(351)S14E1: Bonhoeffer's Dark Cloud: The Importance of Narrative
This episode is going to be the first in a short series that I'm doing on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's gonna be a short series because I'm not planning on going all that in-depth into his life. But because there is so much, controversy surrounding him in the way that, his narrative is portrayed today, I think it's really important to cover some aspects that you probably won't see. In fact, the Bonhoeffer family just, in light of the new movie coming out, just released a letter signed by, like, you know, over 3 quarters of the surviving Bonhoeffer family members saying that they really hate how Bonhoeffer's name is being used today by certain groups. This first episode then is going to try to clue you into the narratives that are surrounding Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the way that his story gets used.
Derek:And understanding how his story gets used and and what the different angles are are going to be important as you sift through, some of the different information that comes at you from different sources. Perhaps more than, most of my other episodes, these episodes are going to be heavily resourced, because I'm gonna make a lot of claims and a lot of statements that, you know, I I can't spend hours and hours going over here. So if you would make sure that you check out the show notes, that would be a a great way for you to check me and to extend your learning. So without further ado, here is our first episode in our series on Bonhoeffer. Welcome back to the 4th Way podcast.
Derek:I have been studying nonviolence for about the past 8 years or so at this point. And I have to say, it has been extremely rewarding for me. Now, 1st and foremost, it's been rewarding because I I believe that it is the teaching of Jesus, and therefore, it has drawn me closer to him. But beyond that, I also think that God created the world to work in line with the good, meaning that doing good isn't just the right thing to do, but it's also, at least in the end, the most beneficial thing that we can do. So studying nonviolence then has really impacted me not only in regard to my personal attitudes, but also my actions, on both the small and the large scale, ranging from how I discipline my children to how I act in the political sphere.
Derek:And certainly, I can't deny that a large part of this study has been intellectual in nature. There are brute propositions and historical facts that you have to deal with when you form your beliefs. But, really, I think what has been the most influential in my life in moving me from intellectual ascent to real world action has been the examples of others, the great cloud of witnesses as Hebrews calls them, or as Chesterton might call them, the democracy of the dead. The lives lived out by great men and women throughout history have spoken and continue to speak into my life. They cast their votes for how I ought to live and exemplify what a life of integrity, sacrifice, and courage looks like.
Derek:I think of great men like Saint Martin of Tours or doctor Martin Luther King Junior. I think of women like Perpetua and Gladys Aylward. They inform me not merely in regards to my faith, but in regard to my actions because they embody the teachings of Jesus for me. They show me what true faith lived out looks like. And one of the biggest heroes of the faith for me, especially as it relates to nonviolence, has been Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Derek:He's had such a big influence on my thinking, not only because he's fairly modern, and therefore, it's easier to put myself in his shoes a little bit, but he's also influential because he's faced what most of us today would consider to be the greatest evil in the last century. Bonhoeffer stood up to evil incarnate, to Hitler and the Nazi regime. When the vast majority of his fellow Germans were rallying behind Hitler, including the majority of churches and churchgoers, Bonhoeffer saw Hitler and his hateful rhetoric for what it truly was. Now I want Bonhoeffer and my cloud of witnesses. I wanna be discipled by Bonhoeffer.
Derek:I want him to cast his vote into my life to shape my beliefs, to influence my actions. Of course, it's impossible for me to be discipled by Bonhoeffer today because, well, he's been dead for over 3 quarters of a century now. But the story of his life and the text of his writings live on. So as best I can, I want to understand Bonhoeffer's heart? I wanna evaluate his thinking and his decisions, and I wanna emulate his practices so that one day, I too could choose to courageously stand up, speak out, and act in the face of great evil.
Derek:And I'm not the only one who sees Bonhoeffer as a pillar of the Christian faith and an example to model. Many Christians, including many Christians who deny the principle of nonviolence, they hold Bonhoeffer in their cloud of witnesses as well. In fact, a new Bonhoeffer movie is being released in theaters this weekend, and it's expected to do very, very well. And it's gonna be attended largely by American evangelicals, most of whom are not even close to espousing nonviolence. While Bonhoeffer has been highly esteemed among Christians of all stripes for a long time now, it seems as though there's a resurgence of Bonhoeffer fervor today.
Derek:And not just in academic circles, like, all the way down to the popular level. There could be a lot of reasons for why this is occurring. I mean, random biopics come out all the time because humans are drawn to real world narratives. Yet, I think there is a lot more to the current Bonhoeffer trend than meets the eye. And I want to dive into what I believe is helping to drive the market today, particularly the Christian market, to demand a film depicting the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Derek:About 15 years ago, I was hanging out at a friend's house, and I noticed a really thick book lying on the table. I asked my friend about it, and he told me that it was the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The book was being acclaimed by the evangelical community as a fantastic piece of scholarship, a compelling read, and a vital story for Christians to know. It was the story of a man who, in the face of absolute evil, stood up to fight a tyrant when everyone else was cowering or fawning. It was the story of how Christianity empowers us to do the right thing no matter the cost, how Christianity calls us to speak up and to act out even if that means we sacrifice our lives, even when the rest of culture is walking off a precipice.
Derek:It was the story of inspirational integrity. The author of that book, Eric Metaxas, had begun to grow in prominence in the evangelical world with his authoring of Amazing Grace, a biography of William Wilberforce, the man who many credit with the abolition of slavery. And with Metaxas' success in writing Amazing Grace, he moved on to write a biography of another hero of the faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That biography has been a smashing hit in the evangelical community. And while the hype for it has waxed and waned over the years, as you can tell by the hype over the new Bonhoeffer movie, Metaxas has helped the hype for Bonhoeffer to climax now, as he has thrust Bonhoeffer forward as an exemplary Christian for all of us to model, and rightfully so.
