just finished the biography of dietrich bonhoeffer by eric metaxas
1.21.1934 dietrich bonhoeffer's (db) sermon on jeremiah.
the sermon opened with, 'jeremiah was not eager to become a prophet of God. when the call came to him all of a sudden, he shrank back, he resisted, he tried to get away.' this reflected db's own situation, the path he saw lay ahead. he was beginning to understand that he was God's prisoner, that like the prophets of old, he was called to suffer and to be oppressed - and in that defeat and the acceptance of that defeat, there was victory.
the picture that db painted of jeremiah was one of unrelieved gloom and drama. God was after him and he could not escape. db referred to the 'arrow of the Almighty' striking down its 'hunted game'. but who was the 'hunted game'? it was jeremiah! but why was God shooting at the hero of the story? before they found out, db swittched from arrow..to noose imagery. 'the noose is drawn tighter and more painfully reminding jeremiah that he is a prisoner...and he has to follow. his path is prescribed. it is the path of the man whom God will not let go, who will never be rid of God..this path will lead right down into the deepest situation of human powerlessness. the follower becomes a laughingstock, scorned and taken for a fool, but a fool who is extremely dangerous to people's peace and comfort, so that he or she must be beaten, locked up, tortured, if not put to death right away. that is exactly what became of this man jeremiah, because he could not get away from God. he goes on to speak of God driving jeremiah from agony to agony.
'and jeremiah was just as much flesh and blood as we are, a human being like ourselves. he felt the pain of being continually humiliated and mocked, of the violence and brutality others used against him. after one episode of agonizing torture that had lasted a whole night, he burst out in prayer: "o Lord, You have enticed me and i was enticed; You have overpowered me and You have prevailed"'.
jeremiah was upbraided as a disturber of the peace, an enemy of the people, just like all those, throughout the ages until the present day, who have been possessed and seized by God, for whom God had become too strong..how gladly would he have shouted peace and heil (hitler) with the rest...
the triumphal procession of truth and justice, the triumphal procession of God and His scriptures through the world, drags in the wake of the chariot of victory a train of prisoners in chains. may He at the last bind us to His triumphal carriage so that , although in bonds oppressed, we may participate in His victory!
on march 15, 1940 the last group of ordinands finished their term and 2 days later the gestapo closed sigurdshof (where db had guided small groups of men of the confessing church in germany who were to become pastors) . they had discovered it at last and the golden era that began at zingst in early 1935 had ended. db could no longer teach ordinands. he would have to think about what was next and his options were being winnowed down. he was moving ineluctably toward deeper involvement in the conspiracy (to murder hitler), but exactly what this would mean was still unclear.
no one has better attempted to explain the seeming paradox of a christian involved in a plot to assassinate a head of state than eberhard behtge. he helps show that db's steps toward political resistance were not some unwarranted detour from his previous thinking, but were a natural and inevitable outworking of that thinking. db always sought to be brave and to speak the truth to 'confess' -come what may; but at some point merely speaking the truth smacked of cheap grace. he explained, 'db introduced us in 1935 to the problem of what we today call political resistance. the levels of confession and of resistance could no longer be kept neatly apart. the escalating persecution of the jews generated an increasingly intolerable situation, especially for db himself. we now realized that mere confession, no matter how courageous, inescapably meant complicity with the murderers, even though there would always be new acts of refusing to be co-opted and even though we would preach 'christ alone' sunday after sunday. during the whole time the nazi state never considered it necessary to prohibit such preaching. why should it?
thus we were approaching the borderline between confession and resistance and if we did not cross this border, our confession was going to be no better than cooperation with the criminals. and so it became clear where the problem lay for the confessing church; we were resisting by way of confession, but we were not confessing by way of resistance.
after hitler's success in france, a new day had dawned. db and so many in the resistance had been convinced that hitler would ruin germany by dragging it into a miserable military defeat. but who could have dreamed he would destroy germany through success, through an ever- escalating orgy of self-love and self-worship? actually db considered it in the truncated speech given 2 days after hitler came to power. he knew that if germany worshipped any idol, it would incinerate its own future, as those who worshipped moloch did by burning their children.
after the fall of france, many understood that hitler was destroying germany thru success. that july, db was thinking about the implications of this when he spoke at a potsdam meeting of the old prussian council of brethren. but what he said was widely misinterpreted and added to his growing sense of alienation from the confessing church.
