CHAPTER 19
SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
The proclamation of grace has its limits. Grace may not be proclaimed to anyone who does not recognize or distinguish or desire it . . . The world upon whom grace is thrust as a bargain will grow tired of it, and it will not only trample upon the Holy, but also will tear apart those who force it on them.
Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.
—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
In 1935, as he embraced his call to be the director of the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer’s relationship with the Confessing Church grew more awkward. He became a lightning rod for controversy, both inside and outside the Confessing Church. And in 1936, the Nazis themselves would take notice of him.
The Scriptures said that faith without works is dead, that faith “is the evidence of things not seen.” Bonhoeffer knew that one could see some things only with the eyes of faith, but they were no less real and true than the things one saw with one’s physical eyes. But the eyes of faith had a moral component. To see that it was against God’s will to persecute the Jews, one must choose to open one’s eyes. And then one would face another uncomfortable choice: whether to act as God required.
Bonhoeffer strove to see what God wanted to show and then to do what God asked in response. That was the obedient Christian life, the call of the disciple. And it came with a cost, which explained why so many were afraid to open their eyes in the first place. It was the antithesis of the “cheap grace” that required nothing more than an easy mental assent, which he wrote about in Discipleship. Bonhoeffer “was a person about whom one had the feeling that he was completely whole,” said one Finkenwalde ordinand, “a man who believes in what he thinks and does what he believes in.”
That summer Bonhoeffer wrote the essay “The Confessing Church and the Ecumenical Movement” in which he took both sides to task. He was the principal point of connection between them, seeing the best and the worst in both. But each saw the best in itself and the worst in the other. Because of the still unhealed wounds from the First World War, many in the Confessing Church were suspicious of anyone, even Christians, from other countries; and they felt that many in the ecumenical movement were theologically sloppy. On the other side, many in the ecumenical movement thought the Confessing Church was overly concerned with theology and overly nationalistic. Both sides had good points.
But Bonhoeffer wanted them to fight their common enemy, National Socialism, and he tried to get them to do so, despite many roadblocks. He was horrified that the ecumenical movement was still willing to talk to the Reich church of Müller, Jäger, and Heckel. And he was horrified that the Confessing Church was still willing to talk to Hitler and was unwilling to confront him. Action was the only thing these bullies feared, but neither the ecumenical movement nor the Confessing Church seemed prepared to act. They preferred to keep up a meaningless and endless dialogue and played into their enemies’ hands. The announcement of the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews was a case in point.
The Nuremberg Laws and the Steglitz Synod
On September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were announced. These Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor stated:
Entirely convinced that the purity of German blood is essential to the further existence of the German people, and inspired by the uncompromising determination to safeguard the future of the German nation, the Reichstag has unanimously resolved upon the following law, which is promulgated herewith:
Section 1 1. Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they were concluded abroad. 2. Proceedings for annulment may be initiated only by the Public Prosecutor.
Section 2 1. Extramarital intercourse between Jews and subjects of the state of Germany or related blood is forbidden.
Section 3 Jews will not be permitted to employ female citizens of German or kindred blood as domestic workers under the age of 45.
Section 4 1. Jews are forbidden to display the Reich and national flag or the national colors. 2. On the other hand they are permitted to display the Jewish colors. The exercise of this right is protected by the State.
The Nuremberg Laws represented what has been called a second, “more ordered” phase of Jewish persecution. Jews, who were once legal citizens of Germany, were becoming subjects of the Third Reich. Their citizenship was vanishing, legally, in the center of Europe, in the twentieth century. Bonhoeffer had known of this pending legislation through Dohnanyi, who tried to thwart it, or blunt it, in vain.
Bonhoeffer saw the enactment of these laws as an opportunity for the Confessing Church to speak out clearly, in a way they had not yet been able to do. The Nazis had drawn a line in the sand and everyone could see it.
But the Confessing Church was again slow to act. It was guilty of the typically Lutheran error of confining itself to the narrow sphere of how church and state were related. When the state is trying to encroach upon the church, this is a proper sphere of concern. But for Bonhoeffer, the idea of limiting the church’s actions to this sphere alone was absurd. The church had been instituted by God to exist for the whole world. It was to speak into the world and to be a voice in the world, so it had an obligation to speak out against things that did not affect it directly.
Bonhoeffer believed it was the role of the church to speak for those who could not speak. To outlaw slavery inside the church was right, but to allow it to exist outside the church would be evil. So it was with this persecution of the Jews by the Nazi state. Boldly speaking out for those who were being persecuted would show the Confessing Church to be the church, because just as Bonhoeffer had written that Jesus Christ was the “man for others,” so the church was his body on this earth, a community in which Christ was present—a community that existed “for others.” To serve others outside the church, to love them as one loved oneself, and to do unto them as one would have others do unto oneself, these were the clear commands of Christ.
Around that time, Bonhoeffer made his famous declaration: “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.” As far as he was concerned, to dare to sing to God when his chosen people were being beaten and murdered meant that one must also speak out against their suffering. If one was unwilling to do this, God was not interested in one’s worship.
The willingness of Lutherans to keep the church out of the world reflected an unbiblical overemphasis on Romans 13:1-5,* which they had inherited from Luther. They had never been forced to deal with the boundary of this scriptural idea of obedience to worldly authorities. The early Christians stood up against Caesar and the Romans. Surely the Nuremberg Laws would force the Confessing Church to take a stand against the Nazis.
