Bonhoeffer: Pastor? Spy? Traitor? Coward?
Bonhoeffer was back in Germany, after his stay in New York, with his colleague, Eberhard Bethge. On June 19, 1940 they were sitting in a café on the Baltic seaside when news arrived that France had surrendered. Everyone arose, hopped up on chairs, and gave the infamous Nazi salute. They began to sing Die Fahne hoch (The Flag Held High), also known as the Horst Wessel Song. Bonhoeffer joined in shouting a triumphant “Heil Hitler”. Bethge objected and Dietrich said, “Are you crazy? Raise your arm!” Later he explained to Bethge they would suffer far greater things and to not get arrested over a song. Bonhoeffer was back walking the razor’s edge.
He applied for a military chaplaincy. It was a good way to avoid being arrested while not having to kill for the Reich. However, his application was rejected. So, he accepted a position in the Abwehr, the German equivalent of the FBI. This position was arranged by his brother in law, Hans Von Dohnanyi, and because of his friendship with Hans Oster, a General and deputy chief of the Abwehr. He would have a dual role as Abwehr officer and a spy for the resistance - what is called a double agent. He also expressed an interest in a military coup, just for emphasis. At the same time, he was summoned for and passed a medical examination. It would only be a matter of time until he would be drafted, as he was fit for military service.
He was banned from public speaking and could not live in Berlin. Even a small gathering of students he led had been reported to the Gestapo. At the end of his speech, agents arrived and broke up the meeting. One person who was baffled by Bonhoeffer’s clandestine life was Karl Barth. He couldn’t figure out what this pacifistic, evangelical monk was up to. How was it that a professed anti-Nazi, beset with various bans and restrictions and the most persistent voice of the Confessing Church would have been given a position in military intelligence?
The answer was very much Bonhoeffer. He had connections and, because he was clergy, he could walk both sides of the street. His motives were to escape war, but that would be impossible. He would get his hands dirty no matter what. The question he was really facing was who he would kill if he must kill someone - Hitler, Himmler, and his henchmen, or a Russian soldier?
Bonhoeffer had come to believe something quite compromising to a pacifist, but so true - it is better to do evil than to be evil. Killing Hitler would be evil, this is pacifistic doctrine, but Hitler was evil, evil incarnate.” Some, even Barth, saw the cowardly side of Bonhoeffer’s position. It goes something like this: a pacifist will not act against evil in a violent way, but they will pray for everyone else who will strike down evil and die in order to keep them free to be a pacifist. This to some is highly immoral and not at all what the Bible teaches. How God managed the Israeli Army in taking the Promised Land does present a major problem for the pacifistic position. At some point the question becomes, “Should we allow the strong evil leader with the best army to destroy other nations, take away their freedom, and subject their people to tyranny of every kind that the 20th century displayed?” Even the idealist Bonhoeffer saw a limit to this kind of thinking.
Suddenly, Bonhoeffer was thrown into a secular existence with a non-clergy role. He was no longer writing sermons, preparing lectures, or coaching pastors. The desire to build a spiritual nobility, an elite class of theologians who could be retrofitted to any and every national emergency, faded into the background. Ironically, Bonhoeffer had to establish his Aryan descent for final clearance with the Abwehr. His mother, Paula, did the paperwork and, periodically, Bonhoeffer would ship his laundry home to be cleaned. He was a pastor without a church, a professor without a class, a double agent without an assignment, a single man without a home. While he waited, he read, prayed, and worked on his magnum opus, Ethics.
He spent evenings at the opera and, during down moments, wrote about his life and even his body.
“Bodily life is meant for joy: ‘Eating and drinking not only sustains bodily health, but also the natural joy of bodily life.’ Clothing is not only ‘necessary covering’ for the body, but ‘an adornment’ as well. Relaxation and leisure not only facilitate ‘the capacity for work,’ but also grace the body with the measure of rest and joy that is its due. In its essential distance from all purposefulness, play is the clearest expression that bodily life is an end in itself.”[1]
Bonhoeffer was concerned about the separateness of his body from his spirit. In October, the waiting was over. The Abwehr granted the so-called UK status indispensable to state security and, thereby, he was exempt from military service. His role would be as a courier, assigned to engage in covert talks with foreign church leaders who would communicate with Allied leaders. This was the work the resistance really wanted him to do. The official instructions were to represent the Third Reich to churches around Europe.
He began to travel widely from late October 1940 until 1943. His mind now went to more secular issues. He thought and wrote about wide cultural issues in Ethics and he realized his future was in the secular world. He spoke of a religion-less spirituality, meaning a rebirth of spiritual health through a new monasticism - nothing like the church based old.
“My recent activity, which has been predominately in the worldly sphere, it gives me plenty to think about. I am amazed that I live and can live for days without the Bible. I should feel it to be auto-suggestion,[2] not obedience, if I were to force myself to read it. I understand that such auto-suggestion might be, and is, a great help, but I would be afraid in this way of falsifying a genuine experience and ultimately not getting genuine help. When I open the bible again, it is new and wonderful as never before, and I should like just to preach. I know that I only need to open my books to hear what can be said against all this. I have had much richer times. But I feel how my resistance against everything religious grows. Often it amounts to an instinctive revulsion, which is certainly not good. I am not religious by nature. But I think continually about God and Christ, authenticity, life, freedom, and compassion.”
I can identify with Bonhoeffer. I recall the late William F. Buckley confessing, “I am conservative in doctrine, but I am not of the breed”. A human cannot command emotions, you can only discipline them to a degree. Like preschoolers in church, if the meeting is too long, eventually, they will start crawling beneath the pews. Bonhoeffer’s life was about to change and his would faith tested like never before. What would erupt from him would be some of the greatest devotional literature ever written, along with radical thinking that still shakes those who read it.
