Are We Still of Any Use?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Reckoning on New Year’s Day 1943

Charles Marsh
December 5, 2022

Born into privilege in a family of scientifically minded humanists, a fourteen year-old

Dietrich Bonhoeffer surprised everyone when he announced his decision, to become a
theologian. Less surprising was Dietrich’s response when an older brother asked, if I may
paraphrase, “Are you kidding me?” “Look at the church,” the brother, in fact, said. “What a
sad, paltry institution– and you hardly ever go yourself.” And Dietrich replied. “Then, in
that case, I shall reform it.” Bonhoeffer is rarely observed in want of self-confidence.

Early on, Bonhoeffer had placed his hopes in the power of a prophetic Christian remnant
to speak against the day and to inspire political dissent. In response to the new policies
excluding Jews from church service, he issued a swift denunciation. A community that
confesses Christ as Lord, he said, will do more than offer thoughts and prayers to those
who wounded or crushed beneath the monstrous Nazi convoy; it will seek to break the
wheels themselves. The church—which is to say, the global, ecumenical Body of Christ—
stands before God, always and everywhere, with an “unconditional obligation” to the
victims of society, regardless of whether the victims are Christians or non-Christians.
Bonhoeffer spoke of Hitler as the Anti-Christ.

Bonhoeffer lived in a manner true to his essential convictions: taking each day as if it
were the last, not in a spirit of fatalism or resignation, but wholeheartedly immersing
himself in the present, borrowing hope from friends and family, relishing pleasures great
and small, nourished by the Lord’s bounty, in expectation of a great future. “To think and
to act with an eye on the coming generation,” he resolved, “and to be ready to move on
without fear and worry.”

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On January 30, 1933, Bonhoeffer had lectured at Berlin University on the Book of Genesis
and the story of Cain, second son of Adam and Eve, who murders his brother Abel out of
jealousy, and becomes the first “destroyer of life.” That same day, Hitler was appointed by
President Paul von Hindenburg as the new Reich chancellor. Nothing would ever be the
same—neither the world of the mind nor the world of politics, not Europe or the world
outside it.

What happened to the landscape of German Christianity after Hitler’s appointment? The
so-called German Christians continued to baptize and celebrate the Lord’s Supper and
preach and run the country’s churches and theological schools (indeed, the universities
full stop), all the while pledging their loyalty to the fatherland and to a fully assimilated
Volkskirche, which is say, an ethno-national church based on common blood. The German
Christians would give the doctrine of the Holy Spirit their best nationalist spin – casting
the spirit as an ethos instead of a person of the Triune God: as “a nature spirit, a folk
spirit, Germanness in its essence.” No less heretically, the German Christians would not
confess that Spirit proceed from the Führer and the Father, and thus, from nature, history,
and nation. God had chosen a new Israel, the German people, abrogating Israel’s ancient
covenant – so declared the German Christians in what came to known as the
disinheritance theory. Baptisms would be recast so as to include the prayer that “this
child will grow up to be like the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler”.
Research centers such as the Institute for the Study of the Eradication of Jewish Influence
on German Church Life – this one based in Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther had
translated the New Testament - recruited Germany’s best Biblical scholars, historians and
theologians. Their mission was to systemically de-Judaizie the Christian faith1 , or as the

1
One of the founders of the Institute explained its mission: “The new truth of the moment is the
völkische truth that every one must understand themselves as a member of a Volk, ‘an organic
whole originating in race, bound to the land, and formed and impressed by its destiny’. ‘For this
reason the opposition to Judaism is the very foundation of the recognition and realization of the
völkische idea…for this reason, the battle against the Jews is the irrevocable obligation of the

2
founders explained, “to overcome everything based on Jewish influence in the
ecclesiastical life of the German People, and to open the way for a faith, defined by the
unfalsified message of Christ, to perform its service to the German People in the
formation of its religious community.”2

To some degree, of course, the idea that framed the German Christian heresy originated in
traditional Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms: Christians must be obedient to the
earthly authorities as unto God. But the German Christians took a doctrine that had
historically yielded a variety of views on church-state matters into an absolutist principle
with catastrophic results: “Submit to Hitler with a joyful heart, in gratitude, as pleasing to
the Lord,” read the new catechism. Make a “personal commitment to the Führer under
the solemn summons of God”. Forge an “intimate solidarity with the Third Reich” and
with the saintly man who both “created that community and embodies it. 3 United around
Aryan ideals of masculinity and race, the German Christians would even try to convince
themselves that Jesus had not been a Jew. The lesson here, of course, is that no one
purporting to be a Christian can create an organic bond between God and nationhood
without heretical consequences. From the time of Hitler’s ascent to power, Bonhoeffer
devoted enormous energies to the preservation of the Gospel from its heretical assaults.