Derek:He is. But here's the thing. History is usually written by the winners as they say. The history that is marketed and consumed tends to be written and read by those in control or those with a voice. Those with the stories that other people want to hear, or who at least tell the stories as others want them heard.
Derek:As a student of history, this makes me wary of stories for which others are clamoring, and stories that are told in booming voices. The louder a story is, the more I tend to question it. The story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is now rising to a crescendo, and I find myself asking, is this really his story? In today's episode then, I wanna explore the stories of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the one you want to hear and have heard, as well as the one you probably don't wanna hear. And in fleshing out the story of Bonhoeffer, we'll also be looking at the great consumer and purveyor of the current Bonhoeffer narrative.
Derek:No. Not Metaxas exactly, though we certainly do need to talk about him. But, I mean, evangelicals and the broader Christian community. A whole industry, a whole political party has been built up around the evangelical community. And to understand how we got the Bonhoeffer of today, we need to understand both those who peddle him and those who consume him.
Derek:There really isn't any best place to start in this story, because history never really begins. It only ever hesitates, stutters, and bifurcates. But stories have to begin somewhere. Right? And I think the the best place for us to start the story of the Bonhoeffer market is immediately following his death in 1945.
Derek:In the late 19 thirties, the world had been snapped out of its hopeful idealism, an idealism created by the culmination of the First World War. The horror and tragedy of that war seemed so clear that some, many even, called it the war to end all wars. Who'd be that stupid to ever go to war again after seeing what they saw? The world had learned its lesson about war and evil. But the war to end all wars was a war that just started another one, an even bigger one.
Derek:Because cyclical violence and harsh retribution, two defining characteristics of pretty much all wars, they don't create peace. They are means unbecoming of and antithetical to the ends of peace. Unsurprisingly then, after the end of the 2nd great war, there was no end to war in sight. Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent theologian, formed in the furnaces of the 2 world wars, along with other theologians, they were spearheading a movement of realism. The idea that ideals, like the Sermon on the Mount and living like Jesus, were hopes for a future day, but that they couldn't really function in the world as it currently was.
Derek:To live rightly and to do justice in a world as fallen as the great wars showed us it was, it meant that if Christians wanted to be useful, they needed to be practical. Christians would have to be realistic and embrace means that would be unbecoming of a Christ like individual in the eschaton. The world came out of World War 2 ready to embrace this realist moral ethic. For twice in a single generation, it had revealed how fallen it truly was. The fires of hell had to be met with the fires of hell, even if that hellfire had to be wielded by the children of heaven.
Derek:Only 5 years after World War 2 ended, the US and other nations entered the Korean War. That was followed by a decade in Vietnam and countless proxy wars and governmental overthrows in between, all in the pretext of stopping the spread of communism. While the US was waging external conflicts and running propaganda campaigns against the Phantom of its own making, it was also managing its own internal conflicts and propaganda campaigns. McCarthyism and the red scare, a persecution of anyone associated with the idea of communism raged on at home. The civil rights movement fomented great unrest as well with leaders who were seeking justice conveniently being labeled as communists and Marxists in order to be dismissed.
Derek:Simultaneously, leaders at home began virtue signaling in order to create a clear separation between them and godless communism. President Eisenhower, though he was a he was a professed Christian for a long time, he became the 1st president baptized while in office. Under his administration, all US currency received, in God, we trust on it. The pledge of allegiance had under God inserted into it. The National Prayer Breakfast began, and Veterans Day was adopted.
Derek:The United States was preparing itself for a world steeped in realism. Never again was it gonna be caught logistically unprepared as a result of its isolationism, like it was in World War 1. Never again would it be caught militarily unprepared as it was at Pearl Harbor, or ideologically unprepared as it was for the start of the Cold War. Charisma, information, and violence, those were power. Those were control.
Derek:That was how the real world worked, and the United States was going on the offensive to control the world, but at first had to control its own populace. Over the next 70 years, the American people would be educated in these currencies of realism. They came to love the power that violence brought them and embraced militarism. They came to love the power that economic goods brought them, and they embraced materialism. And they came to love the unity and power that ideology brought them, and they embrace nationalism.
Derek:If this is how power functioned in the real world, if this is the real world that God had handed to us, then we were gonna be prepared to take control in his name. When the powers of government began more seriously courting the ideology of religion for the unifying power that it could give them in such a tumultuous time, the Evangelical Church was largely uninterested in politics. A famous sermon by the late Jerry Falwell presents this really well. In a sermon preached on March 21, 1965, 20 or so years after the start of the Cold War, exactly a month after Malcolm X's assassination, and smack dab in the middle of the Selma March, Falwell preached a sermon entitled, Of Ministers and Marches. In this sermon, which is well worth a read, I highly recommend it, and you can find the link in the show notes.
Derek:Falwell argues that Christians are to essentially refrain from politics. Falwell says that, quote, our ministry is not reformation, but transformation, end quote. Falwell talks about the local bootleggers and other ilk, you know, moral ilk of, of their area. And he says that Christians don't seek to make laws to put those immoral people in jail, but, rather, Christians preach the gospel to them in hopes of their transformation. In the sermon, Falwell waxed biblical about the Christian position in the world and our distinction from state action.
Derek:But if you know anything about modern day politics, then you likely recognize the name Jerry Falwell. And you know that he was extremely involved in political engagement. What changed for Falwell? Did the Bible change? Nope.
