A Grand Liberation
Bonhoeffer's path to Christian pacifism, awakened by the Black Church in America
This post follows as the second entry in a series on Bonhoeffer’s life in resistance of sweeping support from German Christians of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s rhetoric. In particular, I am wanting to refute the popular notion that he Bonhoeffer scuttled away his Christian convictions and supported an assassination attempt on Hitler’s life. In my previous post, we looked briefly at Bonhoeffer’s conviction that Christ’s Sermon on the Mount spoke to the problems Germany faced with a clarity “unmistakable”.
This unmistakable clarity is a freedom which gathered Bonhoeffer up from a vain Christianity and quickened him, binding him to the person and work of Jesus Christ. He narrates this transformation in a letter to Elizabeth Zinn in January of 1936, calling it a “grand liberation”, a turning point of deep attention to Scripture, especially Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
Then something different happened. Something that has changed my life, turned it around to this very day. I came to the Bible for the first time. It is terribly difficult for me to say that. I had already preached several times, had seen a lot of the church, had given speeches about it and written about it—but I still had not become a Christian, I was an untamed child, my own master. I know, at that time I had turned this whole business about Jesus Christ into an advantage for myself, I kind of crazy vanity.
Bonhoeffer, a surprisingly well-traveled individual, lectured and visited in many countries, including Switzerland, America, England, and others. Prior to the 1930s, he could be heard providing rationale for killing one’s enemies for the sake of family and country, as is the case in a lecture he gave in Barcelona in 1929. Though he was no war-monger he certainly was no pacifist either. In this particular lecture, he spoke freely of his willingness to take up arms: “I will defend my brother, my mother, my people, and yet I know I can only do so by spilling blood; but love for my people will sanctify murder, will sanctify war.”
Yet between delivering that lecture in Barcelona and the writing of his letter to Zinn in 1936, Bonhoeffer traveled to America. That experience of the American Church left him wanting—white conservative and liberal Christians were an utter disappointment! The only caveat was the gritty perseverance and social witness of the Black Church in America. It was during this time and experience that he came to realize that the Christianity he had received thus far had been a useful and nationalistic endeavor. Preaching, teaching, calling on the name of God, had all been a way to make his life in a Christianized Germany plainly advantageous. And he repented,
I pray God, it will never be so again. I never prayed, or at least not much and not really. With all my loneliness, I was still pleased with myself. It was from this that the Bible—especially the Sermon on the Mount— freed me (emphasis added). Since then, everything is different. I am clearly aware of it myself; and even those around me have noticed it. That was a grand liberation. There it became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must belong to the church, and it became clear how far this has to go.
The witness of African-American brothers and sisters in Harlem altered Bonhoeffer. He learned to truly love Jesus and concrete obedience to his Word. Christ’s word pierces through the darkness of fear to free us from the lie of necessary evils, of justifying bloodshed. It is a freedom which not only casts out the possibility of passivity, but it also refuses to the death to participate with the powers of death and violence.
I now saw that everything depended on the renewal of the church and of the ministry…Christian pacifism, which I had previously fought against with passion, all at once seemed perfectly obvious. And so it went further, step-by-step. I saw and thought of nothing else… My calling is quite clear to me. What God will make of it I do not know… I must follow the path .