One day, from his home church in Dahlem, Franz Hildebrandt called Finkenwalde with alarming news. The Confessing Synod was proposing a resolution conceding the state’s right to enact the Nuremberg legislation. It was the last straw for him. Hildebrandt was ready to resign from the Pastors’ Emergency League and to leave the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer decided he must do something, so he and a group of ordinands would go to Berlin, to see whether they might influence things at the synod, which would be held in Steglitz. Bonhoeffer was not a delegate and couldn’t speak at the synod, but he could be an encouragement to those who saw things as he did. He wanted them to see that the Nuremberg Laws gave them an extraordinary opportunity to take a stand.
The trip was an anticlimax. The synod did not approve the resolution, and it also failed to take a stand. The National Socialists’ strategy of dividing and conquering its opponents, of confusing and delaying, was working with the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer knew that something of this unwillingness to speak out with boldness had to do with money. The state provided financial security for the pastors of Germany, and even pastors in the Confessing Church would jeopardize their incomes only to a certain point.
Family
During this period, Bonhoeffer’s struggles with depression continued. There was much to be discouraged about, not least his church’s unwillingness to speak out against the monstrous Nuremberg Laws. These laws would affect his own family. As a non-Aryan family, Sabine and Gert had suffered, but now the Nuremberg Laws would make things worse. They were forced to dismiss many women who worked for them. “There were tears,” Sabine wrote. The women had been increasingly harried for working in a Jewish household. SA men making deliveries to the home would say things like, “What, are you still working with Jews?” Some professors who had been their friends distanced themselves, fearing for their jobs. The more Sabine heard through her sister Christel von Dohnanyi, the more she knew that she, Gert, and the girls would have to leave Germany, hard as that was to fathom. When Christel told Sabine of what was happening in the concentration camps, long before others knew, she couldn’t hear any more and asked her to stop.
Bonhoeffer’s grandmother, then ninety-three, had a friend whose Jewish family member was forced to give up a legal practice as a result of the new laws. In what would end up being her last letter to Dietrich, she asked his help: “This fifty-four-year-old man is traveling around the world looking for work so that he can finish raising his children. . . . A family’s life destroyed! . . . Everything is affected, down to the smallest details. Can you actively advise or help us here? . . . I hope you can give some energetic thought to this and perhaps know some way out.”
That October of 1935, Bonhoeffer’s parents moved from their vast home on Wangenheimstrasse in Grunewald to a new house that they had built in Charlottenburg. It was smaller, but still large enough for guests. Dietrich would always have a room on the top floor. Grandmother Julie Tafel Bonhoeffer moved with them into this new home, but after Christmas, she contracted pneumonia and died in January. Her influence on Karl Bonhoeffer and his children was incalculable. On January 15, taking as his text Psalm 90, which the family read every year on New Year’s Eve, Bonhoeffer preached at her funeral:
A refusal to compromise over the right principle, free speech for the free individual, that fact that one’s word once given is binding, clarity and common sense in one’s opinions, candor and simplicity of life in private and in public—these were factors that went to her very heart. . . . She could not bear to see these values despised or to see the rights of an individual violated. For this reason her last years were clouded with the great sorrow that she bore for the fate of the Jews among our people, a burden which she shared with them and a suffering which she, too, felt. She stemmed from another age, from another spiritual world, and this world does not descend with her into the grave. . . . This heritage for which we thank her lays duties upon us.
The Trip to Sweden
On February 4, 1936, Bonhoeffer celebrated his thirtieth birthday. He had always felt overly conscious of his age and thought thirty impossibly old. It was the last such milestone he would see. And it was the celebration of this birthday that would for the first time bring him into the sights of the Nazis.
It began innocently enough in one of the many postprandial conversations with his ordinands in the main hall at Finkenwalde. A fire blazed in the huge eighteenth-century copper brazier that he had bought in Spain. They had been celebrating Bonhoeffer’s birthday in the usual manner, with singing and other tributes to the honoree, and when the evening was winding down, they got into a rather free-wheeling conversation about gift giving. Someone brightly suggested that perhaps the person celebrating a birthday should not be the one to receive the gifts, but to give them—and his friends should be the recipients. When Bonhoeffer took the bait and inquired what everyone might want, they settled on the idea of a trip to Sweden. Would he organize one for them? As it turned out, he would.
The trip to Sweden was one of many examples of Bonhoeffer’s generosity. One ordinand at Gross-Schlönwitz, Hans-Werner Jensen, said that “serving his brother became the center of Bonhoeffer’s life. He avoided keeping them in tutelage; he only wanted to help them.” Jensen recalled other incidents of Bonhoeffer’s generosity. When Jensen was at Stolp hospital with appendicitis, he was transferred from the third-class ward to a private room. “The orderly told me that a good-looking gentleman with glasses had been in that morning declaring he would bear the cost. . . . Another time we were making our way home after an open evening in Berlin. Bonhoeffer bought the tickets for all of us at the station. When I wanted to repay him, he just answered: ‘Money is dirt.’”
This was a grand opportunity to show his ordinands the church beyond Germany. He had captivated them many times with tales of his trips abroad. And he had explained that the church was something that transcended national boundaries, that it extended throughout time and space. There were many good reasons for such a trip, not least to afford his ordinands some measure of the culturally broadening experiences he’d had in spades. Bonhoeffer also knew strengthening Finkenwalde’s ties to the ecumenical church abroad would be helpful in safeguarding it from Nazi interference.