db said that germany had given its full assent to national socialism and hitler. he called it a 'historic yes'. before the french victory, there had been great possibilities for hitler's quick defeat and the end of national socialism , but these had vanished. they who stood against hitler must get used to it, must try to understand the new situation and act accordingly. it would be a long haul, not a short one, and different tactics were in order. db often spoke hyperbolically, for effect, and sometimes it backfired, as it did now.
he had once told a student that every sermon must contain 'a shot of heresy', meaning that to express the truth, we must sometimes overstate something or say something in a way that will sound heretical - though it must certainly not be heretical. but even in using this phrase, 'a shot of heresy', db betrayed his habit of saying things for effect that could easily be misinterpreted. many seized on that phrase to claim that db was unconcerned with orthodox theology. db often fell into such traps and for this reason he might be the most misunderstood theologian who ever lived
that day in potsdam he was trying to shake the cobwebs from everyone's understanding and it happened again. by saying that hitler had won, he was trying hard - in retrospect, too hard - to get his listeners to wake up and change course. so now, when he spoke of how national socialism had won, some in his audience thot he was giving his assent to this victory. they seriously thot he had said, in effect. 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'. in the next few years, after he began work for the abwehr (an intelligence group like the gestapo) - ostensibly as an agent of the german government, but of course as a member of the resistance - many remembered what he said that day and thot he actually had gone over to the 'other' side and was working for hitler and the nazis.
db obviously meant that those opposed to hitler must rethink their approach to the new situation in germany. db was quite willing to do this, to forgo his previous position of outward opposition to the regime and suddenly pretend to be in step with it. but of course it was only so that he could be in opposition to it on another, more fundamental level.
this involved deception. many of the serious christians of db's day were theologically unable to follow him to this point, nor did he ask them to. for many of them, such deception as db would soon be involved in was no different from lying. (note: it is interesting that that the prohibition is not to bare false witness against another person and we may have translated that into 'never tell someone something that is not true', 'you must tell everything you know', 'you must never knowingly deceive another person' or ideas like this) db's willingness to engage in deception stemmed not from a cavalier attitude toward the truth, but from a respect for the truth (note: or better yet 'the Truth' as seen in God's word?) that was so deep, it forced him beyond the easy legalism of truth telling.
in tegel prison several years later, db wrote the essay 'what does it mean to tell the truth'?' in which he explored the subject. 'from the moment of our lives in which we become capable of speech we are taught that our words must be true. what does that mean? what does 'telling the truth' mean? who requires this of us?
God's standard of truth entailed more than merely 'not lying'. in the sermon on the mount, Jesus said, 'you have heard it said...but i say unto you'. Jesus took the old testament laws to a deeper level of meaning and obedience, from the 'letter of the law' to the ' spirit of the law'. following the letter of the law was the dead 'religion' of which barth, among others had written. it was man's attempt to deceive God into thinking one was being obedient, which was a far greater deception. God always required something deeper than religious legalism.
in the essay db gave the example of a girl whose teacher asks in front of the class whether her father is a drunkard. she says no. 'of course one could call the child's answer a lie; all the same, this lie contains more truth - ie. it corresponds more to the truth - than if the child had revealed the father's weakness before the class'. one cannot demand 'the truth' at any cost (note: this may be part of the reasoning behind the practice of non self-incrimination or pleading the fifth) and for the girl to admit in front of the class that her father is a drunkard is to dishonor him (note: keeping the commandment 'honor your father and mother') . how one tells the truth depends on circumstances. db was aware that what he called the 'living truth' was dangerous and 'arouses the suspicion that the truth can and may be adapted to the given situation, so that the concept of truth utterly dissolves, and falsehood and truth draw indistinguishably close to each other.
db knew that the flip side of the easy religious legalism of 'never telling a lie' was the cynical notion that there is no such thing as truth (note: God's word?), only 'facts'. this led to the cynical ideal that one must say everything with no sense of propriety or discernment, that decorum or reserve was 'hypocrisy' and a kind of lie. he wrote of that in his ethics too:
it is only the cynic who claims 'to speak the truth' at all times and in all places to all men in the same way, but who, in fact, displays nothing but a lifeless image of the truth...he kons the halo of the fanatical devotee of truth who can make no allowance for human weaknesses; but, in fact, he is destroying the living truth between men. he wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he live and laughs arrogantly at the devastation he has wrought and at the human weakness which 'cannot bear the truth.
