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Bonhoeffer: Exile and Martyr
By Eberhard Bethge
New York, Seabury Press, 1976. 191 pp. $7.95.

Bonhoeffer: Worldly Preaching
By Clyde E. Fant
New York, Nelson, 1975. 180 pp. $6.95.

A Dissent on Bonhoeffer
By David Hopper
Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1975. 184 pp. $8.50.

Evaluation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer continues. His powerful, enigmatic, and fragmentary writings still excite the interest of a wide variety of respondents, as the creative variety in the most recent crop of assessments helps to illustrate.

Each of three recently published books sheds new light on Bonhoeffer. Eberhard Bethge establishes that Bonhoeffer really was a martyr; Clyde Fant provides new evidence that Bonhoeffer really was a preacher; and David Hopper contends that Bonhoeffer really was not a theologian.

Two things make Bethge's Bonhoeffer: Exile and Martyr particularly timely. One is the fact that the lectures from which the book is adapted were given in South Africa, where the parallels to Bonhoeffer's own Nazi Germany are tragically close and where such postures as "exile" and "martyr" are more than textbook issues. In South Africa, Bonhoeffer's life and death are not only an heroic tale from the near past but a possible scenario for the near future. This does not diminish the relevance of the book for the rest of us, since South Africa only presents, in vivid form, the kinds of choices that may increasingly confront Christians elsewhere.

The other timely dimension of this book is that it provides Bethge with a chance, several years after the completion of his huge biography (Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, first published in German in 1967), to take a second, reflective look at the major crises in Bonhoeffer's life. So the book supplements, without supplanting, its predecessor.

Bethge early reminds us that what we learn from the life of another depends in large measure on what we bring to it. West Germans have feared that when Bonhoeffer became involved in political resistance, he "lost his faith," whereas East Germans have found in the later epi-

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sodes of Bonhoeffer's life a model for faith. Others have found particular help in Bonhoeffer's Finkenwalde period; Life Together, Bethge informs us, has sold as many copies as all of the editions and translations of Letters and Papers from Prison. There is a sense in which Bonhoeffer is "all things to all men," and while David Hopper, in A Dissent on Bonhoeffer, appears troubled by this fact, there is something important about it. One who is attracted by Letters and Papers must also confront The Communion of Saints, and one who is moved by The Cost of Discipleship must also confront "the world come of age," since it is the same man who communicated all of these different themes, and full justice is not done to him until all of the various emphases have been explored. One must not be allowed to appropriate only that part of Bonhoeffer that mirrors one's own concerns.

It is important that, whatever others may have done to create a "St. Dietrich," Bethge always manages to avoid the hagiographical impulse. There is an honesty in his appraisal of the entire period of Bonhoeffer's life that needs to be emulated by others. He can acknowledge the initial timidity of Bonhoeffer on the Jewish question (though Bonhoeffer was ahead of most) and deal candidly with the withering of opposition to Hitler in the Confessing Church. Because of his unwillingness to glorify the past romantically, Bethge remains a trustworthy interpreter.

This heightens the importance of one of Bethge's major concerns, which is to justify Bonhoeffer's part in the resistance. Many Germans have questioned the appropriateness of such activity on the part of a Lutheran pastor (as indeed many Dutch Reformed pastors would have done in South Africa). The discussion may at times seem almost labored to Americans, who interpret Bonhoeffer's political involvement as a necessary consequence of his theology and would have questions only if Bonhoeffer had disavowed such engagement. But Bethge's discussion is important, since the political engagement of the church is being challenged afresh on the American scene.

In one sense, Bonhoeffer in his later years had to engage in a shift from church to world, since the church had become guilty of sterility, and the worldly (such as Bonhoeffer's friends committed to humanism and liberalism) were doing what needed to be done. But in another and more profound sense, Bonhoeffer was the embodiment of the true posture of the church in the world; rather than having "forsaken" the church, he was, in his own person, taking the church to where people were, since the people (for understandable reasons) were unwilling to go to where the church was.

All of this was bound to necessitate a new kind of theology, and Bethge has provided a careful exegesis of the four pages in Letters and Papers devoted to Bonhoeffer's "Outline for a Book" that deal particularly with the church. Too little attention has been given to these comments, which sketched Bonhoeffer's future theological direction, and Bethge's commentary is a welcome step forward.

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Bethge's rich examination of the notion of "martyr" is also important, particularly his insistence that we must now understand that martyrdom is no longer simply bearing testimony to the name of Jesus Christ but also "bearing testimony on behalf of a threatened 'humanum' " (p. 159). We must hope for the time when others of Bonhoeffer's countrymen, long disturbed by the notion of Bonhoeffer as a Christian "martyr," will follow Bethge's lead.

