Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times, by Jeffrey C. Pugh

Continuum, 2009
ISBN 9780567032591
$24.95…discounted 30% until Nov. 1…$17.47

By action of the 2008 General Conference, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became the first martyr officially recognized by The United Methodist Church. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, was a member of the resistance against dictator Adolf Hitler and was executed by the Nazis in 1945, during the final months of World War II. The resolution states that “during a time of grave darkness in Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer shined the light of Christ all the way to a hangman’s noose. Nearly every clergy has studied him and used him in sermons and theological discourse. It is time we recognize his accomplishments and martyrdom of the highest calling.”

Growing up in the church through the 1950’s and 1960’s, the name and witness of Bonhoeffer became familiar to me through the teaching and preaching of our senior minister. The well-read and worldly Rev. Dr. Richard W. Cain encouraged the youth of our congregation, along with the adults, to read and be inspired by the witness of contemporary martyrs of the church, several of whom had died for their faith during the then recent WWII. But as Martin Marty points out in his preface to Pugh’s new book, generations since that time, or outside the circle of theological discourse and inquiry, may already be completely unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer’s name and have little, if any, knowledge of his life, his pastoral work, or his theology, let alone with the insights and challenges drawn from his work that may illumine the complexities and faith issues of our own day. The premise of the General Conference resolution may thus well overstate the familiarity of pastors and laity with his witness and work.

How timely, then, is the publication of Jeffrey Pugh’s new work on Bonhoeffer. Chapter 2 provides a very helpful overview of the trajectory of Bonhoeffer’s life for those who may not even know its basic story. But lest commemoration of Bonhoeffer as martyr remain frozen at the level of hero worship or distanced iconography, the remainder of Pugh’s book probes the complex and evocative questions that arise from Bonhoeffer’s sermons, writings and pastoral practice.

“Why Bonhoeffer, Why Now?” Pugh asks. Bonhoeffer is a martyr, a witness, a teacher, for the troubled times in which we live, Pugh argues. Our troubled times, he asserts, are marked by economic consumerism (and this, before the current, crushing recession), moral confusion, ecological degradation, acceptance of torture, and secularism, a world, Pugh notes “in love with its own self-destruction.” These marks of what Bonhoeffer called “a world come of age” name the ways bureaucracy and technology functioned both in Nazi Germany and in our time as well, a world in which God has become superfluous.

This book moves through Bonhoeffer’s work to examine the challenging and complex questions of “who we are, who God is, and how we live in the space between.” Throughout his lifetime, Bonhoeffer wrestled not only with what Pugh calls “one of Western Christianity’s greatest failures,” that is, support of and collaboration with the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Germany, but with the willingness of even the Confessing Church to cave in to its evil tyranny. The struggle to find faith in the midst of such radical moral confusion is the struggle that results in insights that remain powerfully compelling in the midst of our troubled times as well.

The title of the book itself heralds that Pugh is not shy about engaging the tensions and ambiguities in Bonhoeffer’s writings. The phrase “religionless Christianity” does not signal straightforward comprehension. Along with Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer had come to believe that the concept of religion in liberal protestant theology had come to replace faith. Writing from his prison cell near the end of his life, in the context of what Pugh calls the “horrible seduction of Christianity that had turned it into a tool of pogrom, ethnic cleansing and death-dealing terror,” the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of Christianity propelled Bonhoeffer into what he called “religionless Christianity”—for the sake of true and faithful discipleship to the Crucified, rather than to the church itself. Out of the midst of degradation, faith finds new language.

So make ready for April 9th, the Feast Day of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by acquainting or re-acquainting yourself with this complex man and pastor, who no doubt would have himself been terribly uncomfortable with the designation of “martyr” or any other designation that set him apart from the basic human experience, lived with God amidst the sufferings and challenges of these troubled times. Abide awhile with Bonhoeffer in the ever-urgent spiritual quest to name that which “ultimately shapes our lives, sustains us, offers to nourish us with the hope of something other than what the state and the market offer.”