Derek:Now what a lot of people wanna do is they want to attribute Falwell's position change to the issue of abortion with Roe versus Wade being decided in in the early 19 seventies, in, in 1973, less than a decade after Falwell's of ministers and marches sermon. But as Randall Balmer clearly shows in his various books, the abortion issue was not a major unifier for evangelicals or any political group until the late seventies at best and really more like well into the eighties. Now Falwell's change of views in regard to politics, it wasn't spiritual or moral. It was the result of a loss of control. Falwell was content to let politics run as it did in 1965, because up until the seventies, it allowed him significant freedom and control being in the majority.
Derek:If the government wanted to legislate integration, well, Falwell didn't really like it, but, you know, Falwell would just circumvent that by creating his own segregation academies private schools, I mean. Simultaneously, he was going to undercut the credibility of Christians who agreed with integration, and he would call integrationists godless Marxists. And any Christian who joined the integrationist cause would be labeled as unchristian, because they were seeking reformation rather than transformation. But in 1971, in Greene versus Connolly, the government determined that segregation academies like Falwell's would no longer receive tax exempt status due to their circumvention of the new integration law of the land. Now soon afterwards, Falwell was much more interested in reformation and becoming politically involved.
Derek:And you can see this very clearly by looking at the Falwell family papers made available through Liberty online, where he he calls things like the Equal Rights Amendment, a, quote, satanic attack upon the family, end quote. While Falwell began seeking reformation in 1973 in regard to tax exemption and the freedom to discriminate, he didn't preach his first sermon against abortion until 1978, 5 years after Roe versus Wade was decided. As doctor Balmer points out, the rise of the religious right can, with a pretty high degree of certainty, be linked to starting primarily in relation to the issue of integration and a loss of state funding for religious institutions. It was largely linked to religious freedom, the religious freedom to keep raking in the dough from the government and to discriminate. The late seventies saw the rise of the religious right and neoconservatism.
Derek:The religious right, in particular, was grown out of a desire to escape state imposition, as we just saw, and it centered its values around the idea of freedom. Really, though, it was a it was a negative freedom in particular, a freedom from, specifically from governmental oversight and restriction. But it was also a group which sought to impose its views on others. It was all well and good for evangelicals to abstain from politics when things were going their way, when they were getting kickbacks from the state. But now they were losing power, and that's really uncomfortable.
Derek:If they were gonna enter politics to preserve what power they had remaining, they may as well use the power they sought to obtain to garner even more power and more prestige. Thus, evangelicals were thrust into politics throughout the seventies and rose to prominence as a solid voting base candidates sought to appease. A base who now not only viewed politics as an acceptable and vital means to both transformation and reformation, but a group who also began to be conformed to the moral ethic of realism in which the political culture was steeped. Power required winning, and winning in such a tumultuous world required compromise. One of the first major tests evangelicals were faced with was in choosing whether to vote for a fellow evangelical and seeker of relative peace, Jimmy Carter, or voting for a cultural Christian at best, a movie star, a playboy, racist, Hawk, and Ronald Reagan.
Derek:The Christian realists were quick studies and, of course, chose power. They selected Reagan. Reagan was a president who ran his campaign with some strong racist signaling to his supporters that he was pro white, beginning in a small location of Philadelphia, Mississippi, one day short of the 16th anniversary of the murders of 3 civil rights workers there and running on a platform of states' rights. Now you can't really send a much stronger signal than that, can you? So who was this man that the Christian realists chose?
Derek:Well, they chose a man who would prevent the release of Iranian hostages under Carter, prolonging their captivity in a deal that has become known as the October Surprise. And he did this in order to make Carter look weak and himself look strong so he could win the presidency. During his time in office, the president was also responsible for the Iran contra affair, in which weapons were sold to Iran, our, you know, huge enemy that everybody has hated in the United States for for so long, and and says is, you know, the epitome of evil in our world. Reagan sells them weapons, the proceeds of which went to the Contras in Nicaragua, a group who massacred tens of thousands of civilians. It was also during this time that the Reagan administration inadvertently created and exacerbated the crack epidemic in the inner cities by allowing drugs and money funneled by the Contras to go unprosecuted so that the Contras could prosecute their own war at home.
Derek:The Reagan administration was responsible for a number of other great evils, but 2 that are particularly representative are his support of 2 horrendous dictators, Rios Mont and Ferdinand Marcos. Both dictators ran heinous regimes in their respective countries. Whereas Carter had pulled funding from Mont because of, what he was doing, Reagan reinstated it so that Mont could continue his brutal regime. And as for Marcos of the Philippines, his own people overthrew him, but he escaped his island aboard a US plane, thanks to his friend, Ronald Reagan. Marcos lived out his days with all of his stolen money from from his people, with US support on the quaint US Islands of Hawaii.
Derek:And Christian Rialis voted for this man twice. And still, knowing what we know today, all of this stuff that, you know, some of which wasn't known at the time, like, we know that. And Christian realists want to go back to that time, and they claim that president Reagan was the best president in their lifetime, if not ever. Reagan is extremely revered because he used power. He got us control.
Derek:This is the legacy of the first president that you can probably attribute to, the moral majority having helped to win. But the realism that Christian evangelicals were voting for was not, in fact, reality. The drug problem that Reagan created largely in the inner cities didn't impact Christian evangelicals for the most part, because most of them were in the suburbs. They never saw it. They also never saw the massacres in South and Central America, because those who were killed were undeserving of mercy.
Derek:And anybody who sought mercy at the border, should just stay on the other side of the border. They were the undeserving poor, equivalent to the welfare moms that the Reagan administration caricatured, and they were socialists, perhaps the least deserving of all. In reality, many of those killed in Central and South America, they were Christians, fellow Christians. The truth was that in taking on politics, evangelicals took on realism. And in taking on realism, this violent chaotic world is what they created.
