Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  There was also the matter of a growing self-knowledge respecting his vocation. “I have always wanted to be a pastor,” he had written to Barth at the beginning of his London tenure, defending his decision to answer that call. But had he?114 As we have seen, his earliest report to his grandmother Julie expressed amazement at the volume of work involved in ministering to even a small parish.115 He’d made himself present as required, as far as we know. He happily sang with the choir at St. Paul’s and tried to improve the music at Sydenham, though with limited success. He introduced the new German hymnbook for overseas congregations and tried to attend faithfully the Monday-morning meeting of ministers of Forest Hill. He oversaw confirmation classes and performed baptisms, and also performed baptisms and also attending the parties to follow. He officiated at numerous funerals and at least one wedding. At first, it had all been rather exhilarating, allowing him to bear the cold water and drafty rooms of the parsonage.

  When Julius Rieger’s wife gave birth to their second child, Bonhoeffer bought the entire stock of cornflowers and marguerites in a Forest Hill florist and carried the large bouquet with him as he negotiated two tram transfers on his way to their flat. Even so, in London Bonhoeffer would succumb to weariness at pastoral ministry, a feeling he had previously managed to avoid. The last-minute scurrying to find “flower-arrangers for the altar or someone to pump the organ,” or to recruit actors for the nativity plays and other pageants; the constant haggling over church reports and budgets—there seemed no end to such drudgery. Increasingly the demands of shepherding a flock of German expatriates felt like a great distraction from a truer, more urgent calling.116

  For fourscore years now, the Barmen Declaration, primarily the work of Barth during a synod of the Confessing Church held May 29–31, 1934, in the city of Barmen-Wuppertal in Rhine-Westphalia, has served the Protestant world as an inspiring example of radical Christian conviction and courageous dissent, a ray of light in those darkest of times. In his classic Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Biblical to the Present, the scholar John H. Leith calls it “a witness, a battle cry.”117 The London Times ran the full text on June 4, less than a week after the synod concluded, and translations soon followed in newspapers and church periodicals throughout western Europe and the English-speaking world. Bonhoeffer had skipped the conference but signed the declaration. But even as he promoted the declaration to his ecumenical allies, he remained suspicious of many of his cosignatories.

  He’d seen the dilution from which such group statements typically suffered. The preceding autumn, he had abruptly abandoned work on the Bethel Confession after discovering that all references to the Aryan paragraph and the Jewish people had been omitted from the final draft. The Barmen Declaration was in some ways just a forthright and single-minded affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ according to scripture and tradition: “ ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.’ (John 14.6). ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.… I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.’ (John 10:1, 9).” But it was also an exercise in subversive indirection. Reflecting on John 14:6, for instance, it says, “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, any other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.”118 It was bold as far as it went. And yet in Bonhoeffer’s estimation, the statement remained intolerably evasive on the concrete issues, never once mentioning the Aryan paragraph, just as years later the Confessing Church would demur on the burning of synagogues, the deportation of Jews and other non-Aryans to the concentration camps, or the extermination of people with physical or mental disabilities.

  Bonhoeffer did not hold Barth solely responsible for this demurral on concrete applications. The master’s articulation of Christ’s Lordship was principled and daring. It no doubt unleashed iconoclastic energies; if Christ is Lord, Hitler is not. Still, in Bonhoeffer’s judgment the extraordinary circumstances called for more, especially on the “Jewish question,” which had been sometimes referred to as the “Jewish Problem.” Barth would later allow that his omitting to mention it or the Aryan paragraph had been calculated to maximize support among the delegates: no text foregrounding these contentious issues, he explained, “would have been acceptable even to the Confessing Church, given the atmosphere at the time.”119 Still, he admitted that the matter could have been handled better.

  And Barth’s calculations were not merely concerned with whipping up support. He had been put under house arrest earlier in the year in Bonn, where he had taught since 1930, and his days as a professor at a German university were numbered. Bonhoeffer understood the limitations under which the Swiss theologian was operating.

