Stephen R. Haynes - The Battle for Bonhoeffer

Stephen Haynes has written a must-read Bonhoeffer book. Tracing Bonhoeffers American reception over time through scholarship, op-ed pieces, blogs, documentaries, artistic presentations, and more, Haynes uncoverswith striking claritythe range of images of Bonhoeffer and his legacy, paying particular attention to the evangelical appropriation of that legacy and its role in current political realities. I cannot commend this book highly enough.

LORI BRANDT HALE

Augsburg University

Highly visible US evangelicals endorsed and still support Donald Trump, some doing so in the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to the horror of the vast majority of serious students of the great German theologian and resister. Stephen Haynes long ago carved out a niche as the single best scholarly interpreter of the American reception of Bonhoeffer. Here he not only updates his scholarly work but also enters the Bonhoeffer-Trump-evangelicals debate himself with an impassioned warning to evangelicals to reverse their surrender to Trump before it is too late. This is a riveting book that every US Christian should readimmediately.

DAVID P. GUSHEE

Center for Theology & Public Life, Mercer University

THE BATTLE FOR

BONHOEFFER

Stephen R. Haynes

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2018 Stephen R. Haynes

All rights reserved

Published 2018

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ISBN978-0-8028-7601-0

eISBN978-1-4674-5132-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haynes, Stephen R., author.

Title: The battle for Bonhoeffer / Stephen R. Haynes.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018022306 | ISBN 9780802876010 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 1906-1945.

Classification: LCC BX4827.B57 H359 2018 | DDC 230/.044092dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022306

CONTENTS

PART ONE:
EXPLORING BONHOEFFERS AMERICAN RECEPTION

PART TWO:
BONHOEFFER AND HOMEGROWN HITLERS

PART THREE:
TRIUMPH OF THE POPULIST BONHOEFFER

IN THE DECADES SINCE he was executed on Hitlers orders for the crime of high treason in the concentration camp in Flossenburg on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become one of the most widely read and influential religious thinkers of our time. His story brings together people from diverse ecumenical and religious traditions in shared admiration of an indisputably authentic witness. No other theologian of the modern era crosses quite so many boundariesgenres, cultures, and audienceswhile yet remaining exuberantly, and generously, confessional.

In his protest against totalitarianism and xenophobia, his early and consistent support of the Jews and the other victims of Nazi brutality, his theological cosmopolitanism and evangelical humanism, Bonhoeffer is surely a Christian for our time, and an exemplar of righteous action. The British ecumenist and scholar Keith Clements has said that Bonhoeffer belongs not first to church history or to the Christian camp but to the human race, standing, as he does, among those who represent the further possibilities of the human spirit.

It is understandable then that readers with differing theological and ideological perspectives would desire to claim Bonhoeffer as their own. Excerpting Bonhoeffer has become a familiar exercise in each teams efforts to win; a quick Google search of A Bonhoeffer Moment

As I write this foreword in the summer of 2018, with the nation transfixed by horrific images of children in cages and ProPublica recordings of toddlers separated from their families sobbing in ICE gulagsthe work of the Trump-Nielson-Miller-Sessions zero-tolerance immigration policymost of us who position ourselves outside the provenance of Fox News evangelicals indulge in what-about-Bonhoefferisms and partisan proof texting. Prophetic judgment with invocations of the Confessing Church and German Resistance has rarely been more tempting. We can produce, on demand, high-minded (often inaccurate) disputations on the relevance of Barmen and the shocking displays of cheap grace among Fox News evangelicals.

On the other end of the spectrum, Eric Metaxas, with his populist Bonhoeffer, takes willful misuse to its extreme. Not since the death-of-God movement of the late 1960s has anyone produced so flawed, or

How fortunate we are that Stephen Haynes, a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust and public theologian, has intervened in the increasingly contentious debate over Bonhoeffers legacy. For the past quarter century, Haynes has also been at the forefront of international Bonhoeffer scholarship, writing for scholarly and popular audiences and lecturing widely on religion, race, and violence in Hitlers Germanyand, as in his extraordinary Noahs Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), the American South as well. Haynes skillfully and even-handedly analyzes the interpretive conflicts surrounding Bonhoeffers inheritance in the United States. His intention is to understand Bonhoeffer for our cultural moment, and even more, to understand the cultural conditions that produce such incompatible, and often unsupportable, appropriations. Is it the arrogance of expertise? The contempt of the guild for popular readings? Have we been misled by a perceived open-endedness in Bonhoeffers thought? Haynes treats the Bonhoeffer phenomenon to a much-needed acid bath, stripping away the accretions of partisan cherry-picking and wishful thinking to which we must all plead guilty. Still, The Battle for Bonhoeffer is more than an incisive account of interpretive conflicts and their repercussions for the church and the world; it also serves as a compass we will need to keep our bearings amid the confused and often colliding images of God in our perilous times.

The polarization of Bonhoeffers thought is most vexing precisely because such efforts are rarely accompanied by attention to his own politics. Have you heard progressive Christians cite the passage in Ethics calling abortion nothing but murder?

Regarding the specifics of his political views, it might be helpful to recall that, during the only free election in which he participated, Bonhoeffer supported the Catholic Center Party. In a letter to his friend Hans Hildebrandt, who supported the Protestant Christians Peoples Party, Bonhoeffer said that only the Catholic Center Party

We also knowon the question of Bonhoeffers politicsthat he admired the work of the American religious Left and its innovations in social ministry, encountered during his year in the United States. Upon his return to Berlin in the summer of 1931, he told his socialist He met with representatives of the National Womens Trade Union League, the NAACP, and the Workers Education Bureau of America, and, as he wrote in his notes, visited housing settlements, Y.M. home missions, co-operative houses, playgrounds, childrens courts, night schools, socialists schools, asylums, [and] youth organizations. Bonhoeffer discerned, and he experienced, the presence of Christ in these spaces of social healing existing within and beyond the walls of the parish church. He discovered a new way of pursuing the theological vocation.

In his immersions in African American Christianity, Bonhoeffer discovered a new way of being Christian. I heard the Gospel preached in the Negro Churches of America, he said. The African American Christian story came as a refreshing breeze to a theological prodigy from Berlin who found himself completely uninspired by the plodding Lutheranism of the north German plains. From the diaspora through slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and civil rights, the African American Christian witness has always confronted the nation with troubling questions about American exceptionalism. The shameful practices of slavery, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, and segregation contradicted the mythic identity of Americans as a chosen people. Bonhoeffers encounter with the church of the outcasts of America came too as a call to discipleship and obedience.