Derek:And if not created it, at least perpetuated, at least became complicit too. In the next 4 decades, we'd see 2 Iraq wars and the killing of half a 1000000 Iraqi children, a 20 year fruitless war in Afghanistan, a fight against so called terrorism leading to the rise of the surveillance state, a Russia, China, and North Korea encircled by NATO and US alliances, strangled and threatened by US encroachment, and therefore, posturing bellicose, a blind allegiance to Saudi Arabia and Israel, providing each with carte blanche to oppress and murder those they deem inconvenient or impediment, in a world ever on the brink of war. This is what the Realists got us. In embracing Realism, they created the reality that we now live in, this product of the self fulfilling prophecy that Realism is. You fight fire with fire, and you find that everything burns down.
Derek:But the terrible global conditions that we have now, produced in part by evangelical realism, is not the only terror that has been produced, not at all. The embrace of realism by evangelicals has also contributed to the Kierkegaardian existential terror of despair that is so prevalent today, spiritual nihilism. See, I grew up in the church. I went to a Christian school. I often went to church 3 times a week.
Derek:I attended missions conferences. I had almost exclusively Christian family and friends. I attended a Christian college. I was and still am steeped in evangelicalism. I was taught that God is love.
Derek:I was taught that integrity mattered. I was taught not to judge. I was told that the world out there, that the world that the unbelievers were trying to sell me, that that wasn't true reality. Now the material wasn't bad. We didn't say that, but their values, their ideas, the virtues that they tried to sell me, they weren't real.
Derek:There was no substance to them. Jesus was true reality. Loving enemies was true reality. Uncompromising faithfulness was true reality. But when the the portcullis of my Christian school was raised and the children of evangelicalism entered the world to proclaim the true reality of the true kingdom that they had been taught to believe, they were shot with arrows, not by the world, but with arrows in their backs coming from their own side.
Derek:Love the foreigner and the immigrant? No. Keep them out and terrorize their country for personal security and gain. Support victims of a the AIDS crisis? Hell no.
Derek:Ostracize them from your communities and proclaim god's judgment on them. Support unwed mothers? No. Be the first to throw stones for sexual promiscuity, unless unless it's, the sexual indiscretion of your party's candidate or charismatic leader, of course. Promote peace?
Derek:Nope. Support war. Refuse to support injustice? No. Support the atrocities of our allies.
Derek:The list goes on and on. We, the children of evangelicalism, were taught that the kingdom of Jesus was the true reality that was to guide our actions in uncompromising integrity. But by our parents' embrace of an antithetical reality, they showed us what they truly believed. For much of my adult life, people have been trying to figure out why those raised in the church are leaving. Why aren't the children living out the faith of their parents?
Derek:Theories abound in the evangelical community as to why the children are apostasizing. You know, it's colleges, liberal professors. The generation is shallow. This generation is materialistic. This generation is too soft and sentimental.
Derek:They only think with their heart. You know, few of those theories end up getting at what I think is, by and large, the reality. Anecdotally, I found that the children who have left evangelicalism have done so often due to the exact same void evangelicalism so often leaves in me, a void of authenticity. If Jesus isn't real, if his teaching doesn't relate to the real world, if it doesn't supersede the artificial reality the world has to offer, then it's worthless. The land during televangelists know that Jesus is worthless, which is why they wear 2 faces.
Derek:Materialistic megachurch leaders know that Jesus is worthless, which is why they try to worship both God and mammon. Nationalistic fundamentalist churches know that Jesus is worthless, which is why they crucify him for the fatherland. Better that one man die for the people, that the nation and the church be saved. Right? Realist evangelicalism told its children an insufficient and quaint story at best, and a dissonant and hypocritical one at worst.
Derek:Their story has nothing to offer that the world can't offer. And in fact, the world has more. Because if I have to choose between living like the world in most ways, but being chained to what remains of Jesus' ethic, which for evangelicalism is mostly just a seeming puritanical sexual ethic unless you rise high enough in the ranks to to be immune from that charge, if Christianity is essentially just the same thing as the world, but with one extra chain, then why not just drop that and go all in with the world and not have to be a hypocrite on all the other stuff that Jesus said? And that really is most of what's different about the evangelical reality as compared to the world's reality, isn't it? I mean, the sexual ethic.
Derek:Don't be gay, don't have sex unless it's with your spouse, or unless you have a good organization, Yaconate, or enough hush money that can brush it under the rug for the greater good, of course, to protect Jesus's name, of course. Other than that, the evangelical Jesus doesn't touch our money. He doesn't touch our love for the foreigner unless it's in objectifying them through missions work or low cost labor. He doesn't touch our violence or hatred for our enemies. So why are the children leaving the church?
Derek:Well, if you ask me, the children of evangelicalism have have realized that Jesus is a vestigial organ. He's an appendix. He only matters at the end of time, but not right now. So if that's the Jesus that evangelicalism offers, if all he really does now is to serve to inflame bigotry, let's just do the surgery and excise him completely. We don't need our appendix.
Derek:Carpe diem. As a child of evangelicalism myself, I have seen this apostasy happen to many of my friends. I've seen them faced with accepting the reality that evangelicalism could teach but not show, or the reality that evangelicalism in the world both actually embraced in regard to power and control. I, myself, have been faced with this decision to apostasize many times, but I just couldn't dismiss the compelling reality depicted to me and Jesus, no matter how deviant the broader community was from him. When I read Jesus, he was compelling, even if many of his storytellers were not.
Derek:And all of that brings us back to the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While Bonhoeffer was awaiting the unknown, sitting in prison, he wrote something that resonates with me so completely at this moment in history. Bonhoeffer, he wrote the following, quote, I often ask myself why a Christian instinct often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, but which I don't in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but I might almost say in brotherhood. Well, I'm often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people because that name somehow seems to me here not to right ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest. It's particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon.
