with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his Letters and Papers from Prison. As earlier said, the thoughts expressed in these are especially tantalising, as clearly most of them are only worked out in a nascent preliminary form, Bonhoeffer’s intention being to further expand on them after his release from prison. That release of course never came.
The teasing kernel of the work comes in letter dated April 30, 1944. It is good to quote it extensively because even as it is in full it is clearly but a précis of where Bonhoeffer’s thought was taking him. He begins by expressing his hope for the success of one of the upcoming plans to assassinate Hitler. “I think,” he writes, “God is about to accomplish something that, even if we take part in it either outwardly or inwardly, we can only receive with the greatest awe.” He follows then with some theological reflections in which he clearly understands himself as broaching new ground. “What is bothering me incessantly,” he writes,
is the question what Christianity really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time. . . . Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of humankind. “Christianity” has always been a form—perhaps the true form—of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore humans become radically religionless—and I think that that is already more or less the case . . . what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what to now been our “Christianity.”5
It could be argued that this style of thought stands within the Barthian neo-orthodox tradition which had so shaped Bonhoeffer, but Bonhoeffer as I understand is clearly carrying Barth’s conclusions further:
Barth, who is the only one to have started along this line of thought, did not carry it to completion, but arrived at a positivism of revelation, which in the last analysis is essentially a restoration. For the religionless working person (or any other person) nothing decisive is gained here. The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God—without religion? . . . How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now speak as we used to) in a “secular” way about “God”? In what way are we “religionless-secular” Christians, in what way are we the “ek-klesia” [NB: Greek literally ‘called out,’ from which we get our word ecclesial], those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world?6
Again just four days before the von Stauffenberg plot, July 16, 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote,
The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.7
The day following the unsuccessful von Stauffenberg plot, Bonhoeffer wrote,
During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo-religiosis, but simply a person, as Jesus was a man—in contrast, shall we say to John the Baptist. . . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.8
Clearly Bonhoeffer writing in such manner is an expression of his interests and actions having moved far beyond the sphere of religion to the down-to-earth questions of living in the midst of the ambiguity of the world. Of course his thinking in such secular manner had been strongly shaped by his ongoing involvement in the conspiracy that he was hoping as he wrote was about to culminate successfully in the most extensive and best known of the plots on Hitler’s life.
This tantalising reflection of Bonhoeffer’s thought has led to much speculation as to where Bonhoeffer may have taken the theological world if he had survived the war. As earlier stated, I believe that Bonhoeffer was past a mere restatement of Barthian neo-orthodoxy, though holding to its essential anti-religiosity. It is clear from his words above that he has left behind a view that merely replaced a “via-positiva,” working from the world to God, with a “via-negativa” and therefore a need for revelation from God, for such revelation leaves us still in the religious realm and is therefore irrelevant in the radically secular world of which Bonhoeffer speaks. Bonhoeffer’s view of the secularity of the world and therefore the absence of God as a premise needed to make sense of existence, led in the 1960s to the “death of God” school of theologians including Harvey Cox, Bishop John Robinson, and Thomas Altizer, while his call for action in the pained reality of the world found voice in the liberation theologians primarily associated with South America, figures such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Lenonardo Boff, and Juan Segundo.
Bonhoeffer also presented an ecclesiastical challenge to the church, writing in his April 30, 1944 letter of the church in a secular age being made up of
a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as “religious.” Are these to be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervour, pique or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion upon them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgement must be that the western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us in the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians?9
Clearly again in his ecclesial understanding Bonhoeffer was visualising a future—perhaps already then becoming present—in which seemingly the religious domain, along with its vehicle, the church, was redundant.
While in the Tegel prison Bonhoeffer clearly hoped to be released, and that real hope remained present for him right up the failure of the von Stauffenberg plot and the subsequent discovery of the Zossen files. Bonhoeffer was treated well at Tegel, almost certainly due to his uncle on his mother’s side being General Paul von Hase, the military commandant of Berlin and therefore in charge ultimately of the military prison. Bonhoeffer, however, never took advantage of this fortuitous relationship, sharing with other prisoners the goods sent to him by his family and refusing on one occasion the offer of moving to a better cell, though at one point Bonhoeffer was visited by his uncle armed with plenty of sekt (German champagne), which they shared together with a few others. Paul von Hase was also involved in the conspiratorial movement, an involvement that would cost him his life just six weeks after that visit to Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer had a particular reason for wanting to be released from the Tegel prison: his engagement with Maria von Wedemeyer, only concluded a matter of months before his arrest. This action alone represented a change in Bonhoeffer’s theological understanding. Previous to this he had a relationship with a fellow theological student, Elizabeth Zinn, and this lasted eight years before Bonhoeffer increasingly distanced himself from the relationship, believing that, given the context in which he found himself, there were seemingly more important things to do. Now, however, with Maria his attitude had changed to one in which deeply human, life-affirming things such as love must be celebrated. It was almost as though he was saying, “What greater protest against a surrounding nihilist culture of death, seemingly closing off from any future, could there be than the concluding of a marriage celebrating love and a commitment to the future?”
Maria was the granddaughter of a dear friend, Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, who had long been a supporter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from the time he had been directing the
