102. “114a. Hardy Arnold to Eberhard Arnold,” Birmingham, June 14, 1934, and “114b. Hardy Arnold to Edith Boker,” Birmingham, June 15, 1934, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13. pp. 158–63.
103. Ibid.; Arnold, Innerland, p. 311. Eberhard Arnold noticed another worrisome pattern in Bonhoeffer’s presentation. He said nothing about the Holy Spirit. He spoke only about Jesus. In his summation of a community permeated by the Sermon on the Mount, Bonhoeffer held forth gloriously on “religious exercises and serious study, and the process of conforming to the essential core of the truth of Christ.” But without an appreciation of the Holy Spirit, a spiritual leader—itself a problematic notion for Arnold—would eventually replace Jesus Christ with a hardened rule, and the rule would be set by the whims of a single person—which in this case meant Bonhoeffer. Arnold thought that Bonhoeffer may have even been too much influenced by Barth in this regard, identifying “spirit-filled Christians” with Pietists and navel-gazers. Eberhard Arnold, Hardy Arnold’s father, said this in an exchange: “The belief in unanimous community is so amazingly unknown everywhere, because the third article of the Apostles’ Creed, that of faith in the Holy Spirit and the work of the Spirit, has been totally lost to Christendom in general. Even in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who has not yet come to see us here although we telephoned him, the foundation of the renunciation of private property and holding of goods in common, as well as nonviolence, still seems to me, like many another such undertakings, to be quite far from the calling of the community by the Spirit of Jesus Christ.” See “115a & 115b. Eberhard to Hardy Arnold,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 164–66.
104. Rieger, “Contacts with London,” p. 98.
105. Bonhoeffer’s letter to Gandhi had been preceded by a formal introduction by Archbishop George Bell, who in a letter of October, 22, 1934, described Bonhoeffer as “a friend of mine … who wants to study community life as well as methods of training.” Bell “heartily commend[ed]” the young German pastor to Gandhi, calling him a “very good theologian” and a “most earnest man.” See “154. George Bell to Mahatma Gandi,” October 22, 1934, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 225.
106. “158. From Mahatma Gandi,” November 1, 1934, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 229–30. In original English, printed in and photocopied from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 59 (September 16–December 15, 1934) (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust; published in Delhi by the director, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India; printed by Shantilal Harjivan Shah, 1974). Bonhoeffer’s travel companion would have been either Julius Rieger or Herbert Jehle; both later said they had made plans to travel to India with Bonhoeffer. The Anglican priest, Charles Freer Andrews, had very likely given Bonhoeffer details on India; Andrews had spent most of his life in India and immersed himself deeply in Indian culture and Gandhian spirituality. Andrews also encouraged Bonhoeffer to visit Woodbrooke and to speak with Horace Alexander at Selly Oak. From Charles Freer Andrews, April 29, 1934, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 136–37 and 137, note 2.
107. Reinhold Niebuhr told the ethicist Larry Rasmussen in a 1968 interview that he had advised Bonhoeffer not to study with Gandhi, saying that Gandhi was “an ethical liberal with philosophical footings at great distance from the Weltanschauung of a sophisticated German Lutheran; furthermore, Nazi Germany was no place for attempting the practice of nonviolent resistance.… Hitler’s creed and deeds bore no resemblance to British ways and means. The Nazis would suffer none of the pains of conscience about using violence which the British did, and organized passive resistance would end in utter failure.” Rasmussen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 213. Bonhoeffer nevertheless pursued his plans for India; see Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 225. 4.
108. Rieger, Bonhoeffer in England, p. 27.
109. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 370. Hardy Arnold had been delighted to tell a colleague that Bonhoeffer shared the Bruderhof view that Gandhi’s movement was “without doubt the most positive living example today in the area of individual mysticism and the monastic thinking connected to that.” “114b. Hardy Arnold to Edith Boker,” Birmingham, June 15, 1934, in ibid., p. 163.
