Commentary: Bonhoeffer - a martyr's boom

WASHINGTON, July 7 (UPI) -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been dead for almost six decades now, and the 100th anniversary of his birth is less than three years off. Yet this martyred Lutheran pastor is currently experiencing a boom unlike any other.

In church halls all over the United States and other countries, amateur ensembles are performing plays extolling his short life to large audiences, who at the end often break into Luther's stirring hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. And now, only a couple of years after the PBS airing of the feature film, Agent of Grace, the documentary Bonhoeffer by Martin Doblmeier is enjoying a success that is stunning for this kind of work.

In movie theaters in New York and Chicago, Washington, Indianapolis and Santa Fe - and again in countless churches - the voice of Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer sends shudders down people's spines as he reads from the prologue of Bonhoeffer's Letters & Papers from Prison:

"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms... Are we still of any use?"

Doblmeier, who became fascinated with Bonhoeffer while reading this book in high school, is a Roman Catholic. A subdivision of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops helped finance this documentary, along with the Lilly Foundation and others.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived Luther's - and his own - Theology of the Cross, speaks with a powerful voice into this modern and postmodern world with its phony, self-serving theology of cheap grace. Because of this, according to Doblmeier, he appeals to all branches of Christianity - the liberal and the conservative, Catholic and Protestant.

And here is why: "Bonhoeffer was a vibrant witness to truth and died a martyr to the Christian faith," the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priests and president of the Institute on religion and Public Life, once wrote. "If Rome ever finds a way to canonize those who were 'truly but imperfectly in communion with the Catholic Church' (Vatican Council II), Bonhoeffer should... be high on the list of candidates."

When the documentary is shown in churches, "Pastors see people in the pews they have never seen before," Doblmeier related. "They come for a sign of hope. No story of faith is more potent as Dietrich Bonhoeffer's."

Yet the message that comes across from this theologian who received his doctorate summa cum laude at age 21 and was hanged, naked, 18 years later in Flossenbuerg concentration camp, only days before the end of World War II, is a stark one: True Christian faith is not clinging to life; true Gospel faith is choosing death - the cross.

For a Christian is a disciple, who takes up his cross and follows Jesus. In Bonhoeffer's case, this meant returning to Germany from a safe teaching position in New York on the last ship before World War II broke out. It meant appalling tensions as a double agent for the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service, which plotted Hitler's assassination.

The late Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend and editor, who died soon after this film was made, once told me how Bonhoeffer dealt with this internal conflict that was the consequence of his double role as pastor and co-conspirator.

"Dietrich said, 'For the first time I understood Luther's dictum, sin boldly but even more boldly believe and rejoice in Christ.'" By this he meant that as a citizen of the finite temporal realm, which is under sin, he has to act under the dictates of reason, but then, being also citizen of Christ's infinite realm, he must turn to God for forgiveness and grace.

Bonhoeffer, "the moral backbone of the German resistance," as U.S. theologian Geffrey Kelly called him, had learned much from - and rejected parts of - American theology. His statement, "Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants," was linked to what he had learned about the fate and faith of black Americans, the documentary shows.

He had attended the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr.'s Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and taught Sunday school there - and discerned parallels between the injustices done to American blacks and the persecution of the Jews in Germany.

Yet he was no fan of the American social Gospel taught at Union Seminary in New York by Reinhold Niebuhr. "It is necessary to free oneself from the way of thinking which sets out from human problems and which asks for solutions on this basis," Bonhoeffer wrote. "Such thinking is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ, and therefore the way of all Christian thinking, leads not from the world to God but from God to the world."

However, as eyewitnesses in the documentary pointed out, this did not mean that Bonhoeffer thought there was no need for Christians to follow Christ's Sermon on the Mount because it was too hard to do so. Like Niebuhr, he stressed social concern - not as starting point but rather as discipleship without which the believer would indulge in cheap grace.

That there should be such a keen and growing interest in a dead German theologian is perhaps one of the most hopeful signs in these postmodern days. What's probably most remarkable is a bold retranslation project of Bonhoeffer's works headed by the Rev. Clifford Green, an Australian-born professor emeritus at Hartford Seminary.

There will be altogether 17 volumes of Bonhoeffer's works in English, of which seven have already been published (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). One reason for this venture is the eclectic translations used for typically Bonhoefferian terms, such as Stellvertretung. Previously, the word "deputyship" was used. Now it is, "vicarious representative action." The notion that an English expression should be wordier than its German equivalent makes Green chuckle.

"Now we see in Bonhoeffer a more complex and rich theologian than people expected," said Green in an interview. Most fascinating, though, is this observation: "Bonhoeffer's theology is like a Rohrschach test. It says more about its readers than about Bonhoeffer."

To an era defined by the postmodern Trinity - Me, Myself and I - Bonhoeffer has this to say, newcomers to his theology are finding out: He preaches a Christianity that is neither exclusively earthbound nor exclusively alienated from the world.

As Green said, "Those who only have one foot on earth are likely to have only one foot in heaven."