  Bonhoeffer was less forgiving, however, of another type of “dissident” that gravitated toward the Barmen Synod—the kind that found Barth’s abstracted theology a convenient excuse for avoiding hard realities and choices. Barmen had exposed one of the Confessing Church’s dirty little secrets: some of its members were card-carrying members of the Nazi Party who were merely put off by the crude pronouncements of Reich Bishop Müller’s bumptious lackeys. The “naive, starry-eyed idealists like Niemöller,” Bonhoeffer said, “still think they are the real National Socialists.”120 Though Niemöller would soon become one of the German resistance’s most recognizable faces, Bonhoeffer saw through the Dahlem cleric’s delusional hope of preserving the sacred freedoms of the church while affirming the political authority of Hitler.

  From the perspective of men like that, Barmen’s insistent focus on the theme of Lordship was palatable as the least radical reaction to awkward circumstances. It offered the thunder of righteousness without precipitating irreconcilable schism in the communion.

  Not that it was entirely toothless. The declaration did refute many of the German Christian teachings, its six theses affirming the primacy of the traditional confessions and scripture. There was also a repudiation of Nazi interference in church governance, an absolute call for independence from the state’s “ideological and political convictions.” Finally, the declaration unambiguously rejected the Führer principle, the very foundation of the dictatorship. But in sum Barmen never amounted to more than a statement for potential political resistance, as Victoria Barnett has carefully shown in her definitive study of the Confessing Church, For the Soul of My People. It illuminated what could be seen as “a first step” toward a true confrontation but did not in itself constitute real defiance.121

  Ultimately, Bonhoeffer would be glad to have skipped the Barmen Synod. For him, dogmatic proclamation would never be enough, and he believed that every confession of Christ as Lord must bear concretely on the immediate work of peace. Obedience could not be separated from confession. The kingdom of heaven does not suffer lip service.

  Bonhoeffer would countenance no strategic compromise. He would stand or fall as a true dissident, certain of his judgment that the German Protestant Church had forfeited its membership in the body of Christ, and he engaged the church crisis from this radical position. “Those who knowingly separate themselves from the Confessing Church in Germany, separate themselves from salvation,” Bonhoeffer said.122 As he told Henri-Louis Henriod, secretary general of the World Alliance in Geneva, the Confessing Church must affirm and boldly act upon its claim of being the “only theologically and legally legitimate Evangelical Church in Germany.”123 For the hour was late, and “the lines have been drawn somewhere else entirely,” Bonhoeffer said.124 “And while I’m working with the church opposition with all my might, it’s perfectly clear to me that this opposition is only a very temporary transitional phase on the way to an opposition of a very different kind, and that ve
ry few of those involved in this preliminary skirmish are going to be there for that second struggle.”125 The second struggle would be for regeneration, a new way of being Christian, which he believed demanded a modern monasticism, and it would be finally for conspiracy and tyrannicide: “I believe that all of Christendom should be praying with us for the coming of resistance ‘to the point of shedding blood’ and for the finding of people who can suffer it through. Simply suffering is what it will be about, not parries, blows, or thrusts such as may still be allowed and possible in the preliminary battles; the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must be one of simply suffering through in faith.”126 It was with this understanding—that German Christians had made a Faustian bargain with Hitler—that Bonhoeffer had titled one of his sermons “The Church Is Dead.”

