Strange glory A life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's compelling thought, unlikely life, and execution at the hands of the Nazis have made him a 20th-century icon. Avoiding hagiography and finding a fresh line of interpretation is no easy matter for a biographer of Bonhoeffer, but Marsh (Univ. of Virginia) succeeds on both counts. One of his chief revelations concerns Bonhoeffer's relationship with Eberhard Bethge, another member of the dissident Confessing Church during the Nazi era. Marsh depicts their relationship, though not sexual, as extraordinarily intimate. Bonhoeffer comes across as emotionally needy, judgmental about his intellectual inferiors, and something of a dandy. These all-too-human qualities in no way undermine Bonhoeffer's signal achievement as a thinker and political actor. Marsh shows how Bonhoeffer's life and thought are of a whole. He does this especially well in two areas. First, he describes how Bonhoeffer's year in the US--particularly his introduction to African American religious life--constituted a turning point in his thought. Second, he discusses Bonhoeffer's openness to Roman Catholicism and his experiments with "a new kind of monasticism." Though not a definitive biography, this volume powerfully complements other accounts of Bonhoeffer's remarkable life. --Steve Gowler, Berea College

COMING TO TERMS with the genocidal century just past, especially the unvarnished evil of Nazi Germany, has prompted theologians and philosophers to adjust and recalibrate much of what they thought they knew. Writers as diverse as Reinhold Niebuhr, John Pawlikowski, Richard Rubenstein and Elie Wiesel - some more successfully than others - have all struggled to reconcile the existence of the divine with unspeakable atrocities, many of them carried out in the name of God. Few theologians witnessed the juggernaut of Nazi depravity at closer range than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In "Strange Glory," Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, renders Bonhoeffer's life and thought in exquisite detail and with sympathetic understanding, and in the course of more than 500 pages, we see Bonhoeffer's transformation from pampered scion and theological dilettante to energetic churchman and Christian martyr, all against the backdrop of cataclysmic changes in Germany. Born the sixth of eight children in Breslau, Prussia, in 1906 to a psychiatrist and his wife, Bonhoeffer grew up in a privileged environment but one that was not especially religious. When Dietrich announced at age 13 his intention to become a theologian, his siblings questioned and even belittled his choice, arguing that the church was hopelessly irrelevant. "In that case," the undeterred teenager replied, "I shall reform it!" After his family moved to Berlin, Bonhoeffer attended the Grunewald Gymnasium, graduating at the precocious age of 17, and in 1923 settled in for a year of study at Tübingen University, while the Weimar Republic continued its downward economic spiral. Insulated by his family's wealth, Bonhoeffer barely noticed. The following year, he set off on an aesthetic summer in Italy. Whereas Martin Luther had been repulsed by the opulence and corruption he witnessed on his visit to Rome four centuries earlier, Bonhoeffer was rather enchanted with the Eternal City and even, in Marsh's telling, lured by the "beauty, exuberance and grandeur" of Roman Catholicism. Bonhoeffer's theological training began in earnest under the tutelage of Karl Holl, Reinhold Seeburg and Adolf von Harnack at Friedrich Wilhelms University in 1924. These were tempestuous times, not only politically but theologically. Although the eminent theologian Karl Barth had also studied with Harnack, he rejected what he saw as Harnack's enervated liberalism, tethered as it was to nationalism and reduced to social utility. Barth sought a fresh understanding of divine transcendence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1924. Bonhoeffer was entranced, and in ensuing years he would seek to embellish Barth's insights by emphasizing the ethical and communal ramifications of doctrine, insisting that the Christian Gospel unfolds most authentically within community, "not through individual social or ethical experience." Bonhoeffer was searching, Marsh writes, "for a more embodied, vital and dynamic Protestantism." The danger in Bonhoeffer's ideas, as Marsh acknowledges, is that his notion of the kingdom of God, in the context of rising nationalism, could be commandeered in the service of Germany, especially when the German theological establishment "presumed the providential blessings of the warrior God." Bonhoeffer's brief stint as an assistant pastor to the German Lutheran congregation in Barcelona provided a respite from the growing crisis in Germany and also exposed him to those less fortunate (although he continued to live comfortably). Even more formative was his year in the United States for postgraduate study in 1930. Although he was underwhelmed by his courses at Union Theological Seminary - and found that among his fellow students everyone "just blabs away so frightfully" - he responded to the Gospel he heard at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he became a pastoral assistant. And a road and rail trip through the South and into Mexico allowed him to see firsthand the effects of poverty and racism. Bonhoeffer came to admire the social conscience of Union students, although he found no more sustenance in the preaching of liberal Protestants in the United States than he had in Germany. "The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events," he lamented. Back in Berlin in 1931, Bonhoeffer continued his engagement with the poor in parish work, but the Lutheran church in Germany was quickly capitulating to Hitler's regime. Nazi banners ornamented the churches; one minister declared, "Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler." Bonhoeffer's initial protest centered on the so-called Aryan paragraph, passed by the Reichstag on April 7, 1933. It mandated the removal of all Jews, even baptized Jews, from civil service, which included the churches. The protests were unavailing. As a leader of what would become the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer organized a school for dissident