But Bonhoeffer would never reform the church. He would not even be able to inspire the
Christian dissidents who formed the so-called Confessing Church to commit to a clear
and concrete judgment against Hitler.

To be sure, the Confessing Church (bekennende Kirche) had rallied around a robust
doctrinal orthodoxy and courageously protested the state’s intrusions into church affairs.

German People.” Cited in Peter M. Head, “The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus” (JSHJ 2.1, 2004), p.
77.
2
Cited in Peter M. Head, “The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus” (JSHJ 2.1, 2004), p. 77.
3
Cited in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, pp. 504–5.

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The Confessing Church had formed in 1934 when delegates from the twenty-six regional
churches of the German Evangelical Church met in the town of Barmen and signed a
declaration opposing the majority’s embrace of Hitler.4 The declaration, often
anthologized in volumes of the great creeds of the church, is now known simply as the
Barmen Declaration. Written by Karl Barth in a single all-night sitting, it is a forthright
affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ according to scripture and tradition: “ ‘I am the
way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.’ (John 14.6). But
it is also an exercise in subversive indirection. Reflecting on John 14:6, for instance, the
Declaration states, “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word
of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.
We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its
proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, any other events, powers,
historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.”

The Barmen Declaration was bold as far as it went, denying the state’s pseudo-religious
demands for complete obedienc. If Jesus Christ is Lord over all worldly powers, the
adoration of Hitler is idolatry. And indeed clergy and parishioners who supported Barmen
would pay the price in arrests and imprisonment. But the Confessing Church never
denounced the brutalities of the Hitler regime or take action against the state. It would
never voice its support of the civil liberties of the Jewish people, nor denounce the Reich’s
intent to create—in the words of historian Alon Confino—“a world without Jews.” 5

4
The number 26 comes from Christiane Tietz’s Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), p. 48. The United States Holocaust
Museum puts the number in its on-line Holocaust Encyclopedia at 28 regional churches.
5
Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). At a church gathering in October 1938, Bonhoeffer asked his
comrades in the church resistance whether “instead of talking of the same old questions again

4
The failure of the dissident church to mount a direct threat to Nazi power startled
Bonhoeffer into a new way of thinking about the Christian’s witness in the world. His final
writings, including two texts in this volume, refract the lessons of a,chastened, in some
ways, devastated faith. “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds,” he writes. “We
have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocation. Experience
has rendered us mistrustful of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a
true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical.”

But it would not be enough to resist the Reich by appeals to its theological errors alone,
important as such judgment are. It would be necessary to take concrete action.
Bonhoeffer imagined the situation rather like this: If he were walking along the
Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, or Oxford Street in London, and he saw some lunatic plowing
his car into the crowd, he could not stand idly on the sidewalk. sidewalk. He would not say
to himself, “I am a pastor. I’ll just wait to bury the dead afterward.” In whatever way he
could, he would try to stop the lunatic driver.

Increasingly, in the years preceding his arrest on April 5, 1943, he found himself a voice
crying in the wilderness, as he came to understand that moral responsibility obliged him
to treason.

*
Before looking more closely at the historical collisions and theological breakthroughs that
mark Bonhoeffer’s final two years, let’s begin with the question that inevitably arises in
discussions of his legacy: why, and how, was he able “to see clearly, speak honestly, and to

and again” (by which he meant the now effectively irrelevant issue of the church’s authority
versus the state’s) it would not be better “to speak of that which truly is pressing on us: what the
Confessing Church has to say to [this] question of church and synagogue?” He would now
begin/began speaking of an equivalence before God of the church and the synagogue.

5
pay up personally”, to recall Albert Camus’s haunting words from his lecture, “The
Unbeliever and the Christian”, given in 1948 at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-
Maubourg. All the qualities of an aristocratic heritage - courage in the face of danger,
musical talent, intellectual curiosity, high-minded confidence and a cosmopolitan mind –
coalesce in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s singular goodness.