He immediately contacted his ecumenical friends in Sweden and Denmark. Plans for the trip had to be made as quickly and quietly as possible, because once Bishop Heckel caught wind of it, there would surely be trouble. He would do all he could to stop it, and he could do much. But not if they left before he heard about it. Nils Karlström, who was the secretary of the Ecumenical Committee in Uppsala, understood Bonhoeffer’s situation and went to great pains to help. His official invitation, which was a crucial matter, since Heckel would look into the propriety of every detail of the trip, came on February 22. Three days later Bonhoeffer sent official notice of the trip to his superiors, as well as to the Foreign Ministry, where a Bonhoeffer family friend was the head of the Justice Department. He thought this would give him some cover, but it backfired. Someone else saw it and contacted Heckel, who in turn gave them a bad report on Bonhoeffer. As a result, the Foreign Ministry wrote to the German Embassy in Stockholm: “The Reich and Prussian Ministries for Church Affairs, and the Church Foreign Office, warn against Pastor Bonhoeffer because his influence is not conducive to German interests. Government and church departments have the strongest objections to his visit which has just now become known.”
On March 1, the twenty-four ordinands, with Bonhoeffer and Rott, boarded a ship in the port of Stettin and sailed northward to Sweden, unaware that the Foreign Ministry had taken an interest in their trip. Bonhoeffer knew of the dangers of such a trip and had warned his ordinands to be very careful about what they said, especially to newspaper reporters. Whatever they said would be blown up into the cartoon proportions of typical newspaper headlines. Bonhoeffer didn’t want a repeat of the “Hitler Wants to Be Pope” fiasco.
News of the trip made Heckel look bad with the Reich government. On March 3, the Swedish press put the seminarians’ visit on their front pages, and the next day, their visit to Archbishop Eidem in Uppsala made the papers too. On the sixth, in Stockholm, they called on the German ambassador, Prince Victor zu Wied. The prince, having just read the warning letter about this troublemaker, received Bonhoeffer and his associates with obvious coolness. Bonhoeffer didn’t know why, but later recalled that a life-sized portrait of Hitler in the room glowered at them.
With their arrival in Stockholm came many more articles and photographs. Each column inch of international coverage made Heckel look worse. He must do something immediately, and as usual, the resourceful cleric would do everything possible. First, he fired off a letter to the Swedish church. Next, he wrote a letter to the Prussian church committee, taking them to task. But this time, he would bring out the big artillery and blast Bonhoeffer officially and in writing, in terms that moved the whole dispute to another level:
I feel impelled . . . to draw the attention of the provincial church committee to the fact that the incident has brought Bonhoeffer very much into the public eye. Since he can be accused of being a pacifist and an enemy of the state it might well be advisable for the provincial church committee to disassociate itself from him and to take steps to ensure that he will no longer train German theologians.
A corner had been turned. Heckel placed Bonhoeffer at the mercy of the Nazi state. Bethge wrote that “no form of denunciation was more fatal than the description ‘a pacifist and an enemy of the state,’ especially when this was used officially and in writing.”
The immediate upshot was that Bonhoeffer’s right to teach at Berlin University was officially revoked. He had given a lecture there on February 14, which turned out to be his last. His long relationship with the world of academia ended forever. He would protest and appeal, but there was no way to rescind the judgment. And yet, in the topsy-turvydom of Hitler’s Germany in which academia was closed to Jews, it can hardly have been entirely disheartening. His brother-in-law Gerhard Leibholz was forced to “retire” that April. In some ways the judgment was a badge of honor.
“An Atrocious Piece of False Doctrine”
On April 22, Bonhoeffer delivered a lecture titled “The Question of the Boundaries of the Church and Church Union.” It was typically measured, thorough, and definitive, to the point of being elegant and beautiful, like a winning equation. In it, he explained how the Confessing Church was not solely concerned with dogma, but neither was it unconcerned with dogma. In a memorable and hideous turn of phrase, he said that the Confessing Church “takes its confident way between the Scylla of orthodoxy and the Charybdis of confessionlessness.” He talked about the boundaries of engagement, explaining the vital difference between engaging “another church”— such as the Greek Orthodox Church or the Roman Catholic Church—and an institution that was “anti-church,” such as the German Christians. One could have differences with another church, but engage in a dialogue to further mutual understanding. One could not have a dialogue with an institution that was “anti-church.” This lecture on the eternal question, What is the church? helped his students make clear, biblical sense of a confusing issue at a confusing time in German church history.
But someplace in this beautiful landscape, planted like a time bomb, was a single sentence. It would soon explode and effectively obliterate every sentence around it and cause a firestorm of controversy. Bonhoeffer did not think of it that way when he wrote it, and he had never imagined that it would become a focal point of the lecture. The controversial sentence was this: “Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church in Germany separates himself from salvation.”
The condemnations were thundering. When the lecture was published in the June issue of Evangelische Theologie, the paper quickly sold out. Bonhoeffer’s essay led Hermann Sasse, who had cowritten the Bethel Confession with him, to declare that the Confessing Church as “distinct from the confessional movement upheld by the Lutheran churches, is a sect, the worst sect in fact ever to have set foot on the soil of German Protestantism. ” Merz said that Bonhoeffer’s declaration was “the ecstatic effusion of a hitherto levelheaded man, contradicting everything that was essential to Luther.” General Superintendent Ernst Stoltenhoff called it “nothing more than an atrocious piece of false doctrine.”
