Barth and Bonhoeffer’s Wartime Warnings Apply Today

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s name is well-known in Christian circles. His early resistance against the Nazi regime leading to his execution in 1945 has made Bonhoeffer into a modern Christian martyr. At times of social conflict, upheaval, and tyranny, Bonhoeffer’s legacy is often looked to as a moral guide. Karl Barth is less of a household name, but his own response to Nazism has inspired many as well. With both Barth and Bonhoeffer, what inspires Christians to this day is how their resistance to National Socialism arose directly from their theological convictions.

As we watch the horrors unfolding in Ukraine, many rightly wonder what Barth and Bonhoeffer might have to say to the church today.

Born in 1886, Karl Barth was a Swiss theologian who held a professorship in Bonn, Germany, when Hitler and the Nazis came to power. Twenty years his junior, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 and grew up in an aristocratic household in Berlin. Though Barth and Bonhoeffer came from different backgrounds and church traditions (Barth was Reformed, Bonhoeffer was Lutheran), both were early opponents of National Socialism. This point is often quickly passed over, especially in stories that quickly move to Bonhoeffer’s participation in a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler.

Bonhoeffer and Barth saw the danger of Nazism many years before the horrors of the Holocaust took place, let alone became well known. Knowing what we now know about how the Nazi regime would turn out, it is all too easy to read that knowledge back into 1933, and assume that we would likewise oppose the Nazis in the way that Barth and Bonhoeffer did. But considering how many Germans joined the bandwagon and how few resisted, some skepticism here is appropriate.

The hagiographical narrative surrounding Bonhoeffer in particular tends to be overly simplistic and self-congratulatory. Bonhoeffer was fighting against Nazis, which seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do. Praising Bonhoeffer, we often implicitly praise ourselves, assuming we likewise would have resisted Nazism even to the point of death. For Bonhoeffer himself, the story was not so simple. Whereas we tend to see Bonhoeffer as a sacrificial hero, he saw his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler as a responsible action through which he and his co-conspirators became mired in guilt. The very idea is hard to wrap our minds around today. Sure, we know that killing is almost never justified, but outside of radical pacifist circles few today would decry those who attempted tyrannicide against Hitler. But this is to read Bonhoeffer’s action anachronistically, as if he could know in the early 1940s everything we know today. Bonhoeffer had to act in history as it was unfolding, not with the benefit of hindsight. He was unsure about how he would be judged—not only by history, but also by God.

No doubt countless people live in a gray zone of uncertainty today in Ukraine and Russia. In Ukraine, many men are women are fighting, risking and in many cases sacrificing their lives, not knowing what the outcome of this sacrifice will be. Many others are fleeing, whether from Ukraine or from Russia, seeking to escape the war and terror Putin is exacting both in Ukraine and within Russia. Then there is a financial ruin many face as a result of Putin’s invasion. What can be done? Whatever it is, the answer will not be obvious. Responsibility will require choices to be made even in a situation where no option is ideal. Indeed, it might appear no option is even tolerable.

The State as Ordered by God

Why did Bonhoeffer believe he risked incurring guilt for taking part in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler? As I have suggested, the very idea might appear odd today. Hitler is the exceptional case, even for those with pacifist sensibilities. Many would be inclined to think Bonhoeffer took a big personal risk, but that he did so in the service of an unambiguously moral end. Bonhoeffer himself was less certain about that.

In order to understand why, it’s necessary to keep in mind that Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian for whom the doctrine of the two kingdoms was important throughout his life. According to this Lutheran political theology, Christ is present in the world both in the church and in the state. This entails that Bonhoeffer maintained a great deal of respect for the state as a mandate given by God. The state and its leaders are not to be resisted on a whim, or simply because of a difference of political opinion. Indeed, resistance is called for only in an extremely exceptional case, when the basic institutions and structures of society have completely broken down. Even then, one risks getting it wrong. One must act responsibly, which doesn’t ensure one will remain innocent. Indeed, in Bonhoeffer’s view, responsibility requires the acceptance of guilt.    

For Bonhoeffer, both the church and the state are characterized by their own mandate or mission: the church is there to preach the Gospel, while the state is there to create peace and order. The sinfulness of humanity means that without order and coercion, the strong will prey on the weak and utter chaos will ensue. This side of the eschaton, the state ensures that a reasonable peace among societies can endure, and thus allows the church to fulfill its own mission of preaching the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

However, in extraordinary situations, such as when Bonhoeffer found himself living in the rise of Nazi Germany, there comes a time when the church must openly speak out against the state. But he believed these times are rare indeed. For Bonhoeffer, the church should not dictate what the state should do on everyday policy decisions. In doing so, the church would be abandoning its own mandate and attempting to take over the state’s mandate. It is only when the state ceases to be a state—when its character fundamentally changes—that he believed the church must speak out and resist.