Unlike other Protestant theologians of the twentieth century – Karl Barth, Paul Tillich,
Rudolf Bultmann, the brothers Niebuhr, Herman Bavinck, Martin Luther King, Jr. –
Bonhoeffer was not the son of a minister. Born on February 4, 1906, Bonhoeffer spent his
first years in Breslau, with his seven siblings in a sprawling villa near the university clinics,
where his father, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, taught and practiced psychiatry. In 1912, the year
Dietrich turned six, his father was offered the chair of neurology and psychology at
Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin, a prestigious post overseeing the clinic for
nervous and psychiatric disorders, and the family moved into the leafy neighborhood of
Grunewald, on the edge of a large urban forest by the same name.

Dietrich's mother, Paula Bonhoeffer (nee von Hase), held liberal views on family and
society–which is to say, encouraged the free, open, and orderly exchange of ideas–and
presided over a domestic staff that included a governess for the older children, a nurse for
the smaller ones, a housemaid, a parlor maid and a cook (and after the 1920s, a
receptionist and a chauffeur). Paula Bonhoeffer observed religious rituals in the home,
and all eight children were baptized; but she distrusted fanaticism of any sort and would
not burden her children with spiritual demands. Dietrich was the exception among the
four boys in showing an interest in theological matters. As a child, Bonhoeffer he to play a
game with his twin sister Sabine that explored the idea of eternity. After they’d been
tucked into bed and prayers were said, the two would lie awake trying to imagine this vast
and mysterious notion. “Ewigkeit”, he might whisper. “Eternity”. Sabine found the word a
little unsettling. Dietrich found it to be an “awesome word”.

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By the age of twenty-one, Dietrich had written a doctoral dissertation titled Sanctorum
Communio that would be hailed by the prominent Swiss theologian Karl Barth as a
"theological miracle." Three years later he successfully defended a second dissertation in
Berlin with an exceedingly ambitious work called Act and Being; a treatise on how the
Christian doctrine of revelation resolves certain philosophical questions about the nature
of the self and the other – that also seeks to deconstruct the consequential Hegelian
notion of an all-powerful human subject. It was an exercise requiring supreme self-
confidence – which Bonhoeffer possessed in spades – that left him feeling at a loss.
“Everything seems so infinitely banal and dull,” he wrote in a note.6

Ever a seeker of new ideas and easily bored, Bonhoeffer did the unexpected: he exchanged
the comforts of the German professoriate for a peripatetic life. Between 1924 and 1932, he
would to Italy, Spain, France, and Denmark, as well as to Libya, Morocco, Mexico, Cuba,
and the United States. These travels included six weeks in Italy in the spring of 1924 – at
the age of 18 – during which he reveled in the pageantry of Rome during Holy Week (not a
typical rite of passage for German Lutherans) and felt “tempted” to convert to
Catholicism, so enthralled had he become by its physicality and beauty – “magnifico!”, he
wrote in his journal; a six month-immersion in African American Christianity primarily by
way of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem – an experience that led to his remarkable
claim at years end that he had heard the Gospel preached only in “the churches of the
outcasts of America”.

Bonhoeffer had reached Harlem through a fellowship exchange program at Union

Theological Seminary in New York for the school year 1930 – 1931. Arriving in Manhattan
late summer 1930, he was very much a rising academic star – with the two dissertations
under his belt – and not inclined to think that Americans had a thing to teach him about

6 Ibid., pp. 177–78.

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theology. But when he left New York ten months later, he took with him a vital new
understanding of his vocation as pastor and theologian.

Scholars have often noted that Bonhoeffer was underwhelmed by the liberal Protestant
liberal thought he encountered in the 1930’s at Union Theological Seminary. “Is this a
theological school or a training center for politicians?” Bonhoeffer is reported to have
Reinhold Niebuhr after a lecture. The student were even worse; easily “intoxicated with
liberal and humanistic phrases”, they talk a “blue streak,” but often without the “slightest
substantive foundation.” But despite his grumblings over the lack of doctrinal rigor in
American pragmatic theology (a fair criticism, and one the Union faculty might have
received as a complement), it is undeniable that Bonhoeffer was, finally, inspired by the
example of the engaged theologian – by the applied theology of Niebuhr as well as
numerous other professors and fellow students in this veritable laboratory of Christian
social thought on the Upper West Side It excited Bonhoeffer to think that the enterprise
of theology pertained not only to doctrine, but to race, politics, literature, social justice,
citizenship, and the complex realities of the day. The spirit of American public theology is
present every time we hear Bonhoeffer say after 1931 that grace without ethical obedience
is a betrayal of the cross; such grace is cheap.