Bonhoeffer wrote to Erwin Sutz:
My paper has made me the most reviled man of our persuasion. . . . Things are approaching the stage when the beast before which the idol worshippers bow down will bear the caricature of Luther’s features. . . . Either the Barmen Declaration is a true confession of the Lord Jesus Christ which has been brought about through the Holy Spirit, in which case it can make or divide a church—or it is an unofficial expression of the opinion of a number of theologians, in which case the Confessing Church has been on the wrong track for a long time.
Memo to Hitler
Bonhoeffer’s hopes for the Confessing Church were raised again in the spring of 1936 when he learned that the church administration was preparing a document that forthrightly criticized the Nazis’ policies against the Jews, among other things. It was a brave but measured document, and it was being written for the eyes of one man. It was a memorandum from the Confessing Church to Adolf Hitler.
The memo was written in such a way as to invite its maniacal reader into a conversation. It was neither demanding nor accusatory, but asked questions, and as such was calling Hitler’s bluff, asking him to clarify things, giving him the benefit of the doubt. Was the “de-Christianization” of the German people official government policy? What did the Nazi Party mean by the term positive Christianity? It also noted that party ideology was forcing German citizens to hate Jews, and as a result, Christian parents faced difficulties with their children since Christians were not supposed to hate anyone. Hildebrandt was involved in drafting it, and Niemöller was among the signers.
The document was hand delivered to the Reich chancellery on June 4. Besides the copy for Hitler, only two other copies existed, both closely guarded. It was all a calculated gamble, since Hitler could respond negatively. As it turned out, Hitler did not respond at all. Days passed, then weeks. Had he ever received it?
After six weeks, disastrous news: they heard news of the memo from a London newspaper. On July 17, the Morning Post published an article about it. How could the British press have known about it since it had not been made public? Now Hitler would look bad in the eyes of the world at the very moment the Confessing Church had hoped to give him an opportunity to react privately, to save face. And it got worse: a week later a Swiss newspaper published the memo in its entirety. It appeared that the Confessing Church had leaked the memo to the international press with the intention of making Hitler look bad. But no one who had written the memo had a copy of it. Some suspected that Hitler himself had leaked the memo to make the Confessing Church look bad. Indeed, the church now appeared traitorous, having used the international press against the German government. As a result, many mainline Lutherans distanced themselves even further from the Confessing Church.
So what happened? It turned out that two of Bonhoeffer’s former students, Werner Koch and Ernst Tillich, and Dr. Friedrich Weissler, a lawyer for the Confessing Church, were behind the leak. They had been frustrated with Hitler’s lack of response, and they thought they could force his hand. All three were arrested and sent to Gestapo headquarters and interrogated. In the fall they were sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Weissler, for the crime of being Jewish, was separated from his brethren and died within the week.
The Olympics were to begin in two weeks, so Hitler delayed taking immediate action against the trio. After all, international visitors and media were on hand, and more than four million tickets were sold. For now, he wished to appear magnanimous and tolerant.
The Confessing Church now made a bold move. Since the horse was out of the barn, the memo would be read from pulpits across Germany “to provide unmistakable evidence that the church had not completely lost its voice about the flagrant injustice.” Furthermore, the text of the memo would be printed onto a million pamphlets and distributed. By criticizing Hitler publicly, the Confessing Church was swimming against a surging tide of popular opinion for Hitler. He was in high regard among even those who had been his detractors a year or two earlier, and the Olympics would be a crowning achievement. Anyone criticizing the buoyant Hitler at that high-water mark in Germany’s resurrection from the Versailles grave was likely to be thought a griping fussbudget. Or an enemy of the state.
Olympiad
That summer the Olympic Games afforded Hitler a singular opportunity to show the cheerful, reasonable face of the “new Germany.” Goebbels, who spared no expense in building his cathedrals of deceit, erected a veritable Chartres of trickery and fraud. The propagandist Leni Riefenstahl was even making a film of the spectacle.
The Nazis did their best to portray Germany as a Christian nation. The Reich church erected a huge tent near the Olympic stadium. Foreigners would have no idea of the internecine battle between the German Christians and the Confessing Church; it simply looked like there was an abundance of Christianity in the midst of Hitler’s Germany. At St. Paul’s Church, the Confessing Church sponsored a series of lectures: Jacobi, Niemöller, and Bonhoeffer spoke. “Not a bad evening yesterday,” Bonhoeffer wrote. “The church packed; people were sitting on the altar steps and standing everyhere. I wish I could have preached instead of giving a lecture.” Most of the Confessing Church lectures were packed. The Reich church sponsored lectures by “approved” university theologians, all thinly attended.
