Playing games with Jesus

Metaxas critically misreads Bonhoeffer

This post exists as the sixth entry in a series refuting the popular notion that Bonhoeffer affirmed or supported an assassination attempt on the life of Hitler. You can get caught up on this effort below:

1. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”: A starting point for reimagine Bonhoeffer’s resistance of Hitler

2. A Grand Liberation: Bonhoeffer's path to Christian pacifism, awakened by the Black Church in America

3. 'I have made a mistake in coming to America': Bonhoeffer returns

4. 'Everything is lost if mistrust arises': Bonhoeffer’s return raises question for many, including closest friends

5. 'Who' not 'How': Bonhoeffer's Ethic cannot be understood apart from his Christology

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Among the many scholars of Bonhoeffer who accept his supposed involvement in an attempt on Hitler’s life as fact, they do so recognizing the dramatic shift this would have been from his previous thinking on the matter. However, in his New York Times bestselling biography of Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas argues that killing Hitler would be “a natural and inevitable outworking” of Bonhoeffer’s ethic.¹ This is the argument that we must now take up seriously. How does Metaxas make this claim? To put it too simply, but only slightly, it is in reading Bonhoeffer, however poorly, that Metaxas makes his error.

Bonhoeffer’s writings suffer greatly from misreadings. On the surface, he appears to suggest he could in fact support virtually any action, so long as it was done in the surety of the will of God: “Who stands firm?” he writes, “Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man.”²

At a superficial level, Bonhoeffer implies here (as well as in other places) that one should be ready to turn against one’s own conscience if called upon by God to ‘responsible action’. This is precisely the misreading popularized by Metaxas—that Bonhoeffer means for human beings, in order to live rightly, to commit themselves to disregarding their conscience, acting by any means necessary so long as the ends are justified in a pure conviction, in certainty of God’s will.³

But this cannot be further from what Bonhoeffer means by his critique of one who stands on “virtue” and “principle”. For Bonhoeffer, our principles are yet another way in which we spiritualize the will of God into meaninglessness. “Principles” and “virtue” are simply how we play word-games to dissolve obedience into a sentimental vapor:

Jesus would say: if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. But we would understand: it is precisely in fighting, in striking back, that genuine fraternal love grows large. Jesus would say: strive first for the kingdom of God. We would understand: of course, we should first strive for all sorts of other things. How else should we survive? What he really meant was that final inner willingness to invest everything for the kingdom of God. Everywhere it is the same—the deliberate avoidance of simple, literal obedience. How is such a reversal possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus has to endure this game?⁴

He remarks as well on Christ’s command to “Love thy neighbor: “The commandment ‘Love thy neighbor’ is as such so general, that it requires the strongest concretion if I am to hear what it means for me here and today. And only as such a concrete word to me is it God’s word.”⁵

Perhaps we can hear it. Bonhoeffer cannot possibly be arguing for the dismissal of his pacifist convictions in the name of a supposed will of God to assassinate Hitler. This would be to accept the premise of standing on “his reason,” as a final standard, and as such would be to sentimentalize Jesus’ concrete word to us. Instead, Bonhoeffer is centering our knowing of God’s will and our obedience to Him upon the person of Jesus, upon Christ’ knowing and obedience. As Chris Green taught me, “His [Jesus’] obedience grounds every good obedience and every good disobedience.”

1. Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 360.

2. Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 86.

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

4. Clifford J. Green and Michael P DeJonge, The Bonhoeffer Reader (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 487.

5. Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 28.