The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was right to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life
as a “journey to reality”. And it was journey spirited to the end by his American
encounters. In the tenement buildings of New York; in the literature of the Harlem
Renaissance; in the worship, preaching, and song of the Black Church; and in the lived
theologies that flourished in a city battered by the Great Depression – he began to make
what he would later term “the turning from the phraseological to the real”. And as a
bookend of that transformative year, in the spring of 1931, he and a fellow exchange
student – a Reformed pastor from Calais, France, who would later be active in the French
Resistance –took a road trip together that carried them to Midwest through Texas into
Mexico and then back to New York through the heart of Jim Crow South. After his year in

8
America, Bonhoeffer would never again consider theology to be an activity confined to the
academy, but part of the lived life in Christ

In America, Bonhoeffer’s quest for a cloud of witnesses led him to a place where -- to
borrow from C. S. Lewis— he was “surprised by joy.” (C.S Lewis, who at fifteen had
pronounced himself “very angry at God for not existing,” became a Christian that same
spring following a late-night walk with J. R. R. Tolkien.) When, in June of 1931, Bonhoeffer
embarked on his return to Germany, it was with a new perspective on his vocation as
theologian and pastor. Made alert to the joy of worshipping in the Black church and of
grassroots ministry by the social gospel reformers, Bonhoeffer could now see his way to a
more demanding and complex faith. Beyond any expectation, the year had set his “entire
thinking on a track from which it has not yet deviated and never will,” he said. 7 “It was the
problem of concreteness that concerns me now,” he said.

Back in Berlin in the fall of 1931, he began, for the first time, to practice a rich devotional
life, animated by the African American spirituals and gospel standards he had discovered
in America. His daily readings followed the order of the Moravian Prayer Book that his
governess had given him as a child. He organized spiritual retreats, sometimes held at his
hut in the forest near Brenau and encouraged his students to read Scripture with an
attention to the distressed and excluded and the life of Jesus. He taught his students
African American spirituals and shared insights learned in the “church of the outcasts”.
He was drawn into an intimate reading of the Sermon the Mount, the most inescapably
demanding of the Gospel’s teachings, and at the same time he affirmed the Christianity
essential bond with Judaism and with the Jewish people. Importantly, his understanding
of the Lutheran doctrine of justification shifted in significant ways as well. He would no
longer think of grace as a one-sided affirmation spoken by God to sinful humanity but a
partnership between the divine and the human. The fundamental question was not how

7
Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 16, pp. 367–68.

9
shall I be saved from the wrath of God, but what is the shape of a life lived “under the
constraint of grace” and in obedience to Jesus.8 The grace that frees is the grace that
forms.

*
On Christmas Day, 1942, Bonhoeffer’s father read aloud a letter that Bonhoeffer had
recently written to his family and to his associates in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler.
Much has been written about Bonhoeffer and the German conspiracy that adds to an
already confusing story. Readers wanting a clear and thorough account of Bonhoeffer’s
unique role would do well to find Sabine Dramm’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance,
listed in my recommendations for further reading at the end of this introduction.

Suffice it to say, the German conspiracy was no uniformly coordinated national network,
but a network of dissident cells that worked largely independent of the other. In the
summer of 1939, Bonhoeffer had become a civilian member in the counterintelligence
agency called the Abwehr, joining an elite group of conspirators that included Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, Head of Military Intelligence, General Hans Oster, and Dohnanyi, in a
plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s role, however, would not get him near explosives
or the actions of the July 20, 2022 coup attempt – as portrayed, for example, in the movie
Valkerie.

Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, had used his position at the Ministry of
Justice to obtain confidential government records and compile a record of Nazi brutalities.
The document, called “A Chronicle of Shame,” contained a day-by-day listing of war
crimes, military plans, and genocidal actions and policies, the full realization of which
made clear to Bonhoeffer that his principled commitment to Christian nonviolence must
yield under these extreme circumstances to actions intended to “kill the madman”.

8
Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer, p. 182.