110. When Bonhoeffer told George Bell that the issues at stake in the Kirchenkampf were not simply internal church matters but ones that raised inescapable questions about the future of Christianity, he was affirming Christian internationalism and asking whether Western Christianity had run aground.
111. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 81.
112. Ibid., p. 152. Bonhoeffer “was haunted by the question about the will of God hic et nunc.,” and he turned to Gandhi with his teachings on passive resistance and the soul-force of agapeic love did not represent God’s will for the nations. Jacobi, “Drawn Towards Suffering,” p. 73.
113. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 370.
114. Ibid., p. 22.
115. Ibid., p. 151.
116. Ibid., p. 74.
117. Leith, ed., Creeds of the Churches, p. 517.
118. See Barth and Green, Karl Barth, pp. 148–51.
119. Barth cited in Busch and Bowden, Karl Barth, p. 248: “But that does not excuse me for not having at least gone through the motions of fighting.”
120. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 135.
121. In her lecture at the University of Virginia on the Confessing Church (“The Rise and Fall of the Confessing Church”), Victoria Barnett explained that, despite its story being widely praised among contemporary church people, and indeed in some Protestant circles granted near-canonical status, “the Barmen Declaration moves in two different directions.” On the one hand, it can be read “as a retreat inward to a pure Christian message that will remain untainted by the politics of the world”; on the other hand, it issues an outward “challenge to the world and its attempts to stifle the conscience and the spirit.” In fact, the declaration was “read in both directions at the time, even by the more than 100 Protestant leaders who voted in Barmen to affirm it. As a condemnation of German Christian ideology, of the attempt to create an ideological Christianity that conformed to National Socialism, the Barmen Declaration was a clear statement to the world, a real ‘here I stand’ moment. But the basis of the Christianity it proclaimed—a return to the scriptures, to the claim to follow Christ alone (not any worldly führer)—could also be read as a move inward, a call to ‘let the church be the church,’ to withdraw from the tumultuous political world toward institutional purity, to ‘render unto Caesar.’ This was actually the most widespread interpretation at the time.”
122. Cited in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 6, p. 344, note 22.
123. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 179.
124. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Church Is Dead,” sermon presented at the various ecumenical conferences, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland, 1932.
125. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 135.
126. Ibid., p. 129.
127. Ibid., p. 309.
128. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 6, p. 163.
129. Bonhoeffer cited in: Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, 76.
130. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 29.
CHAPTER TEN “A New Kind of Monasticism”
1. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 9, p. 138.
2. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 347.
3. Ibid., p. 425. During World War II, there were several industrial companies that were of military importance and in which thousands of people were employed. In 1940, the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft I was built. Ten thousand members of the Royal Air Force and of the U.S. Air Force were handed over there until April 1945. From November 1943 to 1945, there was a KZ, or Konzentrationslager (concentration camp), on the site of the military airfield, a branch of the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. About seven thousand women and men from twenty-one nations were forced to work for the Heinkel airplane factory; more than two thousand prisoners died.
4. Pejsa, Matriarch of Conspiracy, p. 207.
5. Bonhoeffer to Ernst Cromwell, June 1935, letters
in possession of Stephen Plant, Cambridge, England.
6. Mary Glazener, A Cup of Wrath: The Story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Resistance to Hitler (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 1993), p. 113.
7. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 145.
8. Bonhoeffer to Ernst Cromwell, July 2, 1935, in Letters to London, edited by Stephen J. Plant and Toni Burrowes-Cromwell (London, SPCK, 2013), pp. 60–1.
9. Pejsa, Matriarch of the Conspiracy, p. 208.
10. Cited in Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 115.
11. Cited in ibid., p. 116.
12. Bonhoeffer made every effort to stay in touch with his former students at Finkenwalde, but restrictions on his correspondence required further circumventions of official policy. He often responded to questions large and small in the circular letters but through indirection.
13. Cited in Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 117.
14. Cited in ibid., “Life Together,” p. 153.
15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Way to Freedom: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1935–39, edited and introduced by Edwin H. Robertson, translated by Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden. (London: Collins, 1966), p. 34.
