Paul Althaus, the esteemed pastor-professor turned zealous Nazi, responded by saying he would not stand by idly and let Bonhoeffer promote “his Christian radicalism.” In the name of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, Bonhoeffer, he charged, seemed intent on confusing Christians “with regard to the law, nation, government, and military service.”88 Such a piety lacking toughness and strength must be firmly rejected.
Of course, Bonhoeffer had not always been sympathetic to the philosophy of pacifism. As an assistant pastor in Barcelona, one will remember, he had blithely intoned the rhetoric of blood, soil, and fatherland, paying homage to the old Germanic war gods. Far from merely hewing to the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, and their view of just war in the case of self-defense, he had also claimed territorial expansion and conquest as legitimate casus belli. The influence of his brothers, so disillusioned by the Great War, had not altered his views. But more recently, friendships with Christian pacifists like Lasserre and Hildebrandt, and of course his encounters a few years earlier with Christian peacemakers in America, had inspired new ways of reading scripture. These encounters had awakened Bonhoeffer to an intimate relationship with scripture that privileged Jesus’ moral teachings and its fierce summation in the Sermon on the Mount.
To be sure, Karl Barth had written a fairly vertiginous account of the righteousness of God and the quaking of the tower of Babel, and despite the complicated and sometimes contentious exchanges of the two men, Barth, Bonhoeffer believed, had discerned the theological quandary of the hour with razor-sharp clarity. How might it be possible to experience the reality of God amid the prevailing idolatry? And who is God? Is God the continuation of blood and soil, humanity rendered in a loud voice? It was Barth’s defiant “Nein!” that first shook Bonhoeffer out of his Protestant liberal slumber. No—this was the way of idolatry. God is the One who comes to humanity from a “wholly different” source, Barth claimed, whose history reproaches “with its own distinct grounds, possibilities and hypotheses,” who lifts our sights “to the open portals of a new world,” to the peace that passes all understanding. Still, Bonhoeffer pressed Barth’s triumphal narrative into the straighter way of the cross and the intimacy of discipleship. Obedience to Christ’s peace commandment represented the opposite of Nazism.89
By the time he came to Fanö his pacifism was fully formed. The physicist Herbert Jehle, who’d attended Bonhoeffer’s 1932 lectures and heard him preach at Berlin’s Dreifaltigkeitskirche, called on him often in London. “I was in Cambridge and came to visit … I’m sure 30 to 50 times,” Jehle said. “I became a pacifist exclusively through Dietrich.”90 Upon returning to Germany after his Cambridge postdoctorate, Jehle would join the Quakers, rejecting numerous employment offers in the rearmament industry, before at last declaring himself a conscientious objector. By 1940, this tall lanky scholar with “an ample golden beard and a sparkle in his eyes”—the son of a decorated German general, to boot—was arrested and sent to the Gurs concentration camp. He would survive the imprisonment, later immigrating to America.
Bonhoeffer’s London calling notwithstanding, on July 4, 1934, members of the Old Prussian Union Council of Brethren who were unhappy by their regional church’s alignment with the Reich Church approached him with the offer to direct a seminary in Finkenwalde, near the city of Stettin, some one hundred kilometers northwest of Berlin. Bonhoeffer had long lamented the German educational system for clergy, his view of academic theology routinely expressed in metaphors of confinement and asphyxiation. But his embrace of the offer was no doubt inspired by the strenuous Christological disciplines that now accompanied all his comings and goings.
