The Steep Price of Grace

100 years after Dietrich Bonhoeffer's birth, he still has much to teach us.
by Larry Rasmussen

An encounter following a recent viewing of a documentary on Dietrich Bonhoeffer unnerved me. As discussion of the film about the German theologian and leader of Christian resistance to the Nazis drew to a close, an elderly gentleman stepped to the microphone and said simply: “I’m a Holocaust survivor, and I can tell you what year this is: It’s 1932.” He turned and left. <snip>

As the 1930s dawned the German body politic was deeply divided. Moderates (largely secular democrats) faced off against extremists of both Right and Left. The Far Right—the National Socialist German Workers Party (“Nazis”)—portrayed Weimar Germany, with its hedonism, sexual revolution, and failing democracy, as a moral-political swamp vulnerable to the Left, by whom the Nazis meant Communists and Jews. The Nazis were not yet a major force, however. The party won less than 3 percent of the popular vote in 1928. By 1932, however, they came in first. What had happened? <snip>

Meanwhile, German moderates simply underestimated the power of Hitler’s Manichean unreason and the appeal of right-wing populism. In Stern’s words, “resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.” German elites also imbibed “this mystical brew of pseudo-religion and disguised interest.” Though later kicked awake by events, the moment of truth for moderates came too late. Nationalistic conservatism in the military, the civil service, the universities, and the churches failed to oppose Hitler even when they found him unscrupulous and a clear and present danger to civil liberties. By then the party had state powers well in hand and a popular base seething with resentment. <snip>

“We were resisting by way of confessing, but we were not confessing by way of resistance,” wrote Bethge in Friendship and Resistance. Or, in Bonhoeffer’s simple formulation from prison, “The church is only the church when it exists for others.” When the Confessing Church did not intervene for Jews beyond its own membership, for gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis, for the euthanized, Roma (“gypsies”), and imprisoned socialists and communists, in that moment it forfeited being church. <snip>

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It’s 1932.” He turned and left. . .

chilling . . .

The church's biggest enemy is contentment, or success. This makes the church feel smug and self-righteous, thinking it's prosperity is proof of God's blessing. That means that those outside the church (gays, lesbians, jews, poor, whatever) who aren't prospering have the opposite of God's blessing. This explains the plethora of Religious Right Churches with massive congregations who spend each Sunday morning reveling in how God has blessed them and praying that outsiders might join them and have the same experience. So, the lines get drawn between the insiders and the outsiders.

There is a story in the gospel of Luke where Jesus warns his audience (the religious/political power mongers of his day) saying (I paraphrase here),"Be very careful. There will come a time when you will knock at the door trying to get inside but will not be admitted. However, all the outsiders will be admitted - from the East, West, North and South."

My point is, I think the holocaust took place because those inside the church failed to see the outsider as a recipient of God's blessing. Of course, we have this same nasty attitude today.

One more thing - if you take the stories in Luke and substitute the label "Samaritan" with any group on the fringes today (Muslim, gay, whatever), you immediately see them, the stories, saying something very different than what preachers in churches normally make them say.

(By the way, I am very new to this group and have decided to just jump in.)