A Reflection by Paolo Naso
In this time of egregious government overreach in many parts of the world, Italian Waldensians, like Christians everywhere, still cherish the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great theologian of resistance to Nazism and Hitler. Less than a month before Hitler’s suicide and the collapse of the Nazi regime, Bonhoeffer was given a sham trial without any witnesses or evidence and then executed by hanging. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom was commemorated in remarks by Paolo Naso, a long-time friend of many in the American Waldensian Society.
Eighty years ago, at dawn on April 9, 1945, the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Hitler’s Third Reich project was in the process of collapsing and there were only a few weeks left until the Führer would commit suicide, and yet it was he who, with a final and brutal twist, ordered Bonhoeffer’s execution.
The son of a famous psychiatrist, Bonhoeffer had decided to become a pastor. His commitment to the pastorate expressed itself above all in theological research and reflection.
Already in 1933, in a Germany that was rapidly veering towards Nazism, Bonhoeffer showed his aversion to the Führer by denouncing the immorality of the anti-Jewish laws and the danger represented by the rise of a leader capable of seducing the masses with the facile language of populism. As the years passed, his opposition to Nazism became increasingly militant and brought him ever closer to the anti-Nazi resistance for which he carried out intelligence missions. The phrase attributed to him by a fellow prisoner to whom Bonhoeffer explained why, in the face of tragedy and danger, the Christian could not remain quiet and inactive is well known: “When a madman throws his car on the sidewalk, I cannot, as a pastor, be content with burying the dead and consoling the families. I must, if I find myself in that place, jump and grab the driver at the wheel”.
Having ended up in the sights of the German authorities, Bonhoeffer, who had just begun a study year at Union Theological Seminary in New York, could have taken refuge in the United States and pursued a brilliant career teaching at Union or elsewhere. Instead, after being only a few weeks in the United States, he chose to return to his native Germany. It was there that Christian discipleship was being put to the hardest test. Many members and leaders of the Lutheran church had effectively fallen in line with the Nazi regime leaving only a small minority, mostly influenced by the theologian Karl Barth, who were willing to defend the independence of the church from the Nazi regime and to affirm that the follower of Jesus had to proclaim his sole and absolute loyalty to God alone and not to any earthly authorities.
Bonhoeffer left behind a substantial body of writings, some of which have become classics of Christian theology. His best-known text, known even to a non-specialist audience, is probably Letters and Papers from Prison, a collection of Bonhoeffer’s writings from 1943 to 1945. Although these were written in prison, the reader who looks for a political proclamation in those pages will be disappointed. A theological criticism of Nazi ideology was implicit in everything Bonhoeffer wrote, but the heart of Letters and Papers from Prison is a reflection on Christianity and its current crisis. Bonhoeffer argued that, especially in difficult times, the Christian faith cannot be reduced to a conventional or consumerist religion, with the idea of a god who fills in the gaps and answers human questions that, in fact, have no answer. God should not be sought only in the face of death, at the limits of our life, but at its center, in the face of the questions that most challenge us. In Letters and Papers from Prison Bonhoeffer argues against the idea of a “cheap” grace, grace without following, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ alive, incarnate, and crucified. The grace of God engages Christians, invites them to abandon the nets with which they have been fishing to set out on the path of following Christ.
These are the words of a believer who feels the weight of the history he is going through and who, precisely because he believes in God’s action, knows he must assume his responsibilities as an “adult” believer. Bonhoeffer’s faith was not a reassuring refuge, but on the contrary exposed him to the challenges of the world. In dramatic times like the early 1940s, this appeal to the responsibility of conscience in the face of evil led Bonhoeffer to the gallows. We should not be surprised that his moral and theological teaching inspired figures like Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu. The literature about this giant of Christian theology in the last century is also very rich. Among many other titles, we can point to Bonhoeffer: A Profile by the Italian Waldensian theologian Fulvio Ferrario, which has just recently been published. Some writers go further and effectively beatify this Lutheran believer, which is a mistake. Bonhoeffer should not be treated as a plaster saint to be put on the altars of ecumenism, but rather understood and studied. He remains a complex thinker, marked by the greatest drama of the twentieth century, who continues to question every believer who faces the sometimes-dramatic choices of history.
Despite the way he died, Bonhoeffer addresses us with a message of hope. In 1933, in a Europe of dictatorships sliding toward war, he launched an appeal that today is more relevant than ever. He proposed, in fact, a “great ecumenical council of the holy church of Christ” that would pronounce a word of peace and, in the name of Christ, promote disarmament. At the time, the churches did not heed that appeal. They can – they must – do so today, in the face of wars now already underway and other wars that, with intolerable lightness, are hypothesized and threatened every day.
These reflections about Dietrich Bonhoeffer were originally presented by Paolo Naso in a program on the Italian Protestant radio program on RAI Radio1.
In a letter written shortly before his return from New York to Germany, addressed to the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer wrote:
“I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America this time. I must live through this difficult period in our national history along with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people … Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that a future Christian civilization may survive, or else willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization and any true Christianity. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from a place of security.”