Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Discipleship without Religion

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) is known primarily as a martyr to Nazi barbarity. Unfortunately, contemporary martyrdom often winds up inflating the victim into a mythic hero, who then gets employed by various factions for their own ideological ends. This has certainly been the case with Bonhoeffer. He has been invoked by Right-wing Christians like Eric Metaxas, who enlist Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the German state against LGBT rights. Bonhoeffer has been claimed by pacifists who oppose the US reflex toward violent intervention in the affairs of other nations, by neoconservatives who advocate such intervention on the grounds of resistance to tyranny, by anti-Trumpers who see in the present regime a frightening resemblance to the early days of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and so on.

Like Mother Theresa, Bonhoeffer has become a kind of postmodern celebrity saint, and again like Mother Theresa, who had her petty faults, ideological blinders, and serious crises of faith, Bonhoeffer has readers and fans who more often than not paint an icon in their own image, and wind up failing to take account of the man, and the thinker, in full.

There are as many Bonhoeffers as there are Bonhoeffer “fan clubs.” This is unfortunate for many reasons, chief among which is that not all versions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are created equal. In this essay I want to focus first on one such version, now on the wane, that construes his theology as essentially “post-Christian” because of its hostility toward religion. It latches on to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison as the definitive statement of his mature theology, but misses the context in which “religionless Christianity” makes sense (i.e., his reformulation of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, and his implicit turn to Anabaptism and the peace churches) and thus seriously distorts his message. After this, I will address Bonhoeffer’s willing participation in the assassination plot against Hitler, and how his doomed role in this conspiracy, despite appearances, coheres with his endorsement of nonviolent discipleship

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In a letter to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge, dated April 30, 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote:

The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological…