He speaks of a day when the church would resolve to become an agent of the promised peace rather than another force of violence. He speaks of communities of discipleship formed by the teachings of Jesus, obedient without reserve to his commandments. He speaks of the urgency of Christians beginning again with the affirmation that the church of Jesus Christ exists at one and the same time in all peoples, beyond all national boundaries, political, social, or racial:. All who confess Jesus Christ as Lord, are quite necessarily, and ontologically, members of and citizens in the global, ecumenical church; brothers [and sisters] bound together.
The hour is late. What are we waiting for? Peace must be dared. Peace is the great venture. Schlingensiepen would find this address unremarkable. As theological speech, the Barmen Declaration registers a fierce protest against idolatry, affirming that the lordship of Jesus Christ brings judgment upon all the ways the righteous God becomes tethered to ideology and profaned. But Barmen did not raise its voice against Hitler. Hilaritas, in other words. The resistance was not a movement one joined but a process.
These are important details. It was sounding great. A man not unlike his own father. He is correct to point out that no river runs through the village of Eisenach. As Bonhoeffer traveled with Bethge in March , the by-then familiar sight of Nazi banners draped on homes, buildings, and churches sickened him. As the Wartburg Castle came into view, he could see that the cross that had once framed the entrance was gone, and in its place waved a massive swastika.
It was in this hunting lodge, owned by the ducal of Saxony, that Luther took refuge in and translated the New Testament in a feverish ten-week stretch.
Four centuries later, Nazi churchmen spoke of their mission to complete the work of Martin Luther. In disgust, Bonhoeffer and Bethge abruptly ended their journey, diverting to the refuge of the Bonhoeffer country house in Friedrichsbrunn.
The Institute promulgated a theological rationale for Kristallnacht and is nowhere to be found in Bethge or Schlingensiepen. Religionless Christianity means, more prosaically, relationship with God without the entrapments of religion. In the preface to his book Antonioni: The Poet of Images , the classicist William Arrowsmith pays tribute to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni by placing him among the intellectual innovators of the twentieth century.
Only the Prussian Minister for Culture could do that, as an act of state. This was done in , at the insistence of the SS. In service to story and character, it was my intent to tread lightly over the thorny road of German Lutheran history, giving the reader details in tolerable doses.
Without a principle of selectivity, the narrative sprawls endlessly; selectivity keeps the story focused and the biographer sane. A writer can aspire toward mastery of his subject and encyclopedic breadth. Schlingensiepen then unveils a criticism that he thinks will be the coup de grace. The other author is Metaxas. This is a scurrilous and incoherent claim. Schlingensiepen is correct to say that I originally planned to write a book on Bonhoeffer in America.
Books such as Nietzsche in Turin , Adorno in America , and The Death of Sigmund Freud set in London appealed to my interest in observing transformations of character under the constraints of unfamiliar places.
At the closing of his rather elaborate text, [Marsh] wrote that he felt he was born to write this book. But Schlingensiepen was right about the initial design. The first, as a visiting student at Union Theological Seminary in New York for the academic year beginning in was a singularly transformative period. He arrived in Manhattan a straight-arrow, twenty-five-year-old philosophical theologian with two doctoral dissertations under his belt. The trip was kind of a lark for him, something to pass his time.
Within two years of returning to Germany, the Nuremburg laws were passed. And within weeks of their passage in and the codification of anti-Jewish church policies in the so-called Aryan paragraph, Bonhoeffer explained to a group of Lutheran pastors that it was the obligation of the church not simply to bandage the victims under the wheel of state violence, whether these victims were Christian or not, but to crush the wheel itself.
In criticizing Strange Glory for a lack of new research, Schlingensiepen falls back on his favorite hobbyhorse. In leveling these charges against me, Schlingensiepen again invites criticisms of his biography.
Bonhoeffer found Spanish Catholicism positively thrilling. He marveled at how his thinking had taken a humanistic turn. The pageantry of sun and sea illuminated for him a new field of vision.
The sermons read like lyrical essays; I count them among his most beautiful writings. A mystical current guides the pen. And that these sermonic essays followed the doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio so closely gives them the sense of being little miracles. A rundown of the new research and biographical perspectives coalescing into Strange Glory would require an inventory taken of each chapter and page.
By my estimation, 70 percent of the content has not appeared in any previous biography. I do not mean to add snark, to snipe and sink to ad hominem attacks myself. I wish only to convey my initial response to a criticism so patently false. Dozens of church dissidents and political conspirators number among the dramatic personae of Strange Glory and are included by name.
Except the inference does not contain the political judgment. In any case, Bonhoeffer knew well that the Confessing Church refused to speak a concrete word against the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people. And his realization that it never would is one of the narrative threads running through his decision to leave Germany in the summer of for his second trip to America.
According to Bethge: 60 percent of the ministers in Rhineland swore allegiance, 70 percent in Brandenburg, 78 percent in Saxony, 80 percent in Pomerania, 82 percent in Silesia, and 89 percent in Grenzmark.