  Perhaps he meant only the German Protestant Church. For Bonhoeffer placed a great burden on the ecumenical movement to carry high the cross and lead the nations toward peace and a lasting fellowship. As he said in Denmark, “Only the one great Ecumenical Council of the Holy Church of Christ can speak out so that the world, though it gnash its teeth, will have to hear, and the peoples will rejoice as the Church of Christ in Christ’s name takes weapons from their sons’ hands, forbids war, and proclaims the peace of Christ against the raging world.”127 In the late summer of 1934, on the windswept island of Fanö, he had dared to imagine a world thus inundated by joyous evangelical fervor. His words were sublime and subversive, a cathedral of solemn hopes rising above the clamorous earth. But the burden of creating it was to prove more than the ecumenical church could bear. He would come to see that he had asked too much of this world, was too quick to pronounce the last word. Events would soon deliver him to a chastened hope for “something greater than the half-spoken word, not the final and decisive word, but the word before the last.”128

  “Perhaps this will amaze you,” Bonhoeffer wrote to Sutz, “[but] it is my belief that the Sermon on the Mount will be the deciding word on this whole affair.”129

  On February 11, 1935, the church council of St. Paul’s, Sydenham, convened for a quarterly meeting. Following a reading from scripture and a prayer, the minutes were signed and approved. Then the treasurer presented the account books, which were examined and found to be in order. Bonhoeffer asked that a special collection for winter aid be approved; German refugees were coming to England in ever-larger numbers, and the need was great. The pastor then requested six months of leave “to answer a call from the leadership of the Confessing Church in Germany to set up a theological seminary.” The request was met with the council’s full forbearance; it was decided that the leave would run from March 15 to September 15, for which Bonhoeffer offered heartfelt thanks. “The meeting was adjourned with a prayer at 8:30 p.m.”130

  CHAPTER TEN

  1935–1937

  ~

  “A New Kind of Monasticism”

  In April of 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived at the seacoast town of Zingst. It was hardly a terra incognita. He had spent summer holidays with his family near the Baltic Sea and later, as an undergraduate, trekked with classmates through Lübeck, Timmendorf, Plön, and along the trails of Dithmarschen, where the land is flat and green. And so, quite naturally, as he pondered where to set his experiment in evangelical monasticism, his musings led him to the sparse places of the northern shores, the vast inlands and the endless plains that dissolved into the horizon.1 It was here that he would establish a seminary for preachers of the Confessing Church.

  He was not unaware of the venture’s eccentricity. As Bonhoeffer confessed to his agnostic brother Karl-Friedrich, it bothered him “that you really find all these ideas of mine completely mad”: the restoration of the church, a new monasticism, a life of uncompromising discipleship “according to the Sermon on the Mount.”

  The communities Bonhoeffer had visited in England were housed in stately manors on well-kept grounds, with funds from church trusts and philanthropic societies supporting them. The first class of what would officially be known as the Emergency Teaching Seminary of the Confessing Church, on the other hand, was initially lodged in an unheated timber-framed structure surrounded by windswept outbuildings and low-thatched huts that looked like outcroppings of the craggy coast. Bonhoeffer could not have been more pleased with the arrangements. The sand dunes, only a hundred meters away, were the perfect setting for devotional readings, morning prayers, and afternoon naps. When the weather turned warm enough, Bonhoeffer would reconvene classes to a hollow in the dunes and lead a discussion on the day’s readings or speak on scripture and doctrine accompanied by the rhythms of the sea nearby. One student recalled a day when Bonhoeffer abandoned the curriculum altogether and instead conducted a choral piece for four voices by Josquin des Prez.2

  Across the channel to the east lay the island of Hiddensee and the greater expanse of Rügen beyond. The Bodden chain, the Fischland-Darss Peninsula, and the fortressed town of Barth framed the southern horizon.3

  But warm days were few and far between on Europe’s northern coasts. A clear June morning might yield suddenly to gray sheets of rain and bracing winds. By summer’s end, huts warmed only by the sun were uninhabitable. It became obvious to Bonhoeffer and everyone with him that life in the rugged Zingsthof would not be feasible beyond September. And so he and his twenty-three students decamped to a local youth hostel to plan the next move. It was not long before providence smiled on them. Nearby in Pomerania—the Baltic south-coastal region lying between the Recknitz River near Stralsund and the mouth of the Vistula River, near the port city of Gdańsk—a shuttered school for preachers had become available. The village itself, Finkenwalde, lay just east of the Oder River, 250 kilometers northeast of Berlin and 380 kilometers north of Bieslou.4 From the city of Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), it was a half-hour drive, or one stop on the eastbound train. The school was set on thirty well-tended acres. It had proper classrooms and reliable heating. In close proximity there was also the abandoned, ramshackle estate of the von Katte family. Bonhoeffer liked that, too: “Simple but on a grand scale, near the forest” was how he described it.5