seminarians at Finkenwalde, near the Baltic Sea Until it was closed down by the Gestapo in 1937, Finkenwalde immersed Bonhoeffer in Christian community, a place where, in his words, "the pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and worship are taken seriously." It was also where Bonhoeffer developed a life-long, homoerotic relationship with a student, Eberhard Bethge, although Marsh insists it was chaste. Marsh is a bit less persuasive in making the case that Bonhoeffer in no way cooperated with the Nazi regime. An avowed pacifist, Bonhoeffer secured an appointment with German military intelligence, which allowed him remarkable freedom to travel both in and out of Germany. His complicity in a plot to assassinate Hitler, however, sealed his fate, although his principal involvement lay in providing moral justification for tyrannicide. Marsh contends that Bonhoeffer produced his finest work during his final months, including those in prison, where "the strenuous austerity of his writings" gave way to "a faith more open, munificent and sensuous." Here the paradox of a believer in the face of evil comes fully into focus. Bonhoeffer "gave his blessings to those who conspired to murder the Führer while affirming the essential nonviolence of the Gospel," Marsh writes, invoking Luther's dictum to sin boldly. "Bonhoeffer did not try to resolve the paradox by assuming moral innocence but accepted the paradox by incurring the guilt born out of responsible action." In addition, "Bonhoeffer realized finally that genuine humanness would forever wander into abstraction if it were not anchored in the history, suffering and religion of the Jews." Marsh guides his narrative with a steady hand, although at times his indictment of German liberalism is searing. "The German Christian movement did not so much destroy as emerge from the ruins of the once-grand Protestant liberal architectonic," he writes. "It was perhaps a predictable denouement for a tradition that increasingly turned theology into anthropology, surrendering the disciplined language of belief to the habit of speaking about God as if of human nature writ large." On the final day of his life, before the Gestapo ushered him to Flossenbürg for execution, Bonhoeffer joined with others in the singing of "Eine Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott," which Johann Sebastian Bach composed to the words that Luther had written while exiled in Wartburg Castle - lyrics better known in English as "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." Though often rendered lugubrious in American churches, Bonhoeffer (and possibly Bach as well) preferred that it be sung briskly, with "bouncing rhythms." "We still love life, but I believe that death can no longer surprise us," Bonhoeffer wrote in his final months - a fitting epitaph for a genocidal century. RANDALL BALMER teaches at Dartmouth College. His most recent book is "Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter."

Starred Review. The trajectory of German Lutheran pastor Bonhoeffer's life was set early toward a religious vocation. From his youthful musings on the nature of eternity to his growing confidence in his burgeoning skills as a theologian, listeners move along with Bonhoeffer as he travels the world, gathering spiritual insights at every turn. The road darkened considerably with the rise of the Nazis in his native Germany. With his country and church quickly succumbing to the conflagration of World War II, Bonhoeffer feverishly sought a place for God and the new Christian life in a skeptical, post-religious world. Paul Hecht narrates this comprehensive biography with warmth and perspective. Though the story never descends into intricate apologetics, the theology is deftly handled. Hecht's pronunciation of German names and terms is flawless. VERDICT Recommended for anyone interested in religion, especially in the religious life lived at the edge of mortal danger, and for those curious about the history of Nazi Germany. ["The intimate glimpses Marsh provides into a great man make for a powerful new account," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ 6/15/14.]-Denis Frias, Mississauga Lib. Syst., Ont. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A fresh look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), both intimate and theological.Marsh (Religious Studies/Univ. of Virginia; The Beloved Community, 2005, etc.) looks anew at the famed theologian and anti-Nazi activist, using rarely glimpsed correspondence to paint a warts-and-all portrait of this German martyr. His dispassionate biography excels in two ways. First, Marsh thoroughly details how Bonhoeffer related to theology and to the theological backdrop of his times. Even as a young man, he rubbed shoulders and corresponded with some of the premier spiritual figures of his day: Niebuhr, Barth and even, to a slight degree, Gandhi. A major point of exploration for the author is how such people shaped the rising theological star. Secondly, Marsh attempts to provide a more closely examined view of Bonhoeffer's personality than past biographers. For instance, he presents Bonhoeffer as spoiled and immature in his early adulthood and as comparably materialistic and peevish in the years leading up to the depths of war. Marsh delves into Bonhoeffer's extraordinarily intimate relationship with his student, Eberhard Bethge, providing more detail, and more fodder for psychoanalysis, than previous biographers. Throughout the work, Marsh looks for ways of revisiting old truths about Bonhoeffer and offering fresh perspectives. Even his death is re-examined. Instead of simply repeating the story told by the concentration camp doctor that he died a quick death with grace and composure, Marsh points out that camp survivors have told different stories about how executions took place, leading one to believe Bonhoeffer suffered a terrible and tortuous end. Such re-examinations of previously unquestioned assumptions are common throughout the book. Though Eric Metaxas' Bonhoeffer (2010) is a more sensitive and well-written account of the subject's life, Marsh also serves readers well.There is no doubt Marsh's portrayal will infuse new controversy into discussions about Bonhoeffer for years to come. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.