Bonhoeffer had mixed feelings about whether the Confessing Church should participate. Serious Christians in Germany were at war with something that was unrepentantly evil, that would not listen to reason and would not compromise. One must act and be prepared to face the consequences. As ever, he seemed alone in seeing this. The ecumenical movement continued its interminable dialogue, and the leaders of the Confessing Church did much the same, straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
The evangelical American leader Frank Buchman, who was the head of the Oxford Movement, was in Berlin now, hoping to bring the gospel of Christ to Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. His colleague Moni von Cramon had made the acquaintance of Himmler, with whom Buchman lunched during this time. The year before, Himmler told Cramon: “As an Aryan I must have the courage to take the responsibility for my sins alone.” He rejected as “Jewish” the idea of putting one’s sins on someone else’s shoulders. He was even less interested in what Buchman had to say. Later in August Buchman made his tragic remark: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.” It was a throwaway comment made in an interview with the New York World-Telegram from his office at Calvary Church on Park Avenue and Twenty-first Street, and it did not reflect his wider thinking on the subject. Still, it illustrates how easily even the most serious Christians were initially taken in by Hitler’s conservative pseudo-Christian propaganda.
After the Olympics, Bonhoeffer went to Chamby, Switzerland, for the Life and Work conference. The memo to Hitler would be read by Confessing Church pastors across Germany on August 23. Bonhoeffer asked his superiors whether he might stay in Switzerland, since it would be valuable to have someone outside Germany who was familiar with the memo, who could get word to the international press about it and about how Hitler was dealing with those who proclaimed it.
A number of brave pastors read the proclamation from their pulpits on the appointed day. One was Gerhard Vibrans, a close friend of Bonhoeffer and Bethge. At the end of the service the village schoolmaster spied the village policeman. “Arrest this traitor!” he cried. The policeman shrugged that he had no orders to do so. The Gestapo nonetheless had taken the names of those who read the proclamation.
Cast Ye Not Your Pearls Before Swine
In the fall of 1936, Ludwig Müller surfaced again, causing ripples with a pamphlet titled “Deutsche Gottesworte” (“German Words of God”). In the avuncular tone of an iconic chain-restaurant pitchman, the Reibi addressed his constituency in the foreword: “For you, my comrades in the Third Reich, I have not translated the Sermon on the Mount but Germanicized it. . . . Your Reichsbishof.” Müller was only too happy to help his Aryan friend Jesus communicate more effectively with the people of the Third Reich. And since meekness was not an acceptable “German” attitude, Müller had given his comrades something more in keeping with the hearty Germanic image he wished to promote: “Happy is he who always observes good comradeship. He will get on well in the world.” Müller obviously meant this self-lampooning hokum as evangelistic. But to what did he wish to convert his ignorant readership?
The German Christians had convinced themselves that “evangelizing” Germany was worth any price, including eviscerating the gospel by preaching hatred against the Jews. But Bonhoeffer knew that twisting the truth to sell it more effectively was not confined to the German Christians. Members of the Confessing Church had also shaved the truth betimes.
For Bonhoeffer, the challenge was to deliver the Word of God as purely as possible, without feeling the need to help it along or to dress it up. It alone had the power to touch the human heart. Any frippery would only dilute the power of the thing itself. He had told his ordinands of this time and again. Let this power speak for itself, unhindered.
But practically speaking, it was difficult to know where to draw the line in proclaiming the gospel. Was it so easy to say that Frank Buchman was casting pearls before swine in trying to reach Himmler? This question would come up in a very practical way for some of the ordinands who were dispatched to parishes not terribly interested in what they had to offer. It could be discouraging. Gerhard Vibrans was sent to a tiny village east of Magdeburg that seemed populated almost exclusively by dullards:
My parish of six hundred souls at Schweinitz is a very poor one; on average only one or two people go to church there every Sunday. . . . [E]very Sunday, wearing my vestments, I make a pilgrimage through the whole village primarily to bring home to the people that it is Sunday. . . . The people try to comfort me by saying that I will get my salary even though no one goes to church.
He said that on Trinity Sunday no one at all showed up, “apart from the woman sexton.” Bonhoeffer’s response to Vibrans was simple, practical, and biblical: “If one village will not listen we go to another. There are limits.” He was echoing Jesus’ injunction to the disciples that they shake the dust from their sandals and leave a village where they were not welcomed (Matt. 10:14). But Bonhoeffer was not cavalier about it, and his heart went out to Vibrans, who had been about as faithful a servant as anyone could have imagined: “Your loyal observance of our advice almost puts me to shame. Don’t take it too literally or one day you might get fed up with it.”
Bonhoeffer visited the village and preached there. He later wrote Vibrans and said that he should write his congregation “telling them that this is possibly the last offer of the Gospel to them, and that there are other communities whose hunger for the Word cannot be satisfied because there are too few workers.”
In the spring of 1937, Bonhoeffer wrote a dramatic paper titled “Statements about the Power of the Keys and Church Discipline in the New Testament.” He was trying to get the church to take itself seriously, to grasp what power God had given it, an awesome and frightening power that needed to be understood and used as God intended. Just as he spoke to his ordinands about preaching the Word, he now spoke to the whole Confessing Church. The paper begins:
1. Christ has given his church power to forgive and to retain sins on earth with divine authority (Matt. 16:19; 18:18; John 20:23). Eternal salvation and eternal damnation are decided by its word. Anyone who turns from his sinful way at the word of proclamation and repents, receives forgiveness. Anyone who perseveres in his sin receives judgement. The church cannot loose the penitent from sin without arresting and binding the impenitent in sin.
