Some more thoughts about Bonhoeffer
I’ve been wrestling for months to understand what’s coming with the new Bonhoeffer film, opening in theaters tomorrow.
Friends and contacts have asked for my opinion about the film in recent months. I still haven’t seen it, though I know a lot who have. Over the last months, I’ve reached out to many thoughtful people for their opinions and insights, which they have generously shared with me. I’ve listened, listened, and listened some more. I am working on a reflection piece for a publication in the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, I’ll share some resources for your own deliberations, and ask that you pay attention to your emotional reactions as I make them:
1) Dr. Victoria Barnett just published an essay in The Christian Century that is not specifically about the film but raises some essential, deeply unexplored angles about Bonhoeffer history and interpretation. If The Christian Century isn’t your usual cup of tea, then I especially commend it to you. (Barnett served as one of the general editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English project and worked at the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum before she retired.)
2) Dr. Myles Werntz has just published a critical review at Christianity Today, and yes I’ve read it. If Christianity Today isn’t your usual cup of tea, then I especially commend it to you.
3) Dr. Tripp Fuller interviewed the film’s director, Todd Komarnicki, about the process of making the film. Both men share vulnerably, with great emotion, about how they each have experienced and understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and significance. I hope you’ll watch it all the way to the end.
4) Dr. Jemar Tisby offered a valuable interpretive angle on his Substack — hat tip to the very dear one who flagged it for me! — in which he suggested that America’s Confessing Church is the Black Church. If Dr. Jemar Tisby is not your usual cup of tea, or if a suggestion like his irritates you, then this is the essay to read first, before the others.
We have to remember that we share the wide room of history with many, many others who experience events and the meanings of those events differently. We have to humbly accept that we often get the basic facts wrong, and that what we call truth is intensely contestable. Yet accepting the reality of pluralism doesn’t mean that truth doesn’t exist; it means humbly acknowledging that we are neither its final arbiters nor its owners.
And we are invited to listen for and live in truth, to practice and participate truthfully in life, but that often the best we can hope to do is prayerfully seek to act responsibly as truth’s stewards, keeping future generations in mind as we do. We are actually keeping it, for good or for ill, and usually a deeply complicated mix of both, and actually handing it along to future generations, who will live within the consequential shadows and gifts of how we live today. So we must be sober, awake, and prayerful, not half-cocked, not delusional or emotionally drunk, not actually drunk, and by all means, not operating out of our isolated, imperious pride or sloth or favorite private falsehoods.
The person we gaze upon to see how to prayerfully seek to act responsibly in our own lives — the one we listen to, imitate, and converse with about how to do that for ourselves — is the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected Jesus Christ existing communally in the church, which does not exist for itself but for others. (That last phrase is Bonhoeffer’s theology.)
For now, I’ll just say that I keep puzzling over: What are we Americans — especially American Christians — doing with Bonhoeffer, and why might we be doing it?
**
PS. About that phrase “a Bonhoeffer moment.” The phrase dates to 2012, if Stephen Haynes gets the history right, and the best analogue I have found to describe its ludicrousness is by means of the LDS comedy group Studio C and its sketch about Tourette’s Syndrome, written by one of its cast members who has Tourette’s (yes, “the swearing kind”). To connect these analogical dots, if Tourette’s Syndrome means “getting to swear for free,” the propaganda device “a Bonhoeffer moment” — as in, “We’re in a Bonhoeffer moment! Time to panic!” — implicitly means “getting to do something extreme, half-cocked, or violent and lawless for free.”
Nope.