Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  84. Ibid., p. 367.

  85. Ibid., pp. 370–71.

  86. Ibid., p. 156.

  87. Ibid.

  88. Ibid., p. 167.

  89. Ibid., pp. 170–71.

  CHAPTER FIVE “Covered in the Moss of Tradition”

  1. Bonhoeffer correspondence with Detlef Albers, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 177.

  2. Ibid., p. 189.

  3. Ibid., pp. 182–83.

  4. Ibid., pp. 177–78.

  5. Ibid., p. 178.

  6. Bonhoeffer wrote to Harnack, “It is no accident that during recent weeks my thoughts have repeatedly been drawn to you and to your seminar as if by a magnet, since it is once again the anniversary of those early days in July, when for years you would take your seminar in the afternoon to Grunewald to give us a few hours, times that are surely as vivid for many others, as for me, as if they were only yesterday. And while during the course of the semester’s work I had the chance to express modestly the gratitude I always feel toward you in an inconspicuous fashion through the actual attempts at collaboration, and because on several occasions over the past few years I was able to take the floor in the name of the seminar and speak to you openly about those unexpressed things that were on our hearts—words that were always as difficult for me—for who can find the right words for such things?—as I would like to have spoken them from my heart—for what is more beautiful than being permitted to speak without reserve about that which moves us? So, too, this year, when I am so distant from all that, such hours of gratitude often come upon me precisely at this time, and such hours should not be left unused. Here amid all my purely practical work, where as a scholar I am completely dependent on myself and my books, where I must live without any exchange of ideas in this regard, I think back to those hours in your house and to those afternoons in Grunewald with a certain sense of longing and melancholy, and often wish I could sit again for but a single hour in your seminar circle or have a conversation with you of the unforgettable kind that I remember from seminar celebrations, outings, and various other occasions. Only here have I come to realize completely what I had and what I have lost, both in a scholarly and in a human sense. But this realization is accompanied by the hope that it will not be much more than six months now, and I will have all that again, and today I am already looking forward to it. That said, the time I am spending here as an academic hermit, absorbed in so many new impressions from the practical side of life, does seem to have the potential to be quite fruitful in its own way. One gains distance from so many things with which one had become a bit obsessive, one acquires a measure of freedom from didactic doctrines and also learns to recognize much more precisely the limits of the value of pure scholarship; and in turn all that provides the point of departure from which one reexamines everything one has worked on. Hence I believe that my time here—precisely this time spent outside Germany—has a significance that I should make the most of. I am glad to be here but will also be glad to return home, for scholarship never releases those it has seized. I have very few others to thank besides you for the fact that it has seized me … that I remember from seminar celebrations, outings, and various other occasions.” Ibid., p. 115.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid., p. 179.

  9. Leibholz-Bonhoeffer, The Bonhoeffers, p. 9.

  10. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 190.

  11. Ibid., p. 186.

  12. Ibid., p. 205.

  13. Reinhold Seeberg in ibid., p. 145.

  14. Bonhoeffer, ibid., p. 103, emphasis mine. The birthday present—as attested by Bonhoeffer’s letter to Susanne Bonhoeffer on June 20, 1928—was a piece of “Toledo handwork,” a particular kind of embroidery (à jour or openwork pattern).

  15. Ibid., p. 191.

  16. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 2, pp. 157–61.

  17. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 209.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid., p. 213. The report states, “Likewise, the comment in the curriculum vitae, that the author has followed the progress of dialectical theology with an active interest, is confirmed by this work. Its course is in a constant argument with dialectical theology, and the familiar concepts of this theology are recurring and to some extent adopted. In this respect, the dissertation is a very characteristic document of the interest that the younger generation of theologians takes in dialectical theology. Yet one cannot speak of a dependence here either, for occasionally there is also a very energetic objection to Barth (e.g., 94, 130, 132, 171). But one cannot fail to recognize the sympathy with Barth’s religious standpoint, most especially with the eschatological standpoint, when, e.g., faith is described as determination by the future (178). Kohlbrugge is cited with absolute agreement (150, 153, 164). It cannot be denied that the author is a student of Reinhold Seeberg. Epistemologically he is explicitly tied to him (33, 38). Otherwise, too, the point of departure that the author has taken from Seeberg is expressed explicitly (97ff., 115, 1). But even here, the author intends to proceed beyond Seeberg’s position” (pp. 210–11).

