37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., pp. 88–89.
39. Ibid., p. 89.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., p. 91.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 111.
44. Ibid., p. 91.
45. For centuries, the Lutheran suspicion (if not abhorrence) of Rome had become part of the cultural inheritance of German Protestantism. At the time of Bonhoeffer’s 1924 visit, the relationship between Catholics and Protestants could be summed up in the phrase “Fremdheit und Scheu”—strangeness and shyness. But unlike many Protestant pilgrims to Rome, Bonhoeffer was smitten by the Eternal City.
46. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 88–89; Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologe—Christ—Zeitgenosse, p. 85. On the same page Bethge observes, “Ihn hat die Ewige Stadt nicht wie andere protestantische Romfahrer entsetzt und abgestoßen; sie hat ihn im Gegenteil für immer mit Sehnsucht erfüllt.”
47. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 91.
48. Ibid., p. 92.
49. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, p. 337.
50. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 93.
51. Ibid., p. 113.
52. Ibid., p. 95; Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 129.
53. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 95.
54. Ibid., p. 113.
55. From Klaus Bonhoeffer to his parents, ibid.
56. Ibid., p. 97.
57. Bonhoeffer, ibid., p. 98; Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 59.
58. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 116.
59. From Klaus Bonhoeffer to his parents, ibid., p. 114.
60. “The 10,000 Jews live in a special quarter. They have little in common with our German Jews or the Polish Jews.” From Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his parents, ibid., p. 116.
61. From Klaus Bonhoeffer to his parents, ibid., pp. 113–15.
62. Steiner, “Desire and Transgression,” p. 29.
63. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 116–18.
64. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 97.
65. Robert Steiner’s phrase; see “Desire and Transgression,” p. 23.
66. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 98–100.
67. Ibid., pp. 101–2.
68. Ibid., pp. 87, 104.
69. From Detlef Albers to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, April 14, 1929, in DBW, vol. 10, p. 181. Detlef Albers told Bonhoeffer that during a recent holiday he had seen a great deal of Spanish Catholicism and had found it chaotic and grim. “The Roman variety that tempted you to convert, I think, must have been quite different, for I really cannot possibly imagine such a temptation in my own case.” In Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 180.
70. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 121, 112.
CHAPTER THREE University Studies
1. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 129.
2. Ibid., p. 51.
3. Ibid., p. 129.
4. Ibid., p. 123.
5. Bonhoeffer accompanied his twin sister, her husband Gert, and their two daughters, Marianne and Christine, “some of the way into exile” before the Leibholzes crossed the border near Basel into Switzerland. The family emigrated to England, where Gert obtained a faculty post at Oxford. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 112. Four weeks after their flight from Germany, “on 5 October all non-Aryans’ passports that were not stamped with a ‘J’ were declared invalid.” Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 632.
6. Leibholz-Bonhoeffer, The Bonhoeffers, p. 55.
7. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 54.
8. Leibholz-Bonhoeffer, The Bonhoeffers, pp. 56–57.
9. Wendebourg, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Berliner Universität.”
10. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 144–46.
11. Kenneth Hagan, “Changes in the Understanding of Luther: The Development of the Young Luther,” Theological Studies 29, no. 3 (1968): 477–79. The reference is to the polemical writings of Heinrich Denifle and Hartmann Grisar.
12. In this manner, Holl argued that “[o]nly both reformist movements, the Wittenberg movement and the Geneva movement, opened up the whole process of reformation.” The Lutheran Renaissance illuminated “a step beyond Luther,” which meant that in the face of nationalist movements, Protestant Christians should “keep developing the economic and legal order in such a way that respect to human dignity becomes evident everywhere.” Hagan, “Changes in the Understanding of Luther.”
13. Holl argued that the Reformation banner of sola fidei—God justifies sinners by faith alone—presupposed the life of the church community. Not only is justification rightly understood in the context of the church; the consequence of justification is the church. The church exists by grace alone.
14. Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums.
15. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 132–33.
16. Wendebourg, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Berliner Universität.”
17. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 133, 135.
18. Ibid., pp. 137–38.
19. Ibid., p. 133.
20. Ibid., pp. 129–30.
21. Ibid., p. 161.
22. Ibid., pp. 144–45.
23. The two would marry in November 14, 1929.
24. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 145–46, 150.
25. Ibid., p. 150.
26. Pfeifer, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” p. 572.
27. “B minor Mass for today’s Repentance Day. For years it has been part of Repentance Day for me, just as the St. Matthew Passion is part of Good Friday. I remember quite clearly the evening I heard it for the first time. I was eighteen years old, was coming from a Harnack seminar in which he had discussed my first seminar paper very graciously and had expressed the hope I would someday become a church historian; I was still quite full with this when I entered the Philharmonic Hall; then the great ‘Kyrie eleison’ began, and at that moment everything else sank away completely. It was an indescribable impression.” See Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 8, p. 177.
28. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 146–49.
29. Weizsäcker, “Thoughts of a Nontheologian on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Development,” p. 163.
30. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 148–49.
31. Wendebourg, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Berliner Universität.”
32. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, pp. 148–49.
33. Ibid.
34. See Pfeifer in ibid., p. 148.
35. Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 28.
36. Barth and Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology in the Making, p. 43.
37. Von Hase, “ ‘Turning Away from the Phraseological to the Real,’ ” p. 595.
38. Barth’s lectures on Christian dogmatics during the summer semester of 1924 and the winter semester of 1924–25 comprised an early draft of the first volume of his Doctrine of the Word of God: Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics.
39. Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, pp. 59–60.
40. Ibid., p. 80. Nowhere did the disagreement between Harnack and Barth appear more sharply than at the 1920 Students’ Conference in Aarua, Switzerland, where Barth delivered the lecture “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas.” With Harnack sitting in the audience, and in the company of old-guard liberals, Barth unleashed a full-scale attack on what he considered the central convictions of the liberal-historical school. “Jesus simply has nothing to do with religion,” he said. Jesus was a radical and a revolutionary, who overturned moral conventions. Christianity was not about making the world more comfortable. The teaching of Jesus begins and ends with his proclamation of a new world actively invading the old world in judgment. “The affirmation of God, man, and the world given in the New Testament is based exclusively upon the possibility of a new order absolutely beyond human thought,” he said, “and therefore, as prerequisite to that order, there must come a crisis that denies all human thought.” Harnack was appalled by what he heard. In his published letter to the “Despisers of Scholarly Theology” on January 11, 1923, he challenged Barth to face the
intellectual demands of the modern age. Under the pretense of a radical agenda, Harnack felt, Barth was retreating into the irrational and undoing all progress in religious thought.
41. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 166.
42. Ibid., pp. 171–72.
43. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 495.
44. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 1, p. 120. The phrase Bonhoeffer used to describe the source of the distinctive social relation of the church is the kind of phrase academic theologians use to avoid the embarrassment of simplicity—“vicarious representative action.” He had in mind his favorite of all of Luther’s writings, “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods” (1519), the passage that reads, “It is good if you find that you are becoming strong in the confidence of Christ and his dear saints, so that you are certain that they love and stand by you in all the trials of life and death.” See Luther, Luther’s Works, p. 72. Vicarious representation means simply this, Bonhoeffer concluded: the essence of Christianity is the grace of God revealed in community and the awakening of love in return.
45. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 60.
46. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 1, p. 119.
47. Reinhold Seeberg, cited in editorial notes in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 1, p. 119.
48. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 170.
49. Moses, The Reluctant Revolutionary, p. 28.
50. Ibid., p. 32.
51. Ibid., p. 33.
52. Ibid., p. 10.
53. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 174.
54. Ibid., pp. 175–77.
55. Ibid., p. 177.
CHAPTER FOUR “Greetings from the Matador”
1. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 57.
2. “Friedrich Mahling came from the city mission; he was a man who could provide exact diagnoses and analyses of the effects of the social upheavals on the Church that started in the late years of the Kaiser’s reign and lasted until the years after the World War. Inspired by the goal to keep up the Church of the People also in new times, he prepared his students in all fields of practical theology to fulfill their future profession as pastors in the face of new conditions. Only in 1920, the University established a new Chair for Mission Studies. It was held by Julius Richter, who had already been teaching for quite some time at the faculty and who had been granted an honorary doctorate. His five-volume History of Missions and an abundance of other publications about different stages and areas of the world mission in the past and present were Richter’s instruments to give academic legitimacy to this young discipline. Furthermore, he was a former member of the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910 and consequently committed to the international ecumenical movement.” Wendebourg, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Berliner Universität.”
3. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 57–58.
4. Ibid., pp. 53–55, 60.
5. Ibid., pp. 53–55.
6. Ibid., p. 53.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 54.
9. Ibid., p. 59.
10. Ibid.
11. Green cited in ibid., p. 69.
12. Bonhoeffer, ibid., p. 59.
13. First citation is my translation from the German. The second citation can be found in ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 66.
15. Ibid., p. 60.
16. Ibid., p. 67.
17. Ibid., p. 62.
18. Ibid., p. 82.
19. Ibid., p. 62.
20. Ibid., p. 70.
21. Ibid., pp. 70, 80.
22. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 4.
23. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 60.
24. Ibid., p. 69.
25. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” pp. 4–5.
26. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 47.
27. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 68.
28. Ibid., p. 174.
29. Ibid., p. 64.
30. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 66.
31. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 62–64.
32. Ibid., p. 61.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p. 481.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 483. Here in the restless heart, in the “great disturbance” and the “great disruption,” emerges another path than guilt and shame, the path of God to human beings, the path of revelation and of grace, the path of Christ, the path of justification by grace alone.
37. Ibid., pp. 491–92.
38. Ibid., pp. 515–16.
39. Ibid., pp. 494–95.
40. Ibid., p. 501.
41. Ibid., p. 519.
42. Ibid., pp. 519–20.
43. Ibid., pp. 174–75.
44. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 47.
45. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 53–94.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 174.
48. Ibid., pp. 174–75.
49. Ibid., p. 54.
50. Ibid., pp. 485–87.
51. Ibid., pp. 485–90.
52. Ibid., p. 83.
53. Dietrich wrote to his parents, “Now we are planning our trip to the south, and Klaus shocked me by telling me he was to withdraw money for the trip and for his stay here in Spain using a letter of credit. Briefly put, this is how things stand. I had 1000 pesetas here = 720 marks. From that, I withdrew 400 pesetas; 120 pesetas of that went for the athletic outfit (which is, however, quite respectable and is considered such a bargain that someone else is having one made as well), ca. 80 pesetas for our Montserrat outing (i.e., 15 marks each day, including travel), also tennis club, racket, socks over 100 pesetas, then I have to pay all sorts of dues, buy all sorts of things like ties, so that over time the 400 pesetas have simply run out, even though on a daily basis I get along on my salary. So there are still 600 pesetas here, i.e., 450 marks. The trip south and back is 3,000 km and costs ca. 225 marks each. If we were to travel third class the whole way, we could save 75 marks, but we would be spending a great deal of time on the frightfully slow railways, would often have to travel for considerable hours at night, etc. Daily expenses will probably be an average of 10 marks, eighteen days = 180 marks, so that the whole thing will cost a bit over 400 marks for each of us. Was that approximately what you imagined, or not? Please write soon concerning this so that we can make arrangements. Klaus still has 500 marks here, so that we can go ahead and depart if that’s all right with you, although it would be better if you could raise the limit on the letter of credit (which at the moment would be very advantageous given the low status of the peseta)…. It would be very good if you write soon, considering all the preparations we can begin making only then.” Ibid., p. 84.
54. Ibid., p. 98. Referenced in DBW as Tarragona.
55. Ibid., p. 94.
56. Ibid., p. 93. A “baldachin” is defined by Clifford Green in the notes as “[a] canopy, often richly embroidered, carried above the dignitary.”
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., pp. 95, 91.
59. Ibid., p. 122.
60. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 1.
61. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 61.
62. Ibid., p. 63. Bonhoeffer wrote, “During the afternoon I had no desire to work and so went to the movies with Mr. Thumm: Don Quixote was being shown. Because I had never read the novel, I couldn’t really get a good overview of the content, so the film probably had some errors. Besides, like all Spanish films, endlessly long. The cinema is the cheapest form of entertainment here. For one peseta at the most, one is entertained for four consecutive hours. Two or three, often even four films are shown one after the other; the first are generally incredibly dumb and boring. Nonetheless this film did bring the problem of Don Quixote to my attention, and I will probably soon pick up the novel itself.”
63. He returned to Don Quixote in his Ethics (DBW, vol. 6, pp. 51, 80) and in his prison writings (DBW, vol. 8, p. 42, 176, 303).
64. Bonhoeff
er, DBW, vol. 10, p. 103.
65. Ibid., p. 112.
66. Ibid., p. 87.
67. Ibid.
68. Bonhoeffer already detected a hint of world suspicion and Christian triumphalism in Barth, without having yet met him, and for reasons that will become clearer over time, Bonhoeffer was truly bothered by it.
69. Ibid., p. 75.
70. Ibid., p. 106.
71. Ibid., pp. 98–99, 106.
72. Ibid., p. 99.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., p. 118; Clifford Green notes, “Probably St. Christopher, whose feast day was actually July 25.” St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers, and, as Bonhoeffer’s report illustrates, he had been adopted in modern times by motorists in particular.
75. Bonhoeffer, ibid., p. 77.
76. Ibid., p. 84.
77. Ibid., p. 74.
78. Adolescent boredom: “As far as going swimming is concerned, things are rather awkward insofar as you have to walk a half-hour through the hot city, which is not particularly attractive and is also extremely boring if you are by yourself. But I have a bathtub with a shower head, in which I will spend most of the day.” Ibid., pp. 102–3.
79. Ibid., p. 82.
80. Ibid., p. 110.
81. Ibid., pp. 165–66. He asked his sister to send him a copy of Paul Tillich—“Right away!!”—and to his Barcelona address, of course; he wanted to read Tillich in preparation of a fourth lecture, but it appears Bonhoeffer never gave a fourth lecture. Clifford Green cited in ibid., p. 157.
82. Ibid., p. 363.
83. He said, “Acting according to principles is unproductive and merely reflects or copies the law. Acting in freedom is creative. Christians draw the forms of their ethical activity out of eternity itself, as it were, put these forms with sovereignty in the world, as deed, as their own creations born of the freedom of God’s children.” Indeed, Nietzsche’s Overman is not, as he imagined, the opposite of the Christian; without realizing it, Nietzsche imbued the Overman with many of the features of the free Christian as described and conceived by both Paul and Luther. Bonhoeffer states, “Traditional morals … can never provide the standards for the action of Christians.” Ibid., pp. 366–67.
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