CURRENT BOOKS: Costly Grace

Irina deFischer, MD

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas, 624 pages, Thomas Nelson (2011).

I was drawn to this biography because I had heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the context of the German Resistance but knew little about him. Eric Metaxas—who wrote the bestselling Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery—uses extensive research to paint a vivid portrait of Bonhoeffer in the setting of his family and early 20th century Germany. Metaxas also attempts to explain the evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theology, which has often been misunderstood. What is certain is that, unlike most of his countrymen, Bonhoeffer was not afraid to stand up against the Third Reich.

The ethical challenges of Bonhoeffer’s era were famously summarized by one of his contemporaries, Pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1906, the sixth of eight children of an upper-middle-class family. His father, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, who had studied under Wernicke, was a renowned neurologist and psychiatrist, and his mother, Paula von Hase, was a university-educated teacher who counted among her forebears theologians, artists and musicians. Paula ran the household and home-schooled the children in their early years. She taught them religion through hymns and scripture readings. Because Karl was an agnostic, the family did not attend church regularly.

When Dietrich and his twin sister Sabine were 6 years old, the family moved to Berlin, where Karl had accepted an academic appointment. Berlin in 1912 was an intellectual and cultural center, with one of the world’s finest universities. The family lived in an elite community near the university and enjoyed an active social life. Many of their friends were Jewish. Karl taught his children fairness and intellectual rigor.

The children spent idyllic summer holidays at their country home in the Harz Mountains, reading and playing outdoors. Their holidays where cut short in 1914, when Germany declared war on Russia. The family was patriotic to some extent and followed the progress on the front with interest. The war really came home to them when two older sons were drafted and one of them, Walter, was killed in 1918. Paula was devastated and withdrew into herself for the better part of a year. Dietrich’s childhood ended, and Germany changed: the Kaiser abdicated and the Weimar Republic came into being.

Life went on. Dietrich entered high school, and at the age of 14, though he was a talented musician, declared his intention to study theology. The decision was met with some resistance. His brother Klaus, who had chosen a career in law, accused the church of being “a poor, feeble, petty bourgeois institution,” to which Dietrich replied, “I shall have to reform it!”

In 1923, Dietrich entered the University of Tübingen. At the time, Germany was going into a financial free-fall. Meals cost a billion marks! Hitler led his first Beer Hall Putsch and began writing Mein Kampf. After a year at the university, Dietrich decided to travel with his brother to Rome for a semester abroad. The stay in Rome opened his eyes to the diversity and universality of the Catholic Church and sparked his interest in the ecumenical movement.

Upon his return to Germany, Dietrich transferred to the University of Berlin and began his theological studies in earnest. The leading theologians of the day were extremely liberal, and though Dietrich held his teachers in high regard, he differed from them in his more literal interpretation of the scriptures. He contrasted the prevailing attitude of “Cheap Grace” (in which believers could live their lives as they pleased as long as they attended church services and received absolution periodically) with “Costly Grace,” which involved devoting one’s entire life to following the teachings of Christ as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount.

By the age of 21, Bonhoeffer had successfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated summa cum laude. Too young to be ordained, he accepted a position as the assistant pastor of a German congregation in Barcelona, Spain. His sermons challenged the congregation both spiritually and intellectually, and attendance at the services increased during his year-long tenure. Back in Berlin, he returned to the ivory tower and became a university lecturer. Soon afterward he was offered a Sloan Fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Bonhoeffer’s stay in New York had a profound influence on him, particularly because of his exposure to the revivalist preaching of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and the piety and spirituals of the former slaves. He became interested in the racial issues in America and travelled extensively on the East Coast and the South, and as far as Cuba and Mexico. During this time, he became a pacifist and got more involved with the ecumenical movement, which eventually led to his activities during the German Resistance.

Back in Berlin once again, Bonhoeffer resumed his work as a university lecturer and author. He became more and more troubled by the German church establishment, which was being co-opted by Hitler and the National Socialists. Bonheoffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, a lawyer at the German Supreme Court with access to privileged information, reported to Bonhoeffer the atrocities of the Third Reich that were not known to the general public. Another brother-in-law, Gerhard Leibholz, was subject to sanctions because he was of Jewish descent. Bonhoeffer eventually helped Leibholz and others escape to relative safety in England. He also helped found the Confessing Church, which pledged to take a stand against the Nazis and was eventually driven underground. Bonhoeffer lobbied his friends in the ecumenical community outside Germany to support the opposition, but he made little headway. Hitler’s power increased, and his critics were silenced through execution or imprisonment.

In 1938, Bonhoeffer learned that war was imminent. His friends, afraid for his safety, arranged for him to take a visiting professorship in New York, but after a brief stay Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, feeling he couldn’t abandon his country in its time of need. “I shall have no right,“ he wrote to a colleague, “to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people. … Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.”

Bonhoeffer was forbidden to speak in public, or to print or publish his works, and he was required to report his movements to the police. He was able to avoid conscription by joining the Abwehr, a branch of the military intelligence service, and he became a double agent and co-conspirator with his brother-in-law von Dohnanyi in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. As a pacifist, joining the plot was a difficult decision for Bonhoeffer, but he felt it was the only way to stop Hitler, and he was willing to assume the guilt for his action. As he said, “It is not only my task to look after the victims of madmen who drive a motorcar down a crowded street, but to do all in my power to stop their driving at all.”

In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested along with Dohnanyi and spent a year and a half in a military prison in Berlin awaiting trial. When his connection to the conspiracy was discovered, he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp and later to the Flossenburg camp, where he was executed just a month before the capitulation of Nazi Germany. He left a legacy of both finished and unfinished works, including The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics, and Letters and Papers from Prison.

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Dr. deFischer, a Petaluma family physician and geriatrician, is president-elect of MMS.

Email: irinadefischer@gmail.com