for the German airline Lufthansa, and Karl Friedrich distinguishing himself as a brilliant physicist working with such figures as Albert Einstein and Max Planck in the quest to split the atom. The Bonhoeffer family were not churchgoers, although Paula as mother along with her familial church background had been imbued with the piety of the “Herrnhut movement” and so ensured that regular Bible reading and hymn singing were a part of the family life.
Though Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theological training took place in an institution synonymous with the German historical-critical method, that was not to be the system of thought which most influenced him. Instead his major influence came from a man who stood irrevocably opposed to that liberal tradition, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), who had shaken the theological world when in 1922, while working as a rural pastor, he wrote a commentary on Romans that represented the beginning of his sustained attack on theological liberalism. Theological liberalism had equated European progress, thought, and culture with Christian theology, stating that the gospel must be couched in such a manner to make sense in that context. Of course when Barth wrote Europe had just passed through the catastrophic war of 1914–18, making such an easy accommodation of the gospel to European culture much more problematic. In response Barth developed a system of theological thought resolutely opposed to all for which the liberal tradition stood. The liberal system, its father being Schleiermacher, had been the norm in the European theological tradition for over a century and of course much of it was centred on Bonhoeffer’s alma mater, the theological faculty within the University of Berlin. So entrenched was theological liberalism that the contribution of Barth represented ‘a bolt out of the blue.’ While the liberal project had seen culture and faith as analogous, believing the task of theology to be to speak coherently and sensibly to the culture, Barth charged that faith instead stood dialectically rather than analogously to culture and far from acting as the affirmation of culture stood instead dialectically as its great “no.” Human beings from within their framework of culture and tradition were totally unable to work their way to God, who always stood above and outside the human project looking down from a height on the human towers of Babel. Barth’s God was utterly transcendent and there were no means by which humans could win divine approval through their own methods, but rather salvation could only come from the divine side mediated as grace through Jesus Christ. As such it cast a great judgement upon all human effort.
Barth understood his theology as a restatement of the Protestant orthodoxy of “sola fides,” that one could only be saved through faith. That in particular had been the experience of the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, a man whose figure towered over Germany. However, though Protestantism in essence rejected any idea that one could achieve salvation through their own means or through participation in a particular culture, the historical reality that Protestantism had been founded in Germany by a German, Luther, and represented a break with the universal church meant that the Protestant faith had ironically become deeply linked with what it meant to be German, so that the two had almost become synonymous. Martin Luther, who had stood against the universal church, was viewed as a German hero and in his opposition to the universal nature of the Catholic Church was understood to be the one in which German particular identity was created and centred. By his translation of the Latin Vulgate into German Luther had also largely codified a language unifying the disparate Germanic traditions into a greater sense of oneness, though that process of unity would not culminate until Bismarck established the German nation in 1871. Given this context, the Protestant church and in particular the Lutheran church had strongly developed as a German nationalist church.
The Lutheran church also importantly had a very particular way of understanding faith in relation to the political order. The theological centre point of the Lutheran faith, as we have just seen, was that a person is entirely dependent on the grace of God for salvation, with no one being able to save themselves. This thought of course had a radical outworking within the political and social order by stripping away all distinctions of self-righteousness and in so doing had a revolutionary impact in that it undermined a class system at that time firmly set within the framework of feudalism. If no one was more justified than anyone else before the great Lord then why should one seek justification before the lesser lords? Rather, each person was equal before the magisterial divine. Understanding the political implications of this theological thought, the German peasants began a rebellion against that old order they no longer viewed as having divine sanction. Initially Luther was supportive of the peasants, but then turned against them in the style of vile language that perhaps only Luther could muster, urging the princes to “smite slay and stab” the peasants, before adding, “such wonderful times are these that a prince can merit heaven better with bloodshed than another with prayer.”1 The sudden turn of Luther’s sympathies is best explained of course by his realisation that he needed the support of the German princes if his Reformation was to succeed in face of the power of the Holy Roman Empire. What seemed to be a logical nexus between the theological idea that all people, in total need of grace, were equal before God with the sociopolitical outworking that therefore no one should be privileged and that all were equal, had to be broken. Luther did this by separating the religious and the secular realm. In the former, yes, all were equal in that all were equally dependent on God’s grace, but this was to be held entirely separate from the political realm in which the old order would prevail. Lutheran thought would operate by a stark dualism whereby the religious and secular realms were held separate. The church was to only be concerned with the realm of faith but must remain mute in the secular realm which properly belonged to the state for state authorities like those in the church had been placed in those positions by the Divine will. They drew especially from the Scripture passage “for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1) for this view, along with the passage calling one to “render Caesar that which belongs to Caesar and unto God that which belongs to God” (Mark 12:17).
This dualist understanding was to strongly shape the German church response to the Nazis, largely precluding the church from mounting an effective opposition to that regime. That response to the regime, however, did vary.
I response of a large part of the church was that represented by the German Christians, those who completely fell in behind the Nazi Reich not only understanding it as being like other political leadership as being established by God, but going further by seeing the Nazis as having a special providential role. Led by such figures as Ludwig Muller, later made Reichsbishop of the Reichskirche (the unified German Protestant Church) by the Nazis, the German Christians offered total support to the regime, gladly superimposing the swastika with the cross. Selling themselves completely to the Nazis, they viewed Hitler and the Nazis as saviours divinely sent in order to save Germany from both the ignominy of the strictures placed on the nation by the Treaty of Versailles and also from the Communist threat both from within and outside Germany. They identified the Weimar Republic with German weakness, both of which had been a result of Versailles, and its weakness they understood as fuelling the atheistic Communist threat. Further, they joined the Nazis in seeing the Jews as the integral part of an international “Zionist conspiracy” being behind the Weimar Republic, and viewed both the Jews and that Republic as being part of a planned “Zionist-Communist” takeover. The Jews were understood in this to be a fifth column, a traitorous festering sore within Germany. In order to create this narrative, Jesus of course had to be rebirthed as a classic Aryan hero who had been betrayed and executed by this perfidious race. In one sense, however, the German Christians were not classically Lutheran, for they were all too eager to hand over control of the church, the properly religious realm, to the Nazis. The German Christians came later to dominate the Reichskirche and the same could be said also of that body.
The main alternative response to that of both the German Christians and the Reichskirche was that initially represented by the Pastors’ Emergency League and then later the Confessing Church. The response of both these fell classically within the duality of the Lutheran framework, in that they largely ceded the political sphere to the Nazis but strongly opposed Nazi interference in the religious realm. Opposing the Reichskirche for their selling out of the properly religious sphere to the Nazis, the Confessing Church, because of their dualist understandings, were never able to offer the needed strength of opposition to the regime. While unable to offer