10
For ten years, Bonhoeffer had been on a collision course with Hitler. But what had been
accomplished? Why had his efforts – and those of his fellow dissidents not only in the
Kirchenkampf but in the wider resistance - failed to create any meaningful opposition or
threat to the regime. What had gone wrong? Had they played too much music; sung
Gregorian chants when they should have been crying out for the Jews; had they embarked
upon an inner migration instead taking on the blood-stained face of history, worn their
world-weariness as an exemption from moral responsibility?9

Though the letter would come to be known by a name suggesting measured self-
examination - “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Years 1943” - the title belies its
anguished intent; to survey the ruins of the German nation and its apostate churches and
to ponder the shape of Christian witness amid the brutalities of the present age. Reading
“After Ten Years”, we meet Bonhoeffer in his last days of freedom and at the height of his
intellectual powers.10 Promising that the future will be uncertain and that personal goals
will remain unfulfilled, everything in the essay – and let’s call it that, since there is no
salutation, complimentary close or other elements of a letter – rushes toward the one
inescapable question: “Are we still of any use?”

In this manner, “After Ten Years” is Bonhoeffer's rumination on the limits of religious
dissent and the complexities of treason.The essay unfolds in a mannered, professorial, and
at times diagnostic, fashion. It is indeed a reckoning with the high-minded principle that
had distinguished such families as his own - an examination of those German who knew
the importance of duty, whose moral imaginations had been shaped by the imperatives of
Kantian reason, but who – Bonhoeffer concluded – “failed to reckon with the fact that

9 Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 8, p. 52

10
[VB];

11
duty, reason, and conscience could be misused in the service of evil.”11 In their book No
Ordinary Men, the historian Fritz Stern and his wife, the writer, editor, and daughter of
Reinhold Niebuhr, Elisabeth Sifton, called it “an unsparing assessment of Germans and
their conduct over the previous decade” – though, I would add, the author himself is
spared the harshest verdicts, and deservedly so.12

In earlier times, Bonhoeffer says, we might have expected the “reasonable ones” and the
“ethical zealots” – the high-minded denizens of the Bildungsbürgertum – to meet evil
with reason and principle; but despite their good intentions, or at least, the presumption
of decency, they had, in this era of Fascism and violence, misread reality. Presuming that
by the appeal to reason, morality, taste and an imagined superior discipline, they could
protect a structure that was fast collapsing, they were crushed by colliding forces without
accomplished a thing.

But the same qualities that had shaped these officious Kantian servants of the law, have
now - in face of the “great masquerade of evil” – constrained free and imaginative action
– precisely the kind of action that would otherwise enable civil courage. Withdrawing
from conflict and confrontation “into the sanctuary of private virtuousness,” the good
German chose the illusion of purity over the vexing insistence of injustice - resignation to
defeat over a defiant venture of faith. Yet this was a false purity and an indulgent
resignation. For in their deference to the imperatives of duty, they remained blind to the
“one decisive and fundamental idea” that might have enabled vision and courage.
Bonhoeffer speaks of “the need for the free, responsible action even against career and
commission.” These last gentlemen and gentlewomen of the evening land– the presumed
curators of virtue – fretting endlessly over the consequences of responsible action, in the

11
. Fritz Stern and Elisabeth Sifton, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi,
Resisters Against Church and State(New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), p. 100.
12
. Fritz Stern and Elisabeth Sifton, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi,
Resisters Against Church and State (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), p. 100.
12
end, closed their eyes to the injustice around them, remaining withdrawn and silent.
“Disappointed that the world is so unreasonable, they see themselves condemned to
unproductiveness; they withdraw in resignation or helplessly fall victim to the stronger.”
In doing so, they forsake Jesus Christ.

“Who then stands firm amid the tumult and the catyclsms?”, Bonhoeffer asks.

“Only the one whose ultimate standard is not reason alone nor, principle, conscience,
freedom, or virtue; but only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these in concrete
response to God – the ones who answer the call to obedient and responsible action.13

*
When the knock on the front door, on the evening of April 4, 1943, three months after New
Year’s reckoning, Bonhoeffer was sitting at his desk in his upstairs room. Some of his
writings, including parts of his unfinished Ethics, were hidden in the rafters. The fictitious
diary he had kept to disguise his conspiratorial exertions lay on his desk. He surrendered
to Gestapo agents and was led out of the house in handcuffs and into a black Mercedes
waiting at the end of the walkway. He was thirty-seven years old and would remain in
prison until his execution on the morning of April 9, 1945.

