Part of the post-World War II consensus was to look for heroes after the devastation. Many evangelicals latched onto Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was both a theologian and a Lutheran pastor. He participated in the effort of lesser magistrates (in this case, German Generals) to intercede and protect the people from a tyrant. The plan was to kill the tyrant, Hitler, and petition the Allies for peace. Bonhoeffer’s role was diplomatic. His status as a theologian allowed him freedom to travel, and thus he could act as a conduit of communication between these lesser magistrates and the Allies. The lesser magistrates failed, and Bonhoeffer was executed, but not before writing books like The Cost of Discipleship (1931), Life Together (1939), and Letters and Papers from Prison (published posthumously in 1951).
White Lies
Because of his martyrdom, Bonhoeffer is given a theological pass. I think if you surveyed American Evangelicals, many would say Bonhoeffer was an orthodox believer. Bonhoeffer’s books and writings contain many good quotes:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession… Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” (The Cost of Discipleship)
“The religion of Christ is not the tidbit after the bread. It is the bread itself.” (1928 sermon)
“This is the end—for me, the beginning of life” (His last words before going to the gallows)
However, despite these quotes, evangelicals need to be cautious about Bonhoeffer. One clue is that Bonhoeffer remained very conflicted about his participation with these lesser magistrates. An early Biblical example of lesser magistrate doctrine is found in 2 Kings 11 & 12. The High Priest Jehoiada crowned Joash over the objections of the tyrannical Queen Athaliah. God blessed Jehoiada’s actions with forty years of good government. The Lutheran Magdeburg Confession (1550) clearly articulates the lesser magistrate doctrine. Calvin wrote about it in the Institutes (1559).
To get an appreciation of Bonhoeffer’s theology, it is necessary to be aware of the theological landscape in early 20th-century Germany.
Rudolph Bultmann
Bultmann was in the “higher criticism” camp of German theology. He believed much of the Bible was “mythologized.” He had no problem denying the virgin birth, resurrection, and any of Jesus’s miracles. Bultmann differentiated between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Bultmann believed the gospel accounts had to be demythologized to discover the “Jesus of history.” It should be noted that early in his career, Bonhoeffer was in the Bultmann camp.
Karl Barth
Barth was considered “Neo-orthodox.” Bonhoeffer migrated from higher criticism to Neo-orthodoxy, eventually taking Barth as a mentor. Bart seems to obfuscate doctrines intentionally. Bultmann differentiated the “Jesus of history” from the “Christ of faith.” Barth differentiated the “divine historical fact” from the “human historical fact.” On page 158 of his Church Dogmatics, Vol. 4.3.2, Sections 72-73: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Study Edition 29, Barth states, “the Gospel which has this divine historical fact as its content, and to declare it with the human means at its disposal, thus introducing the human historical fact which corresponds to it.” Barth takes this nebulous category of “divine historical fact” and applies it to the resurrection, virgin birth, etc. He doesn’t deny these events outright; he obfuscates them. Now, if someone says, “George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to defeat the British at Trenton is a patriotic historical fact,” it should cause you to wonder, “Does he put the 1776 victory over the British at Trenton in the same category as Washington chopping down the cherry tree?” The qualifier “patriotic” before “historical fact” introduces ambiguity and confusion.
What about Bonhoeffer?
Bonhoeffer was trending toward a more orthodox position as his career progressed, but he would not have survived a pulpit committee interview in a reformed or fundamentalist American church. Despite his misgivings, Bonhoeffer was not sinning by throwing his lot in with the lesser magistrates any more than Nathan Hale was sinning by spying for Washington. Bonhoeffer is ambiguous. Did he, in prison facing his own imminent execution, adopt a more orthodox understanding of terms like “Christ” and “gospel?” It is possible, and only God knows the heart.
White Lies do Matter
This sugar coating of Bonhoeffer does have unforeseen consequences. There is a fairly popular, self-described “conservative-traditionalist” podcast called ”Stone Choir.” They have a podcast episode on Bonhoeffer. The Stone Choir podcast professes Christ. They do an excellent job of documenting Bonhoeffer’s rejection of fundamental doctrines of Christianity. They are very scrupulous in citing sources. About forty-five minutes into the podcast, they assert that the Nazi genocide of the Jews never happened. Their evidence is a Google ngram search on the frequency of the word “Holocaust” in publications. The graph shows the word was rarely used before 1960. The usage takes off like a hockey stick after 1960. They want their listener to infer that the Nazi genocide of the Jews is a fabricated historical fact. Since many of their listeners are young and likely exposed to the sugar-coated Bonhoeffer, they may be impressed by Stone Choir’s scholarship on Bonhoeffer, and not notice the slipshod evidence they provided on the Holocaust.
Slipshod Research
The word holocaust means “burnt offering” and comes from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. In 1957, the word Holocaust was first used by Yad Vashem in Israel as shorthand for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The Google ngram search is not evidence of a fabricated historical event.
Neo-Nazis will argue that the surviving images of piles of bodies were not the result of industrial genocide, but rather the fruit of Allied bombing destroying the German infrastructure. Therefore, the inmates could not be properly fed in a war-torn country. They would also argue that the Nazis were justified in confining the Jews to camps because of the newspaper headline on March 24, 1933, “Judea Declares War on Germany.” This headline is from a racist British paper. The article actually describes an effort to boycott German goods to pressure Hitler’s government into abandoning its discriminatory treatment of Germans of Jewish descent. A modern analog of this reporting would be a 1996 headline, “Protestants Declare War on Mickey,” to describe the SBC’s 1996 boycott of Disney.
In 1942, the firm Topf and Sons (founded in 1878) did engineering calculations for ovens that could incinerate 7,000 corpses per day with minimal fuel. Why do all this math in 1942, while you still have the infrastructure to build the ovens, if all the deaths are unplanned and in the unforeseen future?
Hitler’s Weltanschauung
Podcasts like Stone Choir will claim Hitler was Christian and somehow foresaw the cultural Marxism that has been plaguing us today.
Hitler was born in 1889, only 30 years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and 24 years after Marx’s Das Kapital. When Hitler was only 19, Francis Galton’s Essays in Eugenics were published in 1908. Galton coined the term eugenics and had been writing on the topic since 1865. In 1926, Hitler would write, “The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so, it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution, then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.”
In 1908, Guido von List, living in Vienna, would publish a book that introduced the idea of a lost Aryan super race. The book was Secrets of the Runes. List, influenced heavily by Theosophy, claims that the meanings of these fanciful runes were revealed to him through channeling the gods of Germanic paganism and the ancient Aryan past. List identified the Sieg (that lightning bolt style S) as meaning victory. Hitler used a single Sieg for the Hitler Youth and, of course, the double Sieg for the SS. List had the swastika as the most powerful rune; thus, Hitler adopted it as the symbol for his Reich. The Erbhof rune was used to identify Aryan farms. Items decorated with the Lebesgurune (life rune) were given as baby shower gifts.
Hitler was a product of his time. Darwin and Galton taught him that all that mattered was genetics. Guido von List (through a demon-inspired trance) gave him the hope that a lost Aryan race could be revived through selective breeding of the right genetic material. He had rejected the truth that men are created in God’s image. He was a pagan adrift in a German culture with only the bare vestiges of its reformation past. He was in no sense a Christian man.
Conclusion
Evangelical sugar-coating of Bonhoeffer leaves a gap in knowledge of our younger brethren. Neo-Nazis can and have used this gap to drive a wedge, saying in effect, “You were not given the whole truth on Bonhoeffer, you were deceived on the Holocaust, and Hitler too.”
White lies do matter.
