Bonhoeffer Today

Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in 1906 and martyred by the Nazis in April of 1945, has been depicted as an apostle of “religionless Christianity” and a radical opponent of tradition. Eberhard Bethge, his friend and biographer, has over the years vigorously protested this depiction. It is protested also by Bonhoeffer’s own words, as witness this passage from Ethics on the decadence of Germany, and of the West, in the 1930s:

If we now find ourselves obliged to raise precisely this question once again and to think it over afresh, we must first of all make it clear that we are here taking the concept of good in its widest sense, that is to say, simply as the contrary of vicious, lawless and scandalous, as the opposite of public transgression of the moral law, as good in contrast to the publican and harlot. Good, in this sense, contains an extremely wide range of gradations, extending from the purely external observance of good order to the most intimate self-examination and character-formation and to personal self-sacrifice for the most sublime human values. It was very necessary to protest against that bourgeois self-satisfaction which, by a convenient reversal of the gospel, considered being good simply as a preliminary to being Christian and which supposed that the ascent from being good to being Christian could be accomplished more or less without a break. This protest has, however, taken the form of an equally dangerous distortion of the gospel in the opposite sense which was brought forward in the most impassioned terms at various times in the course of the nineteenth century and then especially during the past twenty years. The justification of the good has been replaced by the justification of the wicked; the idealization of good citizenship has given way to the idealization of its opposite, of disorder, chaos, anarchy and catastrophe; the forgiving love of Jesus for the sinful woman, for the adulteress and for the publican, has been misrepresented, for psychological or political reasons, in order to make of it a Christian sanctioning of anti-social ‘marginal existences,’ prostitutes and traitors to their country. In seeking to recover the power of the gospel this protest unintentionally transformed the gospel of the sinner into a commendation of sin. And good, in its citizen-like sense, was held up to ridicule.