Bonhoeffer speaks of the state imposing “too much order” or “to little order.” Too much order is when the state imposes such harsh restrictions on the lives of citizens that their basic freedoms are curtailed. Too little order is when the state ceases to fulfill its mandate to establish a tolerable peace that allows a society to endure through time.

The benefit of Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran reticence to critique the state was that when he decided to speak out—by openly opposing Hitler and his Nazi regime—it meant something.

Barmen Declaration

Bonhoeffer and Barth were both deeply involved in the Confessing Church in Germany during the 1930s. This was a movement within the German Protestant Church which sought to resist the infiltration of National Socialist ideology into the church’s witness. In 1934, a synod of the Confessing Church was held in the German city of Barmen, leading to the famous Barmen Declaration. This declaration begins with the claim:

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

The Barmen Declaration.

It pairs this opening statement with a concomitant rejection:

We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.

The Barmen Declaration.

By this rejection, the confessors at Barmen rejected the ideology of the “German Christians,” who sought to align the Christian message with National Socialist ideology. According to this Nazi theology, the history and culture of the German people served as a source of authority alongside that of God’s revelation in scripture. The confessors at Barmen rejected this infiltration of nationalist elements into Christian teaching, thus putting themselves on a collision course with Adolf Hitler.

Karl Barth was the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, and his theological sensibilities can be seen throughout the document. Though involved in the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer was not present at Barmen as he was serving German congregations in London at that time. Nevertheless, Barmen would set the course for the German church struggle in the years to come.

For both Barth and Bonhoeffer, it was imperative that the church and the state remain distinct. The church should not try to govern society, but neither should the state interfere in the church’s proclamation of the Gospel. This conviction helped Barth and Bonhoeffer be ahead of the curve in resisting Nazism. Even before it was clear exactly how Hitler’s reign would turn out, even when the worst was yet to come, their theological convictions provided resources for them to resist Hitler’s aims of coordinating the church along with all social institutions with Nazi ideology.

Relevance Today?

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, what can we learn from Barth and Bonhoeffer? It depends on who the “we” is. What they would say to the church in Ukraine would be different from what they might say to the church in the United States, or in Russia, for that matter.

Neither theologian would encourage the view that America and the western powers are purely righteous actors fighting against pure evil. Both would question the state ideologies that are all too easily absorbed by the churches and incorporated into the proclamation of the Gospel. Both would, however, side with the victims of war and against the aggressors. And lastly, both would contend that God’s desire is for peace—but that in extraordinary circumstances, and especially in cases of self-defense—armed resistance can be necessary and justified.

In September of 1938, Hitler was poised to attack Czechoslovakia. German tanks were at the border, and speculation mounted as to what Hitler was going to do—not unlike how the situation in Ukraine unfolded in recent months.

At that time a letter emerged from Karl Barth to Josef Hromadka, a Czech professor of theology, in which Barth made the remarkable statement:

Every Czech soldier who fights and suffers will be doing so for us too, and—I say this without reservation—he will also be doing it for the church of Jesus, which in this atmosphere of Hitler and Mussolini must become the victim either of ridicule or of extermination.

For Barth, as for Bonhoeffer, there are boundary cases, or moments of extreme emergency, when even Christians must fight. But the moment should not be entered into lightly.

Soon after the Nazi rise to power in Germany, Bonhoeffer wrote an essay entitled “The Church and the Jewish Question,” which includes this famous passage:

There are thus three possibilities for action that the church can take vis-à-vis the state: first (as we have said), questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does. Second is service to the victims of the state’s actions. The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. “Let us work for the good of all.” These are both ways in which the church, in its freedom, conducts itself in the interest of a free state…The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 12, Berlin: 1932-1933, edited by Larry L. Rasmussen (Minneapolis, 2009), 365.

Admirers of Bonhoeffer tend to skim over most of this paragraph and focus on the last sentence, which many mistakenly assume refers to violent resistance against the state. However, as Michael DeJonge has persuasively argued, it refers to the church making a concrete ecumenical declaration regarding the state’s actions.

But when it comes to Ukraine, we should not ignore the second option Bonhoeffer mentions: the church’s obligation to serve all who find themselves victimized by the state and its societal order, whether they are Christians or not. Few of us can remain unmoved at the images and stories of Ukrainians fighting for their lives against Putin’s attack. But the victims also include the Russian people, who are themselves suffering under Putin’s tyrannical rule and will to war.

Bonhoeffer encourages us to think of this issue not merely as Americans or westerners, but as Christians who are members of the global church. And among other things, that means learning about and keeping in contact with the churches both in Ukraine and Russia—and finding ways to support their ministry among the victims of war.

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© Joshua Mauldin, 2022.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “Destruction War Ukraine Banner Flag Building” by WiR_Pixs is licensed under the Pixabay License.