There was nothing wishy-washy about it. Later he touched on the concept of cheap grace—without using the term—and he commented on how the ecumenical movement and the Confessing Church had sometimes engaged in well-intentioned dialogue with Hitler and the Reich church:
3. “Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you” (Matt. 7:6). The promise of grace is not to be squandered; it needs to be protected from the godless. There are those who are not worthy of the sanctuary. The proclamation of grace has its limits. Grace may not be proclaimed to anyone who does not recognize or distinguish or desire it. Not only does that pollute the sanctuary itself, not only must those who sin still be guilty against the Most Holy, but in addition, the misuse of the Holy must turn against the community itself. The world upon whom grace is thrust as a bargain will grow tired of it, and it will not only trample upon the Holy, but also will tear apart those who force it on them. For its own sake, for the sake of the sinner, and for the sake of the community, the Holy is to be protected from cheap surrender. The Gospel is protected by the preaching of repentance which calls sin sin and declares the sinner guilty. The key to loose is protected by the key to bind. The preaching of grace can only be protected by the preaching of repentance.
He had made similar comments before, in many contexts. He had warned the Confessing Church leaders much as the prophets of the Old Testament had done. And like the prophets, he had warned in vain.
But in 1937, the true nature of the beast with whom they had been dealing would suddenly reveal itself. The wolves, no longer needing to creep along under their sheepskins, would toss them away and come running.
The Nazis Crack Down
In 1937, the Nazis abandoned all pretense of being even-handed and came down hard on the Confessing Church. That year more than eight hundred Confessing Church pastors and lay leaders were imprisoned or arrested. Their leader, the outspoken Martin Niemöller of Dahlem, was among them. On June 27, he preached what would be his last sermon for many years. Crowds had overflowed his church week after week. That final Sunday, Niemöller was no less outspoken than he had always been. From the pulpit he declared, “We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of the authorities, than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.” That Thursday he was arrested.
Even when being brutal, the Nazis were canny and careful. They were exceedingly sensitive to public opinion, and their approach to the Confessing Church was mostly one of ever-increasing and ever-tightening regulations. Their methods were “not so much aimed at banning the Confessing Church directly,” Bethge said, “but gradually liquidating it through intimidation and the suppression of individual activities.”
They forbade the reading of intercessory prayer lists from the pulpit and revoked passports; Niemöller’s passport had been revoked earlier in the year. In June the Nazis declared that all collections taken during services of the Confessing Church were illegal. In July all “duplicate communication” would be subject to the Nazis’ Editorial Law and would receive the same treatment as newspapers. For example, the Finkenwalde circular letters that Bonhoeffer wrote to his former pupils must now be signed personally by him. He put the words Personal Letter at the top of each copy. The welter of inane regulations and unjust laws overwhelmed the Confessing pastors, who were constantly running afoul of one of them and being arrested.
Over the next few years, Bonhoeffer felt a keen responsibility toward any Finkenwaldians taken to prison. He visited many of them and stayed in touch with their wives and parents. To the parent of one, he wrote:
It is often difficult for us to grasp God’s way with his church. But we may attain peace in the certainty that your son is suffering for the sake of the Lord and that the church of Jesus intercedes for him in prayer. The Lord confers great honor on his servants when he brings them suffering. . . . [Your son], however, will pray that you place everything in God’s hands and that you will give thanks for everything that God may visit on you and on his church.
He wanted them to know that they were part of a larger community of resistance. To this end, and as a way to generally bring some relief to the harried young wives of imprisoned pastors, Bonhoeffer arranged for them to stay at the country home of Ruth von Kleist-Retzow at Klein-Krössin. She, too, became a supporter and encourager of many of the brethren and their families. When Werner Koch was imprisoned in a concentration camp, she wrote him: “We live in strange times, but we should be eternally thankful that poor, oppressed Christianity is acquiring greater vitality than I have ever known in the course of my seventy years. What testimony to its real existence!” Bonhoeffer sent Koch’s wife to Frau von Kleist-Retzow to enjoy her peerless Christian hospitality. The rambling house, built in the old half-timbered German style, was surrounded by gardens and tall chestnut trees. She even raised young geese in her large country kitchen and had three guest rooms, named Hope, Contentment, and Joy.
Niemöller Arrested; Hildebrandt Departs
On the morning of July 1, Bonhoeffer and Bethge were in Berlin. The arrests of the Confessing Church pastors had been increasing, so they went to Niemöller’s house in Dahlem to strategize with him and Hildebrandt. But they found only Hildebrandt and Niemöller’s wife. The Gestapo had arrested Niemöller just moments earlier.
The four of them were talking about what to do next when several black Mercedes pulled up to the house. Knowing these to be Gestapo, Bonhoeffer, Bethge, and Hildebrandt made for the back door and were there stopped by Herr Höhle, a Gestapo official already familiar to them and most of the Confessing Church. The three men were escorted back into the house, searched by another officer, and then placed under house arrest, where they remained for seven hours, during which time they sat and watched as the Niemöllers’ house was searched. The Gestapo’s meticulous perseverance was eventually rewarded with the discovery of a safe behind a picture, and the thousand marks within, belonging to the Pastors’ Emergency League.
Niemöller’s ten-year-old son, Jan, remembered that anyone who showed up at the house that day was detained and fell under suspicion. “The house became full,” he said. Somehow the inimitable Paula Bonhoeffer got wind of the situation. Bonhoeffer saw his parents’ car pass several times, his mother peeking out. Everyone but Niemöller was released that afternoon. Things had entered a new phase.
