WWBD (What Would Bonhoeffer Do?)

The German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo nearly 79 years ago, on April 5, 1943. He was implicated in the plot to overthrow the German government under Hitler and sentenced to die—and, indeed, he was hanged on April 9, 1945. 

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1933)

What Did Bonhoeffer Do in Germany?

On the 110^th anniversary of his birth on February 4, 1906, I posted a blog article titled “Honoring the Memory of Bonhoeffer.” Thus, this post focuses on Bonhoeffer’s activity as a part of the resistance to Hitler from 1933 until his arrest by the Nazis ten years later.

Bonhoeffer was one of the first prominent German Christians to speak out in opposition to Hitler. Two days after Hitler was installed as the German chancellor in January 1933, Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address in which he criticized Hitler.

In April of that year, he raised the first voice for church resistance to Hitler's persecution of Jews, and in the following year, he joined with Martin Niemöller, Karl Barth, and others to form what came to be known as the Confessing Church.

These anti-Nazi Christians in Germany drafted the Barmen Declaration in 1934. They sought to make it clear that Jesus Christ was the Führer, their leader and the head of the Church, not Hitler.

In 1940, Bonhoeffer became even more active in the German resistance and finally, he was arrested because of that activity. At that time, he was charged with avoiding military service, advising his students to do the same, and also for helping some Jews escape Germany.

Despite what is often said/believed about Bonhoeffer, he was not arrested for participating in any assassination attempts. The main attempt to kill Hitler came on July 20, 1944, and after that plot failed, some 7,000 people were arrested and nearly 5,000, including Bonhoeffer, were executed.

Bonhoeffer was, indeed, a part of the resistance and until his arrest worked closely with those who devised the July 20 assassination attempt, especially with his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, who was accused of being the "spiritual leader" of the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.

It is obvious, though, that Bonhoeffer was not directly involved in the 7/20/44 assassination attempt itself, for he was imprisoned fifteen months before it occurred.*

What Would Bonhoeffer Do Now in Ukraine/Russia?

It is difficult to know what Bonhoeffer would do in Ukraine if he were living there now, for he lived, wrote, and was martyred in a country that was waging war, not one suffering from the horrors of unprovoked invasion.

Being a Christian in Ukraine now is far different from being a Christian in Germany in the 1930s. We know what Bonhoeffer did there then; we don’t know what he would do in Ukraine now.

However, I think we do know what Bonhoeffer would do if he were a Christian living in Russia today. He would undoubtedly become a part of—and likely the leader of—a resistance movement that would agree with Pres. Biden’s moral outrage: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

It is not evident, though, that all Christians should do the same—or that we who safely live in this country should “tell” Christians in Russia what they should do. (This issue is dealt with at some length in the March 11 posting in Christianity Today: Do Russian Christians Need More Bonhoeffers?)

What Would Bonhoeffer Do Now in the U.S.?

With some certainty, we can assume that were Bonhoeffer alive in the U.S. today he would speak out strongly against those American Christians who advocate Christian Nationalism—as, thankfully, some American Christians are. (See Christians Against Christian Nationalism.)

More specifically, he would doubtlessly oppose efforts to “make America great again” and the growth of White Christian nationalism since 2015.**

Bonhoeffer’s most widely read book is Nachfolge (1937; Eng. trans., The Cost of Discipleship, 1949, and Discipleship, 2003), the theme of which is faithfully following Jesus and living by his teachings, especially as found in the Sermon on the Mount.

That, surely, is what Bonhoeffer would do here now—and what he challenges us to do also.

_____

* Bonhoeffer’s persistent pacifism is a central theme of a new book by Mennonite scholar Mark Thiessen Nation, Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Recovering the True Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2022).

** White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (April 2022) by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry promises to be a helpful analysis of the latter; see this interview with Gorski in the March 15 post of YaleNews.

The Death and Legacy of #16670

On August 5, I posted an article mostly about Jesse Owens, who remarkably won his fourth Olympic gold medal on August 9, 1936. This article is about Maximilian Kolbe, a man who died five years and five days later, on August 14, 1941.

At the Berlin Olympics in 1936 Owens was snubbed by Hitler because of his being of African descent. Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest, was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp operated by Hitler’s Nazis.

