The Heresy of Relevance: Bonhoeffer's Warning to Preachers

Amid a crisis in biblical interpretation brought to a head by the Church Struggle in Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer delivered an address in August 1935 to a group of Confessing Church pastors entitled “Contemporizing New Testament Texts.” Bonhoeffer sounded a clarion call for the retrieval of a thoroughly theological hermeneutic that would liberate preachers for the bold proclamation of the Gospel within a culturally compromised church. This paper will present a reading of Bonhoeffer's daring address that seeks to both situate it within its unique historical context and attend to the ways that it calls into question many of the cherished hermeneutical and homiletical assumptions that dominate contemporary preaching for the sake of a more faithful proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Lonely Flame

This chapter surveys how the American Protestant ecumenical leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., responded to the Nazi regime while serving as a pastor in Berlin from 1936 to 1941. Through an examination of Herman’s views of Hitler, the German Church Struggle, and Nazi persecution of the Jews, it weighs just how conflicted American Protestants, including leading Protestant ecumenists, proved on these matters. Based in the Nazi capital, Herman in particular captured the uncertain mind of American Protestants on German affairs. In Berlin, Herman expressed caution about Nazi totalitarianism, yet he still proved open to some of Hitler’s aims of national renewal and voiced his support of the German leader. He also hesitated to support the Confessing Church at first, fearing that the movement might cause enduring ecclesial schism. Finally, when Berlin’s Jews came to Herman seeking aid, anti-Judaism and Christian antisemitism led him and other Americans to be slow to offer their help. Overall, Herman’s interwar record illustrates how Protestant ecumenists were far from monolithic or fixed in their views of their era’s challenges. As their witness fractured, they struggled to meaningfully counteract Nazi fascism.

“A Swissman in the Middle of Germany”

In the summer semester of 1930, Barth moved to Bonn. He was soon drawn into a conflict with German nationalists about the German pacifist and theologian Günther Dehn, whom Barth defended. A few months after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933, Barth wrote Theological Existence Today!, declaring that church and theology constitute a boundary for every state, even a totalitarian one. At the same time, Barth’s domestic situation grew more difficult, leading him to consider divorce. In 1934 Barth co-authored the Barmen Theological Declaration of the Confessing Church. Barth didn’t conform with even minor regulations at the university and refused to swear the loyalty oath to Hitler without an addendum. This led to Barth’s suspension as professor, followed by a disciplinary criminal process, in which Barth protested that Hitler was treated as a second God. The process led to Barth’s compulsory retirement in 1935.

“We Who Can Still Speak”

In July 1935 Barth returned to Basel as professor. He retained his ties to the Confessing Church. In the 1938 Sudeten crisis, Barth wrote to the Czech professor Hromádka, encouraging the Czech to violent resistance against Hitler’s aggressive policies. In Nazi Germany Barth’s stand was viewed as treasonous and the Confessing Church withdrew from Barth. In the following years Barth’s engagement focused on refugees. He criticized how National Socialist ideology and antisemitism spread also in Switzerland and how Switzerland understood its neutrality. Barth’s texts were censored in his home country, and his phone was under surveillance. In 1941, Barth’s son Matthias died at age twenty in a tragic accident in the Alps. As the defeat of Germany became foreseeable, Barth called upon his compatriots to adopt a postwar attitude toward the Germans that combined friendship and criticism.

Karl Barth

From the beginning of his career, Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) was often in conflict with the spirit of his times. While during the First World War German poets and philosophers became intoxicated by the experience of community and transcendence, Barth fought against all attempts to locate the divine in culture or individual sentiment. This freed him for a deep worldly engagement: he was known as “the red pastor,” was the primary author of the founding document of the Confessing Church, the Barmen Theological Declaration, and after 1945 protested the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany. Christiane Tietz compellingly explores the interactions between Barth's personal and political biography and his theology. Numerous newly-available documents offer insight into the lesser-known sides of Barth such as his long-term three-way relationship with his wife Nelly and his colleague Charlotte von Kirschbaum. This is an evocative portrait of a theologian who described himself as “God's cheerful partisan,” who was honored as a prophet and a genial spirit, was feared as a critic, and shaped the theology of an entire century as no other thinker.

