Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

The rising tension between Nazi pressure on the church and the slow but growing pushback from pastors set up a phase in German Christianity known as the “church struggle.” In this, Bonhoeffer would emerge as one of the main players on the side of the resistance. Other leaders would also emerge, like the pastor Martin Niemöller, but at this stage Niemöller was still convinced that Hitler was a blessing for Germany, and that all the problems were coming from the German Christian movement, not from Hitler.

The resistance pastors managed to get a fitting bishop, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, elected to the head position of the German church, rather than Hitler’s pick of Ludwig Müller. Helped by Hitler’s SA thugs, Müller raided the church offices and Bodelschwingh resigned in the face of growing resistance. A new election was called, and this time the German Christians and Hitler used every tool available to secure a win for Müller. This pushed Bonhoeffer and his contingent to consider a new move: Drafting a confession of faith to highlight the differences between their idea of a true German Christianity and the Nazi-fied heresies spouted by the so-called German Christians.

In the same summer of 1933 when the “church struggle” was taking shape, Bonhoeffer received an invitation from Theodor Heckel, one of the state church’s officials, to serve as pastor for London’s German expatriates. Bonhoeffer went to London to see the posting for himself, and then he stopped at a care center which Bodelschwingh ran for people with disabilities, at a place called Bethel. There the full value of every human being, no matter how disabled, was impressed on him—a dramatic distinction from the directions in which Nazi values were headed: “It is sheer madness, as some believe today, that the sick can or ought to be legally eliminated” (184).

While at Bethel, Bonhoeffer authored a confession of faith which he hoped he could get other like-minded pastors to sign onto. Ultimately, however, his draft was so watered down by the editing of theologians who thought he had gone too far that the document failed to represent what he had hoped for. Chastened and saddened by this, Bonhoeffer left Germany for a time and accepted the London post.

Meanwhile, the state church continued to morph ever further toward Nazism. At the Brown Synod they not only accepted the Aryan paragraph but made it retroactive, barring non-“Aryan” clergy even if they had already been ordained to the ministry. Bonhoeffer and his friend Hildebrandt felt the time for schism had come, but other leaders, like Barth and Niemöller, were not yet ready for such drastic action.

Nevertheless, in response to the Brown Synod, a new band of resistance leaders rose up: The Pastors’ Emergency League, who would coordinate their efforts to bring the German church back in line with the historic Christian faith. Bonhoeffer also used his contacts in the ecumenical movement to draw negative global attention to Hitler’s program to change the German church. Bonhoeffer’s activism prompted a rebuke from Heckel, the overseer who had placed him in London, but Bonhoeffer feared what Hitler’s policies represented and was determined to stop them. The argument he was pressing on his colleagues would soon come into sharper clarity when a German Christian rally gave ordinary laypeople a glance at what their program really entailed: Stripping their faith of anything Jewish, including the Old Testament of the Bible and the story of a crucified Messiah.

In London, Bonhoeffer resumed his parish-based pastoral work, for which he was just as gifted as academic theology. He cultivated a close relationship with George Bell, the influential British bishop of Chichester, who would actively take part in resisting the changes in the German state church and, with Bonhoeffer’s help, bring global Christian condemnation down on its forfeiture of traditional Christian doctrine. Others, like Karl Barth, pleaded for Bonhoeffer to get back to Berlin, where he was needed for the resistance. However, pastoring in London would prove advantageous for Bonhoeffer, giving him access to the global church and the ecumenical movement in a way that raised the work of the Pastors’ Emergency League to new heights.

Bonhoeffer began using his leverage in London to move the expatriate German churches toward threatening a break with the state church. In the midst of all this, some of the sermons that he preached seemed to indicate that he was coming to understand his own calling as that of a suffering prophet, one who—like Jeremiah in the Bible—was being called to a road of sacrifice.

Things had reached such a point with the church struggle that a personal audience between Niemöller and Hitler himself was arranged. This was the turning point for Martin Niemöller: Finding himself attacked and treated as a traitor, all of Niemöller’s hopeful delusions about Hitler were shattered. The gulf between the state church and the pastors who formed the resistance was growing rapidly.

At a special meeting in Berlin, Bonhoeffer met with other leaders of the Pastors’ Emergency League. They coordinated their efforts with the league and the ecumenical movement to move the church struggle to its definitive breaking point, where no one would any longer be able to confuse the German state church with their own Christianity. They planned a synod for the end of May 1934, and there they affirmed Karl Barth’s Barmen Declaration, a clear repudiation to the German Reichskirche and a confession of their own claim to Christian orthodoxy.

With the Barmen Declaration in print, Bonhoeffer believed the matter was settled: No one could any longer mistake the German state church for representing all German Christians, and the churches signed to the declaration—now called the Confessing Church—would represent what he regarded as true German Christianity. He was upset to find that the ecumenical movement did not see the matter in that light, but regarded the Barmen Declaration as merely creating a second German church. As such, both the Reichskirche and the Confessing Church were offered places at an upcoming ecumenical conference. All this took place as Hitler was further consolidating his power, eliminating political opponents and emerging as the sole center of political authority.