Owens became known worldwide because of his athletic achievements before tens of thousands of people. Kolbe became known worldwide because of his sacrificial death witnessed by hardly anyone.

Maximilian Kolbe was born in January 1894 in what was then the Kingdom of Poland. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in April 1918, and the following year he began teaching in a seminary in Krakow.

Fr. Kolbe went to Japan as a missionary in 1930. The following year he founded a monastery and school in the suburbs of Nagasaki, and he also started publishing a Japanese edition of the periodical he had published in Poland.

By 1933 Seibo no Kishi (Knights of the Holy Mother) is said to have had a circulation of 50,000—and still today it is the leading Catholic monthly periodical in Japan.

On April 30 my blog article was titled “In Memory of Dr. Nagai.” Takashi Nagai was the doctor and medical school professor who suffered serious injuries in the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bomb explosion over Nagasaki.

Dr. Nagai (1908-51) had been baptized in 1934. As a new Christian he met Fr. Kolbe a few times—and even treated him as a patient.

After being seriously injured by the atomic explosion, Dr. Nagai thought about Kolbe often. When it seemed as if Nagai was going to die, someone brought him water from the Lourdes grotto the Polish Catholic priest had built—and he began to recover miraculously and lived nearly six more years.

Because of his poor health, Kolbe returned to Poland in 1936. In February of 1941, he was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo for hiding Jewish people in his Polish monastery. Kolbe was soon sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp and branded prisoner #16670.

In late July, an inmate of Auschwitz escaped. To discourage others from trying to do likewise, the Nazi guards selected ten prisoners at random to die by starvation. One of the ten chosen was Franciszek Gajowniczek, who cried out for mercy because he had a wife and children.

Upon hearing Gajowniczek’s pitiful plea, Kolbe stepped up, identified himself as a Catholic priest, and volunteered to take his place. Somewhat surprisingly, the Nazi in charge agreed.

After nearly three weeks, Kolbe and three of the other nine were still alive, barely. To clear out the cell, the four were then given an injection to kill them in a matter of minutes. This was the terrible end of the life of Maximilian Kolbe—but his story has lived on. 

Forty-one years later, in October 1982, Kolbe was canonized—and the ceremony in Rome was witnessed in person by Gajowniczek, who, amazingly, lived to be 94. When he was canonized by John Paul II, who was a Pole like Kolbe, the Pope proclaimed him as the “patron saint of the difficult 20^th century.”

“Life for Life,” a 1991 movie about Maximilian Kolbe, closes with a still shot of Jesus’ words recorded in the Bible: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Race and the Olympics

The Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, opens today in Rio de Janeiro. There have been many challenges with Brazil’s hosting of these Games, but none as momentous as those surrounding the Olympics held in Berlin, Germany, 80 years ago this month. 

Many of you likely remember hearing about the 1936 Olympics, mainly because of the outstanding feats of Jesse Owens from the United States.

Last month June and I watched “Jesse Owens,” the DVD of the 2012 “American Experience” PBS documentary about the great African American athlete. The next night we watched “Race,” the 2016 movie about Owens’s life and achievements. 

In the latter, the winsome Stephan James plays Owens, and while the actor may be more handsome than Owens was, he is no more winsome. It was a joy to watch the actual movie clips of Owens in the PBS program. 

For those of you haven’t seen either film, I recommend both—and viewing them close together, if possible.

You can easily find biographical information about Owens (1913-80), so I won’t give much of that here. In addition to the Wikipedia article, for an informative, easy-to-read book I recommend Tom Streissguth’s Jesse Owens (2006).

Because of his athletic feats, Jesse was able to go to Ohio State University. Not unexpectedly, he faced much racism there as well as when going to and participating in Big Ten track meets. Still, partly due to Larry Snyder, his outstanding coach and mentor, he also excelled on the college level, setting four world records on one May day in 1935. 

It was no surprise that Jesse made the U.S. Olympic Team chosen to compete in the 1936 Olympics. Because of Hitler’s policies, however, there was a move in the U.S. to boycott those Games. Largely due to the efforts of Avery Brundage, the U.S. ended up not boycotting the Berlin Olympics.