Some popular biographers have trivialized Bonhoeffer’s prison writings, while some
admirers theologians have read Bonhoeffer as if he had written nothing else. The Anglo-
American Death of God theologians who had a fleeting fifteen minutes in the late 1960’s -
and whose books you might still find in thrift shops and retiring faculty giveaways -
represent the latter. Eric Metaxas is the most conspicuous of the occasional dilettante
who wishes Bonhoeffer had written everything else except, he says, those “few bone
fragments . . . set upon by famished kites and less noble birds, many of whose

13 Ibid., pp. 38-39

13
descendants gnaw them still” - by which Metaxas refers to the unflinching honest and
searching theological writings that Bonhoeffer wrote on paper smuggled into and out
of prison in the two years preceding his murder in a concentration camp.

In fact, these luminous texts reveal new themes and directions that can only be
understood in relation to the whole of Bonhoeffer’s thought.14 Neither the death of God
theologians nor Metaxas possess the interpretive discipline to understand the late works
in their novelty and continuity.15

These writings, which would be posthumously collected and published in English under
the title Letters and Papers from Prison, proceed as a montage of images, in lightning
flashes of insight, written in metered and free verse poems, devotional meditations, Bible
studies, reports on both prison life and the books he was reading, and theological
fragments with breakthroughs both esoteric and thrilling. They remind us that so many of
Bonhoeffer’s penetrating insights lie not in the answers he gave, but in the questions he

14
Bonhoeffer’s explorations of “the world come of age” and “religionless Christianity” – and of
“living with and before God as if there were no God” – are explorations that go to the extremes
precisely because of their anchor in the “redeeming and liberating love of Christ.” The flights of
ponderous thoughts—and they are, to be sure, at times ponderous, Bonhoeffer’s saintliness
notwithstanding--are like counterpoints that return time and again to their origin in the
“clear and plain” cantus firmus of Jesus Christ.
15
In an interview after his biography was published in 2010, Metaxas said, “[Bonhoeffer’s] legacy
was hijacked by theological liberals, most notably the 'God is Dead' movement of the 1950s and
60's, and it's taken until now to begin to seriously set the record straight.” Five years later,
Metaxas emerged as one of the most demonstrative evangelical supporters of Donald J. Trump,
invoking Bonhoeffer as an ally to the dismay of anyone who’d ever read a book about German
history. He has yet to set the record straight.

14
asked. “Who is Christ for us today?”, “Are we still of any use?” “What is religionless
Christianity?”, “Who am I?”

On the second Sunday of Advent 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote to his dearest friend Eberhard
Bethge: “By the way, I notice more and more how much I am thinking and perceiving
things in line with the Old Testament. In recent months I have been reading much more
the Old than the New Testament.”

“Only when one knows that the name of God may not be uttered may one sometimes
speak the name of Jesus Christ.”

“Only when one loves life and the earth so much that with it everything seems to be lost
and at its end may one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.”

Atheists who argue that Christianity is inherently world-indifferent would do well to read
Bonhoeffer’s late works. Here Bonhoeffer ponders what it means to be Christian for the
sake of the world. Many horrors have transpired in the course of human history because
Christians turned their eyes upward and abandoned the narrow path for some imagined
ladder of progress.

Surveying the German nation and its fateful allegiance to a brutal nationalist
pigmentocracy, it was evident to Bonhoeffer that the “foundations are being pulled out
from under all that is ‘Christianity.’” How has the Reformation church so utterly betrayed
its theological inheritance: that the sole basis of its existence is the Son of God born,
crucified, buried, and resurrected for all humanity; that its speech and action are meant to
bring glory to God, and to serve always and everywhere as sign posts towards that greater
righteousness; that to be a follower of Jesus Christ means to be in the world according to
a different standard than racial, national, or ideological orthodoxy?

15
And given those betrayals, how then should Christians live in this time after the age of
religion? The question is the thematic thread that runs through Bonhoeffer’s final works.
The answers scattered throughout the prison writings cover a kaleidoscope range of
distinctive habits and discernments; and include: keeping the language of the Gospel
from profanation; learning to see history and to read Scripture with a “view from below”,
from the perspective of the poor, the outsider, and the reviled; affirming out citizenship in
the global, ecumenical church and ontological kinship with all who suffer for
righteousness sake; confessing Christ as Lord over the powers and principalities; living in
the present time for the sake of the coming generation, acknowledging earth’s distress;
affirming the sacred character of all created life: confronting without apology our
complicity in violence and exercising the humility appropriate to our fallible judgments;
and speaking the Gospel, thoughtfully and with disciplined, so as to bring glory to God.
These habits and discernment give shape to Bonhoeffer’s vision of Christian witness after
the church’s fatal allegiance to Hitler.

