While recognizing his many admirable traits—compassion, courage, commitment, and integrity—we should be wary of many elements of his theology. He imbibed large doses of Continental philosophy, including Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—that profoundly influenced his worldview. His theology reflected Barth’s neo-orthodox theology, which called Christians to get back to Scripture as the source for religious truth, but without believing that Scripture is historically true. Bonhoeffer always considered himself a follower of Barth, though most Bonhoeffer scholars rightly consider Bonhoeffer more liberal than Barth.

This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 35, number 06 (2012). The full text of this article in PDF format can be obtained by clicking here. For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org/christian-research-journal/

SYNOPSIS

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology seems to appeal to just about everyone. After reading The Cost of Discipleship, I was excited by Bonhoeffer, but my zeal for him waned after reading Letters and Papers from Prison. I discovered later that Bonhoeffer’s theology was different from my evangelical views. Most evangelicals appreciate Bonhoeffer’s stress on the importance of Scripture that led him to meditate daily on it. However, during the last few years of his life, Bonhoeffer discontinued his daily Bible meditation, opposing the practice as too “religious.” Bonhoeffer did not believe in biblical inerrancy, but followed Karl Barth’s view that Scripture is true, even if it is not empirically accurate. Because of this, he rejected apologetics, considering it a category mistake. Under the influence of Nietzsche, he also denied that Scripture contains any universal, timeless principles or propositions.

Bonhoeffer’s view of salvation was also quite different from the views of most evangelicals. Though he experienced some kind of conversion around 1931, he hardly ever mentioned it. Later he expressed distaste for Christians talking or writing about their conversions. He even stated that the gospel was not primarily about individual salvation. While in prison, he preferred the Old Testament to the New Testament. He complained that the New Testament was tainted by “redemption myths,” but he liked the this-worldliness of the Old Testament. Besides all this, Bonhoeffer was a universalist. In sum, Bonhoeffer’s theology was neo-orthodox, and his position was even more liberal than Barth’s.

When President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, he invoked Dietrich Bonhoeffer to help justify his action. Some Bonhoeffer scholars were indignant, arguing that Bonhoeffer would have decisively opposed the “war on terror.”¹ In 1966 Joseph Fletcher honored Bonhoeffer as a key inspiration for his book Situation Ethics; he argued that situation ethics meant that (among other things) abortion was permissible in some situations.² The Presbyterian minister Paul Hill, on the other hand, murdered an abortionist in Florida in 1994, claiming that his violence was the same as Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazi regime.³ In the 1960s, radical death-of-God theologians claimed that they were building on Bonhoeffer’s insights in Letters and Papers from Prison, but a couple of years ago the evangelical biographer Eric Metaxas told Christianity Today that Bonhoeffer was as orthodox as Saint Paul.⁴ Bonhoeffer seems to have become all things to all men, beloved by all, everybody’s saint.

But how can Bonhoeffer appeal to so many contradictory constituencies? One Bonhoeffer scholar, Stephen Haynes, has devoted an entire book to dissecting the many conflicting interpretations of Bonhoeffer. Indeed, Haynes’s own interpretation of Bonhoeffer changed as his theological convictions shifted. As a young man, Haynes identified with evangelicalism and considered Bonhoeffer a fellow evangelical. However, as Haynes became more liberal in his theological views, he discovered that Bonhoeffer was a fellow liberal. At all times, it seems, he was a fan of Bonhoeffer’s, despite the changes in his own theological perspective.⁵

MY ENCOUNTER WITH BONHOEFFER

As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, I (like many other evangelicals) first encountered Bonhoeffer by reading The Cost of Discipleship. Brimming with admiration for this theologian who sacrificed his life to oppose the evils of Nazism, I enthusiastically recommended his book to my friends. Bonhoeffer’s understanding of radical discipleship and self-denial resonated with me. I also esteemed him for rejecting racism and anti-Semitism, and for his works of compassion for the poor and oppressed. Bonhoeffer was my hero.

Several years later I read Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, expecting spiritual nourishment. However, it baffled me. Was this the same Bonhoeffer I knew and loved? Had he changed? What did he mean that we have to live “as if there were no God”? Why did he castigate Rudolf Bultmann’s opponents?⁶ Since Bultmann rejected miraculous events in Scripture, I opposed Bultmann. Bonhoeffer apparently did not share my concerns.

My next exposure to Bonhoeffer came in the late 1980s, when I was working on my Ph.D. in modern European history. In a church history course at a liberal seminary both the textbook and professor admired Bonhoeffer, considering him a fellow liberal. It struck me forcefully that Bonhoeffer was praised by just about everyone across the theological spectrum, from fundamentalists to evangelicals to neo-orthodox to liberals to death-of-God theologians, not only for his courageous life, but also for his theology. How could this be?

