SAET Blog

Bonhoeffer Posts

  • February 10, 2011 by Jason Hood

    Bonhoeffer and Hitler

    Let me recommend a valuable exercise: a simultaneous reading of biographies of two guys who tried to kill each other.

    I normally try to aim for variety in what I read, but for whatever reason it seemed that my sojourn with Metaxas on Bonhoeffer might be paired well with John Toland, Adolf Hitler (HT: @abedis). Fair warning: Toland is 1200 pages of doom, and one can feel a bit like. The mere presence of the book in the house gives my wife the creeps; she has threatened to put a cover on it. And my seven yr old asked me why I was reading about Hitler. But the book is a smashing read, and provides a look at the decline of a nation into fanatical chaos.

    Reading the two bios made for an interesting compare and contrast:

    Both men tried to save Germany: Bonhoeffer by pursuing righteousness and opposition to evil, and Hitler by purifying it of Jews and Communists.

    Both men turned to politics: Bonhoeffer to the politics of the kingdom of God and its demands, Hitler to the politics of raw power.

    Both realized that they could not care what others thought about them, and that the task before them would require courage and resolution in the face of overwhelming odds.

    Both men were given to intensity and passion, which they poured into the vocations they believed God had given them.

    Both men avoided marriage until near the bitter end: Bonhoeffer was secretly engaged shortly before his arrest, Hitler married about 40 hours before death.

    Both men were prepared to look like something they were not for the sake of their mission.

    One man was petrified for his life, given to paranoia, fearing assassination and revolt at every turn. One man did not hold his life but put in on the line for his country.

    One man was much beloved and nurtured by his family, but taught to be considerate of others; the other was abused, listless, and completely self-absorbed.

    One man spent endless days meditating on the Jews, and wrote his own Scriptures urging their termination. The other man spent endless days studying Jewish Scriptures and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—writing about those Scriptures led to the termination of his publishing career.

    Each tried to kill the other; Hitler succeeded, only to kill himself in defeat three weeks later.

    Categories: Bonhoeffer | General | Jason Hood

    4 Comments

  • January 17, 2011 by Jason Hood

    Anti-Jewishness In Bonhoeffer’s Cradle

    Metaxas doesn’t have the space to take advantage of every opportunity to embed Bonhoeffer in the cauldron of racial hyper-consciousness of pre-WW II Germany.  Fodder for Nazi racial ideology could be found in German academic theological works; EM is not as hard-edged here as he might be.

    Bonhoeffer did his doctoral dissertation under the tutelage of Reinhold Seeberg.  Seeberg was aggressively pro-German, favoring  the expansion of German borders as much as possible during World War I.

    Moreover, in 1918 Seeberg penned a seminal essay, ‘Die Herkunft der Mutter Jesu’.  In it he argued that, given the Gentile makeup of much of  Galilee, Matthew included four Gentile women in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus so that readers would conclude that ‘[d]ie Mutter keine Jesu war Jüdin oder wenigstens keine Jüdin reinen Blutes’ (‘the mother of Jesus was not Jewish or at least not a Jew of pure blood’).

    Nazism was not Christian, but it needed compliance from Christians in order to thrive or even survive.  Long before Hitler, German anti-semitism sought as much coherence with Christianity as possible.  Seeberg paved a way to sell believers on the doctrine of racial purity and superiority.

    Combine Seeberg’s argument for a non-Jewish Mary with a virgin birth and you get a purely Gentile Jesus.

    Categories: Bonhoeffer | General | Jason Hood | Jew/Gentile Relations

    3 Comments

  • September 28, 2010 by Gerald Hiestand

    Jamenson Ross on Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer

    Jameson Ross has a nice little guest review over at Euangelion on Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer. His comments about Bonhoeffor as a pastor and theologian are worth noting (as opposed to “nothing” as I incorrectly wrote earlier!).

    “Bonhoeffer was a theologian. His life as a theologian and pastor, calls into question the dichotomy between the pastor’s role to preach and live theology, on the one hand, and the scholar’s role to produce theology on the other. Bonhoeffer was both. Perhaps Bonhoeffer offers a refreshing example of pastor-theologian to a new generation of pastors who wish to construct theology within the context of the church. Bonhoeffer’s work called the church to obedience rather than compromise, and that summons could only be invoked from a deep theological well.”

    Read the whole piece here.

    Categories: Bonhoeffer | General | Pastor-theologian

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