  20. Wilhelm Lütgert to Adolf Grimme in ibid., pp. 215–16.

  21. Ibid., p. 216. In fact, according to Clifford Green, “Bonhoeffer occupied the position of assistant from May 1 to July 31, 1929, for which he was paid 900.00 marks.” Green cited in ibid.

  22. “Bonhoeffer’s talent for finding people to do things for him proved useful,” Bethge said. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 129.

  23. Wilhelm Lütgert to Adolf Grimme in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 216.

  24. Bonhoeffer, ibid., p. 206.

  25. Ibid., p. 229.

  26. Ibid., pp. 229–30.

  27. Rahner, Encyclopedia of Theology, p. 173.

  28. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 558–71.

  29. Ibid., pp. 558, 229.

  30. Ibid., pp. 229–30.

  31. Ibid., p. 233.

  32. Ibid., pp. 230–31.

  33. Ibid., p. 230.

  34. Ibid., pp. 574–75.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid., pp. 226–27.

  37. Ibid., pp. 227–28.

  38. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” pp. 14–15.

  39. For the trial lecture Bonhoeffer proposed the topics: (1) The significance of the sociological category for theology; (2) the possibility of a dogmatic system; and (3) the concept of dialectic in dialectical theology. He had covered the first topic over several hundred pages in “Sanctorum Communio.” The second he had explored in “Act and Being,” only to conclude that a dogmatic system drained the vitality out of Christian faith and practice (as any claim to systematic knowledge in the humanities tended to quash spontaneity and verve). The faculty picked the third topic, the “concept of dialectic in the so-called dialectical theology.” Or, more simply stated, the theology of Karl Barth. The manuscript of the trial lecture has not been preserved, though it very likely resembled the same talk he gave several months later titled “Theology of Crisis,” in which he outlined in fairly prosaic fashion the basic themes in Barth’s theology. The fall lecture is intriguing in only one respect: Bonhoeffer put aside the criticisms of dialectical theology he had made in the second dissertation and spoke without reservation as an apologist for Barth to a skeptical audience. But it did appear that Bonhoeffer’s attention had moved to other concerns. See ibid.

  40. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 224.

  41. Ibid., pp. 389–408.

  42. Ibid., p. 408.

  43. “Veni creator spiritus”: found in Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack, p. 442.

  44. A young man from Bonhoeffer’s Barcelona youth group, the troubled Karl-Heinz Köttgen, had also joined the family for the holiday at Friedrichsbrunn.

  45. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 238.

  46. Ibid. See also note 2.

  47. Ibid., p. 240.

  48. Ibid., p. 385.

  49. Ibid., p. 261.

  CHAPTER SIX “I Heard the Gospel Preached in the Negro Churches”

  1. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol
. 10, pp. 241–42. In note 5 on this page editor Clifford Green writes, “Bonhoeffer uses the German cognate ‘Prolet,’ short for ‘proletarian’; in addition to its class connotation, it can also mean ‘lout’ or ‘clod.’ ”

  2. Bonhoeffer, ibid., p. 242.

  3. Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), p. 97.

  4. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 147.

  5. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 242.

  6. Ibid., p. 243.

  7. “Though occasionally Black students had attended the seminary since the mid-nineteenth century, the number significantly increased during Coffin’s presidency. In the years 1926–33, for example, those who came to [Union]…included William H. King, Leroy J. Montgomery, J. Neal Hughley, Shelby A. Rooks, William E. Carrington, Claude L. Franklin, Colbert H. Pearson, M. Moran Weston, Charles E. Byrd, Porter W. Phillips, and Seth C. Edwards.” Still, despite the new social mix of the student body, the majority of seminarians at Union remained northeastern white males. Although the number of women graduating from the seminary would increase in the Coffin years—in part because of the founding of the School of Sacred Music—Coffin was not particularly keen on the notion of a woman studying theology. As Robert Handy notes in his history of Union, a number (most) of the denominations served by the seminary did not permit the ordination of women. “When Doris Webster Havice—who entered the seminary the same year Niebuhr joined the faculty—asked Coffin for permission to complete her last year abroad (at New College, Edinburgh), Coffin responded gruffly, ‘I will do everything in my power to get rid of you,’ adding that the presence of women was ‘hazardous’ to the wellbeing of the school. Havice later earned a doctorate at Columbia University.” Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York, p. 178.

