Bonhoeffer Was Wrong

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Why Bonhoeffer now? Six years ago, in June 2000, PBS presented the docudrama "Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace," which, in my opinion (NCR, June 16, 2000), was particularly relevant then because it fit in with our turn-of-the-millennium concentration on World War II as both a historical and moral event.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the German Lutheran theologian who was author of The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison. He studied briefly at New York's Union Theological Seminary in 1930, and developed a theory of "religionless Christianity." He taught that we should not use the concept of God to "fill in the gaps" in our understanding of the world, helped rescue some Jews and, along with several members of his large family, participated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was arrested and hanged in 1945. With the help of liberal Protestant theologians like Harvey Cox, Bonhoeffer's ideas were rediscovered and became influential in the 1960s.

In 2000 I compared Bonhoeffer's story to that of Sergeant York, the World War I hero whose 1941 film biography helped us put aside our natural resistance to even a just war. Both Alvin York and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were peace-loving religious …