To support the training of ministers drawn from the ranks of men who hadn’t been nazified, the nascent Confessing Church had adopted five languishing seminaries mostly in rural areas just slightly beyond the scope of Gestapo surveillance. Funded by the direct contributions of sympathetic Christians, these institutions were able to maintain an unusual degree of independence from the state as “Nazi-free spaces.” It seemed to Bonhoeffer a supremely worthy purpose, and a logical next step in the mission still revealing itself to him. Bonhoeffer asked the parish council for a six-month leave of absence, explaining that he needed “to answer a call from the leadership of the Confessing Church,” and his request was granted.91
To his older brother Karl-Friedrich, a committed atheist and anti-Nazi, he offered a frank explanation. “Perhaps I seem to you rather fanatical,” Bonhoeffer said. “I myself sometimes worry about that. But to be honest, I know that the day when I become more ‘reasonable,’ I shall have to chuck my entire theology. When I first started in theology, my idea of it was quite different—rather more academic, probably. Now it has turned into something else altogether. But I do believe that at last, for the first time in my life, I am on the right track. And I am often quite happy about that. My only anxiety is that fear of what others may think will bog me down and keep me from moving forward. I think I am right to say that true inner clarity and honesty will come only by starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. In it alone is the force that can blow all this hocus-pocus sky-high.… The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with its former self but proposes a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount. I believe the time has come to gather the people together and do this.”92
In October, Bonhoeffer told Bishop Bell he wanted to visit as many alternative seminaries and peace centers as he could during his final months in England and to take a few days to hike in the Lake Country or climb Ben Nevis in Scotland. For the work ahead, he was eager to learn more about Anglican and Free Church experiments in Christian community, and “very anxious to have some acquaintance with our methods,” observed Bell, who graciously made the necessary introductions. Among those Bonhoeffer sought out was Father E. K. Talbot, the superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield.93 Nestled on twenty-two acres in West Yorkshire, Mirfield was an Anglican monastery operated according to a variation on the Benedictine Rule. Life revolved around the daily office—in the course of which the brothers prayed through the entirety of the acrostic Psalm 119—as well as work on behalf of the poor and unemployed. Five of the six founders of Mirfield were members of the Christian Social Union, and their judgment had figured prominently in “the decision to settle in the industrial north, between Wakefield and Huddersfield.”94 Bonhoeffer’s experience there would deepen his “already strong attachment to the Psalter,” and in particular to Psalm 119, the longest of all the songs, which “increasingly held him captive with its reiterated plea of the one who wants only to be allowed to live as a sojourner on the earth” and to fulfill the “beloved commands of the Lord.”95
The tour of peace communities and alternative seminaries also took Bonhoeffer to Charles Spurgeon’s Baptist College on South Norwood Hill, the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Oxford, the Society of the Sacred Mission in Kelham, the Quaker community of Woodbrooke in Selly Oak (which he visited twice), and Cowley. He had already seen Richmond Methodist College in the western suburbs of London the previous autumn.96 There, a seminarian noted in his diary on October 4, 1934, the visit by “Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the University of Berlin, one of the leading young Barthian theologians and one of the most important figures in the German Church situation”; true to his reputation, the young pastor gave a “splendid talk” on those matters and others.97
Although they differed in their forms, tone, and sources, these communities shared a commitment to the mysteries of faith. Mirfield, Cowley, and Kelham were products of late-nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholicism.98 Woodbrooke had been established in 1903 in Selly Oak, near Birmingham, when the chocolate magnate George Cadbury donated his estate to the Quakers to found a peace community and education center. Each had its own rule of order.
On his visit to Cowley, Bonhoeffer reached for a cigarette in his pocket only to be told that smoking was fo
rbidden. It was startling news for one who hailed from a nation of smokers and never left home without a supply of good German tobacco. At Mirfield, on the other hand, the habit was allowed, and among the brotherhood of Kelham, where the superior was a smoker, tobacco seemed de rigeur.99 The director of Kelham, Father Herbert Kelly, was a chain smoker of uncommon enthusiasm. His black monk’s habit appeared permanently covered in gray ash, and an even stranger custom could be daily observed at his lectern, where he kept a squat metal pail holding a flammable liquid into which he frequently dipped a long wooden stick that served as an elaborate cigarette match. The chain-smoking abbot told Bonhoeffer he found the strength to traverse the ascetical way through the daily acceptance of his weakness. “I can do it, because I cannot.” The answer made sense to Bonhoeffer.100
Bonhoeffer was pleasantly surprised to discover that some communities found virtue in spontaneity and play, regarding leisure as a means of soul craft. A photograph from Mirfield shows Bonhoeffer in a sharp tweed suit preparing to serve in a game of ping-pong.101 At times, he seemed as thrilled by the sight of Anglican monks enjoying sport—tennis, soccer, cricket, even rugby—in the afternoon as by the solemnities of compline and the simplicity of communal life.
