Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis

Summary: An assessment of Bonhoeffer as a pacifist and how that pacifism remained unchanged throughout the 1940s, in opposition to how Bonhoeffer's story is often presented.

Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis is intentionally trying to reframe the story of Bonhoeffer. The common story is that Bonhoeffer after his time studying in NYC in 1930-31 came to see the Sermon on the Mount as the central teaching of Christianity. Bonhoeffer focused his teaching in the underground seminary on the Sermon on the Mount and that is reflected in his book Discipleship. But starting at some point in the late 1930s or early 1940s, there was a shift in Bonhoeffer and he came to see that his peace ethic was no longer a viable means of operating. This traditional version of Bonhoeffer shifts into a couple of variations, either Bonhoeffer kept his peace ethnic but violated his own teaching and particpated in the assassination attempt anyway, or he moved toward a type of Nebuhrian realism that justified his participation in the assassination attempt.

Mark Nation says that is all wrong. He directly challenges Bethge's presenation of Bonhoeffer as changing and instead suggests that Bonhoeffer remained fully and conscously a pacifist until the end. The book is essentially a collection of six main essays about different aspects of why Nation thinks this reframing best makes sense of the evidence that we have and then four appendix essays.

The first essay is summarized by this quote: "Bonhoeffer, let it be said over and over, was not arrested for participating in any assassination attempts. He was arrested for helping to save the lives of fourteen Jews and was imprisoned for subverting the military’s power to conscript him into service." Part of this discussion is about how Nation doesn't think there is much, if any, evidence that Bonhoeffer did anything other that communicate with the ecumentical church that there was a movement in Germany trying to remove Hitler from power.

The second essay is about the importance of the "Jewish question". It is nearly 40 pages and both points out how Bonheffer saw the the problem of overt antisemitism, but how Bonhoeffer was still supersessionist in his treatment of the question and how Bonhoeffer's method was primarily to talk about the ability of Jewish Christians to be part of the church. Nation suggests that this was at least in part a strategy to get the church to recognize that if Jewish people are unable to be recognized within the church then the very concept of evangelism and the universality of the church was at stake. Germany was only about 1% Jewish and of those about 1 in 6 ethnically Jewish people were Christians.

The third essay makes the argument that we should use the word pacifist to describe Bonhoeffer's beliefs. That isn't just controversial in regard to Metaxas' presentation of Bonhoeffer, but much of the consensus around Bonhoeffer, but I think that Nation shows in detail that Bonhoeffer not only used the word to describe himeself, but consistantly taught his students to be pacifists, even if most of them rejected the teaching. Part of the method here is that Nation is challenging the reader to ask if Bonhoeffer was a pacifist by the mid 1930s, then when did that change, if it did. Nation believes that he took the job with Abwehr to avoid conscription into the army, not with the express purpose of being a part of the resistance.

The fourth essay is about how Bonhoeffer understood the work of discipleship, but in his framing of his book named Discipleship but also that broader concept. I have an ongoing reading project on the concept of Christian Discernment and this essay and the next one, on Bonhoeffer's understanding of Ethics bounce around the idea of discernment. Nation quotes Bonhoeffer as saying, "Discipleship in essence never consists in a decision for this or that specific action; it is always a decision for or against Jesus Christ." That concept is essentially describing discipleship as a type of discernment process. The chapter on Ethics makes clear that Bonhoeffer rejected ethics as a set of principles, but rather viewed ethics as essentially following Christ.

"Moral weapons of the past simply will not do, says Bonhoeffer; “we must replace rusty weapons with bright steel” (81). The central—and defining—weapon in our arsenal is “the living, creating God” (81). In fact, if we are grounded “in the reality of the world reconciled with God in Jesus Christ, the command of Jesus gains meaning and reality” (82). Then we will realize: The world will be overcome not by destruction but by reconciliation. Not ideals or programs, not conscience, duty, responsibility or virtue, but only the consummate love of God can meet and overcome reality. Again, this is accomplished not by a general idea of love, but by the love of God really lived in Jesus Christ. This love of God for the world does not withdraw from reality into noble souls detached from the world, but experiences and suffers the reality of the world at its worst. The world exhausts its rage on the body of Jesus Christ. But the martyred one forgives the world its sins. Thus reconciliation takes place."

Part of what attracts people about Bonhoffer is his unwavering vision. Nation quotes Bonhoeffer as saying, "Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.” Part of the method of ethics is standing with the vulnerable. There is a good discussion about how Bonhoeffer's understanding of four ideas, responsibility, vicarious representation, talking on guilt, and freedom, were worked out with regard to our "concrete neighbor."

