Excerpts from Newsletter Transcript
In these sections from the show, documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier discusses how Bonhoeffer's understanding of Christian ethics evolved during the Nazi period, and what he meant by the phrase "religionless Christianity."
Tippett: I want to come back to also some of these tensions that are at the heart of his legacy and the things he was holding together and also really draw you out in terms of how you sort of lived through that with him as you created the film. And there's this other paradox that he's writing his opus on ethics, which I guess he didn't finish—right?—but it was such an important project. He's writing this book on ethics, Christian ethics, at the same time that he is implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Mr. Doblmeier: And he's not only implicated in the plot, he's having to lie to stay alive. He's having to act and do things that he doesn't want to be doing. He's signing letters that are trying to be part of his official documentation, "Heil Hitler." This has to be disturbing for him. And then at the same time he would go back home to his room at night and continue in different chapters of Ethics about how we're supposed to live in the world. And I think that's what makes Ethics so compelling is that he has to live this duplicitous lifestyle just to survive, and yet at the same time, he's really trying to come to grips with, A, what is it doing to him, and what kind of a legacy is it going to be for the rest of the world.
Brandauer (from Bonhoeffer): The will of God is not a system of rules established from the outset. It is something new and different in each different situation in life. And for this reason a man must forever reexamine what the will of God may be. The will of God may lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.
Tippett: My guest, Martin Doblmeier, is the writer and producer of a documentary chronicling the life and faith of the 20th century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer wrote his great unfinished volume on ethics while gradually forming his resolve to be part of a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. He believed that Christian ethics could not be dictated by the church, but had to be worked out in human relationship. For two years of the Nazi period, Bonhoeffer ran an underground seminary to train leaders of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Eventually based in the German town of Finkenwalde, the seminary was closed by the Gestapo in 1937. I asked Martin Doblmeier how his immersion in the theology of Bonhoeffer has made him think differently about ethics, especially Christian ethics.
Mr. Doblmeier: I really do believe that fundamentally this was a man who, in the midst of incredible suffering and pain and anger that was going on around him, never stopped looking for the will of God, and this is what I really most admired about him. I mean, he didn't turn at a point and say, "I have to take care of myself. I have to do what I have to do to sort of get through this and get by this," and accepting the fact that the will of God may not lead you to self-preservation, it may call you to do things that you wouldn't normally want to do, and that the call to follow Jesus Christ is often the downward path. And I think he saw that clearly as this might be the way this is going to go. But I think he never stopped that constantly opening himself to the will of God. That's what I really admired about him.
Tippett: And that is really where he came out—isn't it?—that you have to be discerning ethical principles and norms, but in the end, you have to do the best you can and throw yourself on the will of God, and that, in this case, I suppose, he felt the will of God calling him to betray what he might have defined as his ethical…
Mr. Doblmeier: Or to rethink his own paradigm. I mean, I think that's the great mystery of God. God is always calling us to rethink our own paradigm. Just at the moment we think we've got the formula kind of figured out, it's the God that's the mysterious God that comes to us and say, "This may not be the way you had quite figured it out." And I think that Bonhoeffer was open to that at all times. I think he was a prayerful man who—he searched the scriptures for direction in his life, and I think when he felt as though this is what he had to do—the term that Eberhard Bethge used—was that Dietrich took over the guilt of killing and being part of the plots to kill Adolf Hitler.
Tippett: As an ethical move, in a way.
Mr. Doblmeier: I think as a move for the other. I think fundamentally, what Bonhoeffer did was accept that fact that it was the German people of the 1930s who allowed this to happen; maybe in some ways that Bonhoeffer hadn't been diligent enough in his resistance at that time, but that this man and the principles of Nazi socialism and national socialism had taken on so much pain in the world, had inflicted such suffering that something had to be done to stop this. There are times when I really admire Bonhoeffer for the way that he approached this. Sometimes I feel like other people do, well, maybe I would look at him differently if he had sort of stuck to these pacifist kinds of principles. But I wasn't living in that kind of situation. I wasn't the person who was seeing around me all the suffering that was happening and all the pain and the killing that was happening. I think he did it because he really felt as though it was the only resource that he had to try and make retribution for all that had happened.
Tippett: There are these striking words. I wrote them down while I was watching the film: "Peace is the great adventure. It can never be safe; it is the opposite of security."
