(This is a follow-up to my last blog, with the goal of keeping the discussion going. With that in mind, please share this with others as you did before, if that is something you are comfortable doing.)
Eberhard Bethge authored the definitive biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, appropriate in that he was Bonhoeffer’s closest friend and was married to Bonhoeffer’s niece, Renata.
Dr. Bethge was also the person to whom Bonhoeffer wrote his letters from prison and edited the volume we know as Bonoheffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.
I had the distinct privilege of being among those who hosted Dr. Bethge and Renata (she insisted that we call her by her first name) when he spent a semester with us at Lynchburg College in Virginia as a Scholar-in-Residence.
Little did I realize that the many lectures I heard him deliver, and the hours of conversation we had, would speak so directly to the circumstances our nation in general and the Christian community in particular are facing at this moment.
In truth, it never crossed my mind that I would ever believe as I do now that both our democracy and the integrity and the future of the Christian community here in America are under genuine threat.
I don’t think my worries are unfounded. Indeed, in a recent interview Dr. Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, gave this chilling assessment of Trump’s first three weeks in office: “He doesn’t seem to care about [our democratic] institutions and the laws except insofar as they appear as barriers to the goal of permanent kleptocratic authoritarianism and immediate personal gratification. It is all about him all of time, it is not about the citizens and our political traditions” (SZ International, interview with Matthias Kolb).
Statements like that make me realize that behind the question I addressed last time about the divide in churches because of Trump having support among so many Christians lies the more exacting question, “How can this be happening at all?”
That more basic question led me to recall the fact that on more than one occasion Dr. Bethge was asked a similar question, “Why did the German people support what Hitler was doing?” And even more pointedly, “Why did Christians in Germany support Hitler?”
I don’t remember his answers, except that he often drew upon what Bonhoeffer wrote to him in Letters and Papers, so I pulled the book off the shelf and started reading it again.
Here is what I found that seems to speak directly to what is happening to our country and to our churches.
“Upon closer observation,” Bonhoeffer writes, “it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with folly…There are people who are mentally agile but foolish and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish.”
It is critical, he says, to understand that it was not as if “certain human capacities, intellectual capacities, for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that [people] are deprived of their independent judgment and – more or less unconsciously – give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”
At that point, Bonheoffer says, slogans, catchwords, and the like take possession of the fool as if he or she is under a spell, thus, “arguments based on reason fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
And then he makes this stunning observation: “Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings” (pp.7-9).
Let me repeat and highlight part of that: “…the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”
Sobering words, to say the least.
History is an amazing guide when we are willing to learn from it, and I think Bonhoeffer’s wisdom offers us precisely the kind of guidance we desperately need.
I would argue that his words suggest that the reason Donald Trump has widespread support among church members is not at all because of natural and unavoidable differences in political perspectives.
It exists, instead, because folly has overtaken many church members who are not conscious of what has happened to them or why they believe the things they believe.
What is more, it is precisely this reality that makes the demand for prophetic teaching and preaching so timely.
We may be reluctant to do it, especially since we know deep in our bones, as Bonhoeffer said, “Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves.”
As clergy we have feet of clay and we know it and cannot afford to forget it.
Yet these are no ordinary times, and Donald Trump is no ordinary president, and the responsibility for holding the Christian community accountable for the “hope that lies within us” (1 Peter 3:15) always falls to its leadership when the integrity of the faith is under assault.
Bonhoeffer believed that “the only cure for folly,” as he put it, was “inward liberation,” that inward freedom “to live a responsible life before God.”
It was this absence of inward liberation among the German Christians that led him to conclude that those who oppose Hitler “have to realize why it is no use our trying to find out what ‘the people’ really think” (Ibid.).
It seems to me that these words from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison can serve as a call to action for those of us who serve as the church’s ministers in America today.
Can we not see that this is our time in history, whether we want it to be or not, and that speaking truth to power, albeit with love for those to whom we speak, is not optional?
Indeed, it is the imperative of our vocation from which there simply is no relief.
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