16. Schönherr, “The Single-Heartedness of the Provoked,” p. 126.
17. Glazener, A Cup of Wrath, p. 113.
18. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 49.
19. Schönherr, “The Single-Heartedness of the Provoked,” p. 128.
20. Cited in Robert O. Smith, “Bonhoeffer and Musical Metaphor,” Word and World, vol. 26, no. 2, (2006), p. 198.
21. Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pp. 107–11.
22. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Way to Freedom, p. 30.
23. Staats, “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” in, DBW, vol. 10, p. 614.
24. William Richard Russell, Berlin Embassy (New York: Dutton, 1941), p. 41.
25. Busing, “Reminiscences of Finkenwalde,” p. 1108.
26. He aligned himself with the Confessing Church out of respect for the Old Prussian Union and his father’s high regard for independent regional churches.
27. In his biography of Eberhard Bethge, John de Gruchy explains, “As momentous as both Barmen and Dahlmen were for the church, they were not explicitly acts of political resistance but acts of faith and confession. Nor did they address the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Nonetheless, they had serious consequences for Eberhard Bethge and fourteen of his fellow theological students in Wittenberg, who courageously took the risk of publicly identifying with the Confessing Church. Mindful of Luther’s own fateful step in nailing his ‘ninety-five theses’ to the Wittenberg Castle Church door in 1517, fifteen candidates for the ministry wrote a terse letter to the secretary of the Reichsbishop on 28 October 1934, informing him that they had shifted their allegiance to the Council of Brethren of the Confessing Church. At the insistence of the Reich Church authorities in Berlin, they were immediately expelled from the seminary and thus lost the possibility of sitting [for] their second theological examination, which was necessary for ordination.” In Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 12.
28. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 7, p. 100.
29. Vibrans cited in de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting, Spirit, p. 17.
30. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 8, p. 200.
31. Bonhoeffer, The Way to Freedom, p. 31.
32. Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 107.
33. The phrase is Bonhoeffer’s own. See “The First Year at Finkenwalde,” in The Way to Freedom, p. 31.
34. Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 107.
35. Ibid., p. 111.
36. Ibid., p. 108.
37. Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, trans. John Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1960), p. 27.
38. Cited in Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jensen, “Life Together,” p. 153.
39. Ibid. These meditations offered Jensen the soul-care he needed after being confined to a Gestapo prison; he had preached a sermon that related the story of the Good Samaritan to German Jews. “There are still some marginal comments to the psalms in my Bible which date from the Gross-Schlönwitz time, for instance, the date 10th November 1938, the ‘Crystal Night,’ beside Psalm lxxiv, 8: ‘They burned all the meeting places of God in the land.’ ” While the Old Testament was vilified, mocked, and quite often rejected by the Deutsche Christen, Bonhoeffer encouraged his students to reclaim the Psalms as the prayers of the church, promises of presence amid suffering.
40. Ibid., p. 155.
41. Cited in Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, pp. 592–93.
42. Zimmermann and Smith, eds. I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 110.
43. Cited in ibid., p. 125.
44. From the lecture notes of Joachim Kanitz, 1935, NL B 10, 6, pp. 22ff. See also the reference to Kierkegaard in DBWE, vol. 4, pp. 61ff.
45. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 4, p. 57.
46. At the same time, Karl Barth pursued the the work of the Christian dogmatics as an exercise in nachdenken: a thinking after the language of scripture and tradition so as to revivify the faith with new energies and fresh perspective. Barth’s astonishing achievement was nothing less than the “lengthy, even leisurely unfolding” of a theological universe, as Yale theologian Hans Frei explained, an utterly necessary remedy to the exhaustion of Christian language. Barth was “restating or re-using a language that had once been accustomed talk, both in first-order use in ordinary or real life, and in second-order technical theological reflection, but had now for a long time, perhaps more than two hundred and fifty years, been receding from natural familiarity, certainly in theological discourse.” Karl Barth, in the tradition of Reformed theology, held that divine revelation endows Christians with the gifts to think God’s thoughts after him. Bonhoeffer had no serious qualms with this basic conviction. But with church people marching in lockstep to the drumbeats of the führer, a different aspect would need to be emphasized. Nachdenken without nachfolgen was a beautiful castle built on sand.