Niemöller was in jail for eight months, but on the day of his release the Gestapo promptly rearrested him. They were known for this unpleasant tactic. Hitler could not abide the freedom of someone so outspokenly against him, so he honored Pastor Niemöller with the distinction of being a “personal prisoner” of the Führer for the next seven years, which Niemöller spent in Dachau. He was freed by the Allies in 1945.
Meanwhile, Hildebrandt would preach at Dahlem, his sermons no less fiery than Niemöller’s. Still, he began to see that, as a Jew, it might be time for him to make an exit. Passports were being revoked, and he might not be able to leave when it was more convenient. His last sermon was July 18.
There were always Gestapo officers in the congregation. They meant to intimidate the parishioners and pastors, but at Dahlem they failed consistently. Niemöller teased them from the pulpit, sometimes asking a congregant to “pass a Bible to our policeman friend.” This Sunday, in direct contravention of the new laws, Hildebrandt read aloud the list of those for whom intercessory prayers were being asked. He then took up an extra collection explicitly for the work of the Confessing Church. He instructed that the money be placed on the Lord’s Table at the altar, where it was dedicated to God and God’s work with a prayer. The Gestapo usually turned a blind eye to such breaches of the laws, but that day the officer did not. At the end of the service he brazenly went forward and took the money.
After this, Hildebrandt was arrested. A scene ensued in which Hildebrandt protested his arrest. Then the congregation joined in, growing louder and louder. The noisy crowd followed as the Gestapo officers escorted Hildebrandt outside to their car. The congregation crowded around the car, continuing their protest, and watched as the Gestapo officers tried to start the car and failed. After several embarrassing minutes, the humiliated Gestapo officers conceded defeat, got out of the car, and began walking with their prisoner toward headquarters. They preferred to do their work quietly, under cover of night when possible, but now as they walked down the street, they were the objects of a jeering congregation, outraged that their pastor was being taken from them, and letting everyone within earshot know about it. What’s more, the Gestapo were unwittingly marching their prisoner in the wrong direction. Hildebrandt and his parishioners knew it, but they were not in a mood to help the Gestapo, who appeared more and more foolish with each step. In the end Hildebrandt was taken to the Gestapo headquarters on the Alexanderplatz.
The following day, the Gestapo took him back to his apartment, where another stash of money belonging to the Confessing Church was discovered and confiscated. But one of the officers was stricken with a bad toothache during the search, forcing him to end things prematurely, and leaving untouched a second Confessing Church fund.
Hildebrandt was then taken to the Plötzensee prison. Bonhoeffer and his other friends feared for his life there. As a Jew, he was much more likely to be mistreated. The Bonhoeffer family made an all-out effort to secure his release. Hans von Dohnanyi stepped into the fray and was able to get him out two days earlier than the prescribed twenty-eight. The early release enabled him to leave for Switzerland undetected by the authorities. Without this extraordinary intervention, he would have had to remain in the country and likely would have been rearrested as Niemöller had. As a non-Aryan, he probably would not have survived. From Switzerland, Hildebrandt went to London where he immediately became assistant pastor with his old friend Julius Rieger at St. George’s. There he continued to work with refugees, and with Bishop Bell and his other ecumenical contacts. But Bonhoeffer would miss his friend.
The End of Finkenwalde
In Berlin, the Confessing Church planned a service of intercession to be held at Niemöller’s church in Dahlem on August 8. The church was cordoned off, but Niemöller’s congregation, like its pastor, was made of sterner stuff than most, and things erupted into another demonstration against the Nazis. The crowds refused to disperse for hours. Two hundred and fifty of the faithful were arrested and taken to the Alexanderplatz.
Throughout the summer of 1937, Bonhoeffer oversaw the fifth six-month course at Finkenwalde. He was also completing work on his manuscript for a book on the Sermon on the Mount that had been taking form in his thoughts since about 1932. The book, to be called Nachfolge (Discipleship), appeared in November 1937. It would become one of the most influential Christian books of the twentieth century.
When the summer term was over, Bonhoeffer and Bethge took a holiday trip to the Königsee and to Grainau, near Ettal, in the Bavarian Alps. After this they went up to Göttingen to visit Sabine and Gerhard and their girls. It was in Göttingen that he received a surprise telephone call from Stettin, informing him that the Gestapo had closed down Finkenwalde. The doors had been sealed. An era had ended.
For the next six weeks, Bonhoeffer and Bethge stayed in Berlin at his parents’ home on Marienburgerallee. They stayed in Bonhoeffer’s attic room, where there were two beds and many bookshelves.* From the window one looked down at the house and backyard next door, where Bonhoeffer’s sister Ursula and her husband, Rüdiger Schleicher, lived. Bethge became a member of the Bonhoeffer family, eating every meal with them and enjoying these intelligent and cultured people, all of whom were passionately opposed to the Nazis. At night Bethge and Bonhoeffer discussed the latest news from Dohnanyi. It was getting more and more grim, especially with regard to the Jews.
They spent many evenings at the Schleichers’ home, where the grand piano was. Bethge and Dietrich and the others would sing, with Dietrich usually playing accompaniment. Dietrich’s eleven-year-old niece, Renate, was the designated page turner. Like her uncle, she had inherited the von Hase coloring—the flaxen hair and piercing blue eyes—of her grandmother, Paula Bonhoeffer. Neither she nor the twenty-eight-year-old Bethge had the slightest inkling that in six years they would be married.
