students that humanity’s only hope lay in the baby born to unwed Jewish parents in a desolate byway of Bethlehem.56

  On May 17, Bonhoeffer wrote to the minister and social worker Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, long one of the rare beacons of Berlin’s urban ministries. Seeking out the working class and the unemployed, he had established such bodies as the Ulmenhof Adult Education Center (in 1927), to provide education for young workers. But in the Nazi campaign to rid the nation of communists and their sympathizers, he became a prime target of Gestapo repression. The Ulmenhof center and other programs of his were shut down in spring of 1933.

  Bonhoeffer sought Siegmund-Schultze’s advice on “a personal matter.” A Jewish sociologist by the name of Landshut had been working as a graduate assistant at the University of Hamburg. There, he had made the acquaintance of Hans von Dohnányi, Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, who also served as the legal adviser to the Reich Court president. As a result of the Aryan laws, Landshut had fallen on hard times. After the Nazis suspended his academic adviser—the economist Eduard Heimann, also a Jew—Landshut was thrown into limbo, no longer able to pursue the requirements for a university post. In any case, his prominent Jewish features, Bonhoeffer believed, now made an appointment anywhere unlikely.57 Though he’d been earning only a meager stipend, its withdrawal had left Landshut without any income or meaningful employment. His wife, furthermore, suffered from heart trouble, and the couple had three small children.

  Having met Landshut on a recent trip to Hamburg, Bonhoeffer praised him as a person of “the purest scholarship and integrity.” In 1914, at the age of seventeen, Landshut had volunteered for combat duty and spent four years on the front. “He is a man who feels completely German and is not yet able to contemplate looking for a job outside Germany,” Bonhoeffer said. His recent book, Kritik der Soziologie, showed evidence of a disci
plined and judicious mind. Whereas Heimann, as a full professor, had been able to immigrate to the United States, taking a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York, Landshut could not. He lacked the necessary credentials, and besides there was his wife’s failing health; Landshut needed to stay put.

  Bonhoeffer asked Siegmund-Schultze to wrack his brain to find Landshut a post—even if it meant “something completely outside his profession.” Might he introduce Landshut to officials at the Jewish Welfare Association, which had offices in Berlin and Hamburg, perhaps help him meet with the directors? Might the minister himself also meet with Landshut to discuss his problem? “For myself and those in my family, who are close friends of Landshut, it matters very much what happens to him, and I should not like to have failed to ask you earnestly for any help you might be able to provide him.”

  Siegmund-Schultze’s response would be disappointing. He advised Bonhoeffer to have Landshut contact the Central Welfare Office for German Jews, judging this approach likelier to bear fruit. He may have been right. Siegmund-Schultze’s campaign against unemployment and his efforts to build bridges between the churches and the trade unions had rendered association with him toxic amid the Nazi campaign of repression against communists and their sympathizers. The next month, storm troopers would seize the shuttered Ulmenhof center in Berlin, forcing the minister to flee with his family to Switzerland. Landshut succeeded in emigrating to Palestine in 1933, where he flourished as a scholar and teacher; he returned to Germany after the war and died in 1968.58

  The theological faculties offered no sanctuary either. On the evening of May 10, 1933, the first day of the summer semester, students and professors joined members of the local Sturmabteilung around a bonfire at the Opernplatz in the shadows of the Humboldt monument. Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Walther Rathenau, Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, and Hermann Hesse were among the authors whose names were read aloud in a litany of protest against those who defied “the national will to live.” The mob threw hundreds of volumes—seized from libraries, synagogues, and churches—onto the massive fire. Also destroyed were the works of Heinrich Heine, a writer of Jewish descent, who a century earlier had foreshadowed the hell to come: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.”59

  I no longer believe in the university,” Bonhoeffer had said.

  It had indeed come to this. Most of Bonhoeffer’s colleagues and former classmates, and a majority of the students—even many still attending his lectures—were on board with Hitler’s racial-ethnic völkisch vision and were now card-carrying members of the Nazi Party (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei).60 Seeberg, the forty-five-year-old dean of the theology faculty, readily championed the mandates of the Aryan paragraph; at age seventy-four, the dean’s father had made an easy transition from old-school nationalist to new-order Nazi, whose cause he served proudly at his Institute for Social Ethics.61 Professors Caius Fabricius and Arnold Stolzenburg had joined the party in 1932. Under the younger Seeberg, party membership and loyalty became decisive criteria for tenure in the department.62

  Similar pressures existed at other universities, though precious few responded with a defiant “Nein.” In Bonn, Barth quibbled over the new requirement to begin each class with a “Sieg Heil!” and was stripped of his chair. Frankfurt theologian Paul Tillich lost his job after delivering numerous public speeches and addresses critical of Hitler.63 In 1937, New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm lost his venia legendi at the University of Königsberg and did not return to academic life until after the war. And later, Helmut Thielicke was fired from his theology professorship in Heidelberg.

  In his May 28 sermon at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the Tiergarten neighborhood, Bonhoeffer likened the crisis in the German churches to the story of Moses and Aaron, the Hebrew patriarchs and brothers of the tribe of Levi. Most dissenting Christians remained uncertain about how to respond to the German Christians and which policies should be resisted or rejected. While most dissidents opposed application of the Aryan paragraph to the church, others supported the new German state. Some even endorsed the creation of a Reich bishop. It was “against this backdrop” that Bonhoeffer spoke of the “two churches of Moses and Aaron,” which in his telling represented the demarcations of “idolatry and faithfulness.” “The church of Aaron, while priestly and popular, was idolatrous. The church of Moses was the church of the prophet and of the demanding, judging Word of God.”64 Bonhoeffer drew the distinction as sharply as he could: on one side stood Aaron, maker of idols, and on the other, Moses, God’s righteous patriarch. Though they belonged to the same people, the same tribe and clan, it was through Moses’s guidance only, through the “church of Moses,” that Israel was saved.

  “Moses, the first prophet, and Aaron, the first priest; Moses, the one called out by God, the one chosen without regard for his person, the man who was slow of tongue, the servant of God who lived only by listening to the word of his Lord; Aaron, the man with the purple robe and the sacred crown, the priest who had been consecrated and sanctified, who was supposed to keep the people worshipping God.” Moses stood alone “way up on the terrifying mountain,” between “life and death with the thunder and lightning,” called to receive God’s covenant with Israel; while “down in the valley, Aaron in his ‘sacred crown and garish robes of purple,’ ” catered to the people’s impatience, pretending to be God’s ambassador. “Take the gold rings from your wives, [Aaron] said, strip the gold adornments from your sons and your daughters; bring them to me.” Nothing was spared; everything precious was thrown into the smelting cauldron, enough to form the likeness of a calf. “Then the frenzy began,” the ecstatic veneration of the idol, the earth exploding with marches and festivals; “and the church of Aaron sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.” When Moses came down from the mountain and saw what the people had become, he ordered the idol ground to dust and the dust mixed with water and the mixture drunk as gall.

  On this morning in May, Bonhoeffer asked the timorous beloved, who would lead them without Moses?

  By June, German Protestant leaders were united in their praise of the Nazi regime. “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler,” one minister gushed. “Through his power, his honesty, his faith and his idealism … the Redeemer has found us, [and] we know the Savior today has come!”65 Passion and vigor, a brash and cocksure manliness, a Führer whose countenance fairly radiated these virtues—a nation was smitten. It felt good to be a German, again.

  The Young Reformation Movement, formed in April, asked Bonhoeffer to deliver the plenary address at a conspicuous public forum; the hope was to call attention to the German Christians and their tyrannical capture of church authority. The event was held on June 22, in the spacious new assembly hall at Berlin University. “Bonhoeffer, for whom opposition to the Aryan paragraph had become the touchstone” for action, surprised even fellow dissidents by calling upon the assembly to pass a binding resolution establishing itself a “convened church council.” Nothing less was acceptable; he demanded a decisive verdict, grounded in scripture and doctrine, leveled squarely against the pharisaical elites. It was clear to Bonhoeffer that both the “Jewish question” and “the ecumenical imperative of peace” required a “doctrinal decision by the collective church in response to Christ’s binding command.” But few were persuaded by Bonhoeffer’s “unexpected” and “unpopular” declaration.

  There were exceptions. A young Christian dissident named Gertrude Staewen was taken with the radical proposal. A social worker who’d followed Bonhoeffer’s public lectures but who had been vacationing on the Baltic coast at the time of the Berlin forum, Staewen wrote to him on June 26, as soon as friends told her what she had missed. Considering the “Babylonian confusion of Christian discourse,” Staewen said, the convocation of a binding council had become “really necessary.”66

  The German Christian movement did not so much destroy as emerge from the ruins of
the once-grand Protestant liberal architectonic. It was perhaps a predictable dénouement for a tradition that increasingly turned theology into anthropology, surrendering the disciplined language of belief to the habit of speaking about God as if of human nature writ large.

  Protestant liberalism—as the story goes—had begun with Immanuel Kant and his two devastating tomes, The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, both appearing at the end of the eighteenth century. In these books’ trenchant analysis of the human mind and its ways of organizing experience, Kant reached a conclusion that would dramatically alter the course of theological and philosophical thought in the West. His claim: that the idea of God is uncertain and unknowable, since the idea of God, much less God himself, does not appear in space and time, to become an object of experience.67 Nevertheless, the idea of God remains useful, Kant would even say truthful, insofar as it brings order to moral experience.

  Over the next century, Protestant liberalism would flourish, proffering its various creative responses to this radical reduction. In all instances, metaphysical knowledge, the doctrines and beliefs of the church, once held to be reliable and certain, persisted only as lessons, props, and modulations—that is, as useful tools for human understanding. They were denied their traditional transcendent value as truth (indeed, the notion of there being any such thing as truth had been drawn toward a conceptual precipice from which it would eventually fall).