Derek:I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable. But to people with no religion, I can, on occasion, mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course, end quote. So in in this, statement, Bonhoeffer is saying that he identified more with the unbelievers a lot of the time than with believers. He identified with apostates who walked away from the church more than he identified with those who took the name of God in vain, saying his name on Sunday, but espousing German nationalism the rest of the week, declaring their pious Christianity while refusing to help the foreigner and the outcast, the Jew. The name of God meant nothing to so many inside the church.
Derek:But to those whose consciences weren't seared and ears not acclimated to the name of God, to them, Bonhoeffer could sometimes feel kinship, a brotherhood. I so often feel the exact same way today. The children of evangelicalism who have apostasized often didn't leave Jesus. They left the church in order to hold on to Jesus. The choice was Jesus or the church.
Derek:Much of the evangelical church thinks that, you know, the apostates have thrown away their salvation, Because to the church, salvation is clinging on to the apocalyptic Jesus, the Jesus who saves at the end. But for many of those who apostasize, they embrace the Jesus who brought the kingdom now, the Jesus who saves now, who saves us from our hatred, our oppression, our bigotry, our violence, the Jesus who saves us from ourselves, who gets us to look beyond ourselves to the other, not to make Germany great again, not to make America great again, not to preserve my materialism, not to remain in my heaven that I create through my political party or my power, but rather, to not count equality with God as something that I can grasp, but to empty ourselves for the sake of other, in in service to God, in submission and humility. They couldn't hold on to the apocalyptic Jesus who offered some distant hope divorced from reality now. They needed a savior now, and the church couldn't point them to him. And that's why, like Bonhoeffer, I so often feel a greater kinship with unbelievers than I do with those inside the church.
Derek:I feel closer to Jesus, closer to his kingdom and his saving work in me and in the world when I'm in the presence of those who don't take his name in vain. The popular version of the Bonhoeffer story as presented by Eric Metaxas is essentially the embodiment of this side of evangelicalism that I and the apostates seek to leave behind, this religion that leaves Jesus and the ideal behind for the promise of efficiency and pragmatism that modern realism offers. And what is the power that modern realism offers? Turning stones to bread, providing for us, catching us when we fall, and putting the power of empires at our fingertips if we would just bow the knee. And who could compete with that?
Derek:Nobody, of course. And that's why Bonhoeffer, at one naive point in his life, he toyed with the idea of pacifism, this this beautiful ideal that could never be, and maybe he even committed to that peace ethic. But as the Hitler regime came to power, he began to realize that in order to make a real difference in the world, in order to grasp the power away from Hitler, Bonhoeffer had to throw off his idealism, for such an ethic could never work in the real world. Upon accepting a new realist ethic, Bonhoeffer began engaging in plans to assassinate Hitler and wrest power from his hands. Bonhoeffer emerged from his quaint idealism and disengagements in order to embrace action and power in the most meaningful and perhaps the only meaningful way possible in the real world of politics and nation states.
Derek:He accepted and embraced force, violence. In one respect, you you can't really blame Ataxas for his version of Bonhoeffer. 1 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's closest friends and his initial biographer, Eberhard Bette, relayed this very narrative of Bonhoeffer's transformation to readers. Now considering the credibility of Bettege, who was very credible, he was a very close friend to Bonhoeffer, and considering the evangelical community's realist trajectory, it's not a surprise that this narrative of Bonhoeffer, the realist, the the idealist turned realist, the pacifist turned violent, it's not a surprise that this has been the going narrative for most of the 80 years since Bonhoeffer's death. It's not just Metaxas.
Derek:But I am specifically concerned with the Metaxas version for two reasons. 1st, because it's my group's version, and I wanna deal with our own issues. I don't wanna to look outside, you know, my group and, you know, try to blame other people or or critique other people. And second, as Christians who seek to follow the teaching teachings of Jesus, we should have the tools to be critical of realist narratives, so we should know better. And there is indeed another narrative of the Bonhoeffer story, attested to by more numerous sources and just as credible of sources, all who had a high degree of proximity to Bonhoeffer.
Derek:This counternarrative claims that Bonhoeffer did indeed embrace pacifism, that Bonhoeffer did indeed remain a pacifist, and that Bonhoeffer never embraced the realist option of violence. And this evidence is based not only on eyewitness testimony, but also evidence found in court documents and in Bonhoeffer's own writings. But this is a case that few have wanted to hear over the decades. They haven't wanted to hear it because most people are realists. They know how the world works, and in order for Bonhoeffer to be our type of hero, he has to be a real hero, which means that he had to be willing to engage in real action in the real world, actions that had the potential to actually do something of significance.
Derek:A pacifistic Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, would not only fail to be an inspiration to realists, he would be an indictment, an indictment that their reality was a false one, or at least one that ought to be called into question. But this case for Bonhoeffer's pacifism isn't in the purview of this episode. I have an episode planned with the Bonhoeffer Scholar who has written about Bonhoeffer's pacifism, doctor Mark Nation, and we're gonna flesh out that case in more detail, hopefully, sometime in the next few weeks. But here, I wanna explore the real world ramifications of how we form and accept narratives like those of Bonhoeffer. Why does it matter how we embrace his story?