The Collective Pastorates
During these six weeks, Bonhoeffer tried everything to appeal the closing of Finkenwalde. But it was clear by the end of 1937 that Finkenwalde would not reopen. Still, Bonhoeffer knew this didn’t have to mean the end of the illegal seminaries. They would continue in the form of a Sammelvikariat (collective pastorates).
The process began by finding a church whose senior pastor was sympathetic to the Confessing Church and placing a number of “apprentice vicars” with him. Theoretically, they would be assisting him, but would actually receive education in the Finkenwalde mode. Each ordinand would be registered by the local police as an assistant to the local pastor, but would live with other ordinands in groups of seven to ten. In 1938 there were two such collective pastorates, both in the eastern wilds of Pomerania. The first, at Köslin, was about a hundred miles northeast of Stettin. The second was even more remote, about thirty miles farther east.
The superintendent of the Köslin district was the father of Fritz Onnasch, a Finkenwalde graduate. He placed ten ordinands with five Confessing Church pastors in his area. All of them lived in his vicarage. Bonhoeffer also lived there when necessary. Onnasch was the director of studies. The superintendent in Schlawe was Eduard Block, who employed Bethge and Bonhoeffer as assistant ministers under him. In Schlawe, Bethge would be the director of studies. This group of ordinands lived east of Schlawe in what Bethge described as “the rambling, wind-battered parsonage in Gross-Schlönwitz, at the boundary of the church district.”
Bonhoeffer split his time between these idylls, traveling between Köslin and Schlawe on his motorcycle, weather permitting. He taught at Schlawe during the latter half of the week and remained through the weekend. Bonhoeffer often traveled the two hundred miles to Berlin and phoned almost every day, usually speaking with his mother, who continued to be his principal conduit of information about the church and political struggles.
Bonhoeffer was an eternal optimist because he believed what God said through the Scriptures. He knew that whatever befell him or the faithful brethren would open new opportunities in which God would operate, in which his provision would become clear. In his 1937 end-of-the year summation to the Finkenwalde graduates, he wrote, “We can already tell you today that the new ways by which we are being led give us great cause for thankfulness.” A letter from one of the ordinands during this time gives a picture of what life at Schlönwitz was like:
I did not come to Schlönwitz in a glad or hopeful frame of mind. . . . I shuddered at the prospect of this period of mental and physical straitening. It was to my mind a necessary evil . . . which one must endure gracefully and get through as well as possible on grounds of self-discipline . . . but then everything turned out quite different from what I had feared. Instead of entering the stuffy world of theological bigotry, I found myself in one which combined much of what I loved and needed; clear theological work in companionship with others, who never let one be wounded by feeling one’s own incompetence, but who made the work a joy; brotherhood under the Word which united us all without respect of person; and at the same time an appreciation of all that gives charm to the fallen creation; music, literature, sport and the beauty of the earth; a magnanimous way of living . . . when I look back I can see a clear picture. . . . The brothers sitting in the afternoon over coffee and bread and jam. The chief returns after a long absence . . . now we get the latest news, and the world breaks into the quiet and simplicity of our country life in Pomerania. . . . [D]oes it dull the exactness of your theological vision, if I tell you that it was the peripheral things which [were] enhanced by appreciation of the central one?
In 1939 the vicarage in Schlawe was no longer available, but even this was no hardship. The ordinands relocated to Sigurdshof, an even more remote location than Gross-Schlönwitz. It was as if a bird were leading them farther and farther away from the cares of the present and into a realm deep in the heart of a German fairy tale. Bethge wrote:
The small house was two miles south of the village on the estate, and it was more secluded than anywhere they had lived up to that point. Four tiny windows looked out the front onto a little-used courtyard, under an overhanging roof and through luxurious climbing plants. In the back the idyllic Wipper River flowed by. There was a water pump beneath the nearest trees, where a vast forest began that merged with the Varzin woods of the Bismarck estate to the south. There was no electricity. . . . Anyone who did not find even this situation quiet enough could withdraw to a hunting lodge farther away in the forest. In the summer they could use the count’s fishing skiff on the pond and the tennis court at the Tychow manor house.
We are anxious about our coal; and besides that, we have no paraffin, so we have to use candles. We all stay in one room, and someone plays [an instrument] or reads aloud.
In letters to his parents describing the situation, Bonhoeffer wrote:
I arrived here yesterday. . . . Yesterday afternoon I could not stop myself from joining the skiers in the snow-covered wood. It was really lovely, and so peaceful that everything else seemed like an apparition. Generally speaking, I really feel more and more that life in the country, especially in times like these, has much more human dignity than in towns. All the manifestations of the masses simply fall away. I think the contrast between Berlin and this secluded farmstead is particularly striking now.
We are now fairly snowed in and cut off. The postal van can’t get through, and we can get nothing except now and then by sled. . . . Minus 28 degrees. . . . Under the circumstances the work goes well. The forester has let us have two loads of wood and two hundred kilograms of coal, and that will do for a few weeks. Of course, the food supply is rather difficult too, but we still have enough. If I had my way, I think I should like to leave town for good.
The black ice here is indescribable after a good deal of flooding. Up to within ten yards of the house the meadows have turned into a magnificent skating rink. . . . We have enough fuel for a week.
For two days we have been deep in snow with almost uninterrupted snowstorms.
* . “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience” (NIV).
* . One may visit this room today. Bonhoeffer’s bookshelves, desk, and piano are still there.