The Bonhoeffer Project Dissident Movement
dis·si·dent
/ˈdisədənt/
disagreeing especially with an established religious or political system, organization, or belief
On April 7, 1933, The German Reichstag passed the Aryan Paragraph. It called for the removal of all Jews, persons of any Jewish descent from civil service. This included churches, both Catholic and Protestant. The church action was justified by the fact that churches were funded by the government. All Germans paid taxes in support of pastoral functions - baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other services. Pastoral salaries and pensions were also tied to governmental funding.
On July 22, Adolf Hitler conducted a special radio broadcast endorsing his friend Ludwig Muller to be Reich Bishop of the German Evangelical Church. This would be like Snoop Dogg becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury [a blend of different factions]. Muller won with 70% of the vote and also approved the Aryan paragraph.
Three weeks earlier Dietrich Bonhoeffer attended a public rally in the cavernous Auditorium Maximum on the campus of Berlin University. The packed house included professors, church officials, ministers, and students. There were many speeches advocating submission to the wishes of the Fuhrer.
There was a small group that opposed it, they argued that the church needed to preserve its independence from the state, but no one spoke to the plain fact that the gospel was under assault. Bonhoeffer stood quietly with some friends at the back of the room. He could no longer contain his anger; he interrupted the chair and took a step forward as hundreds of eyes turned his direction. He said, “If God leads the church to wage war for her soul, God will honor only those who fight for her integrity.” Bonhoeffer felt much like the Apostle Paul roaming the streets of Athens. He was provoked and a holy indignation had come upon him.
What happened? On July 23 hundreds of students would gather at midnight at the Hegel Memorial to salute the new Reich Chancellor with a thunderous Heil Hitler. Bonhoeffer and the little band of Confessing Church pastors had lost. But more importantly, the Gospel itself had lost. This is what he would later write about in 1937 in his now famous book, The Cost of Discipleship; cheap grace was the mortal enemy of Christ and his church. That book has been read and misunderstood by so many. It has been basically ignored by the majority of American church leaders who have continued to assault and cheapen the Gospel by dividing it between conversion and discipleship. The mistake has been to so lionize Bonhoeffer’s book as the ideal, the preferred, the commendable, but never the normal. Following Christ for the “Christian” remains optional.
The Bonhoeffer Project stands at the back of the room, and we step forward and declare, “The great sin of the church and the root cause of our weakness, our irrelevance , our accommodation to the culture is our failure to make disciples who believe and are committed to repenting of their sins, believing in the Good News, and following Christ in obedience.
We are dissidents, like our namesake. We step up. We speak up. We are willing to lose, to be cancelled - no one will want to publish us, join us, hear us, believe us, or invite us to their meetings. We don’t care! We are willing to step up, speak up, and say, “No, I will not be silent!”[1]
Bonhoeffer was a dissident by persona and personality. Born to privilege in February 1906, Dietrich and his twin, Sabine, were the youngest of eight children. Their parents, Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer, were products of the German nobility and intelligentsia. Dietrich’s propensity to go his own way was apparent at age 14 when he announced his decision to become a theologian. Not a concert pianist as his parents thought, or even a scientist or attorney like his older brothers. This precocious and temperamental boy cut his own trail through the privileged underbrush of high society. He was connected, intellectual, special, lazy, spoiled, and usually unafraid. At twenty-four he did postdoctoral work at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He already held two PhDs and was better educated and smarter than most of the faculty. He feared no one, he challenged the faculty, and was disappointed in their weak arguments and political philosophy. His intellectual power, his privileged life, gave him entry to powerful people, the people in society that made decisions. His aristocratic bearing gave him the confidence to stand up to virtually anyone.
He was dissident in his dealings with church authorities. When most young leaders are compliant and agreeable in order to advance their careers, Bonhoeffer didn’t flinch when he found himself disagreeing with older pastors and bishops. He both admired Karl Barth and eagerly confronted and disagreed with him. From 1933 through 1935, he pastored two German congregations in London. He was increasingly getting on the nerves of the German Church and his Bishop Theodore Heckel. Heckel resented Bonhoeffer because he would not fill out reports and for not signing or agreeing with the Aryan Paragraph. Heckel traveled to London and met Bonhoeffer at the Savoy Hotel Grill. There Heckel insisted that Bonhoeffer sign a document that affirmed the German Church required allegiance to Hitler. Bonhoeffer walked out of the meeting, daring Heckel to do something about it. Heckel was to become the Bishop of the Reich Church.