Derek:We've already discussed the broader history of evangelical politics in the last 80 years. At this point, I think it's helpful for us to zoom into the last decade of evangelicalism, and more specifically, at Eric Metaxas himself as a representative of this movement. If you're not familiar with the name Eric Metaxas from the Bonhoeffer biography, then you may have become familiar with him in the past few years because of his close association with the far right politics and the Trump campaign, as Metaxas was a part of Trump's spiritual council, and he's been rubbing shoulders with influential Republicans and other far right leaders. Or perhaps when you were searching for this Bonhoeffer biography in preparation for the upcoming movie, you also saw his other books like Donald Drains the Swamp, Donald and the Fake News, or Donald Builds the Wall, illustrated parables about a caveman named Donald based on true events, of course. Or maybe you have visited Metaxas' Instagram, which is filled with talks, many about how our current cultural moment is akin to Nazi Germany, how the church has to stand up now.
Derek:Or maybe you heard Metaxas' rhetoric in December of 2020, less than a month before the January insurrection, when he railed against the presidential election being stolen by Democrats, and how it was time for Christians to stand up and to be willing to fight to the death and shed blood if it came to that. Metaxas has made much of his name in the evangelical spotlight, selling evangelicals the exact type of narrative that most of us wanna hear. Heroes of the faith who, rather than engage in a Benedict option of withdrawing from a society, have taken the Christendom option and sought to impose morality through force, the force of the state, like William Wilberforce, or those who tried to do it by the force of a gun or a bomb in opposition to a wayward state as it's claimed Bonhoeffer did. But before you try placing yourself inside of a narrative someone's trying to sell you, it's always good to make sure that you know the full story. If we dig into the history of Metaxas' first narrative, for example, that of William Wilberforce, the transatlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery, you'll find that the story of Wilberforce and abolition is much more fraught with compromises and much less singly impactful than evangelicals in general, and Metaxas, specifically, would have you believe.
Derek:The story of Bonhoeffer is similarly complex. But for a group that seeks to control society and who seeks the helm of power as near equivalent to the helm of salvation, the story has to be told, and it has to be believed in a particular fashion. I recommend you look up Metaxas' 2012 Prayer Breakfast Speech, because it really was quite good, I thought. It was funny, it was gracious, it was loving, yet it was also confrontational and forceful. It was really compelling, I thought.
Derek:But as you start to read and watch Metaxas' more recent works, you'll find that he has become more and more polarized, frequently invoking Nazi Germany as a prefiguring of what the United States is now becoming. In an ironic turn, Metaxas' rhetoric and logic actually sound much more like Hitler's, the figure of which Metaxas and many evangelicals see themselves opposing. And like Hitler, they which hunt the communist threat they see behind every bush, bushes which are conveniently planted in front of anyone who opposes their reach for power. Like Hitler, they want to go back to a mythical day of old when righteousness prevailed because as they see it, it was so much better then. Like Hitler, Metaxas, and modern evangelicals use messianic language surrounding the Republican party and Trump specifically.
Derek:Their ideology is steeped in rhetoric and propaganda. But because they're realists, just as every other despot in history was, it's okay for them because they're wielding power for what they deem are ultimate justified values. Now I don't know all of Metaxas's history, but it seems to me that his trajectory towards the far right was solidified by the 2 great heroes of the Christian faith that he wrote about, Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer. And nothing else shows this as much to me as the way that Metaxas is constantly referring to Nazism and our need to stand like Bonhoeffer did. Metaxas has been inspired by great Christian heroes, but he's been inspired by a specific interpretation of them, a realist interpretation, an interpretation that freezes them in a moment rather than seeking to understand the full history.
Derek:And that's really one of the major things that realism does. When Metaxas sees Wilberforce as the overturner of slavery, he fails to see the many iterations of slavery that were abolished throughout the previous centuries by various nations, religious groups, people edicts, etcetera. He fails to acknowledge that the United States actually documented and affirmed their intention to abolish the slave trade years before Great Britain actually did. The abolishing of which went into effect less than a year after Great Britain enacted their law. Metaxas doesn't see all of the compromises that Wilbur Forrest made in order to end slavery in Britain, the reparations that Britain paid to slaveholders, the failure to repay any of the enslaved, or the sacking of, Wilberforce's own friend as governor for refusing to uphold the years of continued slavery that were required for some of the enslaved after abolition supposedly occurred.
Derek:Metaxas doesn't explore the historical reasons that Britain was finally open to abolition. It wasn't simply because they became more spiritually minded, but rather that their loss of the American colonies and the losses of their national competitors, like France losing Haiti, meant that slavery just wasn't as beneficial for them anymore. They were in a position to be able to relinquish slavery without too much cost to themselves. Metaxas doesn't spend much time talking about pietus do nothings, like the Quakers, exemplified in men like John Wollman and Benjamin Lay, a no name dwarf hunchback who influenced the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. These Quakers who paved the way for the abolition of the slave trade from the bottom up, by example, in first abolishing slavery within their own ranks while also paying theirs the the enslaved that they freed, they paid them back wages.
Derek:And they did this more than half a century before Britain abolished slavery. And Britain's abolishing of slavery, it abolished the slavery, but it paid the slavers, and it failed to compensate the enslaved. The Quakers who often refrained from engaging in government, who freed their slaves and put their lives on the line to work in the underground railroad, they did more good than the majority of those who sought to vote, twiddle their thumbs until the next election, and do nothing but seek top down legislation until the interests of the state and slaveholders just so happen to converge. The realist interpretation, it doesn't see all that. It only sees the moment of power.
Derek:It sees the government as power and associates the end of slavery with successful legislation being passed, but it doesn't see the deep foundation that really paved the way for that. Similarly, the realist perspective of the Bonhoeffer story will only accept violence as a meaningful way to act against someone as barbaric as Hitler. Hitler's power of great violence could only meaningfully be met with great violence. So when Bonhoeffer says that he was a pacifist in the early 19 thirties, when the majority of his close friends affirm that he renounced violence even up through Barth in the early 19 forties, when Bonhoeffer's continued theological writing seemed to bear out his nonviolence without a hint that his deep rooted ideology had changed, none of that matters. What matters is that Bonhoeffer ran in circles with those who had planned to assassinate Hitler, and, therefore, he must be found guilty by association.
