legacy—but even there, assumptions of an earlier age held fast among many. The twenty-first century’s so-called new atheism had its answer in a new fundamentalism, whose leaders, notably in the United States, enlisted on the reactionary side of the culture war being fought over flash points like abortion and gay rights.14 On questions ranging from “family values” to the “war on terror” to the corporate ethos of retail giants, overt appeals to religion, in fact, defined large segments of American society more than ever.15 “Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life,” as the critic Terry Eagleton puts it, “is known as the United States.”16 And not just the U.S. Across the globe, religious true belief has solidified identity in a sea of uncertainty.
Negatively, religion spawned world-historic acts of violence—from the 1995 murder in Israel of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish zealot to the perversion of Allahu Akbar over Manhattan, the Pennsylvania countryside, and the Pentagon in September of 2001 to the God-ordained orgy of killing in Norway in 2011 by a Christian supremacist. One wants to separate such killer-nihilism from “true religion,” yet jihadist and crusader impulses do have underpinnings in authentic faith. We will investigate that connection in this book.
But the power of contemporary religion has been showing itself positively, too. Essential to the civil rights, human rights, and peace movements in the West, faith was also key to the nonviolent grass-roots revolution that brought down the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Religion was a pillar of the inchoate Muslim awakening to democracy, so hopefully begun in the Arab Spring of 2011.17 Indeed, independent of politics, religion remains a source of consolation and strength—of inwardness and conscience—for global multitudes, decisively including impoverished masses to whom material structures of meaning are simply unavailable.
So was Bonhoeffer wrong? Did religion in fact survive intact, if altered? Did he misconstrue the nature of religionlessness? For that matter, what is religionlessness? I locate this question, first, not in poll numbers or philosophical debates but in a deeply personal problem: having myself absorbed—and learned to take for granted—basic assumptions of the so-called Secular Age, what of my own religious inheritance can I believe without being dishonest? I am no fundamentalist, and the limits of religion, even its perversity, are fully apparent to me. If the faith continues to impose itself as a primal option, it does so in my case despite—or is it because of?—the crises of 1945. What happens when traditional belief slams into the wall of the Holocaust? When it plunges into the abyss of Hiroshima? Those questions are what draw me to Bonhoeffer and his crucial intuition that religion and Jesus Christ are not identical. Because Hiroshima had not happened when he was writing, the potential suicide of the human species was not an actual prospect for Bonhoeffer. Yet the “continuation” of human life had surfaced as an overriding moral problem, and I, a nuclear warrior’s son, live to be haunted by it to this day. In Buchenwald, Bonhoeffer may well have had a foretaste of the full horror of Auschwitz, but that particular death camp’s meaning as an epiphany of radical evil remained implicit. For me, though, its meaning as an obliteration of inherited religious absolutes could not be more explicit. The point is that Bonhoeffer, in all of this, sensed that some pin had been removed from the ordered mechanism of civilization, and I know with personal certainty that he was not wrong. How had the jailed German pastor come to such knowledge? Decisively, the answer involved what he saw befalling the Jews.
In April 1933, a newly empowered Hitler tipped his hand when he ordered the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, prompting a Germany-wide display of anti-Semitism. For several days, Jewish businesses, synagogues, institutions, and individuals were subject to insult and even attack—a dress rehearsal for the violent assaults against Jews that would escalate across the decade. Right at the outset of the Nazi campaign, raising a rare voice of protest in that first year, Bonhoeffer published the essay “The Church and the Jewish Question.” He called on his fellow Christians to stand with Jews against their persecution by the Third Reich. The Church should be prepared, he wrote, “not only to help the victims who have fallen under the wheel, but,” if necessary to stop the murderous careening, the Church should be prepared “to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself.”18
Bonhoeffer might not have been aware of it, but such a grasp of an absolute moral mandate to oppose assaults on innocent Jews had to undermine, however gradually, the sanctified religious anti-Judaism on which such an anti-Semitic campaign depended—a religious anti-Judaism to which Bonhoeffer himself still subscribed. In 1933, Bonhoeffer opposed Hitler-friendly Church leaders who, in line with Nazi racism, wanted to bar all non-Aryans from ordination in the ministry, but, at least in that early period, he still saw conversion to Christ as the Jewish destiny. Jewish religion had no reason to continue. That Bonhoeffer was a Christian supersessionist is probably what accounts for the fact that he has never been named a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust museum.
The main point, though, is that an authentic rejection of racial anti-Semitism had to lead, however indirectly, to a rejection of religious anti-Judaism. Here Bonhoeffer was putting his ethical insight ahead of his theological conviction. This elevation of ethics over theology is what made him a religious revolutionary. Few Christians saw it yet, but wicked hatred of Jewish persons and doctrinal denigration of Jewish religion were joined as a grenade is to its pin. Bonhoeffer, simply by taking in what was in fact happening all around him, even as most Germans averted their eyes, found himself set on a course of personal and religious change.19
By 1938, when the Nazi onslaught climaxed in the blatant violence of assaults on Jews everywhere in Germany and Austria, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between Church and Synagogue had evolved—an at least implicit abandonment of supersessionism—to the point that he saw them as equal “children of the covenant.” In the margin of his Bible, next to Psalm 74, Bonhoeffer wrote, “November 10, 1938”—the date of what came to be known as Kristallnacht.20 The adjacent verses read, “They set thy sanctuary on fire, to the ground they desecrated the dwelling place of thy name . . . How long, O God, is the foe to scoff? . . . Why dost thou hold back thy hand?” The attacks on Jews had become a matter of religious revelation. “Crystal Night” took its name from glass being shattered all over Germany—Jewish businesses, homes, and places of worship being ransacked and torched. All at once, the Lutheran pastor’s own Martin Luther had to look different: “To save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death,” Luther had written long before, “my advice is, first, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire. Second, that all their books—their prayer books, their talmudic writings, also the entire Bible—be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf.”21 This was a Luther with whom Bonhoeffer could have nothing further to do.
By the time of his Ethics, written in Berlin between 1940 and 1943, Bonhoeffer began to see the theological meaning of the political horror unfolding in Germany, and his simple insight amounted by then to a personal revolution: “An expulsion of the Jews from the West,” he wrote, “must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”22 We will see how this assertion is not as obvious as it seems in the twenty-first century; in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, home of the Aryan Christ, it was revolutionary.23 The expulsion of Jews meant the expulsion of Jesus—full stop. Only a realization of such magnitude could have then prompted the pacifist pastor’s enlistment in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler: “For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”
Note that Bonhoeffer does not say, as Martin Luther did in the title of the first of his two tracts about Jews, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew.” Luther’s emphasis belongs on “was born,” since the whole point of the Gospel narrative, once “the Jews” rejected Christ’s teaching and sponsored his crucifixion, is that Jesus became something else—“the firstborn of the new Creation,” the first Christian.24 Bonhoeffer’s life-changing insight, in envisioning Jesus as one of those expelled—“Juden raus!”—is surely what gave rise to the great question he then
