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The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint by Stephen R. Haynes Fortress Press, 2004 280 pp., $14.96 
Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World by Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic Books, 2003 208 pp., $11.20 |
"'I believe,' said Bonhoeffer, 'that God can and wants to create good out of everything, even evil.' … In America, very recently, we have also seen the horror of evil and the power of good."
—George W. Bush, speaking to the German Bundestag, May 23, 2002
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is not a comfortable saint; his is a sainthood of contradictions. Since September 11, 2001 no Christian figure has been appealed to so much or so broadly as Bonhoeffer. But Bonhoeffer has not been a single saint. He is now the pacifist Bonhoeffer, the just-war Bonhoeffer, the resistant Bonhoeffer, even the terrorist Bonhoeffer. We are left to ask, where is Bonhoeffer the man in all of the invocations of his name?
The reasons for Bonhoeffer's appeal are varied, but they rest on the "impressive unity" formed by Bonhoeffer's life and thought. As Stephen Haynes has written in The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint, "Bonhoeffer's life reveals a symbiosis between thought and existence that sets him apart from most public figures in his time and our own." Bonhoeffer is relevant now because he was an incarnation of the incarnation, not just a guide along the way. But because we are appealing to a life rather than a principle, we must reckon with ambiguity, with uncertainty, with unresolved tensions.
Bonhoeffer spent much of his life articulating a theology of peacemaking based on the Sermon on the Mount, even as Germany grew ever darker under the Nazi regime. But when he was unable to engage the German church to speak truth to the Nazis, he became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, "to cut off the head of the snake." When this plot was uncovered, Bonhoeffer was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually executed, hung naked with a piano wire.
Bonhoeffer's life is wrapped in the dilemma of faithfulness. And we who come after him are left with that dilemma no more clearly resolved. Are we to follow Bonhoeffer in his calls toward peacemaking, or are we to go his way of drastic action for the sake of justice? Some would-be followers deny that there is any ambiguity in his example. They make him a pacifist and only a pacifist, or a model just warrior who rejected his earlier idealism. To step out of line with either position is a step that demands correction.
When John Buchanan, editor of The Christian Century, wrote that Bonhoeffer "move[d] to the Niebuhrian conclusion that the evil of Nazism should be opposed on Christian ethical grounds,"1 he was upbraided by a reader who responded that "there is no hint that Bonhoeffer ever justified this choice on the grounds of Niebuhrian 'Christian realism' or denied that pacifism was the most faithful Christian commitment."2 In the same vein, Walter Wink wrote a short piece in Sojourners reminding readers that "American thinkers who have used Bonhoeffer as a way of justifying the just war theory overlook his clear statement that he does not regard this as a justifiable action—that it's a sin—and that he throws himself on the mercy of God."3
The divided witness of Bonhoeffer is represented in a more nuanced way by Jean Bethke Elshtain and Stanley Hauerwas. Both Elshtain and Hauerwas have been theologically engaged with the "war on terror," and both have drawn on Bonhoeffer, yet they arrive at very different positions.
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