"Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy" by Eric Metaxas

“….at some point [Bonhoeffer] would be able to do nothing more than “suffer faithfully” in his cell, praising God as he did so, thanking him for the high privilege of being counted worthy to do so.”
(Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson: 2010), p. 195

I can’t remember the last time I was so struck by a sentence. Like so many others under the age of about 55, I have watched organized religion become watered down to the point of being meaningless and airy words like “spirituality” replacing the much harder concept of “faith.”

In this accessible biography of the brilliant Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer - hanged by the Nazis for his role in several assassination attempts on Hitler - Eric Metaxas explores the idea of faith in a hopeless world. Bonhoeffer, one of eight offspring, grew up in an extraordinary cultured, intellectual German family. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a renowned professor of psychology and neurology. Bonhoeffer was not the only one in his family who joined the German resistance movement. His brother-in-law, an eminent German jurist, Karl von Dohnanyi and his brother Klaus Bonhoeffer were both executed for their participation. In the early 30s, as Germany began its descent,  Bonhoeffer was studying theology in New York. After a brief return to Germany, he moved to England and then back to New York in the summer of 1939.  He could have remained in either place, but in July 1939—weeks before the beginning of WWII—he was back in Berlin fully aware that his colleagues in the Church were being persecuted. He held no illusions as to where his fate lay.

We can find the reason why Bonhoeffer returns to Germany in the following quotes. The first is taken from a 1935 letter from Bonhoeffer to his brother, Karl-Friedrich, as Bonhoeffer is making a decision to lead the Confessing Church, an illegal seminary. The second was written from Tegal Prison in 1944.

The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount….Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and justice are such things as in Christ himself. (Metaxas, p. 260)

Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God's question and call. (Metaxas, p. 432)

I can’t be the only one who finds these passages moving. But why? I think these words resonate because faith gave Bonhoeffer both courage and comfort- two feelings which most of us struggle to find in our daily lives.

Faith, for Bonhoeffer, meant a belief in something bigger than himself. It was this belief, this devotion, this faith in the larger idea that enabled him to act. What we learn then from Bonhoeffer is that to act when someone is holding a gun to your head requires a disciplined, unshaken faith in something larger than yourself. It is only faith, by this definition, that gives you the courage to act in a hopeless world.

We don’t talk about faith like this today. Faith is associated with God and talking about God has become embarrassing. Further, most of us live in a safe and peaceful world, quite the opposite of 1930’s Germany. We don’t need to have faith in something larger than ourselves. We don’t need to have that kind of courage. It suffices today to have faith only in oneself.

Or does it?

Faith in something bigger than himself clearly gave Bonhoeffer courage, but if you read the opening quote, you will see that it also gave him comfort. When he sat desperate for eighteen months in his cell in Tegal Prison, he prayed daily and engaged in his habit of scriptural meditation, that is, he spoke—we don’t know whether he did this in his head or out loud—words that had been spoken for hundreds of years, by his historical predecessors and by his contemporaries. What can this martyred Lutheran pastor teach us here?

Let me offer a personal example. There is a service contained within Yom Kippur, the holy Day of Atonement for Jews around the world, called Yizkor. This is a short service where one recites a memorial prayer that may date from the time of the Crusades in the 11^th century. It is traditional for people who have not lost a parent, sibling, or child to excuse themselves from this service leaving only the community of mourners. When I thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer alone in his cell at Tegal praying alone, vulnerable, helpless in the face of inevitable death, I thought a lot about Yizkor because it is during this service that we too can feel alone, vulnerable, and helpless in the face of inevitable death. We think as we say these prayers for our parents:  who will say them for us and when?

How can Bonhoeffer’s view of faith as something bigger than ourselves be a comfort to us during this service? If you believe in God as Bonhoeffer did, the answer is clear: you derive comfort in the fact that God is bigger than you. But what if you, like me, have rejected the existence of a divine being.

First, I derive comfort in the fact that my community is bigger than I am. When I say the Yizkor prayer and look around the shul (it is actually a gym housed in a Jewish community centre) at all the people in my Toronto Jewish community, I realize I am just one of many, and that the community will go on with or without me. Second, I find enormous comfort in words that have been said for hundreds of years. That these words have survived and continue to be spoken provides a sense of historical connection to the past and a sense of continuity—they have been spoken before my lifetime, they are spoken in my lifetime, they will be spoken after my death. The words themselves are bigger than I am. They will outlive me, and I find that comforting. When I say these words with and in my community, I am part of something larger and therefore I am not alone.

Of course, as we know from the example of my earlier post on Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, that faith in words and ideas can be disastrous: the reason Bonhoeffer is executed for his faith is because others had faith in something else. For my next post, I will be looking carefully at one of the most important essays on words, George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, written about a year after Bonhoeffer’s execution.

[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. (George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946)

Book: Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010)
The references in this posting relate to the e-book version of the text.