How do we reconcile the fact that the same Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose pacifist sympathies are well known and whose intention to travel to India and visit Gandhi are well documented, joined the Resistance conspiracy to assassinate the German head of state? In two recent books, Mennonite scholar Mark Thiessen Nation and fellow minded colleagues cut the Gordian knot by insisting that if contemporary readers are to encounter the real Bonhoeffer, his role in the Resistance must be significantly calibrated downward, amounting to a ruse crafted by his brother-in-law to keep him from military service. In the process, he served as a pastoral counselor to a few of the conspirators.¹ Whether we end up agreeing or disagreeing, Nation raises important questions that invite fresh consideration of Bonhoeffer’s path. This essay will look at some details of Bonhoeffer’s reflections on pacifism and resistance, with special attention to the influence of Karl Barth on his path. I will also look at the implications for our own troubled times as the Church again responds to war in Europe.

Nation’s thesis entails two claims. First, he insists that a close examination of Bonhoeffer’s writings reveals a thoroughgoing commitment to pacifism from which he never departed. Consistent in his reflections on pacifism from 1932, Bonhoeffer made an unequivocal call to peacemaking along with a denunciation of participation in war on the part of Christians. “This sort of witness is typically referred to as pacifism; and Bonhoeffer so labels his own approach.”² The implication is that any serious participation in the Resistance conspiracy would have amounted to a betrayal of his beliefs. Nation ascribes the usual view of Bonhoeffer the conspirator to reading him through the filter of Reinhold Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer’s American teacher. According to Niebuhr’s Christian Realism, a morally honest confrontation with the horrors of Hitler would compel one to do whatever it takes to stop the perpetrator, assassination included.³ However, if, as Nation gradually came to do, one holds the Niebuhr paradigm lightly and weighs far more heavily Bonhoeffer’s own writings, his role in the Resistance amounts to naught. Nation’s other argument (to be discussed later) is that when it comes to the conspiracy and Bonhoeffer’s role, the historiography of Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge, is unreliable.

How shall we assess this reappraisal? Straightaway we should note Nation’s alignment with the across-the-board consensus that the Sermon on the Mount was at the center of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the Christian faith. In letters to family and friends, he repeatedly asserts the Sermon’s centrality to discipleship. He writes his brother, Karl-Friedrich, “But I do believe I am on the right track, for the first time in my life…. I think I think I am right in saying that I would only achieve true inner clarity and honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously… The restoration of the church must surely depend on . . . a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount.”⁴

To continue reading, click here to download the full PDF

Page 1 Foototes