47. Kuske and Tödt, “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” DBW, vol. 4. p. 290.
48. Stephen Plant, Bonhoeffer (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 98.
49. Bethge, Bonhoeffer, p. 456.
50. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 4, p. 99.
51. Jørgen Glenthøj, Ulrich Kabitz, and Wolf Krötke write, “According to Jutta Jochimsen, this is probably a reference to the performance by the Berlin Vocal Academy and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Fritz Stein on March 22, 1940, Good Friday, in the Berlin Garrison Church (information provided to the German editor by Jutta Jochimsen, August 25, 1988).” In Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 39.
52. Lehmann, “Paradox of Discipleship,” pp. 41–45.
53. Oetinger’s translation of Swedenborg into German brought him into conflict with ecclesial authorities, but his friendship with the Duke of Würtenburg protected him from suspension or excommunication.
54. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 145.
55. Cited in Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 149.
56. De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 29.
57. Outside of Berlin, very little changed. In one town where Bonhoeffer gave a talk, members of the German Christians hung a sign in the bookstore: “After the Olympics we will beat the Confessing Church to jam”; “When we will throw the Jews out, the Confessing Church will be over.”
58. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p. 232.
59. Large, Berlin, pp. 293–96.
60. Cited in David Large, Berlin, p. 295.
61. Ibid., p. 296.
62. David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 142.
63. De Gruchy, Daring Trusting, Spirit, p. 33.
64. Ibid.
65. Bonhoeffer correspondence with Eberhard Bethge, July 28, 1936, translated by Ingrid Müller and Charles Marsh; unpublished.
66. De Gruchy,
Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 30.
67. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 14, pp. 224–27, emphasis mine.
68. De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 30.
69. While in Switzerland, Bonhoeffer had been disappointed to learn of Barth’s unavailability in Basel but delighted that he was finally able to introduce Bethge to Sutz, his New York classmate. Bonhoeffer found time to write Barth an update on his book Discipleship and appears to have been too busy to fret over Barth’s curt response. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 555.
70. Eberhard’s cousin Vibrans returned to his pastorate in Rosian, “and the misunderstandings of the Chamby journey were apparently soon forgotten. Vibrans remained in his pastorate until it became impossible for ‘illegal’ pastors to avoid conscription. In May 1940 he was drafted into the army, serving in France, then the Balkans and finally on the Russian front, where his unit was involved in the invasion in June 1941. He was killed in action on February 3, 1942. Throughout this period Vibrans remained Bethge’s close friend, as well as a friend of Bonhoeffer and others from his Finkenwalde days. Bethge preached at his memorial service in Rosian on March 22, 1942, reminding those gathered not only of Gerhard’s life and witness as a Christian and pastor of the Confessing Church, but of his love of music and especially poetry, and his longing for community, friendship and love. Thus, sadly, Bethge’s friendship with his cousin, which had begun in boyhood and lasted for so many years, came to an end. After the war, Vibrans’s widow, Elisabeth, married Christoph Bethge, Eberhard’s younger brother.” De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 32.
71. The book was published in 1939 by Christian Kaiser Verlag as Heft 61 in the series Theologische Existenz Heute.
72. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 5, pp. 29-29.
73. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: A Discussion of Christian Fellowship (New York: Harper, 1992), pp. 18–20, 30, 39.
74. Albrecht Schönherr cited in Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 146.
75. Wilhelm Niesel, cited in ibid., p. 146.
76. W. H. Auden, cited in Edward Callan, “Exorcising Mittenhofer,” London Magazine 14, no. 1 (1974): 79. Here was an example of Auden’s prophecy for a civilization in dissolution, that “in elite lands your generation may be called upon to opt for a discipline that out-peers the monks, a Way of obedience, poverty and—good grief—perhaps chastity.”
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