  8. Cited in ibid., pp. 161–62; see also Smylie, “Pastor, Educator, Ecumenist.”

  9. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 21.

  10. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 310.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., pp. 293–94.

  13. Ibid., pp. 310–11.

  14. Ibid., p. 265.

  15. Ibid., p. 294.

  16. Ibid., p. 309.

  17. From Franz Hildebrandt, in ibid., pp. 247–48.

  18. Ibid., p. 246.

  19. Ibid., p. 266.

  20. Ibid., pp. 266, 309–10.

  21. Ibid., pp. 309–10. Alexis de Tocqueville states, “The Americans, having admitted the principal doctrines of the Christian religion without inquiry, are obliged to accept in like manner a great number of moral truths originating in it and connected with it.” Democracy in America, p. 5. There is no indication that Bonhoeffer had read Tocqueville’s landmark study.

  22. Cited in Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 17.

  23. Larry Rasmussen, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), p. 1.

  24. These are Larry Rasmussen’s words.

  25. Radical Religion, 4 (Spring 1937), pp. 2–3.

  26. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 23, note 115.

  27. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 451, and Niebuhr cited by Clifford Green in ibid., note 13. Bonhoeffer, like Martin Luther King later, would say to Niebuhr that his conception of love was too transcendent. See Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 40–41.

  28. Bonhoeffer’s course paper, “The Religious Experience of Grace and the Ethical Life,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 445–51. Bonhoeffer wrote on August 7, 1928, to his friend Helmut Rößler of the contrast between his former academic life as a student and his current life as the pastor of the German-speaking congregation: in the latter, “work and life genuinely converge, a synthesis that we all probably sought but hardly found in our student days—when one really lives one life rather than two, or better: half a life; it lends dignity to the work and objectivity to the worker, and a recognition of one’s own limitations [Grenzen] of the sort acquired only within concrete life” (pp. 126–28). After returning to Berlin, Bonhoeffer wrote in a correspondence with Detlef Albers, the teacher of history and geography at the German Protestant school in Barcelona, “Perhaps today…‘spirit’ [Geist] really is to be found in the particular, that is, precisely in the ‘material,’ in concretely given reality—and precisely not in ‘intellectuality’ [Geistigkeit]” (pp. 182–83).

  29. Horton and Freire, We Make the Road by Walking, p. 43.

  30. Horton, Kohl, and Kohl, The Long Haul, p. 35.

  31. The historian Gary Dorrien refers to the tone of the book as “icy, aggressive and eerily omniscient.” Soul in Society, p. 91.

  32. Secular liberals appealed to reason and nature while Christian liberals appealed to love in their mutual struggles for justice; nevertheless, both, argued Niebuhr, were inadequate responses. The secular liberal appeal to reason and nature fails to grasp human sinfulness and the wide-reaching consequences of the Fall, especially its corruption of knowledge, while the Christian liberal appeal to love fails to grasp human sinfulness as its corruption of society and politics.

  33. Rasmussen, “Introduction: A Public Theologian,” pp. 2–3.

  34. See http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=3279&C=2735 (accessed February 14, 2013).

  35. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, pp. 128, 283.

  36. His mention of Niebuhr in his progress report of the year is hardly a rousing endorsement: “Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most significant and creative contemporary theologians in America, whose primary works one must know, if one is to have an overview of the theological situation.” Bonhoeffer cited in Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 539; written after his return from New York at the end of July 1939.

  37. Rasmussen, “Introduction: A Public Theologian,” p. 1.

  38. “An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942–1943: After Ten Years,” in Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, p. 52.

  39. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 8, p. 24.

