Reading With Gospel Eyes: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Lately, I’ve been reading Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I was struck to see how deeply his way of reading the Bible and listening for God shaped his life and actions.  Though a well-schooled and brilliant theologian in his own right, Bonhoeffer essentially rejected the critical methods of Bible study taught in his university and seminary classes.  The listening heart had been cultivated in him as child, by his mother and governesses, all of whom were trained and influenced by the life that flowed from the Herrnhutt revivals of the 1720’s that formed the Moravian church.  It sounds much like what I refer to as “reading with Gospel eyes.”

Consider these quotations from the book:

Bonhoeffer’s interest was not only in teaching them as a university lecturer. He wished to “disciple” them in the true life of the Christian. This ran the gamut, from understanding current events through a biblical lens to reading the Bible not just as a theology student but as a disciple of Jesus Christ. This approach was unique among German university theologians of that era.  (p. 128).

Bonhoeffer unapologetically approached the Bible as the word of God. At a place like Berlin University, where the ghost of Schleiermacher still walked abroad in the night, and where Harnack’s chair was still warm, this was positively scandalous: “[He said] when you read the Bible, you must think that here and now God is speaking with me. . . . He wasn’t as abstract as the Greek teachers and all the others. Rather, from the very beginning, he taught us that we had to read the Bible as it was directed at us, as the word of God directly to us. Not something general, not something generally applicable, but rather with a personal relationship to us. He repeated this to us very early on, that the whole thing comes from that. Bonhoeffer was not interested in intellectual abstraction. Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian.”  (pp. 128-129)

Joachim Kanitz remembered that once Bonhoeffer told them that they should not forget that “every word of Holy Scripture was a quite personal message of God’s love for us.” Bonhoeffer then “asked us whether we loved Jesus.”  (p. 129)

On one hiking trip, Bonhoeffer had them meditate on a Bible verse after breakfast. They had to find a place on the grass and sit quietly for an hour and meditate on that verse. Many of them found it difficult, as Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde ordinands would find it difficult. Inge Karding was among them: “He taught us that the Bible goes directly into your life, [to] where your problems are.” (p. 129)

The critical approach to the Bible – form criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, etc. - that was taught to me in the 1970's at Davidson College and my brief stint at Union Seminary in Va had its roots in Germany from the 1870’s.  By the way, This is the almost universal approach to the Bible taught in mainline denominational seminaries all across the United States today.

It is no surprise to me that the pastors who accepted the critical methods of Bible study in Germany a century ago would be swept away in the idolatrous German National Church of the Nazis. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - along with a small minority of others like Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller and the Confessing Church – would reject the critical methods and read the Bible differently.  They would read it as the Word of God to them.  And because of that difference, they would stand against the Nazis.  Some were exiled.  Most were jailed.  Bonhoeffer would be involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and be executed.  But unlike the others, they stood against the evil of their time.