Divergent Discipleship

I decided to find out, so I began a systematic study of Bonhoeffer that led me to some rather unsettling discoveries.⁷ I found that Bonhoeffer’s views about Scripture, salvation, and other crucial doctrines were quite divergent from my evangelical beliefs. Bonhoeffer was not the theological conservative I had earlier assumed him to be.

Why, if what I am saying is true, have many evangelicals embraced Bonhoeffer so uncritically? First, most evangelicals read The Cost of Discipleship and maybe Life Together, works where Bonhoeffer’s theological problems are not so obvious. Second, Bonhoeffer was a courageous individual who uniquely combined a powerful intellect with compassion for the disadvantaged. Third, most evangelicals do not understand Bonhoeffer’s intellectual context. He was a sophisticated thinker completely conversant in—and heavily influenced by—Continental philosophy, including Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. Fourth, many evangelicals applaud Bonhoeffer for rejecting liberal theology, not realizing that the neo-orthodox theology he embraced is still far from evangelical theology. Even if it rejects nineteenth-century-style liberal theology, neo-orthodox theology is on the liberal side of the theological spectrum, since it rejects biblical inerrancy and other doctrines central to genuine Christianity.

BONHOEFFER’S ATTITUDE TOWARD SCRIPTURE

Probably nothing about Bonhoeffer appeals to evangelicals more than his insistence on the authority of Scripture. He professed, “I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that we need only to ask insistently and with some humility for us to receive the answer from it.”⁸ This message appears in many of his writings, especially Life Together, where he encouraged Christians to integrate meditation on Scripture into their daily lives.

Bonhoeffer’s doctrine of Scripture did not change appreciably during his career, but his attitude toward Scripture did fluctuate. Sometime around 1931, Bonhoeffer had a significant religious experience, which some describe as a conversion experience. Bonhoeffer rarely mentioned this experience, but in a private letter he testified, “For the first time I discovered the Bible.”⁹ Afterward, Bonhoeffer meditated daily on Scripture and insisted that his theology students do likewise. Many evangelicals wrongly conclude that Bonhoeffer was urging all Christians to follow this example. However, Bonhoeffer was directing his exhortations primarily to theologians, not to the laity. In Ethics he explicitly stated this: “Scripture belongs essentially to the preaching office, but preaching belongs to the congregation. Scripture must be interpreted and preached. In its essence it is not a book of edification for the congregation.”¹⁰ This is a startling statement by a Lutheran theologian, since it flies in the face of Luther’s insistence on the priesthood of all believers.

Struggles with Scripture

After 1939 or so, Bonhoeffer seems to have lost his earlier zeal for the Bible. In January 1941, June 1942, and March 1944, he admitted to his friend and confidant Eberhard Bethge that he went days and weeks without reading the Bible much, though sometimes he would read it voraciously.¹¹ He wrote, “I am astonished that I live and can live for days without the Bible— I would not consider it obedience, but auto-suggestion, if I would compel myself to do it….I know that I only need to open my own books to hear what may be said against all this….But I feel resistance against everything ‘religious’ growing in me.”¹²

Bonhoeffer thus recognized that his devotional life in the 1940s did not match his earlier writings. By justifying his growing indifference about reading Scripture as part of his rejection of “religion,” he signaled that he was moving away from his earlier teachings.

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NOTES

1. Jeffrey Pugh, Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times (London: T and T Clark, 2008).
2. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 149.
3. Pugh, Religionless Christianity, 7.
4. Eric Metaxas (interview), “The Authentic Bonhoeffer,” Christianity Today (July 2010), at www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/july/7.54.html, accessed October 25, 2010.
5. Stephen Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), xiv.
6. Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge, July 16, 1944, June 27, 1944, May 5, 1944, in Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 360, 336–37, 285.
7. See Richard Weikart, The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Is His Theology Evangelical? (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1997); Weikart, “So Many Different Dietrich Bonhoeffers,” Trinity Journal 32 NS (2011): 69–81; and Weikart, “Scripture and Myth in Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Fides et Historia 25 (1993): 12–25 (these articles are available at my website: www.csustan.edu/history/faculty/weikart).
8. Bonhoeffer to Rüdiger Schleicher, April 3, 1936, in Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990), 448.
9. Bonhoeffer to friend, January 1936, in Bonhoeffer, Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols. (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1958ff.), 6:367–68.
10. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 294–95.
11. Bonhoeffer to Bethge, January 31; 1941, June 25, 1942, in Gesammelte Schriften, 5:397, 420; and March 19, 1944, in Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 234.
12. Bonhoeffer to Bethge, June 25, 1942, in Gesammelte Schriften, 5:420.