In recent years, however, I’ve been thinking a lot about another theme in Bonhoeffer’s
late theological repertoire, namely his idea of “a new nobility”. He only gives us a few
hints about his imagings – with the promise always that he will return to the subject in a
future letter.

It’s a tricky idea to summon the notion of new aristocracy when the old one has
performed so badly. But his point is precisely to rethink the aristocratic ideal apart from
class, family, or rank. He envisions instead a “new elite of people” who will form an
aristocracy of responsibility—a nobility of righteous doers and prayerful pilgrims.

“It is exceedingly difficult to believe in God without a living example,” Bonhoeffer told
Bethge. Protestants, and Lutherans in particular, he realizes, have historically not been
inclined towards theologies of the Christian life enabled by human agency. But
exemplification “has its origin in the humanity of Jesus,” Bonhoeffer says, “and is central
in Paul’s writings). In these years after Christianity’s great profanation, when skepticism

16
toward the faith increases among its cultured despisers, it will be necessary to show
before we say.

And so there must be a return of the aristocrats of conscience. “Nobility arises from and
exists by sacrifice, courage, and a clear sense of what one owes oneself and others, by the
self-evident expectation of the respect one is due, and by an equally self-evident
observance of the same respect for those above and those below. At issue all along the
line is the rediscovery of experiences of quality that have been buried under so much
rubble, of an order based on quality.” The order he envisions may first recall a bygone
code of chivalry—by no coincidence, since that code arose with the ideal of the Christian
warrior. But where the medieval knight saved the widow and the orphan from the infidel
and the brute, in this day the danger was from the hollowing effects of totalitarianism and
the leveling of all thought and feeling to the basest instincts. And then there is the matter
of stupidity, which has now become calcified in the Nazi herd. “Facts that contradict one’s
prejudgment simply need not be believed.… —and when facts are irrefutable they are just
pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.” Against such a corruption, only quality
could mount an adequate defense, but quality must cease to identify itself with privilege
and rediscover the imperative of honor; is must demand a return “from the radio to the
book, from feverishly acquisitive activity to contemplative leisure and stillness, from
frenzy to composure, from the sensational to the reflective . . . from snobbery to
modesty.”16 But even more, quality must renounce “the pursuit of position” and the cult
of celebrity, in favor of “an opening upward and downward, particularly in the choice of
one’s friends, a delight in private life, and the courage for public life.” Through prayer and
righteous action, the aristocrats of conscience will safeguard “the besmirched words
freedom, humanity, and toleration.”

Above all, though, the new nobility is marked by the excellences of Jesus Christ, spirited
by a fierce love of the world, to take part “in Christ’s greatness of heart, in the responsible

16 Ibid, p. 48

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action that in freedom lays hold of the hour.”

How do we recognize these aristocrats of responsibility?

*
Some colleagues and friends found it odd that I followed my doctoral dissertation on
Bonhoeffer with a book on religion and the civil rights movement. But the two are deeply
allied in my mind - and more importantly, in their exemplification of redemptive Christian
witness. The founding mothers and fathers of the Civil Rights Movement in the United
States saw in southern and American exceptionalism “a dangerous tendency to turn the
[region and] nation into an idol, and Christianity into a clan religion,” as the late historian
Albert Raboteau wrote in his essential book, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in
the Antebellum South. The story of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955 - 1964, interpreted as
a theological narrative, introduces us to a cast of characters who enact, embody and
exemplify costly Christian witness in the American history. The movement that brought
us the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the campaigns in Albany, Birmingham and Memphis, the
Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins, the voter registration drives and the long, hot summers – this
movement remained anchored in the energies, convictions, images of the Biblical
narrative, in the disciplines of the Black church. The work of building beloved community
clustered around the common grace of women and men, the privileged and the poor, who
found themselves together, in the South, working in common cause towards a more just
nation.