The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) in Western Pomerania in Light of the Activity of St. Mary’s Parish in Koszalin (Köslin) and the Rev. Friedrich Onnasch (1881–1945)

The article deals with issues related to the history of the relations between churches as institutions, and their individual clergymen, and the Nazi state. The source referred to in this article is the intimate journal of Minister Friedrich Onnasch (1881–1945), the superintendent of the Koszalin Church District and parish priest of Saint Mary’s Church in Koszalin, murdered by Soviet troops in Barlinek in February 1945. A document written on a regular basis, never published, is a detailed account (though coded, due to censorship), showing the experience of the clerical office in a time of totalitarian oppression. It shows the situation in the Evangelical Church after 1933 and the commitment of Minister Friedrich Onnasch and others, among them Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), associated with Pomerania, in the movement of the Confessing Church. It explores the areas of Christian religion in its Evangelical topography, limited to the space of the former Prussian province of Pommern (Provinz Pommern) and Western Pomerania after 1945.

Intellectual and Personal Biography I

This chapter recounts the path of Barth’s life between 1921 and 1935. It first reflects on how the second edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans precipitated a widespread movement of thought called dialectical theology, which led in turn to Barth’s move from the pastorate in Switzerland to a chair in Göttingen as Professor of Reformed Theology. The chapter next explores Barth’s time as Professor of Dogmatics and New Testament Exegesis in Münster (1925–1930), at which time contact with Roman Catholic theologians became important for the development of his thought. Barth’s appointment at the University of Bonn in 1930 marks the third phase of the chapter, which considers the beginnings of Barth’s great work—Church Dogmatics—and Barth’s intensive engagement with the writings of Anselm of Canterbury. Finally, the chapter details Barth’s involvement in addressing the problems and failures of the Protestant churches in Germany following Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, his work in helping to establish the Confessing Church, and his role in the composition of the Theological Declaration of Barmen in 1934.

Intellectual and Personal Biography II

This chapter recounts the path of Barth’s life between 1921 and 1935. It first reflects on how the second edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans precipitated a widespread movement of thought called dialectical theology, which led in turn to Barth’s move from the pastorate in Switzerland to a chair in Göttingen as Professor of Reformed Theology. The chapter next explores Barth’s time as Professor of Dogmatics and New Testament Exegesis in Münster (1925–1930), at which time contact with Roman Catholic theologians became important for the development of his thought. Barth’s appointment at the University of Bonn in 1930 marks the third phase of the chapter, which considers the beginnings of Barth’s great work—Church Dogmatics—and Barth’s intensive engagement with the writings of Anselm of Canterbury. Finally, the chapter details Barth’s involvement in addressing the problems and failures of the Protestant churches in Germany following Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, his work in helping to establish the Confessing Church, and his role in the composition of the Theological Declaration of Barmen in 1934.

Bonhoeffer and the Church Struggle

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s unflinching opposition to the Nazi-backed German Christians and the Nazi state in the German Church Struggle (1933–45) led his more conservative colleagues in the Confessing Church to ostracize him and label him a radical. Along with Martin Niemöller he was one of the founders of the Pastors’ Emergency League in September 1933 and a devoted advocate of the 1934 Barmen Declaration and the Dahlem Resolution. As a pastor of a German parish in London and director of a Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde he continued his struggle against the heresies of the German Christians and their efforts to establish racial criteria for membership in the church, the so-called Aryan paragraph. As the Confessing Church’s primary contact with the ecumenical movement he kept Protestant leaders abroad informed about the Church Struggle. Bonhoeffer was one of the very few churchmen to speak out against Nazi persecution of Jews.

Bonhoeffer and Ecumenism

Bonhoeffer’s ecumenism was central and decisive to both his theology and activity from his later student days to his imprisonment. It was founded upon his ecclesiology as basically set out in Sanctorum Communio. The church being ‘Christ existing as community’ was applied by him to the fellowship of Christians across national and confessional boundaries and especially in its calling to embody and proclaim peace in the wold. In the Church Struggle he vigorously promoted the claim of the Confessing Church as the authentic Evangelical Church of Germany and argued for the ecumenical movement, for the sake of its own integrity and renewal, to accept that claim. His recruitment into the German resistance owed much to his having so many ecumenical contacts in the allied and neutral countries, but it also enabled him to pursue still more deeply his ecumenical interests, including relations with the Roman Catholic Church.