Strange Glory
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77. Wilhelm Niesel, cited in Zimmermann and Smith, eds., I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 145.
78. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1954), p. 86.
79. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 185.
80. Karl Barth cited in Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 146.
81. For Bonhoeffer, “the Psalms, and also the entire Old Testament, were the Book of Christ.” The Old Testament should therefore be read in the light of both the incarnation and the cross. A scholarly exposition of this vantage point has been offered recently by Martin Kuske of East Germany, The Old Testament as the Book of Christ: An Appraisal of Bonhoeffer’s Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976).
82. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 589. Earlier abuses of religious leaders held as prisoners had created some concern among Nazi political leaders regarding public perception, so there was some laxity in prosecution in this area.
83. Thomas E. Leuze, “The Collective Pastorates of the Confessing Church: A Model for Ministerial Preparation,” unpublished paper, Chapman Seminary, Oakland City University, Oakland City, Indiana.
84. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 34.
85. Friedrich Onnasch’s son Fritz served as inspector of studies for the group. Previously he had studied at the preachers’ seminary in Finkenwalde under Bonhoeffer. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 590.
86. Ibid., p. 590.
87. Quoted in Informationsdienst, no. 4, DC Landesleitung Nassau-Hese, Frankfurt am Main/M (January 30, 1937).
88. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, pp. 590–94.
89. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 197.
90. Victoria Barnett, “The Rise and Fall of the Confessing Church,” University of Virginia Lecture, March 2009. Barnett said, “Throughout the 1930s, each year is marked by major political events as well as—on the subterranean level, not frequently traced in general historical works of the period—by ongoing church conversations and reactions and debates and—people going to church and sending their kids to bible studies and ministers preaching sermons: 1933—34—35—36—37—38—39. The story of the Confessing Church usually peters out by 1935 or so, and yet it continued. It was part of the reality of thousands of German Protestants.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN “I Must Be a Sojourner and a Stranger”
1. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 620.
2. On the history and mission of the Eisenach Institute, see Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
3. Hitler quoted in Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of My People, p. 124.
4. Cited in Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pp. 201–3.
5. See text on Dohnányi in Höhne, Canaris: Hitler’s Spy, pp. 265–66.
6. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, p. 504.
7. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, pp. 504–5.
8. Luther’s doctrine was based on St. Paul’s remark in his letter to the Romans, that “everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities,” for “the authorities that exist have been established by God” (Romans 13:1–2, my emphasis).
9. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, pp. 504–5.
10. Rainer Bucher, Hitler’s Theology, p. 77.
11. I am grateful to my colleague Alon Confino for his clarification of this larger purpose.
12. Bonhoeffer would have read the report’s grim details in the solitude of his dorm room in New York City in the summer of 1939. These documents appear to be from the files of Charles Roden Buxton; a slip of paper reading “With Mrs. Charles Roden Buxton’s Compliments” is found in the third folder of Box 25. Charles Roden Buxton (November 27, 1875–December 16, 1942) was an English philanthropist and politician, born in London, the third son of Sir Thomas Buxton, 3rd Baronet. His elder brother Noel Buxton was a prominent figure in British politics, as was his cousin Sidney Buxton.
13. “List of Confessional Pastors Subject to Measures of Oppression by Police and Church Authorities as of June, 1939.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer Archives, Staatsbibliothek Berlin.
14. From Bethge, Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 601.
15. Cited in Victoria Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Relationship between Judaism and Christianity,” http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/bonhoeffer/?content=5 (accessed June 10, 2010). See also Christine-Ruth Müller, Dietrich Bonhoeffers Kampf gegen die nationalsozialistische Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1990), pp. 213–22.
16. “Children of Bethlehem” and “innocent children of Bethlehem” are found in Bonhoeffer’s letter to the Finkenwalde Brothers, December 20, 1937, Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 5, p. 23. The others appear in Bonhoeffer’s address (and later as a circular letter) given by DB to the “Illegal Young Brothers” in Pomerania on October 26, 1938, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 15, pp. 407–31. For the reference to “church and synagogue,” see DBW, vol. 15, pp. 435–36, footnote 115. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes of the Jews as the “most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.” Ethics, Guilt Justification Renewal, DBW, vol. 6, page 139. “The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 6, pp. 138. “She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenceless brothers of Christ,” in Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: MacMillan, 1955), p. 50.
17. Keith Clements, The SPCK Introduction to Bonhoeffer (London: SPCK, 2010), p. 18.
18. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 15, p. 161.
19. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 14, pp. 157–58.
20. Ibid., p. 157.
21. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 206.
22. Sabine Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance, p. 7.
23. Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, p. 178.
24. Charles Calvin Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role and Legacy (London: T and T Clark, 2002), p. 96.
25. Ursula M. Niebuhr, Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr: Letters of Reinhold and Ursula M. Niebuhr (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1991), p. 19.
