RUTHFULLY YOURS

For a very long time, I have heard of the man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I recognized him as someone who wanted to save the Jews from Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Recently, I saw a movie about him, and was inspired to learn more about him. Coincidentally a friend told me that Eric Metaxas had written a book about Bonhoeffer, and I felt compelled to read it.

I was impressed and deeply moved.

Like so many brilliant men, Bonhoeffer was complicated. And yet he demonstrated so much clarity in his ideas and beliefs that he left no doubt about his relationship to the Church and his abhorrence of the Nazis. He grew up in a family that was not deeply religious, although Christian, but eventually he saw his own destiny emerge:

It wasn’t until 1920, when Dietrich turned fourteen, that he was ready to tell anyone he had decided to become a theologian. It took a bold and courageous person to announce such a thing in the Bonhoeffer family.

Although his family was taken aback at his decision so early in his life, over time they grew to fully support him in his academic and religious pursuits.

In this review, I don’t plan to review the details of his maturation. Suffice it to say that he saw the dangers well in advance of the Nazi rule, and acted accordingly:

When the Nazis were taking over the German Lutheran Church, he would lead the charge to break away and start the Confessing Church. [The church] must completely separate herself from the state. . . It wouldn’t be long before the people return because they must have something. They would have rediscovered their need for piety.

 

 

Bonhoeffer was well aware of the violations against both the Church and the people who the Nazis would target. He realized early in his career that the Jews were going to be in Hitler’s sights, and he rejected the dictator’s decisions:

The Bonhoeffers learned that something especially disturbing called the Aryan Paragraph would take effect April 7 [1933]. It would result in a series of far-reaching laws that were cynically announced as the ‘Restoration of the Civil Service.’ Government employees must be of ‘Aryan’ stock; anyone of Jewish descent would lose his job. If the German church, essentially a state church, went along, all pastors with Jewish blood would be excluded from ministry. But perhaps the most grievous aspect of the church turmoil was the willingness of mainstream Protestant Christian leaders to consider adopting the Aryan Paragraph.

 

The German Christians, which Bonhoeffer refused to support, had allied themselves with the State and supported its perverse views:

In her book, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, Doris Bergen wrote that ‘the ‘German Christians’ preached Christianity as the polar opposite of Judaism, Jesus as the arch anti-semite, and the cross as the symbol of war against Jews.’ To make Christianity one with Germanness meant purging it of everything Jewish. One of the leaders, Georg Schneider, called the whole Old Testament ‘a cunning Jewish conspiracy.’

 

 

The Confessing Church finally took a stand against the Nazis anti-Semitic policies and the regime responded accordingly:

In 1937, the Nazis abandoned all pretense of being even-handed and came down hard on the Confessing Church. That year more than eight hundred Confessing Church pastors and lay leaders were imprisoned or arrested.

Just as early Christians had refused to worship images of Caesar, and Jews had refused to worship the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, so they refused to take this oath to Adolf Hitler. But the messianic attitude toward Hitler was widespread, and few dared to stand against him.

This was when Bonhoeffer most clearly saw the connection: to lift one’s hand against the Jews was to lift one’s hand against God himself.

During this time of murdering Jews and putting Jews and others in concentration camps, Bonhoeffer was engaged in a secret plot to assassinate Hitler:

The conspirators planned to launch the coup when Hitler gave the green light to attack the West. But he would set a date, everyone would gear up, and at the last minute, Hitler would call it off. He did this twenty-nine times over several months, driving everyone half mad.

Eventually they designed what looked like a foolproof attempt to place a bomb near Hitler, and when it detonated, miraculously he wasn’t even injured.

One of the most courageous books that Bonhoeffer wrote served as a defense of the Jewish people:

The last book he published in his lifetime was Das Gebetbook der Bibel (The Prayerbook of the Bible), which appeared in 1940. 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.

In one slim book, Bonhoeffer 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.

His defense of the Jews was without question integral to his faith:

This was how Bonhoeffer saw what he was doing. He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action.

This review can’t possibly do justice to the depth of Bonhoeffer’s faith, his dedication to Jesus, his commitment to acting to save the Jews, and his ability to relate to anyone of any faith or mindset. In spite of everything he did, he was not admitted to the Holocaust Museum in Israel, Yad Vashem, as a Righteous Gentile. They were not willing to accept that in his early days, he had written one antisemitic article, but had clearly experienced a transformation. Another source described Bonhoeffer’s situation thoughtfully:

Bonhoeffer can’t be defined or understood by what he wrote in one essay in 1933. Just as he can’t be defined or understood based on any one episode or writing. That’s what makes his life so compelling—he’s human, like us, with flaws and also with learning, development, passion, and decisive action.

Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging in 1945.