Not all the monastics Bonhoeffer met credited his appreciation of the cloistered life. The year before, for instance, he had crossed paths with Hardy Arnold, a member of the Bruderhof settlement, who was taking summer courses in education at the University of Birmingham. Founded in 1922 by a pacifist theologian and Anabaptist minister named Eberhard Arnold, Bruderhof was forty kilometers northeast of Frankfurt, near the German village of Hessen. There the initiates pursued a kind of Christian communism, seeking to emulate the earliest Christian communities as described in Acts: people of “one heart and mind” who were “sharing all things in common,” renouncing private property and all violence or coercion. Arnold was pleased to share the story of Bruderhof with Bonhoeffer and his two companions, Rieger and Rudolf Weckerling. As Arnold told a friend later in the day, “Bonhoeffer was so very impressed with what I had to tell him.” Nonetheless he found the Berlin intellectual the least sympathetic of the three. He was put off not only by Bonhoeffer’s dandyism (a whiff of preciousness, lacking a certain deference), but also by how he expressed his hopes of founding a community of brothers based entirely on the Sermon on the Mount—as if he were contemplating some enchantment or thematic work of art rather than the lived faith as Arnold understood it.102
BONHOEFFER PLAYING PING PONG
To Arnold, who had spent his entire life at Bruderhof, Bonhoeffer’s zeal for the monastic life seemed far too romantic: he had seen many young men entranced by the idea of community and the common purse, only to become disillusioned or distracted. Bonhoeffer was delighted when Arnold gave him a chapter from a book by his father (Innerland: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel), which described the Holy Spirit as “the sap of life that brings unity to the living organism called the church.”103 But Bruderhof’s peasant-agrarian mysticism was simply not what Bonhoeffer was hoping to create in northern Germany. His own vision was rather more like a monastic Friedrichsbrunn. He imagined a fellowship of men, single-minded in their ardor and devotion for Jesus, sharing books and music and meals, practicing the daily hours and offering intercessory prayers, and, as needed, taking breaks for tennis or hikes or excursions to the shore, as well as evenings around the piano. It was an especially vivid way of answering the dissident call, with a perfect circle of friends, though it was not everyone’s idea of orienting their lives completely to Christ.
To Julius Rieger, who accompanied Bonhoeffer on the tour, the hourly prayers, the contemplative disciplines, common-table fellowship, reading the Psalter, corporate worship, learning to see the other under the mercies of the Holy Shepherd—these practices seemed a spiritual “straight jacket.” And to most of his Confessing Church colleagues, they would have seemed an antiquated frivolity. But to Bonhoeffer, who had long admired the “secret strength of silence” (among other disciplines dating from before the Reformation), and who had no fear of introspection or paradox, these practices were positively energizing. In this, too, he did not fit the mold of traditional Lutheran piety.104
PHOTOGRAPH OF BONHOEFFER TAKEN BY ERNST CROMWELL ON BEN NEVIS, SCOTLAND, 1935
Shortly before Christmas 1934, a letter arrived at the London parsonage addressed to “Pastor Lic. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Esq.” It was from Mahatma Gandhi. A few years earlier, in a time when he felt overwhelmed by the demands of his inner-city youth ministry, Bonhoeffer had joked with Anneliese Schnurmann, a Jewish friend who’d recently made a financial contribution to his work, that he had half a mind to take her gift and run off with it to India. Bonhoeffer had written to Gandhi earlier that year, asking advice and inquiring whether it might be possible to visit the Mahatma’s Sarbamati Ashram in northwest India.105 But he had not expected a personal reply, certainly not one addressing him as “dear friend.” Gandhi advised Bonhoeffer that the answers to his questions could be found by coming to India, “the sooner the better.” Of course, he and his companion, Herbert Jehle, a Quaker and physicist who had taken theology classes in Berlin, would have to cover their travel expenses, but if Bonhoeffer could manage to live on a vegetarian diet, his living costs would be next to nothing. There was also the question of “how the climate here agrees with you.” These considerations aside, Gandhi promised that as long as he was not out of the country or in jail, he would find time for the German theologian.106