Bonhoeffer made mistakes of judgment and knew it. No surprise here: you kind of knew this was where he was heading all along. I can recall a half dozen occasions when the subject arose in lively exchange over meals or drinks at conferences.
No one was aghast, especially those who had worked closely on the later editions of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. The only shock my book registered among Bonhoeffer scholars was that of recognition—the open secret explored in narrative. I can confirm on the basis of correspondence with readers, book talks, and lectures that most readers of Strange Glory find my approach scrupulous to a fault. I take that as a truthful revelation; and because I believe him—he is writing to Eberhard and knows now he will die in a few months—it is my challenge to reconstruct his homoerotic attraction to Eberhard in its singular and storied particularity.
I can imagine the exchange existing as a stand-alone volume, Love Letters from the Hotel Ludwig der Bayer , published by a small literary press in a handsome edition with deckle edge and French flaps. Has no one but the editor and translator read them? Did the editors and translators of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works expect no one to notice?
In Ettal, Bonhoeffer experienced great loneliness during this unavoidable separation from Bethge, who was fulfilling pastoral duties at the Burckhardthaus in Berlin-Dahlem. Bonhoeffer had come to Ettal for the sanctuary it offered—and in hopes of writing his Ethics.
As the day light hours grew shorter, Bonhoeffer became desperate in his hope that Bethge would join him for Christmas in Ettal. Bonhoeffer passed his time alone imagining their reunion. For two years, he and Bethge had shared a bank account and given gifts as a pair. In this capacity, Bonhoeffer sent Bethge his ideas for Christmas presents and all the reasons Bethge should accept his invitation. They would go to the monastery for the midnight Mass but otherwise celebrate Christmas by themselves.
They could sleep by the fire, read books aloud to each other, and play the piano at all hours. They could rise late and cross-country ski, if the weather turned clear it would. A trail ran along the mountain side from Ettal to Oberammergau, but there were many options. Bonhoeffer was ecstatic when Bethge said yes. John W. And like Charles I avoided saying that he was gay only because the word today sometimes conveys more than can be said about Bonhoeffer. Bethge was certainly not gay and there is not the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that his relationship with Dietrich was sexual.
Bonhoeffer might well have been attracted to other males, but there is also no evidence at all that would suggest anything more than attraction. In his review of my book, Schlingensiepen ignores the Ettal correspondence. Bethge writes the following:. Someone asked me who the other correspondent had been, since they must have been homosexuals given the intimate and intense correspondence. No, we were rather normal. Of course today, one knows that every same-sex friendship carries an element of homoeroticism.
But for us, the reason we were so close from the beginning was simply that Dietrich had severed the relationship to a woman that had lasted for several years and confided in me during this painful process. At the same time, I had reached the bitter end of an engagement, an experience I shared with him.
On the other hand, it was the case that our friendship, towards the end, had lead both of us into relationships with very vivacious new partners, whose developments and whose difficulties caused by the war, we shared with each other, in the way that men do, before anyone else comes to know of these things. Both of our love stories were indeed normal.
Meanwhile, we had already understood the Song of Solomon back then. Unless flamboyance in men reproduces homophobic stereotypes and flamboyance is unmanly and therefore gay? The two women resided under the same roof with the famous theologian triangulating the upstairs bedrooms according to terms deemed necessary to complete his great Church Dogmatics.
Until the principals of Barth, Inc. Various shifting and increasingly implausible explanations were proffered. More typical among the Barth epigones were variations on the theme of going about his sacred duties with the kindly aid of a kindred soul.
All the fraternal defenses imploded in , when Christiane Tietz, a professor of theology at the University of Zurich, addressed the Karl Barth Society of North America at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Tietz brought with her an arsenal of documents from the recently released Barth papers in Basel and blew a hole in the Platonic defense that was big enough to drive a BVB tram through.
Bethge would have sensed something. There was never any suggestion of such tensions when Bethge talked about his time with Bonhoeffer. In the sixteen-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, one finds not a single condemnation of homosexuality. The image of suffering servant Christianity offended the Nazi mind. And named its God an idol. According to most sources, between five and fifteen thousand homosexual men were sent to concentration camps, where many were subject to forced sterilizations and castration.
The Nazi assault on same-sex relationships is highlighted in Strange Glory at precisely those places in the story where previous biographers Schlingensiepen among them have remained silent. The following are two such examples; one is benign, the other is fairly unforgiveable.
The second example had me reaching for the smelling salts. And the claim is entirely fabricated. A hatchet job can be a thrill. It can light up your brain like a club drug. At the closing of his rather elaborate text, he wrote that he felt he was born to write this book. The question persists: What is this all about? What would drive someone to turn a virtue—the virtue of literary texture—into an abomination?