26. In Niebuhr’s mind there were other benefits in bringing Bonhoeffer to Union as a member of the faculty. One was the opportunity to reinvigorate the public mission of the seminary, which in his opinion had become worrisomely rarefied since the fashionable émigré theologian Paul Tillich had replaced Scotch Calvinist John Baillie. Bonhoeffer’s presence, Niebuhr wrote, “would be valuable for our sake as well as for his.” It might sound odd to hear Niebuhr endorsing the “Barthian voice” and “the spirit of the struggle,” but he saw Bonhoeffer as an antidote to the vexing popularity of Tillich’s trendy sobriquets: “ground of being,” “the question of being,” “ultimate concern,” “the structure of being,” “the courage to be,” “the new being.” Enough with all the talk about being: it was time for deliberate and steady action. And while Niebuhr may have never been so blunt, he had come to despise Tillich’s predatory sexual habits. A half century after his death, it may seem implausible that a philandering miscreant, given to interminable pontifications, with no obvious interest in the American prospect, had once been the darling of the religious left. But this was Tillich’s genius: he captivated American audiences with his bipartite and tripartite abstractions and his lumbering prose. Henry Sloane Coffin, the Union president who hired Tillich, later told an interviewer that he never understood a word Tillich said, although he gathered “that what [Tillich] said was important.”
Tillich’s existential search for the “transcendent sphere” required the serv
ices of attractive and provocative women. And his reputation for extramarital relationships preceded his arrival in New York. Prodding his wife, Hannah, into sexual dalliances with other men and women, Tillich had commenced his assault on “legal and conventional” marriage as early as their wedding night. After Paul was dismissed from his teaching post in Göttingen for his socialist views and opposition to Nazism, the Tilliches moved into one of the seminary’s spacious faculty apartments on Broadway and 121st Street. From the start, both did little to hide their contempt for American Protestant sexual conventions, hosting pornography nights in their faculty apartment and forays to Harlem strip clubs.
Although Niebuhr and Tillich had worked amiably enough for the five years of Tillich’s tenure, their collegiality had recently cooled dramatically as a result of the “Tilliches’ moral intransigence.” It was not only that Tillich was unfaithful to his wife and that his wife reciprocated such infidelities as she could on occasion arrange with younger men. Tillich was exuberantly, compulsively promiscuous. Their falling out began after Niebuhr referred a female student to Tillich for office hours. Tillich welcomed her warmly, closed the door, arranged his chair next to the woman, and moved his hands onto her thighs. The student returned to Niebuhr in tears, and Niebuhr never forgave Tillich this betrayal. But neither did he report Tillich’s behavior.
27. Bonhoeffer, “American Diary,” 1939, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 15, pp. 217–37.
28. A year earlier Houghton and Mifflin had licensed the London-based Reynal and Hitchcock for the rights to publish a complete translation. A thirty-one-page pamphlet also appeared in the summer of 1939 under the title Mein Kampf: An Unexpurgated Digest, by the Political Digest Press of New York. The book was translated by a committee from the New School for Social Research in New York and appeared on February 28, 1939. An abridged version had been published in English in 1933. James Murphy, an Irishman, began work on an authorized version in Berlin in the fall of 1936 after spending some time as the official translator for the Propaganda Ministry, mostly working to translate Hitler’s speeches. For reasons as of yet fully unknown, Murphy was taken off the task in the early months of 1937. After he returned to London, a battle ensued between the London publishers and Berlin concerning Murphy’s translation. Against the ministry’s wishes, Hurst and Blackett went forward with Murphy’s translation, publishing the work on March 20, 1939. This was two weeks after two new (also unauthorized) translations were published in America. Central Germany, May 7, 1936,—Confidential—A Translation of Some of the More Important Passages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925 edition) British Embassy in Berlin 11 Germany’s Foreign Policy as Stated in Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler FOE pamphlet n.38
29. Bonhoeffer also had read the German theologian Hermann Sasse’s account during his 1925–26 year at Hartford Seminary, which Sasse had included as the foreword to his book Here We Stand. See Sasse, The Lonely Way, p. 23.
30. He also received an invitation from the Boerickes, his relatives in Philadelphia.
31. Bonhoeffer cited in The Way to Freedom: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1935–1939, trans. Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers,1966), p. 228.
32. Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance, p. 7.
33. The 1939 film Juarez (directed by William Dieterle), with Paul Muni in the role of Benito Pablo Juárez.
34. Bonhoeffer cited in The Way to Freedom, p. 228.
35. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 658.
36. “Later this will eventually be a center of resistance long after Riverside Church will have become a temple of idolatry. I was very pleased about this sermon.”
37. Martin Luther King Jr. would echo this sentiment three decades later when he called Niebuhr’s Jesus “a pure abstraction,” not “the Jesus of history who walked in Jerusalem.”
