The Radiant Faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (I)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau, Germany (today Wroclaw, Poland). He became a Lutheran pastor and opposed the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. Suspected of involvement in the assassination attempt on Hitler, he was imprisoned in Berlin in 1943 but maintained contacts with the outside world. He was subsequently transferred to a Gestapo prison and finally interned in a concentration camp. His fellow prisoners witnessed his humility, kindness and radiant faith until the final moment of his hanging in April 1945.

Rose-Marie-Barandiaran: I wanted to have this conversation with the theologian José Arregi (whom Golias readers have the opportunity to read) because Bonhoeffer’s life and spirituality seemed to me to touch upon issues that concern us today. I will list just a few: atheism, transcendence, reality, omnipotence, suffering, the position of the Church, and… as human beings what should our task be?

As early as 1931, Bonhoeffer noted the rise of atheism among his contemporaries. In 1944, he wrote to his girlfriend Maria: “The world is moving towards adulthood, it is turning a false image of God into a tabula rasa, it is heading towards a non-religious era.”

What do you think, José, nearly 80 years after Bonhoeffer?

José Arregi: These are the words of a righteous man of faith tested by the fire of the crucible. He has risked everything for the sake of what is truest for him, and he’s about to lose it…. On the verge of losing it, unless all our religious and theological categories of truth and falsehood, gain and loss, life and death, are turned upside down.

It is moving to imagine a 37-year-old Lutheran pastor, a brilliant professor of theology, extraordinarily gifted in heart, intellect and speech, a prominent and dangerously committed member of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, locked in a narrow, dark, 2 x 3m-cell, as dark as his personal fate, and deep in theological reflections. Deep down and in his lucid mind there are questions that are shaking all certainties: Is the world, and Europe, especially, this enlightened and convulsed Europe, abandoning life by denying God? Or could it be that it has to deny the “religious God” that papers over, in order to find God as grace to live in freedom and goodness, beyond religion and all its creeds, norms and cults? So what is God? And who is Christ for us today? Does Christianity still have something to offer? What Christianity? What Church? 80 years on, these are the questions that remain for us.

Bonhoeffer, in good spirits nevertheless, does not shrink from any questions, even if they shake the very foundations of his life, and lack answers. He feels an urgent need for a new theology, a new language to speak about God, about Jesus, to announce the Gospel to a world that neither understands nor is able to accept the traditional beliefs linked to a worldview and anthropology in ruins. He did not manage to develop the theology he had intuitively sensed. All we have left out of that is fragmentary, unfinished thought: he was hanged in April 1945 at the age of 39, having spent his last two years in prison.

His fundamental reflections, the most novel ones, often paradoxical and provocative, are to be found in the letters he wrote from Tegel prison outside Berlin to his friend and eventual publisher Bethge between April and September 1944. I am not sure I understand exactly or can correctly interpret some of his best known and most quoted lapidary  statements: that “God is abandoning us”, that Christ is “the lord of the areligious”, that an “areligious” or “worldly Christianity” is needed, that we must live “as if God did not exist”, “live before God without God”…. How I wish he had survived many years and had been able to further and systematise his profound and, I believe, accurate intuitions! His thought is bold, open, searching, and I would say what it suggests to me for our times, no less deadly and dangerous than his were.

That said, let’s get down to your question. What did he really think about atheism? I couldn’t say for sure. He never referred to himself as an atheist, but it is striking that in the midst of a modern European society in which atheism was growing unstoppably –at that moment, among the working masses and intellectual elites, especially– he should confess that he felt more sympathy for atheists than for believers. And that he should describe the traditional, pre-modern, religious and theistic world –the vast majority of those who attended the courses and services presided over by this pastor-theologian–as “underage”, “ignorant” and “unaware”. And what is more, that he should state categorically that the atheistic world that denies “God” is closer to God than the religious world that acknowledges him.

Bonhoeffer thus turns the traditional theological interpretation of atheism upside down, and this presupposes a profound metamorphosis of the very notion of God, of Christ, of Christianity, of faith, of the Church. He offers us partial outlines of a new theology, enlightening if we know how to understand and apply it today with intellectual and vital honesty.

R.M.B. : As far as Bonhoeffer is concerned, “transcendence” does not mean “fleeing from this world to find solutions beyond it”. “Transcendence”, for him, is simply “the neighbour on my path”.

I find this admission deeply moving and directly linked to Jesus of Nazareth.

J.A.: Absolutely. Of course, the Jewish Jesus imagined a “God” as Lord of heaven and earth, but that is not the decisive point. What is decisive is that the Jesus of the Gospel accounts –the “real” (and plural) Jesus of the early Christian communities, beyond strict historicity and beyond dogma, the Jesus whom Bonhoeffer always calls Jesus Christ or Christ, who inspired him and who can inspire us– declares: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my heavenly father” (Mt 7:21*). Let us translate that: “Not everyone who believes in dogmas and worships me will experience the presence of God, but those who live humanely in justice, mercy and freedom.”

His parable of the Good Samaritan is a huge criticism of religion and religious transcendence: to become a neighbour to the wounded person is for Jesus the criterion of the divine and the human. “Understand what this means: I require mercy not sacrifice” (Mt 9:13*, quoting Hos 6:6), not divinities, temples, codes and creeds.

“Remain faithful to the earth” –Nietzsche’s Zarathustra had proclaimed–, stay away from “extraterrestrial hopes”, do not be “despisers of life”, “we do not want to enter the kingdom of heaven: we have become human and we want the kingdom of earth”. Closer to Nietzsche than to religious discourses, Bonhoeffer also calls for the kingdom of God on earth, not beyond it. For the pastor-theologian, free behind prison bars, transcendence, faith, Christianity is realised in mercy and justice, which are not different things. God is incarnated in humanely lived life, in us as in Jesus. And I’d like to add: God is incarnated in the universe, on earth, in the communion of the living and of all beings; Bonhoeffer had yet to say that, but I would like to imagine that he would say it today. Transcendence is not opposed to immanence, but is its profound realisation, which does not mean perfect.

*Revised English Bible (REB)

(To be continued)

Rose-Marie Barandiaran – José Arregi
(Published in GOLIAS Magazine 211, July-August 2023, pp. 20-22)

(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)