"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"
A starting point for re-imagining Bonhoeffer's resistance of Hitler
This weekend I was reminded in my conversations around Bonhoeffer’s works that he suffers from his popularity, as my teacher and friend, Chris Green, so often reminded me. Most particularly, popular notions of Bonhoeffer include the assumption that he participated in the final and failed assassination attempt executed against Hitler. Whenever it comes to discussions of violence, almost invariably the name of Hitler is evoked to stymy the non-violent, and Bonhoeffer’s name as case par excellence of a hero who crossed over. Heroes in American mythology are those who resist crossing the line long enough to ensure for us their goodness, yet are aptly capable to do the violence we believe needs to be done, and thus their violence is made credible for us.
Bonhoeffer serves in the imagination of many as such a hero. The publisher’s summary of New York Times bestselling biography of Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas makes this very claim: Bonhoeffer is the “pastor and author, known as much for such spiritual classics as The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as for his 1945 execution in a concentration camp for his part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.”1
Charles Marsh is another author who flat-out takes Bonhoeffer there: “The kingdom is to those who take action: for these reasons, Bonhoeffer concluded that in the face of Hitler and the prevailing brutalities, only the violent shall bear it away.”2
But Bonhoeffer himself speaks of Christian conviction, a freedom which binds him to live as Jesus in the world. “It seems to me conscientiously impossible to join in a war under the present circumstances,” he wrote to Bishop Bell on March 25, 1940. He added, “I should have to do violence to my Christian conviction, if I would take up arms here and now.”3
It seems to me that Metaxas makes a most outrageous claim. In Metaxas’ reading of Bonhoeffer, he finds someone, unmoored from Christian principles, holding fast only to the will of God as he sees fit. In Metaxas’ misreading, Bonhoeffer doesn’t merely struggle to live up to his Christian conviction as he sees no other option in dealing with Hitler’s regime—killing Hitler Hitler isn’t an “unwarranted detour from his previous thinking”—instead Metaxas somehow harmonizes Bonhoeffer’s ethic to include the killing of Hitler! A decision to kill Hitler is but “a natural and inevitable outworking”.4
Bonhoeffer himself refutes this assumption:
It is true that Christ has not given us specific rules for our conduct in every possible complex political, economic, or other situation that may arise in human life. However, this does not mean that the gospel of Jesus Christ does not give a clear answer to the problems that confront us. To the simple reader of the Sermon on the Mount, what it says is unmistakable.5
For the sake of brevity, I will break up my thoughts on this over the next few days. It is sufficient for now to say that it matters what we say/believe about Bonhoeffer here. It is clear that our hearing of Bonhoeffer’s theology is shaped by what we believe about his life and action, as his moment and place in history is unparalleled, and we have had little help in imagining him outside of the popular portrayal of him as secret-agent-pastor-assassin. However this matters deeply because if Bonhoeffer affirmed the murder of Hitler, or assisted in assassination attempts, it could only mean for us one thing: the life that Jesus lives, the Sermon on the Mount, is unlivable even for those who take it most seriously.
But praise God! The Sermon on the Mount is the life of God made possible for us by the fact that Jesus speaks it in the Spirit, and lives it with us as gift.
“Bonhoeffer,” Thomas Nelson, accessed March 5, 2022, https://www.thomasnelson.com/ 9781400226467/bonhoeffer/
Charles Marsh, Strange Glory (NY: Knopf, 2014), 347.
Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 77-78.
Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 360.
Clifford J. Green and Michael P DeJonge, The Bonhoeffer Reader (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 353.