Mr. Doblmeier: The lines that come back to me again and again were those lines that he delivered in Fäno, Denmark, in 1934, when he was told, "Speak sort of generally about the role of the church in Germany," and he elected not to. And he stood up and he made a clear call, a challenge to stand up for peace to the churches, the collective body of churches that had come to Fäno. And what he said is, "There is no way to peace along the way of safety. Peace is the great adventure. It has to be dared." And there is an enormous risk at standing for peace, but however you think of politics, and the choice that we've made is oftentimes, as a nation, as individuals, to take the road to security. And I think the language of Bonhoeffer is to say that there is no way to peace along the way to security.
Tippett: And then I have to contrast the way he was living and sacrificing himself for peace with the stereotype of working for peace here as mounting a demonstration. We're very safe in doing that. Now, thank goodness, no one in this country is called to this kind of self-sacrifice, but I wonder if he would challenge us to work for peace in ways that are riskier, in fact.
Mr. Doblmeier: How difficult it must have been for Bonhoeffer to stand up publicly and to speak against national socialism. This was clearly speaking against the full tide of the German people at that time. That took enormous courage to stand up and do that and to try and base it on a Gospel response, I think, is what's made him an extraordinary character.
Tippett: Well, and he always sought to embody it, right? I mean he created this community at Finkenwalde. I mean he went to prison for what he was saying. There was always an action to his ideas. It's not so obvious what that action would be in our context.
Mr. Doblmeier: But I think that that's what faith is all about. I think it has to do with opening yourself up to what you believe is the will of God and how God is calling you to act. The act is the second step. The first step is that real true openness to how God is calling you to go forward and to act.
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Unidentified Reader: "Letter to Eberhard Bethge, April 30th, 1944. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience, and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time. People as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as religious do not, in the least, act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by religious. If our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians?"
Mr. Doblmeier: I think the distinction for Bonhoeffer is he's not calling for faithless Christianity. He's calling for religionless Christianity. A lot of it's reactionary. He begins to write this material in fragment forms in Letters and Papers. It's one of the great unfinished thoughts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I think fundamentally what he was getting at has come true, which is to say that back in the 1930s and '40s, you were able to use religious language, and there was a common understanding among people as to what things like salvation and grace and sacrament meant. You could just say those without having to go in and define everything. And yet, I think what he was getting to, there's going to become a time when you can't even make those kind of presumptions, that the world will become so secularized, we're going to have to find new language in which to speak about God and faith and salvation. And I think that's absolutely become the case. He's writing his reaction to two principal things. Number one, his time in prison he spent apparently with a lot of people who had no religious context whatsoever. This was a little bit different in the world for him. I mean, he spent most of his time speaking with people and dialoguing with people who had religion as a common denominator, so the language was all kind of the same for them. Now, when he gets to prison, he finds people that he can't—the starting place is totally different, and I think this is part of what's shaping him.
And I think the second thing is, too, he had become so deeply disappointed by the action of the church, the institutional churches, because the line there, he says, "Even people who call themselves religious don't even act religious anymore. Where is the new starting point for all of this?" But I think the starting point for him is faith. It's not about religion. It's not about the formalization and the acting out of what you believe in ritual and rite and institutions. It's about the fundamental question as to whether or not you believe that God is calling you to act in a certain way in the world. I don't think he ever lost faith in that. I think his perception of religion was constantly being challenged, "What shall we do here? How shall we think of ourselves? Why do the churches continue to break up and fragment and fight each other?" I think he became very deeply disappointed by all of this. But I think the question of God in the world, living in him and the people that he saw in—and the suffering, the face of the suffering Christ in the world-that never left him.
Tippett: Here's a passage that speaks to some of this. "Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration in the Holy Spirit, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship—all these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture to speak of them. In the traditional acts and words, we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it. That is our own fault. Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world." That's pretty strong stuff.
Mr. Doblmeier: I think, though, at the core of it is the realization that to live for Christ is to live for others, that the church, even as a group, as a collective body, will live, can live for themselves, that they make their preoccupation sustaining themselves, sustaining their order, sustaining their position in the world. I mean, he comes from a world where the pastor is in a privileged position.