for db, the relationship with God ordered everything else around it. a number of times he referred to the relationship with Jesus Christ as being like the cantus firmus (a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition) of a piece of music. all the other parts of the music referred to it, and it held them together. to be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with Him that one did not live legalistically by 'rules' and 'principles'. one could never separate one's actions from one's relationship to God. it was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience and db had come to see that the evil of hitler was forcing christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate.
dohnanyi's (db's brother in law) boss, general oster, had said that national socialism was 'an ideology of such sinister immorality that traditional values and loyalties no longer applied'. db knew that God had the answer to every difficulty and he was trying to understand what God was saying to him about his situation. he had moved past mere 'confession' and into conspiracy, which involved a measure of deception that many of his colleagues in the confessing church would not have understood. soon, when he became a double agent for military intelligence under the command of admiral canaris, he had moved into a very lonely place indeed.
as his role in the conspiracy developed, db continued his pastoral work and his writings. he would write until the last months of his life, but the last book he published in his lifetime was the prayerbook on the bible which appeared in 1940. that a book on the old testament psalms was published then is a testimony to db's devotion to scholarly truth and to his willingness to deceive the leaders of the third reich.
db scholar geffrey kelly wrote, 'one should make no mistake about it; in the context of nazi germany's bitter opposition to any manner of honoring of the old testament, this book, at the time of its publication, constituted an explosive declaration both politically and theologically'. the book was a passionate declaration of the importance of the old testament to christianity and to the church and it was a bold and scholarly rebuke to nazi efforts to undermine anything of jewish origin.
because of this, db got into a battle with the reich board for the regulation of literature. as he would do in many interrogations in prison later on, he played dumb, claiming the book was merely scholarly literary exegesis. he well knew that all true exegeses and scholarship pointed to the truth, which, for the nazis, was far worse than a hail of bullets. db also said that the board's prohibitions against his 'religious writings' were unclear and he hadn't understood that he ought to have submitted this manuscript to them.
the incident illustrates db's sense of what it meant to 'tell the truth'. obeying God by publishing this pro-jewish book - and cannily pretending that he had no inkling the national socialists would object to it's contents - was being true. he knew that if he had sent the manuscript to them beforehand, it would never have seen the light of day. db had little doubt that God wished him to publish the truth in the book. he did not owe the nazis the truth about the manuscript any more than the hypothetical little girl in his essay owed her class the truth about her father's vices.
in the book, db linked the idea of barthian grace with prayer by saying that we cannot reach God with our own prayers, but by praying 'His" prayers - the psalms of the old testament, which Jesus prayed - we effectively piggyback on them all the way to heaven. we must not confuse what we do naturally, such as 'wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing', with prayer, which is unnatural to us and which must be initiated from outside us, by God. if we confuse these 2 things, 'we confuse earth and heaven, human beings and God'.
(note: although i have increasingly found praying not only the psalms but other parts of scripture, at a slightly less than verbatim rate, ( ie. the sermon on the mount and parts of nearly every book that contain valuable directives, wisdom, comfort, worship etc.) helpful i'm not sure i can come up with a scripture that limits prayer to such. on the other side of it, Jesus' intro to what we call the Lord's prayer seems to be more toward 'this is only a pattern' to be filled in with all the details from your own life than 'pray these exact words and them only'.)
to continue.. prayer cannot come from us. ' for that one needs Jesus Christ!' by praying the psalms, we 'pray along with Christ's prayer and therefore may be certain and glad that God hears us. when our will, our whole heart, enters into the prayer of Christ, then we are truly praying (note: ephesians 5, 'praying in the Spirit'?) we can pray only in Jesus Christ, with whom we shall also be heard'.
the idea would have seemed impossibly 'jewish' for the nazis, and it was too 'catholic' for many protestants, who saw in recited prayers the 'vain repetition' of the heathen. but db only wanted to be biblical. the ordinands at finkenwalde and afterward prayed the psalms every day. db was firm: 'the psalter filled the life of early christianity. but more important than all of this is that Jesus died on the cross with words from the psalms on his lips. whenever the psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure is lost to the christian church. with its recovery will come unexpected power'.
in one slim book, db was claiming that Jesus had given his imprimatur to the psalms and to the old testament; that christianity was unavoidably jewish; that the old testament is not superseded by the new testament, but is inextricably linked with it; and that Jesus was unavoidably jewish. db also made clear that the psalms spoke of Jesus and prophesied His coming. the following march he would find that publishing this small exegetical tract resulted in his being forbidden to publish anything again.
