Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) was one of the most provocative of the twentieth century's theologians, and this is a welcome addition to the Outstanding Christian Thinkers series. Its text has been organised so that it is fairly easy for the reader with limited knowledge of the man and his world to follow it, and for most of the time Dr Plant has written in an accessible style.
Overall he has succeeded in his aims to introduce us both to Bonhoeffer's life and his theology, and to put these in context. More than once he has assured us that, compared with the major works of reference that have appeared on Bonhoeffer, this book is only going to be of ephemeral value, but here the author is underestimating the usefulness of a book like this. If it makes Christians aware that Bonhoeffer is much more than a cult figure of the 1960s it will have done an invaluable job.
Plant's third aim, however, is ‘to suggest a means by which the consistencies in Bonhoeffer's theology can be brought into the open’. This is where the author comes closest to confronting the question which readers are almost certain to ask him: Do you think that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a ‘great’ theologian? It is now sixty years since Hitler ordered him to be hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp. Enough time has passed to be able to start assessing the man's stature reliably.
It is this third aim which engages the author in controversy. Against the view of theologians (including Bonhoeffer's friend, Karl Barth) who have doubted whether ‘his written legacy can be viewed as a coherent totality’, Plant argues that ethics are at the core of all his theological thought –‘an ethics of responsibility, lived out in obedience to the God who acts most powerfully in ‘the silence of the cross’’. Although he was a profoundly loyal Lutheran, Bonhoeffer, unlike the German theologians of his time who were liberal protestants, placed great emphasis on the role of community and communal obligations in the life of a Christian, and he himself tried to live out this conviction. Apparently it was a visit to Rome when he was eighteen that prompted Bonhoeffer to write the dissertation on the Church which became his first book, Sanctorum Communio, and during the following years he became involved with various forms of Christian fellowship, including ecumenism, pastoral care and the setting up of a House of Brethren for seminarians.
However, in 1939 Bonhoeffer's pacifism drove him to America, only to return quickly because, in his own words, he became convinced that ‘I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share in the trials of this time with my people’. Nevertheless, he correctly ‘sensed that if he stayed in Germany he would feel it necessary to be drawn into the conspiracy against Hitler’. According to Plant, if the plot had succeeded nearly five million lives in Europe would have been saved. As it is, Bonhoeffer is seen in Germany (and not only Germany) even today as ‘morally controversial…to some a martyr and saint, to others a traitor and murderer’.
Mary Fulbrook has said that most of the conspirators ‘were essentially anti‐democratic in outlook’. Moreover, this included Bonhoeffer, difficult although it is for many of his admirers to accept it. Barth felt that in his last book, Ethics, there was ‘just a suggestion of North German Patriarchalism’. Now the most widely‐read excerpts from his writings are those in Letters and Papers from Prison, and these seemingly are affirming the maturity of today's world. In fact Bonhoeffer's words here more readily apply to an elite – to people like Bonhoeffer himself. He had an optimistic faith in benevolent autocracy, and, like St Paul, thought that Christians should be content with the social position which they held when they were called to discipleship. Today's Germany would have been inconceivable to him.
I have given so much space to summarising the book's main theme precisely because it raises quite an acute problem. Bonhoeffer was profoundly conscious that church life was going to change, and we are inclined to think of him as a ‘modern’ who was cut off before he was forty and yet who conveys to us a message for our time, but in certain ways he was not ‘modern’. His thinking was formed primarily by Luther and the Bible, not by ‘our modern world’. It is easy for us to misread him. Dr Plant handles the problem skilfully, so that by and large this is a rewarding introduction to one of the twentieth century's most influential theologians.