38. Martin Sasse cited in “German Martyrs,” Time, Monday, December 23, 1940.
39. Mark S. Brocker, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” DBW, vol. 16, p. 1.
40. Ibid., p. 5.
41. Brocker, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” DBW, vol. 16, Ibid. p. 4.
42. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 26.
43. Ibid., p. 47.
44. Ibid., p. 49.
45. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, Ibid., p. 112.
46. Brocker, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” DBW, vol 12, pp. 1–6.
47. Ibid.
48. Victoria Barnett, “The Rise and Fall of the Confessing Church.” [VB—P]
49. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 5, p. 23–26; Ethics, pp. 46–49.
50. Brocker, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” DBW, vol. 16.
51. Ibid.
52. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, pp. 474–75. “For Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the assumptio carnis, or “assumption of the flesh,” see his “Reflection on the Ascension,” 2/2.
CHAPTER TWELVE “Christmas in the Ruins”
1. Bonhoeffer, Werke, vol. 16, pp. 109–10. (Author’s translation from the original German.)
2. Jørgen Glenthoøj, et al., “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” in DBW, vol. 16, pp. 651.
3. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 239.
4. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, pp. 96–97.
5. Ibid., p. 60.
6. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 245.
7. De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 53.
8. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 81.
9. Jørgen Glenthoøj, et al., “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” in ibid, p. 651.
10. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 95. (Author’s translation from the original German.)
11. Ibid., p. 82.
12. Mark Brocker, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” in ibid., p. 18.
13. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 86.
14. Mark Brocker, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” in ibid., p. 18; Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 89.
15. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 87.
16. Jørgen Glenthoøj, et al., “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” in ibid., p. 650.
17. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, pp. 105, 109–10.
18. Ibid., p. 86.
19. Ibid., p. 89; author’s translation of a quote from the monastery’s 1996 printing of the brochure: Benediktinerabtei Ettal (Oberammergau: H. Weixler, 1996), N.P.
20. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, pp. 89–90.
21. Ibid., p. 87.
22. Ibid., p. 92.
23. While writing his biography of Eberhard Bethge, the South African theologian John de Gruchy discovered that Bethge had himself received the UK exemption given to pastors and that when this exemption was revoked in September 1942 he was given a temporary Abwehr assignment by Dohnányi. See ibid., p. 57.
24. Ibid., p. 95.
25. Ibid., pp. 97–101.
26. Ibid., p. 101.
27. Ibid., p. 105.
28. Ibid., p. 111.
29. Ibid., p. 113.
30. Ibid., p. 105.
31. Mark Brocker in ibid., pp. 106–7.
32. Bonhoeffer, in ibid., pp. 106–7.
33. Ibid., pp. 108.
34. Ibid., pp. 205–7.
35. Ibid., p. 92.
36. Ibid., pp. 104.
37. Ibid., pp. 112, 168.
38. Ibid., p. 137.
39. Ibid., p. 140.
40. Ibid., p. 133.
41. Ibid., p. 282.
42. Although Bonhoeffer does not specify the edition he preferred, this seems the most likely of the three available translations: Ludwig Tieck; an anonymous translation revised by Konrad Thorer; and Ludwig Braunfels.
43. Ibid., pp. 138–40.
44. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 8, p. 394.
45. Although the protest of Barth against natural theology had made sense to the younger Bonhoeffer as an effective means of jamming a wedge between the state and the church (the German Christians employed the ca
tegory of the natural to justify the legitimacy of the Nazi state), he now recognized an urgency to reclaiming the natural—the bodily, the physical, the human—from its colossal disfigurations.
46. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10, pp. 501–2.
47. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), p. 272; Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 6, p. 185.
48. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 6, p. 187.
49. Ibid., pp. 187–88.
50. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 156.
51. Ibid., p. 128.
52. Ibid., pp. 129, 132, 141, 146.
53. Ibid., p. 156. (Author’s translation from the original German.)
54. Mark Brocker, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” in ibid., p. 11.
55. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, in ibid., p. 139.
56. Ibid., pp. 156, 126.
57. Ibid., pp. 134, 139.
58. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 7, p. 131.
59. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 136.
60. Ibid, pp. 138–39.
61. Ibid, p. 159.
62. Ibid, p. 155.
63. Ibid, p. 161.
64. Ibid, p. 162.
65. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 168.
66. Ved Mehta, The New Theologian, pp. 128–29.
67. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 8, p. 50.
68. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, p. 208.
69. Ibid., p. 192. (Author’s translation from the original German.)
70. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 8, pp. 447–48.
71. Wilhelm Ihde in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, pp. 180–81.
72. Bonhoeffer in ibid., pp. 186–88.
73. Wilhelm Ihde in ibid., pp. 189–90.
74. Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1955), p. 181.
75. Ibid., p. 178.
76. Ibid.; “theologian in the resistance” is a concept developed by Sabina Drumm in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance.
77. W. Lovin, New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics “Biographical Context,” pp. 90–91.