on july 14, 1940, db was preaching at a church conference in konigsburg when the gestapo arrived and broke up the meeting. they cited a new order forbidding such meetings and the conference ended. no one was arrested, but db saw that his ability to continue such pastoral work was coming to an end. he and bethge (one of the former ordinands with who db became mutual confessors..bethge became a real strength to db and his closest friend) forged ahead, visiting parishes in east prussia...stalin's troops were very near and the general mood was anxious. so after his tour of these villages, db returned to berlin and spoke with dohnanyi about his plans going forward.
there was great rivalry between the abwher and the gestapo, since they occupied separate spheres, just as the CIA and the FBI do in the states. doh reasoned that if the abwehr officially employed db, gestapo would be forced to leave him alone. it made sense for many reasons. db would have great freedom of movement to continue his work as a pastor and he would have the cover needed to expand his activities for the conspiracy. another benefit was that as an invaluable member of germany's military intelligence, db was unlikely to be called into military service. he would ostensibly be performing an important duty for the fatherland. that was a huge boon since he had never resolved what he would do if he was drafted. doh, bethge, db, gisevius and oster discussed this arrangement in a meeting at the bonhoeffer home that august. they decided to move for ward. for starters they would send db on assignment to east prussia, specially since war with russia seemed imminent and it would be a natural place for him to go since he had plenty of pastoral business there. if the gestapo thought it odd that a confessing church pastor should be used on abwehr business, they could say that the abwehr used communists and jews , too, which they did. the 'front' of a pastorate in the confessing church was ideal camouflage for the abwehr's activities. besides, they were military intelligence, engaged in complex and mysterious missions. who was the gestapo to question them?
so the day had come. db had officiallly joined the conspiracy. he would be enfolded into the abwehr's protection and, in the guise of a member of military intelligence, would be protected by oster and canaris. the levels of deception were several. on the one hand, db would be actually performing pastoral work and continuing his theological writing, as he wished to do. officially this work was a front for his work as a nazi agent in military intelligence. but unofficially his work in military intelligence was a front for his real work as a conspirator against the nazi regime.
db was pretending to be a pastor - but was only pretending to be pretending, since he really was being a pastor. and he was pretending to be a member of military intelligence working for hitler, but - like doh, oster, canaris and gisevius - he was in reality working against hitler. db was not telling little white lies. in luther's famous phrase, he was 'sinning boldly'. he was involved in a high-stakes game of deception upon deception and yet db himself knew that in all of it, he was being utterly obedient to God. for him, that was the cantus firmus that made the dizzying complexities of it all perfectly coherent.
on february 24, 1941 the abwehr sent db to geneva. his main purpose was to make contact with protestant leaders outside germany, let them know about the conspiracy and put out feelers about peace terms with the government that would take over...but at first, db couldn't even get into switzerland. the swiss border police insisted that someone inside switzerland vouch for him as his guarantor. db named karl barth, who was called and assented, but not without some misgivings.
like others at the time, barth was perplexed about db's mission. how could a confessing church pastor come to switzerland in the midst of war? it seemed to him that db must have somehow made peace with the nazis. this was one of the casualties of was, that trust itself seemed to die a thousand deaths.
such doubts and questions from others would plague db, but he certainly wasn't free to explain what he was doing to those outside his inner circle. this represented another 'death' to self for him because he had to surrender his reputation in the church. people wondered how he escaped the fate of the rest of his generation. he was writing and traveling, meeting with this one and that one, going to movies and restaurants and living a life of relative privilege and freedom while others were suffering and dying and being put in excruciating positions of moral compromise.
for those who knew that db was working for the abwehr, it was all the worse. had he finally capitulated, this high-minded patrician moralist, who always was so unyielding and who demanded that others must be similarly unyielding? was he the one who had said that 'only those who cry out for the jews may sing gregorian chants' and who had put himsef in the place of God by outrageously declaring that there was no salvation outside the confessing church?
even if db could have explained that he was in fact working against hitler, many in the confessing church would still have been confused and others would have been outraged. for a pastor to be involved in a plot whose linchpin was the assassination of the head of state during a time of war, when brothers and sons and fathers were giving their lives for their country, was unthinkable. db had come to the place where he was in many ways very much alone. God had driven him to this place, though, and he was not about to look for a way out any more than jeremiah had done. it was the fate he had embraced, and it was obedience to God, and he could rejoice in it, and did.
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