Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

As the Confessing Church came together, it became necessary for it to have a seminary to train new ordinands. Bonhoeffer accepted the role of director at Niemöller’s suggestion, but hoped to use the time before its launch to continue his travels in England.

As the Reichskirche struggled through a period of negative international attention, Bonhoeffer took the opportunity to present to the German churches in England the choice that stood before them: To continue with their Reichskirche affiliation or to follow the Confessing Church. These churches declared their resolution to stand with the Confessing Church, but the Reichskirche’s Bishop Heckel still had a card to play: He would intervene and speak to each church individually, and thus stall or sway their new resolution.

To assist in this venture, Heckel recruited Helmut Rössler, a pastor who had once been a colleague and friend of Bonhoeffer’s. Rössler published a scathing public letter against the Confessing Church. This led to a falling out between himself and Bonhoeffer, and it appears to have been Bonhoeffer’s last significant foray in the “church struggle,” after which he would turn his attention away from the Reichskirche and devote himself almost entirely to the work of training up new ordinands for the Confessing Church.

In April 1935, the first form of the Confessing Church seminary came into being. Bonhoeffer led a small group of ordinands to Zingst, a town on the Baltic coast. While Niemöller and others in the Confessing Church envisioned a traditional theological training for the ordinands along the lines of Lutheran ministerial education, Bonhoeffer had a broader, more monastic education in mind, in which the ordinands would not only study theology, but share a common life of prayer, scripture, and song.

One of the ordinands was Eberhard Bethge, who would eventually become one of Bonhoeffer’s closest friends and, after Bonhoeffer’s death, the compiler and publisher of his biography and other papers. Bonhoeffer’s methods were something of a surprise to the ordinands, but they grew to love many of the practices he enjoined on the community. He also challenged them with his non-nationalistic, pacifist theological ideas, which were a far cry from the normal German-Lutheran milieu of patriotic pride and duty to one’s nation. In their daily life together, Bonhoeffer encouraged the ordinands to seek a personal encounter with God through the biblical text, using scripture to listen for God’s word to them.

The condition of the facility at Zingst was in such disrepair that they had to find other arrangements. They moved to an old Pomeranian manor house in Finkenwalde. The surrounding area was sympathetic to the Confessing Church seminary, with the gentry of Pomerania representing the old Prussian military officer class, and thus an anti-Hitler swath of German society. One of the local families Bonhoeffer came to know quite well was that of Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, a 68-year-old noblewoman who had no time for ambivalent clerics and who took an immediate liking to Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer’s work as a seminary director for the Confessing Church brought him into tension with the governing authorities, and, increasingly, with some members of his own church communion who would have rather maintained a more conciliatory posture toward the state. At the time, however, Nazi Germany was enacting its Nuremberg Laws, which stripped the rights of Jewish Germans. Bonhoeffer came out publicly against the laws, famously equating Christian worship with the defense of the Jews: “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants” (281). With the rising tensions and the growing threat to members of his own family who had close ties to German Jews, Bonhoeffer struggled with periods of depression. Nonetheless, he was able to continue his vigorous activism, including arranging a seminary trip to Sweden, which landed them in the front pages of international news and brought negative press to the German Reichskirche.

Bonhoeffer would encounter even more resistance once he published an attention-grabbing paper that asserted that one could only truly be a Christian in Germany if aligned with the Confessing Church. At the same time, the Confessing Church was drawing negative attention by accidentally publicizing a critical memo which was meant to be a private communication to Hitler. While no direct crackdown on the Confessing Church was forthcoming in 1936 (partly due to Hitler’s desire to avoid bad press during the Berlin-hosted Olympics), in 1937 the retribution came, and more than 800 leaders of the Confessing Church were arrested. This included both Niemöller and Hildebrandt, but the latter was eventually able to escape to safety in England.

Nazi authorities closed down Bonhoeffer’s seminary at Finkenwalde, but he merely transitioned the program into a different form, in which ordinands were trained in small groups under the mentorship of clergy serving in rural areas.

1938 was a year of turmoil both for Bonhoeffer and for all of Germany, as Hitler began to talk about his war aims. Many of his leading generals thought his ideas were crazy and would lead to the ruin of Germany, which encouraged some in the military to begin thinking about a coup. Bonhoeffer was aware of such machinations thanks to his connection to his friend and brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, who held a high civic office. They eagerly watched to see if the military leaders would manage to overthrow Hitler.

The first such promising opportunity, however, was derailed by a public scandal. Shortly thereafter, Hitler annexed Austria, which gained him further public favor in Germany. Bonhoeffer’s sister Sabine, married into a Jewish-Christian family, saw the dangers ahead and fled to England. Hitler began considering the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was so foolishly aggressive that the generals hoped it would give them a needed pretext to launch another coup attempt. However, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement gave Hitler a way out, and Czechoslovakia came under Nazi sway far more easily than anyone had thought possible.

Feeling ever more unfettered to pursue his plans, Hitler ordered action against the Jews, which led to the violence of Kristallnacht, in which Jewish homes and businesses were attacked. Bonhoeffer continued to boldly assert the rights of German Jews, but the Confessing Church as a whole was not as bold in taking a stand. It was around this time that Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy against Hitler, brought in by Dohnanyi, who now worked under Abwehr leader Wilhelm Canaris.