Bonhoeffer left London in 1935 to become the leader of an illegal seminary in a town near the Baltic Sea named Finkenvalde. This was another act of dissidence. Everything in the seminary community was a grand experiment in the New Monasticism, that he described as nothing like the old. The two year experiment is written about in Bonhoeffer’s best-selling book, Life Together. The Rule of Life was Benedictine in nature, it was idealistic, it was both loved and hated by the twenty-three students. The student’s primary criticism was that the rules were Bonhoeffer’s rules and changed based upon his whims and moods. It is also true that Bonhoeffer was a Bon Vivant, driving a new Audi convertible provided by his father, and was free to come and go. He excluded himself from any manual labor around the premises because he had better things to do. You might say that the flaws in Finkenvalde were ordinary ones, because humans and their flaws were present. Bonhoeffer was a dissident at heart; personality, practices, teaching, preaching, writing, and for it he was banned from all the above. He was subversive to the Reich and to the German Church. Subversiveness to the church should frighten us, for it is a very serious matter.
What are we actually against regarding the church? The church is much like a restaurant in that taste and preference govern opinion. I would like to put aside such things as taste in creeds, codes, customs, décor, and the personality of its leaders. I am in serious disagreement in the doctrine of salvation preached and practiced by the majority of the evangelical world. I don’t think we have an accurate understanding of faith, grace, and what it means to be a Christian.
I’ve already said it, but in recent days this mistake has led to disciples who are weaker, intimidated, and easily cowed by the culture. This accommodation is too often driven by a lack of confidence in our message. When in the back of your mind you question the exclusivity of Christ, the authority of the Bible, and the teachings of Jesus about the requirements of discipleship, naturally, you shrink back from those in opposition. Many would agree with my assessment, nodding their heads. But then the discussion ends, and the efforts needed to get from where we are to where we need to be are left undone.
That is where The Bonhoeffer Project comes in.
The Gospel you preach determines the disciples you produce.
It also governs the disciple you become and the Church you get. It defines normal. The Confessing Church fell apart, as it was too costly for the majority. When Bonhoeffer wrote about the church in America in 1939, he called it a church without a reformation. It also has become a church without a spine. Just as the Confessing Church failed for want of courageous disciples, and the power and persecution of the state, our cause may fail.
The most difficult part of the battle is that it is intramural. This is not so much a contest on a national stage, Duke versus Kansas at Cameron Indoor or Allen Fieldhouse, its shirts and skins in the practice gym. The Reformed don’t much care for us, the forgiveness only don't like us, the prosperity types feel sorry for us, the progressives think we are living in the past, the Anglo-Catholics and Catholics think we should live even more in the past and liberals have left theology for politics and they don’t care.
If you want to style on the Big Platform and enhance your brand, you are with the wrong people, and you are headed in the wrong direction. The progressives need to progress; they are on a train to nowhere, but it is moving and has already left the station. As Bonhoeffer himself once quipped, “If you are on the wrong train headed in the wrong direction, it doesn’t matter how fast you run up the train aisle in the right direction.” This is the Bonhoeffer moment, the Bonhoeffer way. We have a choice to make ...
Are we going forward and storming the Bastille, the edifice that is cheap grace?
“We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Jesus.” [2]
Or will we back off, calm down, make peace, reduce the stress, keep our jobs, quell the pushback?
What was the cost of Bonhoeffer’s choice? He ended up in a small prison yard in a now Polish town, Flossenburg, at the end of rope with his body burned in a pile of fellow-conspirators.
Written over the cell door of a fellow prisoner was this, “It will all be over in 100 years.” In 100 years no one will remember us. My grandchildren will, but my great grandchildren and great, great, great grandchildren won’t have any knowledge of me. So, what really counts? If you turn leaders into disciple makers [4th soil], your legacy will be people walking with Christ in all the nations of the world.
Bishop George Bell in the American edition of Discipleship, aka The Cost of Discipleship, begins his introduction with the words of Bonhoeffer, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him, come and die.” Bell goes on to say, “these words contain the essence of discipleship.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life is a commentary on what it means to do exactly that!
[1] Acts 18:9-11
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, New York: Macmillan. 1949 page 58