It was a generous offer considering that Gandhi was then at the height of his powers at home and abroad—Winston Churchill’s snarky dismissal of the “half-naked fakir” notwithstanding. It was the most intense period of the “inter-war constitutional debate” on the future of India, leading up to the passage of the India Act of 1935, a fact surely not lost on Bonhoeffer. The wish to visit Gandhi marks a crucial stage in Bonhoeffer’s growth as theologian and pastor.107 He had read the Mahatma’s memoir long before coming to England, during his time in New York City, where he’d discussed it with Lasserre, Sutz, and the Union pacifists. He “had wanted to get to know India personally,” Rieger observed. He was particularly drawn to the principle of satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, as a complement to the Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi, Bonhoeffer came to believe, showed more respect for the teachings of Jesus than most Christians did.108 In their works of mercy and justice, those “heathen Christians” performed acts of true grace, as Bonhoeffer explained in a London sermon on Luke 13:1–5.109 Like Martin Luther King Jr. a generation later, Bonhoeffer was looking to Gandhi’s India for more than a moral exemplar and an effective means of civil activism.
Facing the pounding waves of hypocrisy and corruption unleashed by the German Protestant Church, Bonhoeffer had begun to feel a certain fatigue with Western Christianity—even as he accepted the challenge to purge its German manifestations of so many lies.110 “In the West Christianity is approaching its end,” he lamented.111 What had begun as longings unfulfilled by Lutheranism, leading him to the basilicas of Rome and the convents of Britain, eventually brought Bonhoeffer to a point where he seemed no longer inclined to assert the superiority of the Christian religion, at least not as it was now lived. Hence the rather paradoxical coincidence of an eagerness to meet Gandhi and the intensification of his devotion to the Sermon on the Mount as God’s will.
“Christianity did in fact come from the East originally,” Bonhoeffer wrote his grandmother Julie on May 22, 1934, “but it has become so westernized and so permeated by civilized thought that, as we can now see, it is almost lost to us.” He further confided to her that he had by now “little confidence left in the church opposition,” having decided that, in any case, the truth of Jesus Christ could best be learned through witness and righteous action—a most heterodox turn for a man formed in a confession traditionally so unified, and so dogmatic in its disdain for the value of works.112 This most learned of Lutherans was now prepared to allow that the “heathen” Gandhi gave u
ncommonly vivid expression to “the strange and slow journey that leads through repentance to the new life.”113
In the end, Bonhoeffer would forego the opportunity to visit India. The decision illuminates a fundamental tension, or perhaps more precisely a clearer sense of calling, in his outlook. Tempted though he might be to take flight to some exotic clime (which he would likely have indulged in his younger days, particularly if oppressed by the judgment of some mediocrity at the reigns of authority), he simply could not justify a sixth-month sojourn with Gandhi. For all its faults, the house of the church was indeed burning. Even if it had lost its legitimacy, he was not prepared to consign the whole body of Christ in Germany to perdition, as long as a few righteous souls, however outnumbered, remained. Abraham, after all, had persuaded the Lord to spare Sodom for the sake of ten righteous men there. Bonhoeffer could do no less for his own people. And so it was, that after eighteen months of absence and incessant reflection, the very sense of responsibility that Barth had tried to drum into him beckoned Dietrich Bonhoeffer home.
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