  AS THE DIRECTOR OF THE NEW CONFESSING CHURCH SEMINARY IN ZINGST ON THE BALTIC SEA

  Everyone agreed that the central room, with its large stone fireplace, would serve as the common room; and on either side, a lecture hall and the refectory. The main building of the seminary was well constructed and spacious but in a shabby state—a “veritable pigsty,” one student complained. And so the seminarians, most of them in their twenties and from rural parishes, rolled up their sleeves and went to work cleaning and renovating. They scrubbed the floors, painted the “stained and peeling walls, washed the dirty windows and repaired the broken ones, mended the roof and the cracked plaster on the ceilings, and overhauled the plumbing.” Outside they worked hard to rescue not only the garden but the house itself from the encroaching weeds and brush, which had crept up the windows. Bonhoeffer instructed the men to set aside one corner of the yard as a vegetable garden and assigned a group to hoe and plant.6 The men also transformed the gym into a chapel with “whitewash, wood from packing cases and hessian,” and across the wall they draped a banner with the Greek word “Hapax” in gold letters: “Once and for all.”7

  Bonhoeffer’s friends, colleagues, and family responded generously to his petitions for help with the restoration. The Protestant congregation in the nearby village of Stolp donated the tables for the seminar room. The chairs came from members of the Confessing Church in Köslin. And the founder made his personal library available to the students, with the exception of books he himself had written (most students would complete their tuition never knowing that Bonhoeffer had published two important monographs). In his own way of helping the monkish evangelicals, Karl Bonhoeffer bought his son a new 1936 Audi convertible—an Auto Union, to be exact, the precursor to the German brand—which would serve him well.

  Bonhoeffer was notably upbeat about the progress when writing to his British acquaintance Ernst Cro
mwell on July 2, 1935: “We managed to put the house here in order by ourselves, without outside help, and to equip it, for the time being, for our work. Farms in the countryside have been sending us all sorts of food stuffs. We could have made good use of your help these days! Now we have a great cook, aged 78, and two unemployed 14 or 15-year-old-boys to help her.”8

  On a warm and clear Sunday in late September 1935, a Prussian aristocrat named Ruth von Kleist-Retzow arrived for the morning service at Finkenwalde, accompanied by six children, ranging in age from ten to seventeen—two were her own, two were grandchildren of Otto von Bismarck, and two were from the family of Hans-Werner von Wedemeyer, who would one day become Bonhoeffer’s kinsman, almost. In a simple Geneva gown, with his Luther Bible tucked under his arm, Bonhoeffer greeted the visitors and ushered them to the front of the chapel.9 Kleist-Retzow was so impressed by his preaching that she soon adopted Finkenwalde as her home parish. Within the week she had obtained copies of Bonhoeffer’s sermons, articles, and books (including the two dissertations), invited him to teach confirmation classes to her nieces and nephews, and begun introducing him to other wealthy families who disliked the boorish führer. After a tour of the seminary, she arranged for the delivery of furniture, rugs, musical instruments, and a variety of other appointments, which she insisted the house needed. Concerned that Bonhoeffer himself lacked a proper work space for his writing, she converted two rooms in her nearby Restow estate into a guest suite and studio. Some historians have called Ruth von Kleist-Retzow the “matriarch of the resistance,” but during the two years of the Finkenwalde community, her concern was simply to ward off all “the dangerous forces that were poised” to attack her new pastor and friend.10