Book review: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’: A Biography” by Martin E. Marty

In a book filled with the debates and arguments of theologians, Marty E. Marty gives the final words to two people who knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the last days of his Nazi captivity before his execution on April 9, 1945.

It was in prison where Captain Payne Best, a British spy, met the Lutheran pastor. Later, in a book about his wartime experience, Best wrote:

“Bonhoeffer was all humility and sweetness; he always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact of being alive. There was something dog-like in the look of fidelity in his eyes and his gladness if you showed that you liked him.

“He was one of the very few men I ever met to whom his God was real and ever close to him.”

At the time, H. Fischer-Hullstrung, one of the camp doctors, didn’t know who Bonhoeffer was but couldn’t forget him, as he detailed in a memoir published two decades later:

“I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds.

“In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely subject to the will of God.”

 

Lives of Great Religious Books

Marty’s book that concludes with the words of the spy and the prison doctor is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison”: A Biography.

Published in February, 2011, the book was one of a trio of works that kicked off Princeton University Press’s richly compelling series, titled Lives of Great Religious Books. The other two were Augustine’s “Confessions”: A Biography by Garry Wills and The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography by Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Over the past decade and a half, those three have been followed by twenty-three others, each of which tells the “biography,” that is, life story, of an important work of faith that has had wide influence.

For outsiders, religions are often mysterious. Yet, down the centuries, the great books of faith have played major roles in shaping the world of believers and non-believers alike, influencing politics, art, philosophy, literature, language and culture.

What makes these Princeton “biographies,” each about 250 pages long, so readable is that they’re written with a light touch by experts who are excited about the stories they have to tell and who understand that they are writing for non-experts.

 

Focused on the book, not the author

In writing about Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Marty makes it clear that a biography of a book is different from, separate from, the biography of the person who wrote the book.

Bonhoeffer’s book, published six years after his execution, was made up of letters and other documents that, during his captivity, he sent to his best friend and pastor Eberhard Bethge, a fellow theologian, and to others.

Marty explains that he goes out of his way to keep his focus tightly on the physical object that Bethge created from Bonhoeffer’s words and on the reaction that those words sparked among Christian theologians and in public discourse.

To keep the book within the boundaries set for this series, I shall concentrate on materials — “secondary sources,” in academic lingo — that manifest a certain landmark quality because they appeared as books or substantial chapters in books.

Wandering into the vastness of periodical literature, news stories, and the Internet would be illuminating, but the temptation to do so has been resisted.

Bibliographers note that there are hundreds of thousands of references to the life and works of Bonhoeffer, many of them commenting on this one book.

This biography of a book is about books that served as conversation partners to author Bonhoeffer and editor Bethge, in a conversation that is now being taken up by a new generation of readers.

 

“What is Christianity…today?”

Bonhoeffer’s time in prison, as a Lutheran theologian accused of conspiring to assassinate Adolf Hitler, is an interesting story in and of itself, one made even more poignant by his execution three weeks before Hitler’s suicide and twenty-nine days before the end of World War II in Europe.

Marty notes that, after the war, many prison memoirs were published, such as the one by Payne Best, and the Bonhoeffer manuscript would have likely have found readers as the work of a man of faith going through a martyrdom for his beliefs and actions.

Yet, what turned Letters and Papers from just another prison memoir to the subject of international debate over faith, the institution of the church and the reality of God were letters Bonhoeffer began writing April 30, 1944, a little more than a year into his captivity and less than a year before his hanging.

Here is a key excerpt that Marty offers:

“What might surprise or perhaps even worry you would be my theological thoughts and where they are leading…

“What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words — whether with theological or with pious words — is past, as is the age of inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether.

“We are approaching a completely religionless age; people are they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ aren’t really practicing that at all; they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’ ”

 

“In a religionless world”

Who, Marty writes, is the “us” in those lines? German Protestants? Western Christians? All Christians?  A few lines later, he notes, Bonhoeffer provided the context:

“But our entire nineteen hundred years of Christian preaching and theology are built on the ‘religious a priori’ in human beings. ‘Christianity’ has always been a form (perhaps the true form) of ‘religion.’ Yet if it becomes obvious one day that this ‘a priori’ doesn’t exist, that it has been a historically conditioned and transitory form of human expression, then people really will become radically religionless — and I believe that this is already more or less the case (why, for example, doesn’t this war provoke a ‘religious’ reaction like all the previous ones!) — what does that then mean for ‘Christianity?’…

“How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well? Is there such a thing as a religionless Christian? If religion is only the garb in which Christianity is clothed and this garb has looked very different in different ages — what then is religionless Christianity?…

“The questions to be answered would be: What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life, mean in a religionless world? How do we talk about God — without religion, that is, without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inner life, and so on?”

 

“God…pushed out of a world come of age”

It is clear that, at this moment in his life, as a human being and as a thinker, Bonhoeffer was grappling with new ideas that went to the heart of the faith and church in which he was rooted.

He had a plan that, if he survived prison, to write about this after the war, and whatever book resulted would have been more closely thought out, more clearly explained, than these impressionistic remarks.

Marty notes that, two months later, Bonhoeffer expressed another thought about the world as it was or as it was becoming:

“My starting point was that God is being increasingly pushed out of a world come of age, from the realm of our knowledge and life, and, since Kant, has only occupied the ground beyond the world of experience.”