Even then, an official of the NAACP tried to get Jesse to back out of going to Berlin. However, according to Streissguth, many black athletes “didn’t believe the United States should boycott the games. African Americans experienced racial discrimination every day. Why should the United States have the right to protest the same thing in a foreign country?” (p. 44). 

Thus, Jesse Owens went to Berlin—and sprinted and jumped magnificently. On August 9 he won his fourth gold metal—much to the consternation of Hitler and other top Nazi leaders, who were expounding the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of all other races as well as the Jews. 

Owens was snubbed by Hitler in Berlin and then, sadly, after he returned to the U.S. even by President Roosevelt. Partly for that reason, Owens became a Republican and campaigned for Alf Landon in 1940.

Many years later, at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, U.S. sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash. On the winners’ podium, Smith and Carlos raised their fists in protest of Apartheid in South Africa and racial segregation in the United States. 

In his book Blackthink (1970), Owens tells how he was very negative about what Smith and Carlos did (see pp. 75-80). Harry Edwards calling him a “bootlicking Uncle Tom” (ibid., p. 13), though, caused him to do a lot of soul-searching, which he narrates in his intriguing last book, I Have Changed (1972).

While race may not be an issue for the black U.S. athletes in Rio this month, it is sad that some still in 2016 have to insist that Black Lives Matter.

Heil Obama?

In “Jesus for President,” the previous posting on this blog, I mentioned that in 2008 some people saw Barack Obama as a type of messiah. However, there now seems to be far more on the Internet, and in the mass media, that demonizes the President.

Recently, I have seen numerous comparisons of the President to Hitler, and there are websites, and bumper stickers, that say Heil Obama! (Just Google “Heil Obama” and see all the websites that come up, or search for images with the same name and see the great variety that appear.)
 

In July 2010 the North Iowa branch of the Tea Party erected a billboard comparing Obama to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. (That billboard was shown on one of the objectionable e-mails I wrote about on my blog posting for July 15.) The billboard in question was removed in a week because of the strong protests it, deservedly, elicited.

Now the End Begins is the name of a website, created in 2010, and of a Facebook account, which has nearly 31,000 “likes.” (I referred to that apocalyptic website on June 25; the collage picture on their homepage refers to the upcoming election as one with “the Muslim vs. the Mormon.”) A fairly recent posting on that website is titled “Similarities Between Obama And Hitler: A Factual Comparison.” (That webpage claims that it has been shared over 5,000 times.)

In April of this year Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Jenky (b. 1947) of Peoria, IL, compared the President’s policies to those of Hitler and Stalin. In spite of a petition signed by more than 23,000 people calling for an apology, none seems to have been made to this point.

Earlier this month, Maine Gov. Paul LePage (b. 1948), in criticizing President Obama’s health care overhaul, described the Internal Revenue Service as the “new Gestapo”. He later issued a formal apology.

Much of the President’s most criticized activity, however, is quite the opposite of Hitler’s policies. Hitler, as is widely known, sought to purify Germany by getting rid of non-Aryans. President Obama has forwarded an inclusivist position, reaching out to embrace people not a part of the “mainstream.”

Last month the President eased enforcement of US immigration laws so young illegal immigrants can remain in the country to work and study without fear of deportation. That directive by the President was vociferously criticized by the political Right. Glenn Beck, for example, said Obama’s decision simply shows that the President is in true violation of the constitution. But be that as it may, it was certainly not an act seeking to keep the dominant ethnic group pure.

Hitler sought to keep the Aryan race pure by means of euthanasia. He issued such an order (T4) in 1939, and around 200,000 people who were mentally defective, severely handicapped, and incurably insane or sick were subsequently put to death. By contrast, “Obamacare,” so much maligned by the Right, seeks to provide insurance coverage to the tens of millions with no insurance coverage and to keep insurance companies for exempting people with pre-existing conditions.

Moreover, while there was persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany under Hitler, Obama is strongly criticized by some of the same people who compare him to Hitler for advocating repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” his lack of enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act, and his support of same-sex marriage.

It is legitimate for people to disagree with and oppose the President, if they are so inclined. It is not at all legitimate to compare him with Hitler in doing so.