That's another thing that's changed, too. You talk about religionless Christianity. I would have to say that going back several generations, the pastor or the priest in the town was the sacred one and lived in a very special position in that little community or town. I'm not sure if it's identical today, especially in this country. I think the pastor is always struggling for, you know, how to put relevance to things in people's lives, but doesn't really hold the same kind of position that he would have. I think our world has become so secularized, and it's a different world two generations later since Bonhoeffer's.
Tippett: I want to talk about something that is deeply troubling in the story of Bonhoeffer, and it came at me full force again in watching your film, which is these good, noble Germans, like Bonhoeffer and his friends and family, who are risking their lives to assassinate Hitler, and there is one failed attempt after the other. Objectively speaking, you could look at this story and say God was on Hitler's side, and you tell the story—there's the bomb that was on the airplane that just failed to detonate, right, and then—and I have to describe this because people listening on radio won't be able to see this. I thought one of the most powerful moments in the film is where you show the family portrait. Was it the 80th birthday of Bonhoeffer's father? And there are several family members in that portrait, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who are implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler and, as that portrait is being taken, are waiting for word of whether the latest plot has succeeded. And you zero the camera in on their faces, and you see what they're living, the seriousness of these men. I don't know. It's very puzzling. Have you thought about—because it could almost make you lose faith. They didn't win. The good guys did not win, and they were faithful and they were praying.
Mr. Doblmeier: But I think the call isn't really the call to win. I think the call is to be faithful. And that's the fundamental difference. I don't think for Bonhoeffer it was about winning. I think for him, it was about being faithful. And I think the angst that you see on his face, if I can read into it, has to do with the fact that they weren't even really sure if they did succeed how the world would remember this act. We presume now from 50 years later this was a wonderful magnanimous gesture to kill the tyrant, but in their own country, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's not been held in high regard for years, thought by many to be a traitor, and that how would history remember them? And I think they believed at that time that it would not remember them that well, especially within Germany; that there was such a strong sense of "We have to work together as a nation, this is our leader." This is the way you would think.
The assassination of a leader of the country was an absolutely immoral act for many people, and Bonhoeffer could never be considered to be a holy man for having done that. But I think they believed in their hearts this was the only thing they had to do. And if you look—first of all, they were—I think Bonhoeffer's a brilliant theologian. Collectively, the evidence shows they weren't very good assassins. They just didn't have this figured out very well at all. But at the same time, this was—what they felt as though they had to do this. There was no other response that they could make to this. And you can see that struggling on their face. Bonhoeffer had just before that photograph was taken—a couple of months actually before the photograph was taken—wrote this wonderful letter called "After 10 Years," and it was his Christmas reflection on what life had been like for them under Adolf Hitler for ten years. And in particular, he wrote it to the co-conspirators who had become demoralized. The war was going on, people were dying every day all around them, and they were being pursued. They knew they were being tracked, their phones were tapped, and how long they could go on if they didn't succeed was in the front of their mind. But really, Bonhoeffer, you know, he admits all the things that they, as conspirators to all of this, have done. They've been witnesses to evil deeds. They've become suspicious of others. Their lives have become totally duplicitous. And he ends it by saying, "Are we still of any use?" This is barely the kind of language that a holy man would ever write, "Are we still of any use?"
But I think fundamentally, what was at his heart was the belief that this was the lot that was chosen for them. This man wanted to be an academia. He wanted to be teaching in a university, not part of a plot to kill Hitler. And he knew this would probably not go well, that in the end, how could they overcome the tide that they were trying to resist? But at the same time, this is all they had left. They had to go and do this and pray their way through all of this.
Tippett: But still, I want to ask you, he was motivated by what he perceived to be the will of God, and how do you think about the will of God through getting inside this story?
Mr. Doblmeier: I think anybody who honestly and prayerfully looks for the will of God and expects that to be revealed and justified by things in this world is probably not truly open to what God is all about. The expectation that revelation would happen constantly and that you would be constantly affirmed that you're on the right track is to deny the mystery of God. This is not only about you take a step in faith and you're rewarded for that. You take another step. That's really, I think, in some ways—a child would take a step and then expect to be rewarded. I think someone like Bonhoeffer knew that he had to open himself to the will of God and if he really, really believed that God was really calling him to do this, I don't think that he needed to have the affirmation here and now that he was on the right track.
