Vantage - Columbia Theological Seminary

Where Bonhoeffer Found Hope

by Walter B. Tennyson ’93

Contentious times may well be the leading cause of despair in the church. At a moment when Christians might step forward into the world’s violence and ecological crisis with reconciliation and vision, we, in fact, embody the very evils of sectarianism and toxicity we deplore in the world. Yet in the midst of the rocky ground of denominational politics, the parching demands of time and money and the choking weeds of post-denominational culture, God the sower faithfully spreads seeds of good news.

The memory of one such occasion in my congregation, Broadway Presbyterian in Manhattan, is a story that not only gives me inspiration to preach (though I often don’t feel up to it) but might inspire weary Christians to persevere on important issues (though we often don’t seem to be very effective). On a Sunday in June of 1939, not long before he would return from New York to Germany following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Dietrich Bonhoeffer—who had earlier that day listened to the renowned Harry Emerson Fosdick preach at Riverside Church—attended the evening service at Broadway.

Bonhoeffer’s day had begun in despair. Even the towering Gothic cathedral built with Rockefeller money and the elegant words of one of America’s greatest homileticians had left him flat. His diary records: “Service in Riverside Church. Quite unbearable. The whole thing was a respectable, self-indulgent, self-satisfied religious celebration. Such sermons make for libertinism, egotism, and indifference.” The biographer Eberhard Bethge saw in such comments the basis for Bonhoeffer’s later suggestion of a “religionless” Christianity.

But the despair of the morning was not the last word recorded that day. We don’t know what faith or memory inspired him to go to church at Broadway Presbyterian that night, but his words provide a rare insight into the piety that inspires modern saints to be bold and courageous: “Now the day has had a good ending, I went to church again. The sermon was astonishing on “our likeness with Christ”. . . A completely biblical sermon—the sections on “we are blameless like Christ,” “we are tempted like Christ” were particularly good . . . I was glad about this sermon.”

Cognitive dissonance arises when we consider the theological labels attached to the two preachers and churches that day. Riverside and Harry Emerson Fosdick embodied theological Liberalism. The church was founded after Fosdick was forced from New York City Presbytery over his refusal to affirm what one faction of pastors considered “essentials” of belief (sound familiar?). Broadway was the home of the “five fundamentals” developed by a previous pastor, Walter Buchanan, to ensure that candidates for ordination adhered to biblical standards.The preacher Bonhoeffer praised that night was John McComb, a friend of the fundamentalist J. Gresham Machen (of Greek School fame) until the two parted ways over Machen’s insistence that theological conservatives were duty-bound to leave the Presbyterian denomination.

Bonhoeffer’s inspiration tingles ears in our time because of its bracing reminder that inspiration and prophetic action are not as dependent as we often imagine on the alliances, coalitions, and ideologies to which we cling. The faith that led this Christian martyr to return to Europe and work actively against the Nazi regime found sustenance even in the contentious first decades of the “fundamentalist-modernist” controversies. As we grasp in our time for the kind of mettle needed to face the anxiety of terror, the reflexive reliance on military might and the erosion of a public ethos of care for the most vulnerable, we might find hope in the faithfulness of the sower and the unexpected patches of fertile soil into which the seed falls.

We despair about the survival of the church in a post-Christian world that no longer seems to supply enough foot soldiers for the established denominations and their offshoots both to wage continuous war. We long to know that Jeremiah’s promise “to give you a future with hope” applies to our ministries and institutions. Bonhoeffer, though, warned of confusing peacefulness in the church with the prospering of the gospel: “precisely here [in America], where the struggle for the right creed is not the factor which governs everything, the unity of the church is more distant than where creed alone unites and divides the church.”

Ernesto Cardenal has said that “the world is not like a picture painted by an artist centuries ago which now hangs untouchable in a museum. It is more like a work of art in constant process of creation, still in a studio.” Remembering how one of the great public theologians of our time drew from the materials at hand to paint an alternative picture of how Europe and the world should look might offer inspiration to those of us standing before our own canvas, dabbing at our palette for a dash of hope.

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