On that day, the keepers of the house will retreat once again to the old defenses only now to discover no ground beneath their feet. The Bonhoeffer encountered in Strange Glory may seem unfamiliar, but it is a portrait shaped by the materials of historical life as I observed them. This building complex was central to the National Socialist regime, the headquarters of the Army High Command, and the site of the July 20, , attempt to overthrow the Reich.
It was in this courtyard that the military officers involved in the July 20 conspiracy were executed that night. While Nazism commanded a fusion of wills into the collective, the artwork at the Resistance Memorial honors the conspiracy and conspirators as an expression of individuals of conscience; indeed here as a solitary person.
The visage of a dandy saint swanning down Unter den Linden with a bouquet of flowers is simply unbearable. And so it drove all those people out of business, in some cases, into bankruptcy. It forced them to sell those properties to companies like BlackRock. And it's gotten worse and worse and worse since COVID started happening, but it's been happening for a while," Justin continued.
When they talk about you not being able to own property, it's not that they'll just seize the property from you. It's that they will put all these policies in place, and they've already done it, that will push most people out of the possibility of being able to own [property] for one reason or another.
And the only people that will be able to control it are these big, gigantic corporations, the investment managers. Who are all on board with the policies that the elites want. Glenn added, "If you want to make a change, if you don't like this direction, you must get your money out of these banks. These are the seven largest and most influential banks in the United States that have joined the alliance.
While they're in Glasgow fixing the alleged climate crisis, our Border Patrol agents continue to be overwhelmed trying to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, while having their hands tied by the Biden agenda.
This fiscal year there have been over 1. And that's just the people who were caught crossing the border illegally. In all the useless political border debates, we rarely get to hear from people with firsthand knowledge of what's really going on at the border. Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott. He is a year Border Patrol veteran who served under five different presidents. But only one president decided to politicize Scott's position.
Rodney Scott wanted to wait until it was the right time to talk — and that time has arrived. The is the true insider account of the massive border and national security crisis few are willing to expose under President Biden. To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
President Joe Biden's recent meeting with the Pope lasted longer than normal, which resulted in the very unfortunate rumor that the president had a bit of a "bathroom accident" at the Vatican. To be clear, there is no evidence to back the claim — which appears to have originated with a Republican on Twitter — but there is a reason why it spread so quickly. Clinging to Christ need not become self-conscious; rather it is wholly taken up by completion of the act itself. In context, he immediately transitions into the theological problem of the child, specifically in reference to baptism.
Wayne Whitson Floyd, trans. Note Bonhoeffer emphasizes that the nature of a faith which is external to reflection places him in conversation with apocatastasis. Thus, we return to the prior quotation. Revelation of the Word of God is revelation that Christ has renewed humanity objectively, outside our participation, through the resurrection. In justification, we learn that which has always been: we are renewed in Christ.
Though, by this time, he no longer calls apocatastasis an inner necessity, it is still an implication of his theology. And, similar to Sanctorum Communio, he immediately reiterates it cannot be formally incorporated into theology.
Through the resurrection, Christ renewed all humanity, taking it into his body, in an act that is external to any human participation.
Act and Being runs along a different register, working in conversation with epistemology and human ways of being. Both texts, however, work from a common theology.
Bonhoeffer never left these formal theological considerations, always holding their paradox in tension. Discipleship, perhaps, gives the best example of how he held these realities together as he went about his work. You will note him drawing on some familiar themes. For Adam too was both an individual self and at the same time the whole of humanity. Adam also bore the whole of humanity in himself. Christ is the second human being 1 Cor in whom the new humanity is created.
The chapter moves from the objective work of Christ in the resurrection, into sin and fallenness in Adam—renewed in Christ— 27 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans.
Hereafter cited DBWE 4. In closing the chapter, Bonhoeffer draws upon the eschatological imagery of Revelation. This means that, precisely because the lamb, Jesus Christ, has taken all humanity into himself through the resurrection, all new humanity will be in the New Jersualem.
And, lest we forget, all humanity is new humanity through the resurrection. What is striking about this account is the skill with which Bonhoeffer has presented a potential theology of apocatastasis without overtly doing so.
He lets its internal necessity stand for the careful reader, yet never allows it to be formally appropriated as part of his system. In that sense, Discipleship is a very subtle text. It is a material presentation of what he formally argued in Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being.
Here, particularly in this chapter, Bonhoeffer very clearly presents his Christology in conversation with humanity in sin, the total renewal of humanity through the resurrection, the unmerited grace appropriated in infant baptism, and the eschatological New Jerusalem as the temple—the body of Christ—which is all humanity. Each of these leave the doors to apocatastasis very wide open, and the final point seems to possibly endorse it.
Yet, he never drives that point home. Emphasis original. Curiously, it is not that he denies the dual outcome so much as he simply moves where and how it is addressed.
God judges those unfaithful to their identity in Christ, not the unsaved. Careful readers will, no doubt, see these theological dynamics staring directly at them, resting in tension and paradox.
He merely lets things stand as they are and allows the reader to hope and sigh after them.
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