While Bethge deals with the bearing of Bonhoeffer's theology upon his life, Clyde Fant, in Bonhoeffer: Worldly Preaching, offers an assessment of Bonhoeffer as preacher. Little has been done on this theme in English since most of Bonhoeffer's sermons are still available only in German (Gesammelte Schriften, IV). Fant has translated student notes on Bonhoeffer's lectures on homiletics at the underground seminary at Finkenwalde. While the resultant manuscript is only fifty-seven pages, they are packed pages to which Fant has prefixed a much longer essay that examines Bonhoeffer's life and thought from the perspective of Bonhoeffer the preacher.

For a young man who had spent relatively little time in the parish, Bonhoeffer speaks with amazing authority. He exalts the sermon almost beyond credibility: "The proclaimed word is the incarnate Christ himself." The sermon is "Christ himself walking through his congregation as the Word" (p. 126). Even more extravagantly: "For the sake of the proclaimed word the world exists with all of its words" (p. 130). At times his advice is imperialistic: sermons should be written in daylight and never at night time, between Tuesday and Friday, with a minimum of twelve hours of work (pp. 147-48). At the same time, Bonhoeffer is not naive about what sometimes happens in the pulpit. He realizes that "it is possible for the church to preach pure doctrine that is nevertheless untrue" (p. 139).

My initial reaction to these lectures was to be a bit put off by their extraordinarily assured tone and by the implication that one man's pulpit experience could somehow be normative for everyone else. But I have since remembered that the hearers of these lectures were already in jeopardy and would need to be able to communicate with authority and that their authority would have to be not their own but that which came from the Word of God. Consequently, these lectures can be an important corrective in the contemporary church.

While Bethge's and Fant's books enlarge our appreciation of Bonhoeffer, David Hopper's book, A Dissent on Bonhoeffer, challenges much of the conventional appreciation of Bonhoeffer. Admittedly polemical, it is a model of responsible polemics. It is not so much a work of demolition as a plea not to claim too much. Hopper does not deny that we have much to learn from Bonhoeffer. He wants us to resist what he feels are exaggerated claims about his strictly theological contribution.

It is Hopper's conviction that a disservice is done to Bonhoeffer when too neat a theological system is imposed upon his

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thought-whether around a clearly developing set of convictions with substantive continuity or around a unifying theme such as Christology, ecclesiology, or "reality." Hopper does not feel that Bonhoeffer's writings can sustain the weight of importance that has been attached to them as theology. They are too fragmentary, diverse, and vacillating.

Hopper analyzes the various critical works on Bonhoeffer, including a major work by Ernst Feil that is not yet in English. He shows clearly that while many critics feel there is an overall theme that unifies Bonhoeffer's works, they fail to agree on what that theme is. I do not find this quite so damaging as Hopper does. A critical report on another person's work tells us at least as much about the critic as it does about the subject of the critique, but Hopper's analysis will warn future Bonhoeffer scholars not to impose simplistic theological patterns upon him.

Hopper does not fully spell out what would be a mature and acceptable "theological" position, I detect strong resistance to a theology that grows too much out of life situations, personal need, or response to historical crisis situations. Since I believe that the latter dynamics have a crucial contribution to make to any theology for our time, I am not as fearful of their presence in Bonhoeffer as Hopper seems to be. I also have difficulty with Feil's contention (as Hopper comments on it) that Bonhoeffer's shifts are not biographically conditioned but are brought about by changes in outward historical circumstances, since it seems to me that these two impacts are inevitably interwoven in Bonhoeffer's (or anybody else's) life and that it is precisely in trying to think through their relationship, in the light of a "received" theology, that a new and more creative theology emerges.

Bonhoeffer undeniably had different emphases in different books, as new questions and problems emerged from him and the German church. Had he remain locked into a "finished" theological system, I doubt if we would be taking him seriously today. Perhaps the apparent vagaries in his thought are signs of theological aliveness and acumen, rather than instances of aimless vacillation.

My reaction to Hopper's provocative and stimulating essay is that what strikes him as weakness, namely Bonhoeffer's lack of a fully and systematically developed theology, may actually be strength. It may be that we will not have the luxury of a "systematic theology" in our day. Perhaps we can only prepare the way for one.

Many of us who are involved in the area of theology come from middle-class or bourgeois backgrounds-as did Bonhoeffer. We are going to have to be pried loose from such backgrounds and our dependencies upon them-as was Bonhoeffer. In that risky process, we will tend to vacillate and be unsure which direction to go-as was Bonhoeffer. We may need stern exterior events to help us put new directions together coherently-as did Bonhoeffer. Thus his pilgrimage may be a prefiguring of ours (even though ours may not lead to prison and martyrdom). If this should turn out to be the way we will have to "do theology," then Bonhoeffer continues to have much to teach us, perhaps even more by

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his ongoing struggle to relate his life and his faith, than if he had had the settled situation, the leisure, or even old age, in which to put it all together for us.

Robert McAfee Brown
Union Theological Seminary
New York, New York