For more than half a century, theologians and other thinkers, Marty writes, have debated the meaning of Bonhoeffer’s phrase “a world come of age.”

What could he mean when, at that time and ever since, there has been a rising wave of Christian fundamentalism? The long-established religious institutions, such as the mainline Protestant sects, might be fading in influence, yet a maverick sort of Christianity, exemplified by the megachurches of America and similar worship sites in Latin America and Africa, has been growing by leaps and bounds.

 

“Even if there were no God”

But Bonhoeffer went on wrestling with these ideas and asking:

“As a working hypothesis for morality, politics, and the natural sciences, God has been overcome and done away with, but also as a working hypothesis for philosophy and religion…It is a matter of intellectual integrity to drop this working hypothesis, or eliminate it as far as possible. An edifying scientist, physician, and so forth is a hybrid. So where is any room left for God?…

“And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world — ‘etsi deus non daretur.’ ”

That Latin term can be translated many ways. Marty suggests that, given the context, it should be understood to mean “Even if there were no God.”

 

“God consents to be pushed out”

Further complicating things was a paragraph that Bonhoeffer added that seemed, at first, to contradict what had gone before and yet, according to Marty, “provided a clue to a charter for fresh theological thinking”:

“And this is precisely what we do recognize — before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. Thus our coming of age leads us to a truer recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage their lives without God. The same God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34).”

That reference to the Gospel of Mark has to do with the crucifixion of Jesus: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which is translated, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ ”

“The same God who makes us to live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God, we live without God. God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us.

“Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence but rather by virtue of his weakness and suffering! This is the crucial distinction between Christianity and all religions.”

That reference to Matthew is best seen with verse 16 as well: “When evening had come, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed. And He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying: ‘He Himself took our infirmities/And bore our sicknesses.’ ”

 

“Enigmatic utterances”

Marty quotes at length from the key portions of the later letters as I have done above.

It’s clear from these excerpts that the Lutheran theologian was working out profound new ideas about the presence of God in human history and in the lives of human beings and about the questions that believers needed to ask themselves about what God wanted of them.

Yet, rather that fitting together in a tight structure of theological insight and logic, these were bursts of ideas, like naturally developing gardens of wild flowers. This is what Karl Barth, a major twentieth-century Protestant theologian, was referring to when he described Bonhoeffer’s letters as being filled with “enigmatic utterances.”

His words are cryptic inasmuch as he hasn’t fit his ideas into a system. Instead, he is writing in an almost scattershot way about enigmas that he is starting to glimpse at the heart of human life.

 

“Creative misuse”

These enigmatic words, so rich and yet so hazy, so potent and yet so risky, left the door open for later theologians and writers to assert a wide range of interpretations, and about half of Marty’s book is used to consider many of these, particularly the most outrageous of them.

Bonhoeffer’s poetically evocative words have been trotted out in support of the Communist East German government, for instance, and as important evidence in the Death-of-God debate of the mid-twentieth century.  Indeed, some who have employed Bonhoeffer’s quotes did so by knowingly — and publicly acknowledging —that they were twisting his words beyond his meaning.

Indeed, American theologian William Hamilton was cavalier in his use of Bonhoeffer’s words, and his own statement, Marty writes, could be applied to others who contorted the Lutheran pastor’s words:

“We make a creative misuse of Bonhoeffer!”

 

The key is Jesus

Throughout Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison”: A Biography, Marty doesn’t hide his great admiration of the German theologian. Even so, he keeps it in check as he works his way through the many clearly false interpreters who have arisen over the past seven decades.

His use, at the end, of the words of the spy and the prison doctor is a gesture, it seems to me, to direct the reader’s final focus on the man himself.

And, before that, Marty asserts that Bonhoeffer’s words from prison didn’t exist in a vacuum but culminated a life of theological thinking. So, while others sought to cherry-pick phrases from the Lutheran pastor to push their own agendas, Marty argues that the earlier life and thinking of the man provide the best context in which to understand him and his new ideas.

And the key, Marty writes, is Jesus.

 

“Good enough for Jesus”

In one of his last surviving letters, Bonhoeffer wrote that he “derived true knowledge of God from the earthly Jesus, the historical Jesus Christ.”  And he quoted from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (1:20): “He is the ‘Yes’ pronounced upon God’s promises, every one of them. That is why, when we give glory to God, it is through Christ Jesus that we say ‘Amen.’ ”

“But the truth is that if this earth was good enough for the man Jesus Christ, if such a man as Jesus lived, then, and only then has life a meaning for us.”

And he goes on:

“Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world.”

 

“Contradictions and paradoxes”

There is much here that is poetic rather than logical, transcendent rather than dogmatic.  In his final letters, Bonhoeffer open the door to puzzles, enigmas and confusions but also to a deeper view into God and humanity.

As Ernest Feil, a Catholic scholar, wrote, a Christocentric theology for Bonhoeffer “was the attempt to speak of the mystery [at the core of Christian belief], something we can only do in contradictions and paradoxes.”

In his final days, Bonhoeffer embraced those contradictions and paradoxes, opening himself to the action of the Spirit.  His words are unsettling. They must have been unsettling for him. Yet, he was willing to write them and think about them.

In that, he is a model for any searching Christian.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.27.26