  40. Ursula Niebuhr did not at all share her husband’s affection for Bonhoeffer. She found him rather pretentious. What may have struck some of his fellow Union students as native confidence appeared to her as the arrogance of a pampered intellectual. “He was so much more densely and seriously educated than the other students,” she said, and he carried “that knowledge proudly.” Sifton, The Serenity Prayer, p. 136. It is not clear whether the Niebuhrs understood the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s experiences in America changed his understanding of the theological vocation. Their daughter later described a Bonhoeffer who regarded as quaint his fellow students’ involvement in progressive social ministries. Even by the year’s end, he had not learned “that to put one’s faith to the test of lived experience is to put one’s life on the line” (p. 140). While the truth is that Bonhoeffer worried that the American seminarians’ zealous participation in the social justice was poorly served by theologians whose articulations of the Christian faith were thinly veiled versions of American pragmatic philosophy. The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas would argue in his 2001 Gifford Lectures that Reinhold Niebuhr’s Yale Divinity School thesis on William James, titled “The Validity and Certainty of Religious Knowledge,” offers insight into not only James’s pragmatic critique of religion but also Niebuhr’s own Jamesian premises: the truth of Christian revelation, scripture, and tradition is the ability to generate myths that regulate and order religious and moral life. See Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology: Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 2001 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001).

  41. Jean Lasserre cited in Kelly, “An Interview with Jean Lasserre.”

  42. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 67.

  43. Nelson, “Friends He Met in America,” p. 37
. After 1931, the two unlikely friends met only twice. They exchanged letters throughout the 1930s and until Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment in 1943. Unfortunately, Lasserre burned all but two of Bonhoeffer’s letters. “Lasserre was a member of the French resistance, and it was too dangerous to retain his friend’s correspondence,” Nelson explained.

  44. Jean Lasserre cited in Kelly, “An Interview with Jean Lasserre.” Lasserre continued, “It was then that I noticed the Americans were for the most part children and weren’t really aware of the situation. They sympathized with the German soldiers against whom they had fought a few years before and they practically ridiculed the misfortunes of the French soldiers.” The film was released in August 1930 and won an Academy Award in November for Outstanding Motion Picture; it was based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque, Westen nichts Neues (German, 1928; English, 1929), which was assigned for the first class of the second-semester course “Ethical Viewpoints in Modern Literature” on the subject “War Literature.” See Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 420–21.

  45. Ibid., p. 261.

  46. Ibid., pp. 312–13.

  47. Ibid., p. 313.

  48. Ibid., p. 266.

  49. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” pp. 23–24. Also see Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 316–17 and note 37 on 316.

  50. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 91.

  51. Ibid., pp. 316–17.

  52. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” p. 24.

  53. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 261.

  54. Ibid., p. 260.

  55. Ibid., p. 265.

  56. Ibid., pp. 268–69.

  57. Ibid., p. 268.

  58. Ibid., p. 269.

  59. He preached two sermons in Havana, both on the same Sunday.

  60. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 631.

  61. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 257–58. The Home Missions Council focused on all those missionary activities falling outside normal congregational life, especially social service work among Native Americans and migrant workers.

  62. Ibid., p. 266.

  63. Clifford Green notes that Bonhoeffer wrote those observations on January 2, 1931, to his brother Karl-Friedrich by hand on the stationery of “The Peninsular & Occidental Steamship Company—Havana—Port Tampa—Key West.” That was the cruise ship he was traveling on in his return voyage to the United States after spending Christmas in Havana, Cuba. He found himself describing this “shameful impression” of white–black southern interaction in that letter while he was traveling through the South, in the middle of it. Green also indicates that Bonhoeffer was deeply disturbed by news of lynchings. In February of 1931, Bonhoeffer learned of a lynching that occurred on January 12, in Maryville, Missouri, when a black man was accused of rape, chained to a schoolhouse roof, and burned to death by a lynch mob. Two months later, in April of 1931, Bonhoeffer was again deeply disturbed by the story of the infamous Scottsboro case, in which “nine young black men were hastily convicted and condemned to death, after being accused,” Bonhoeffer argued, “of raping a white girl of dubious reputation.” He went on to describe it as another “terrible miscarriage of justice.” Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, p. 269.