These chapters again build on the earlier chapters that emphasize that Bonhoeffer was not attempting to gain power to overthrow Hitler, but to love people around him and care for justice in the face of a church that mostly ignored the injustice around them. The traditional story of the outline of his book that was compiled into Ethics is that Bonhoeffer was justifying his participation in the resistance. Nation believes this is a misreading and in fact what Bonhoeffer is doing is writing Ethics to help his former students, most of whom were drafted into the military to see how there could be resistance and how to view their Christian life in that context. Violation of the draft was an capital offense. And as Nation previously made the case, according to court records, Bonhoeffer's work in Abwehr was viewed as a violation of the draft and therefore the main reason why he was executed. The court records show that there was no connection to participation with any assassination attempts.

I think the key section of this chapter is this quote:

Bonhoeffer follows these extraordinary claims by offering ten pages of argument for why the Sermon on the Mount is crucial for understanding our Christian actions within real human history. Toward the end of these reflections—written in 1942 Germany—he says: “The Sermon on the Mount is either valid as the word of God’s world-reconciling love everywhere and at all times, or it is not really relevant for us at all” (243). “The responsibility of Jesus Christ for all human beings has love as its content and freedom as its form. . . . The commandments of God’s righteousness are fulfilled in vicarious representation, which means in concrete, responsible action of love for all human beings” (232). Very specifically he says, “by grounding responsible action in Jesus Christ we reaffirm precisely the limits of such action” (224). We must keep such comments in mind when he says that “the essence of responsible action intrinsically involves the sinless becoming guilty.” For he begins this sentence by saying: “Because of Jesus Christ . . .” Moreover, he follows it by saying, “It is a sacrilege and an outrageous perversion to extrapolate from this statement a blanket license to commit evil acts.

The final main chapter is about Bonhoeffer's prison spiritual disiplines and how he continued to think about his pacifism. I think Nation makes a lot of sense in this chapter, but Nation is also clear that he is doing a lot of speculation here because we cannot know all of the answers. The center of this chapter is using an essay from Barth scholar John Webster about Barth and applying it to Bonhoeffer. Again, another long quote and one of about a half dozen that I could choose:

“More than anything else,” therefore, this gospel entails “a matter of disorientation.” There is an immediate consequence to be drawn here for the church’s social and cultural witness: that witness must not proceed by transmuting the gospel into a stable, measurable, quantifiable social or cultural value. We can no more do that than we can channel a volcano into a domestic heating system. The gospel is no mere “principle” which can then be “applied” to issues about forms of common life or political economy. The gospel is about death and resurrection, new creation, and it is that new order of reality, rather than any immediate social applicability, which is the burden of the church’s testimony. (27) All of this has implications for how we think about the church. “Most fundamentally, it means that the church is what it is because of the gospel” (27). If this is to have any meaning then we must be “very strict to allow the gospel to exercise in an immediate way a controlling and critical influence” within our Christian communities (28). “‘Church’ is the event of gathering around the magnetic centre of the good news of Jesus Christ” (28). But since the church is possessed by rather than itself possessing the gospel, then “it will be most basically characterized by astonishment at the good news of Jesus” (29). The church is church both in its activities of gathering together and being dispersed into its daily life beyond the gathered community.

The epilogue discsses the people of Le Chambon, a village of about 5000 people who worked together to save 3000-5000 refugees, mostly Jewish, that Nation suggests was largely the result of the discipleship of a pastor who also was a committed pacifist.

I am not sure that Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis will change many minds. The very concept of a "Bonhoeffer moment" seems to suggest that at some point we can no longer just follow normal Christian ethics and we are now free to do things that at other points in time would not be justifiable. I have read plenty enough Bonhoeffer to know that he was far from perfect. He was a complex man who was inconsistent but in ways that I think Nation attempts to make sense of. One of the common tactics that Nation is using is to suggest that as a teacher and spiritual guide, Bonhoeffer would take positions that were not his own, but for the purpose of helping others to work through ideas. Or as I regularly do in my work as a spiritual director I become a conversation partner for the purpose of helping to explore a topic, not because I am taking a position of my own direct beliefs. Whether that is enough to move the terms of the conversation I am not rooted enough in the academic study of Bonhoeffer to be able to speculate about.

I have about 35 published highlights that you can read here.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/discipleship-in-a-w...