Among these people of exuberant faith, Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper in
Ruleville, Mississippi, and a prophetic voice of poor African Americans in the Delta, gave
voice to a lush and inviting faith, a fierce and disciplined love of Jesus Christ. Likewise, the
simple, subversive act of Black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter,
praying over their meals, praying for strength through the ordeals of hatred and violence,
contained the seeds that would flower “into the greatest social witness of Christian

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nonviolence in American history”, as Thomas Merton wrote in his book Violence and
Faith.17

These peculiar people exemplify a civil courage that “opens us and those around us to a
force beyond ourselves, the force of righteous truth that is at the basis of human
conscience.” Their patriotism is first and foremost for God’s Kingdom; their testimonies
are difficult to hear. Mrs. Hamer was beaten and tortured in a Mississippi jail by white
policies officers. “Doing good they are punished as evil-doers; being punished they
rejoice, as if they were thereby quickened by life,” to recall the second-century letter that
goes by the name, “St. Mathetes Epistle to Diognetus”, a remarkable inventory of the new
habits and practices of this community gathering around the message of Jesus Christ.
Who are these people?

American Christian institutions have spent vast resources seeking to raise up and nurture
an army of elites to engage the culture wars. As a graduate of an evangelical college and
recipient of fellowships funded by evangelical institutions, I am one of the many
beneficiaries of these investments. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this golden child of the Berlin
Grunewald - which produced a generation of elites unparalleled in their erudition and
aesthetics – directs us to “new sense of nobility being born that binds together a circle of
human beings drawn from all existing social classes.” And in doing so, he directs us to an
arisctracy that binds together the pastor murdered by a firing squad in a Nazi death camp
and the lady who left the cotton fields to “work for Jesus” in civil rights and died in
poverty.

“It’s a funny thing since I started working for Christ, “Mrs. Hamer said 1963 at a Freedom
Vote Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, some twenty years after Bonhoeffer’s reckoning.
“It’s kind of like in the twenty-third Psalm, when he says, “Thou prepareth a table before
me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointed my head with oil and my cup runneth

17
Thomas Merton, Violence and Faith (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) p. 131.

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over.” And as a result I have walked through the shadows of death. But as long as you
know you going for something, you put up a life.” 18

On the day before his death, in the company of other prisoners of conscience, Bonhoeffer
sang Bach’s cantata “Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”).
And though this world, with devils filled,
should threaten to undo us;
we will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us.
“Nothing is lost,” he wrote. “In Christ all things are taken up, preserved, albeit in
transfigured form, transparent, clear, magnificent and consummately consoling.” From a
higher satisfaction the below is revealed; the breadth and the height, heaven and earth,
death and resurrection.

Bonhoeffer declares to us anew the hope that bears the sorrows of the world: “Again and
again in these turbulent times, we lose sight of why life is really worth living. In truth, it is
like this: If the earth was deemed worthy to bear the human being Jesus Christ, if a
human being like Jesus lived, then our life as human beings has meaning.” The “Yes” and
the “Amen” entered history, triumphed over the abyss. Be of good cheer. Spread hilaritas,
he told a fellow prisoner. Learn to “be a disciple, clothed not in the adornments of
nationhood and race, but having, as Paul tells the Galatians, ‘put on Christ.’” Live into the
new humanity, join the new nobility. In this way, you can say, “Whoever I am, thou
knowest, O God, I am thine.” In this way, you put up a life.

18
Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, “I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,” Speech Given at a Freedom Vote Rally,
Greenwood, Mississippi, Fall/1963, To Tell It Like It Is: The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, edited
by Megan Parker Brooks and David W. Houck (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), p. 5.

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Further Reading
I recommend going deeper into Letters and Papers from Prison, then to his posthumously
published Ethics, especially the section “The Church and the World”, and then on to Life
Together, keeping in mind that this Christian classic is not intended as a manual on
Christian community – a Bonhoeffer Option, if you will – but as a poignant meditation on
the gift of Christian fellowship after its physical, communal forms have frayed. If you want
to get a little off the beaten track, read Bonhoeffer’s journals from his first trip to Italy (he
was 19 years old and enthralled by the color and pageantry of Holy Week in Rome), his
sermons from London, where he served as pastor of two German-speaking congregations,
his early speech to the ecumenical movement “Christ and Peace”; his journal entries from
the summer of 1939, when he moved to New York City thinking he might sit out the war in
the security of American academe, only to be overwhelmed by the conviction that he must
return to Germany; and finally Bonhoeffer’s letter to his older brother, Karl-Friedrich, a
brilliant scientist and an unbeliever, explaining his devotion to Jesus Christ and why he
believed that “true inner clarity and honesty will come only by starting to take the Sermon
on the Mount seriously.”

(Charles Marsh is Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of

Virginia and author of numerous books, including Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer (Knopf, 2014).)

A condensed version of this essay recently appeared in a publication of the Trinity Forum entitled
Who Stands Fast? )

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