Derek:It not only must be because it's the only route that makes sense from a realist position, but it must be because it justifies our group's continued realism. Now whether Bonhoeffer succumb to realism in the end, whether he toyed with killing as a rare exception for which he'd still be found guilty by God, or whether he maintained his pacifism, We'll never know for sure. I think the overall case that he maintained his pacifism is is really the strongest, but, you know, I can't say that with absolute certainty. But what I can say is that the narrative that Becky and modern evangelicals have run with without questioning is that Bonhoeffer, like all true Christians who want to make a difference in the world, they must have been a realist ready to do violence. And that unquestioned narrative has added Bonhoeffer to our cloud of witnesses, not as someone who is Christ like, but someone who, like us, is justified in accepting moral compromise in order to achieve the ends that we know God must want.
Derek:But here's the thing. There's a great deal of dissonance that evangelicals take on here, And the children of evangelicalism who are walking away are walking away at least in part because of this dissonance. The stories that we were told growing up in Sunday school were rarely stories of power. They were stories of the ideal. Weaknesses conquering power, not through greatness, but through faithful submission to the ideal.
Derek:Daniel prayed to God, seemingly ineffectual act, despite its illegality, and he was thrown into a den of hungry lions. Dude, just stop praying until the decree ends or close your windows. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to bow down to a a false god, a golden idol. They could have just kneeled without meaning it, and they were thrown into a fiery furnace knowing that God might choose not to save them. I was told the story of David who faced a giant warrior without armor or sword.
Derek:I learned about the multiplication of fish and bread to feed crowds, disciples being able to walk on water, and even that the son of God became incarnate, suffered, and died for me, for me, and then he rose from the dead. I learned that the currency in God's kingdom was idealism, faith in the unseen, but not in the unforeseen, because that's what the cloud of witnesses was for. I can't see God. I can't see his spirit, but I can foresee the future, the victory, the redemption because of my cloud of witnesses. Because of those cloud of witnesses, I can see the promise of Abraham fulfilled in Isaac when Abraham himself couldn't foresee it.
Derek:When Abraham tried under his own power to bring about the ends of God by embracing oppressive and sinful means, means that sexually exploited his maid, Hagar, and sent her and her son into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Because of the cloud of witnesses and the stories and the narratives that I have, like that of Abraham, I can see what they couldn't. I can choose to forego the compromising means that appear good to me, because I can see their lives, and in their lives, how God was faithful over time to bring about his good, despite their almost screwing it up in their moments of realism and weakness. But whereas Sunday school taught me taught us, the children of evangelicalism, about the ideal, realists are constantly adding to their cloud of witnesses those who are strong, those like Wilberforce who fought a government or Bonhoeffer who supposedly fought a tyrant, a dwarf hunchback like Benjamin Lay, who's a prophetic witness through his daily lifestyle and testimony, who helps inspire the Quakers, a nonviolent sect, and one that frequently disengages from politics when he helps them to free the enslaved with back wages paid, that's a cool story, but there's no room for him in the realist cloud.
Derek:Realists are looking to form towering cumulonimbus clouds of testosterone, courage, power, violence, and force. They have pre inserted the revelation Jesus there too. This Jesus of blood and fire. They love the power of their cloud, and it drives them towards destruction. What they fail to see is that the ideal is truly power.
Derek:Take Jesus, for example. He ought to be a part of our cloud of witnesses. In fact, Hebrews 12, culminates the chapter 11, the Hall of Faith by pointing to Jesus. And we should even have Revelation Jesus there too. It's just that Revelation Jesus isn't the Jesus that realist narratives reveal to us.
Derek:At the beginning of the Book of Revelation, the author overturns the realist expectation. He tells us that Jesus is a fierce lion, the lion of Judah. But when we look again, we don't see the lion anymore. The lion's disappeared. What we see is a lamb for the rest of the book, a lamb who was slain.
Derek:A lamb who conquers, yes, but who conquers by his own blood. The revelation is not so much the revelation of future and times, though, you know, there are parts of that in there. Because the the book itself tells us at the beginning that it's the revelation of Jesus, the Christ. And that those who hear and keep those words, which assumes that we can act on them, we'll be blessed. The church in Revelation is called to conquer in light of that revelation of Jesus, to conquer in like fashion to their savior, in the fashion of the lamb who was slain.
Derek:The servant is not greater than the master, and we are called to lay down our lives and shed our blood for the world. For as Tertullian said, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. For followers of the revealed Jesus then, we form a cloud of witnesses, but not cumulonimbus clouds of power, the power to bring death and destruction through lightning, hail, and winds. Rather, we form nimbostratus clouds, low hanging, thick clouds that cover the whole sky as far as you can see. These clouds produce long, steady rain that allows the soil to drink in the life giving water.
Derek:And though these storms lack the power of strong winds or lightning or hail, they're more powerful than the fleeting cumulonimbus clouds that dissipate quickly. They are more powerful because they produce life, and they produce it indiscriminately as the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, because that's what God is like. The story of Bonhoeffer's struggle under the Nazi regime is a beautiful but tragic one. And we have to choose how it is that we want to accept him into our cloud of witnesses. The broader evangelical community has, for decades, incorporated Bonhoeffer into their cloud of witnesses as a life which they use to justify their continuing slide towards theocratic tendencies, towards force, towards political violence, towards the ultimate end that realism inevitably produces, destruction.
