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Otto Dibelius: A Missing Piece in the Puzzle of Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Otto Dibelius is missing in our interpretations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s development in the sense that though well-known, the Berlin general superintendent has been little thought of in this role. Eberhard Bethge in his life of Bonhoeffer and in the collected writings gives enough evidence of their social and ecclesiastical connections throughout Bonhoeffer’s career to provoke enquiry. That Bethge and others have not pursued the enquiry is due in part to the fluctuations of Dibelius’s reputation, especially in the tradition of the Berlin theologians who were young around 1930. Bonhoeffer’s life was written in the shadows of the last period of Dibelius’s life, when he was a prince of the restored evangelical church, the ‘NATO-bishop’ taking a different line in the cold war from many who were finding their prophet in Bonhoerfer.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978
References
1 [E.] Bethge, [Dietrich Bonhoeffer] (Munich 1967) pp 122, 207, 178 (compare O. Dibelius in Der Tag, 27 February 1927; 19 February 1933 and [O.] Dibelius, [Die] Verantwortung [der Kirche] (Berlin 1931); Bethge pp 870, 915; [D. Bonhoeffer], G[esammelte] S[chriften] (Munich) 2, p 441; Bonhoeffer Gedenkheft, ed E. Bethge (Berlin 1947) pp 34-5.
2 Scholder, K., ‘Neuere deutsche Geschichte und protestantische Theologie’, Evangelische Tlteologie, 23, 10 (Munich 1963) pp 510-11.Google Scholar
3 For example, [Dibelius, O.,] Nachspiel (Berlin 1928) p 89.Google Scholar
4 Compare my paper on the controversy between Dibelius, Barth and Heinrich Vogel (forthcoming).
5 Bethge pp 178, 208.
6 Ibid pp 268 seq.
7 GS 3, p 325.
8 Bethge p 207.
9 Bethge pp 159 seq.
10 Bonhoeffer], [D. Ethics (Fontana 1964) pp 64 seq, 263 seq. Google Scholar
11 Bethge p 249.
12 Ibid p 246; Ethics pp 55, 64 seq.
13 Dehn had argued that John 15:13 should not be used on war memorials, since the death of soldiers could never be likened to the death of Jesus; theology and politics have to be separated. See Dehn, G. Kirche und Volkerversammlung (Berlin 1932)Google Scholar. Compare GS 3. pp 259-69. ‘Das Recht auf Selbstbehauptung’, and Bethge p 161.
14 See his letter to his Barthian friend Sutz on Dibelius’s lecture, Christmas 1931, GS 1 p 26.
16 Bonhoeffer], [D. Letters [and Papers from Prison] (London 1953) 22 April 1944.Google Scholar
16 GS 1, pp 23 seq.
17 Bethge pp 246 seq.
18 Letters, 5 December 1943, 21 July 1944. Compare note 12.
19 Dibelius, O., Die Kraft der Deutschen, in Gegensätzen zu leben (Berlin 1936) Gollert, F., Dibelius vor Gericht (Munich 1959) pp 160-71.Google Scholar
20 GS 5, pp 181-226, esp pp 215-16.
21 Ibid p 227.
22 Dibelius, Verantwortung, pp 5-6.
23 Ethics pp 85 seq.
24 Barth, Karl, The German Church Conflict (London 1965) pp 30 seq. Google Scholar
25 GS 1, pp 61-3. These letters to Rössler become clearer when read in the context of the Barth-Dibelius debate of 1931.
26 Nachspiel pp 46 seq.
27 Ethics p 260. How close Bonhoeffer got to Dibelius on the subject of responsibility and service is suggested implicitly by Sölle’s, Dorothee criticism of Bonhoeffer in Christ the Representative (London 1967) pp 96–7.Google Scholar
28 I am grateful to the members of the Ecclesiastical History Society who, in the discussion of this paper, directed my attention to the Scottsboro Case which began its terrible course at the end of March 1931, while Bonhoeffer was in America. Nine negroes in all were charged with the rape of two white girls. The discrepancies in numbers between the different accounts mentioned in the text may well arise from the complications of the case and are unimportant here. There can be little doubt that it is this case to which Bonhoeffer refers. See Carter, Dan T., Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Louisiana 1969) pp 59, 142, 146.Google Scholar
29 Der Tag, 26 March 1933. To pass judgement on Dibelius’s political stance, and especially on his conduct in the early months of Hitler’s regime, is not the purpose of this paper. Dibelius is hardly to be defended, except against simplified condemnations, in which, for example, he is contrasted with Bonhoeffer, as black from white.
Bonhoeffer’s article on ‘The Church and the Jewish Question’, (GS 2, pp 44-S3. 1933) makes the crucial concessions to supposed political necessity in principle which Dibelius, given his official position and consistency, acted on. Bonhoeffer, like Barth, was concerned primarily with the theological issue, of what put the church in statu confessionis. He was then impatient with men like Dibelius who did not see the church situation immediately in such extreme terms, not because they were blind or cryptonazis, but because they had a very similar political analysis and ethic to Bonhoeffer’s. And on many points it was politics not theology that was determinative—as Bonhoeffer allowed, it was the state not the church that made history.
30 Die, Stunde der Kirche, Festschrift for Dibelius (Berlin 1950) p 35.Google Scholar
31 In Letters.