This year is another ominous one for anniversaries. Eighty years ago, the second World War finally came to an end, leaving behind the graves of an estimated 60 million people and a world scarred by destruction and systematic cruelty of a magnitude hitherto unimaginable.
One anniversary has already passed. On April 9th, 1945, just one month before Nazi Germany capitulated, the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was hanged by direct order from the top. His crime? Membership of a clandestine group which had hoped to end the war by their failed attempt on July 20th, 1944, to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
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Among the Lutheran theologians of his time, Bonhoeffer stands out by the compelling force and clarity of his conviction that the Christian faith is incompatible with race ideology.
Faced with the challenge of fascism, he had struggled for more than a decade with the century-old and deeply embedded proximity of Lutheranism to state power. He had been vocal against what was happening in Germany since 1933. He was particularly outspoken against anti-Semitism.
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In the end, the blatantly sinister actions of the German state under National Socialism convinced him that more than words were needed, so he joined the resistance movement that planned to use violence to remove the regime.
However, he never felt that his actions could be legitimated by theology. Before God, his choice of the violent path was unjustifiable. “When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else ... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; ... but before God he hopes only for grace,” he writes in Ethics.
He paid the ultimate price for his stance. Although he died for his faith, he is not a martyr in the conventional sense. Unlike those early Christians who endured a brutal death for their non-violent refusal to venerate the emperor, Bonhoeffer had come to the conclusion that the nature of Nazi evil required a conscientious decision that remained flawed in that it was in contradiction to the pacifist core of the Christian.
His courage to face these contradictions openly, without denying the moral and spiritual dilemma, has led to Bonhoeffer being held in the highest esteem, often being mentioned in one breath with Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.
Recently a stunning shift has taken place.
Perhaps beginning with Eric Metaxas’s 2010 biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, some American evangelical circles associated with the rising tide of Christian nationalism have started to paint Bonhoeffer as a role model for the contemporary culture wars.
They have appropriated Bonhoeffer’s resolute and daring stance against the evils of the Nazi ideology – and they argue that in today’s struggle he would stand with them in their fight against those who grant too much dignity to marginal groups.
Bonhoeffer cast as a culture warrior? A man who boldly stood up for the outcasts in his own time?
On October 15th last year, scholars wrote an open letter rejecting this dangerous misappropriation of Bonhoeffer’s legacy. Initially signed by eight prominent Bonhoeffer scholars, it has since been endorsed by more than 4,000 people from all around the globe, among them church leaders, pastors and theologians.
The day after, 76 adult descendants of the Bonhoeffer family published their own open letter in which they rejected the recent claims on their ancestor. It is the first time since his death that the family came out together in public to defend Bonhoeffer’s legacy.
Among other things, they write: “We are horrified to see how the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is increasingly being distorted and misused by right-wing extremists, xenophobes and religious agitators.
“As direct descendants of the seven siblings of the theologian and resistance fighter executed by the Nazis, we can testify based on what we learned from our families that he was a peace-loving, freedom-loving humanitarian.
“Never would he have seen himself associated with far-right, violent movements such as Christian nationalists and others who are trying to appropriate him today. On the contrary, he would have strongly and loudly condemned these attitudes.”
Around the time of the US presidential election last autumn a new Bonhoeffer film by Todd Komarnicki was released in the US. It was called Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. It was in Irish cinemas earlier this year.
The film has turned Bonhoeffer’s story into a thriller with a relaxed attitude to crucial biographical truth, turning his struggle of conscience into easily consumable buzz and doing nothing to counter the emerging Christian nationalist narrative.
Subsequently the film’s nine lead actors also released a public statement in which they call out the misappropriation of their film while endorsing the statements by the scholars and the Bonhoeffer family.
Perhaps it is time we went back and read some of Bonhoeffer’s writings and judge for ourselves? His estimation of African American theology and church music, his reflections on the Sermon on the Mount, his decisive condemnation of National Socialism in a radio programme back in 1933 or his visionary musings in prison on the future of Christianity as religionless ... we have much to learn.
Rev Martin Sauter is Pastor at the Lutheran Church in Ireland. On Saturday, May 10th, at 3pm in the Lutherhaus, 24 Adelaide Road, Dublin 2, the Lutheran Church in Ireland is hosting a seminar on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Radical Witness in Challenging Times. Keynote speaker is Matthew D Kirkpatrick, fellow in Christian ethics and doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford
