[September 2004 journal entry]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- with his decision to return to Germany in July 1939, his subsequent participation in covert/violent resistance against the Nazis, and his courage to begin radically rethinking his core ideas -- stood out for me in a singular way among the seminal thinkers in the Western tradition as I made the move into being ‘with the world face to face’. Going beyond either the ‘scrapheap’ Job or the Ecclesiastes author, Dietrich assigned “unparalleled value” to the experience of learning to see “from below” (i.e., from the perspective of the sufferer). His experience from the time of his doctoral studies through 1938 (by which time the Nazis had crushed the Confessing Church as a form of civil disobedience) and my experience from the time of my doctoral studies to the ‘imprisoning’ last three years of my first wife’s battle with multiple sclerosis (1984-87) differed in one foundational way – i.e., Dietrich during his university studies stepped back/away from Harnack et al and their participation in modern critical scholarship as he began to study closely and eventually came to collaborate with Barth (who, in the 1920s and in intentional contrast to Harnack et al, was attempting to recover as much as possible of the classic Protestant/Reformed ‘from above’ methodology/theology). I studied Barth carefully in a doctoral seminar and presented him (as I did all seminal thinkers) as forcefully as possible in the ‘Current (20th century) Religious Thinking’ graduate course I taught (1979-92). But in my personal spiritual and ethical journey, I had no ‘Barth phase’. To the degree that Dietrich drew from and aligned with Barth, he (1) neither would nor could consider himself to be a historian first, then a theologian, and (2) would not have felt pressure to engage radically (i.e., into the root) the implications of the ‘world come of age’ realization. His immediate conversation partners during his time as assistant pastor with a German-speaking Church in Barcelona (1928) and his time with New York City’s Union Seminary (1930-31) put no such pressure on him as far as I have been able to determine. The cultural/moral deterioration in Germany that resulted from Hitler’s coming to power seemed to reinforce Barth’s bleak perspective on ‘the world’. I suspect Dietrich’s valued place within his largely ‘non-religious’ extended family contributed directly and deeply to his having a wider, more complex, and more penetrating insight than Barth (who was in Basel after 1934) into the German situation during the Confessing Church pre-war years of resistance. Dietrich could have retained some variation on Barthian methodology/theology if he had remained in New York City in 1939. Instead, he returned to Germany after only a few weeks. His decision to return to Germany minus an intent to ride out the war huddled with the contained Confessing Church put before him in a new/radical way the methodological challenges associated with taking a ‘non-religious’ approach to being ‘with the world – come of age -- face to face’. I am not surprised to find him explaining his disappointment with and his distance from Barth in his prison letters to Eberhard and Renate. Nor am I surprised to find in his prison correspondence frequent requests for and reactions to books about science, philosophy, history, physics, . . . . I think Dietrich felt an urgency to deepen his understanding of ‘the world come of age’ free of a Barthian perspective on ‘the world’. The list I have kept re my reading since 1992 demonstrates that gaining the necessary orientation to be ‘with the world face to face’, to remain ‘non-religious’, and to keep seeing ‘from below’ requires an ever-deepening inquiry, self-examination, and re-thinking. This reading followed naturally for me from my years as a student and teacher of the history of ideas.