Derek:But there's also an opportunity for us to revisit the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as that of all the others that we incorporate into our cloud of witnesses who give us a vision for the future? How can they embolden us to embrace the life giving means of Jesus and to trust God to bring about the end? Unfortunately, as always seems to be the case, it is the winners, the realists, those embracing a power over mindset who are writing history right now. They are the ones spoon feeding realism's seeming power to the evangelical consumers, the ones who haven't yet left the church anyway. Spoon feeding it to them in packages like a a simple and violent Bonhoeffer.
Derek:Yet, while I agree with the sentiment that it's the winners, the powerful, who get to write the history, I also think that this is why the powerful become history, refuse in the dustbin of antiquity. Who knows the name of the pharaoh who ruled the land of Egypt when Joseph was there? Who remembers the names of the Spartan warriors who struck fear into the hearts of all their enemies? Who knows the names of the barbarians who overthrew Rome? Very few, if any, remember these names.
Derek:Percy B. Schelle describes this nothingness of history into which all realists eventually dissipate in what is my absolute favorite poem, Ozymandias. So listen to Shelley here. It's beautiful. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, 2 vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.
Derek:Near them, on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that at sculpture well those passions red, which yet survived, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal appear these words. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Nothing beside remains.
Derek:Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. Tyrants, rulers, realists, they're winners in a sense. They may have the power that they exert over others. They may have the power to kill and destroy, But why fear those who can kill the body? They have no power.
Derek:For someone wise once said, the means are the ends in the process of becoming. In the means of destruction employed by the realists are the seeds of the same ends, destruction. The real winners then are not those who get to write history, but those who endure it into eternity, where their names are remembered. And to them it is said, well done, good and faithful servant. Faithfulness, patience, and endurance ought not to be viewed as encumbrances that hinder, but as joys which drive us to conquer the world with our blood, not our enemy's blood, in the same vein as our savior.
Derek:What are we to do then? How are we as followers of Jesus to live faithfully and effectively in the world? Eric Metaxas offers us the way of Christendom, power, force. Rod Dreher has made a similar assessment to Metaxas in regard to the culture, but rather than seeing the appropriate Christian responses, power and force, Dreyer calls for a Benedict option, a withdraw from society in order to preserve Christian culture without defilement. Now I hate disagreeing with people who are likely much, much smarter and much more spiritual than I am, but I do have to say that I disagree with both of these men.
Derek:So let me offer up a third way. I think it could rightfully be called the Bonhoeffer option, but because his narrative is one that I'm arguing here and is up for debate, I'll call it something else that might not have quite as much baggage. I'm gonna call it the Salvian option. Salvian was a Christian who lived during the fall of the Roman Empire, writing in the 400. One of his most famous works was entitled On the Government of God.
Derek:And Salvion's work came out around the same time as another similar work came out, Augustine's City of God. Augustine's work sought primarily to answer an accusation of the pagans that Christianity was bad for the empire. It's because of the Christians that Rome was falling. Right? The Christians upended the sacrifices and the societal cohesion that had been present prior to Christianity's meddling.
Derek:Augustine spent much of his work arguing that it was actually Christianity that caused the Roman Empire to thrive, and it was the pagan religion that harmed the empire. Salvian, however, took a different approach. Salvian, a thorough going Christian, he didn't attribute the fall of Rome to the pagans, not even to the barbarians. He attributed the fall of Rome to his own group, those Romans who claimed to be Christians. And Salvian argued that these Roman Christians had brought judgment upon Rome because they knew how to live just and holy lives, yet they embrace debauchery and injustice.
Derek:The slaves in their service and the barbarians at the gates were better Christians than the Romans. And that's right. Many of the barbarians who helped to conquer Rome were influenced by the teachings of Jesus. A lot of them were Arians, but Salvian recognizes that even in their heterodoxy and heresy, they exhibited Jesus more than his fellow Roman Christians. Because following Jesus isn't just about how one thinks.
Derek:Salvian recognized that it's significantly about how one acts. Living holy and faithful, uncompromising lives of integrity is absolutely vital to being a Christ follower, and it's vital for changing society. You can't divorce orthodoxy, right thinking, from orthopraxy, right practice. So if I were going to pro propose a method for acting in the world, I would choose the Salvian, the Bonhoeffer way. Live exemplary lives of holiness and love, calling your own group to integrity and repentance, and have faith in a God who has proven himself faithful to bring about the results.
Derek:Pray with your windows open. Don't bow before an idol, even if you don't mean it. Whittle your army down to 300. Give the last of your food to someone in need. And when the barbarians are at the gates threatening to destroy the empire in which you live, don't blame them.
Derek:Don't blame the non Christians in your society. Repent and be refined. Bonhoeffer has a lot to teach us, much of which we'll never learn because we'll never hear it. I know in this episode, you didn't get to hear a whole lot about, what Bonhoeffer positively taught. I do have some previous episodes that I've I've covered before, and I'm planning on, 1 or maybe 2 other future episodes after I see, the Bonhoeffer movie next Friday.
Derek:But I hope that by keying you into the prominent narrative and and what's at stake, that you will at least be discerning in how you incorporate Dietrich Bonhoeffer into your cloud of witnesses, because he should be there. He should definitely be in your cloud. But if he's there, affirming you and your willingness to do violence to your political enemies, or if your Bonhoeffer justifies your hurling of lightning bolts at the barbarians at the gates, I think you've got the wrong Bonhoeffer. Instead, his story should water your soul with a soft and steady rain that produces life. Because that's what God is like.
Derek:And our clouds should cause us to look to the heavens. That's all for now. So peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network.
Derek:Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.
