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The Challenge and Charm of “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.”

The film “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin” was released in the United States in late November 2024. It has been called a historical drama thriller film, though how “historical” it is at various points can be disputed. The film was written, produced, and directed by Todd Komarnicki. Most of the cast have German-sounding names, like Jonas Dassler, August Diehl, Nadine Heidenreich, and Moritz Bleibtreu.

This may explain why many characters in the film speak with a heavy German accent. During my first viewing of the film, this annoyed me: the film is in English. Viewers know that Bonhoeffer was German and spoke German with Germans in Germany. It is unnecessary to carry German accentuation into delivery of an English script. That’s a petty objection but one that irked me enough to keep a critical guard up as I watched. It’s also unfair to the actors, since many actually are Germans, and it shows in their English diction.

In my first viewing, my critical guard was probably up too high. I expected and detected historical inaccuracies, something numerous reviewers have by now pointed out. I found this to be a formidable challenge to giving the movie empathetic consideration. Bonhoeffer’s fictional childhood fantasy of eating strawberries to become invisible, repeated as last words before he was hanged, did not work for me. He was not hanged at the location where the movie shows him serving communion to fellow prisoners but several days later at the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Many statements uttered by Bonhoeffer in the film, whether in sermons or conversations, did not mesh with what I have read by and about Bonhoeffer.

Most of all, I did not hear the clear gospel notes in the film that I associate with the historical Bonhoeffer (I’ll come back to that) and his writings. Those notes are there in formal ways—one hears reference to Jesus and salvation through him—but not with the nuance, clarity, and prominence that one finds in two of his best-known books, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together.

Many have observed that if Bonhoeffer was laser-focused on any particular Christian doctrine and its implications, it would be christology. The movie failed to represent this focus adequately.

So after my first viewing, negative takeaways predominated. Yet because people in my church were asking me what I thought about it, I subjected myself to a second viewing. I wanted to be in a better position to offer charitable but accurate observations.

Before I turn to that second viewing, let me come back to the historical Bonhoeffer. I’m thinking here of a famous chapter in biblical scholarship called the quest of the historical Jesus. In the nineteenth century, as Western Protestant theology in European universities tilted increasingly toward liberalism, many scholars concluded that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels was more mythical than true-to-fact. In the course of decades, books appeared claiming to depict Jesus as he really was, stripped of mythical claims and beliefs. The result was claimed to be the historical Jesus.

Jesus was and is the Son of God, so any comparison between him and Bonhoeffer is risky. But one thing they have in common (besides full humanity) is that different interpreters come up with different portraits of them both—in Jesus’ case, often presenting a Jesus who is largely the interpreter’s own mirror image. “The historical Jesus” of most nineteenth century liberal life-of-Jesus books supported nineteenth century liberal ideas.

This has happened to Bonhoeffer, too. A book that ably demonstrates this is Martin E. Marty’s biography, not of Bonhoeffer, but of his well-known posthumous collection of writings entitled Letters and Papers from Prison.[1] Marty shows, as a reviewer notes, how Bonhoeffer “has been claimed by East German Marxists, Evangelicals, God-is-dead theologians, mainline Protestants and Catholics, and secularists.”[2]

The historical Bonhoeffer occupied a temporal, social, political, and theological era that makes straight-across comparisons with political or theological visions or actions in the US right now hazardous. Share on XSo who and what was Bonhoeffer, actually? The challenge of “getting” him was brought home to me graphically some years ago when I was asked by a publisher to review a manuscript on Bonhoeffer’s life and thought. In checking the author’s quotations of Bonhoeffer, I realized that standard Bonhoeffer translations (which the author relied on) tended to render the word Gerechtigkeit as “justice” (like my Google translator just did when I checked). But in Luther’s translation of the Bible, Gerechtigkeit commonly translates the Greek word δικαιοσύνη, which is better rendered as “righteousness,” not “justice.”

Here are three examples from Romans (ESV translation, which like the Lutherbibel tends toward literal; italics added): “For in [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed” (1:17). “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law” (3:21). “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (4:3). In the ESV, “righteousness” translates δικαιοσύνη each of the 34 times that Paul uses the Greek word in Romans. The word “justice” never appears. In fact, it hardly appears anywhere in the canonical Pauline epistles in standard English translations (ESV, KJV, NASB/LSB; exceptions: Rom. 3:5 NRSV; 2 Cor. 7:11 NIV, CSB).

If Luther is speaking of the righteousness of God, and Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran) is speaking of Christ and the gospel in the same Pauline vein, switching God’s Gerechtigkeit (“righteousness”) to “justice” results in a different gospel message and perhaps even portrait of God.

The point here is not that one should never translate Bonhoeffer as speaking of “justice.” It is rather to be wary of casting Bonhoeffer as a champion of our own causes. The historical Bonhoeffer occupied a temporal, social, political, and theological era that makes straight-across comparisons with political or theological visions or actions in the US right now hazardous. He would probably have something prophetic (meaning: godly but critical) to say to anyone currently who would seek to clothe their cause with the moral authority that is commonly accorded (rightly, in my view) to Bonhoeffer.

This gets us back to my second viewing of the movie—and to what I will term its charm. I say charm not to trivialize but because after my first viewing I intuitively adopted a less stringent hermeneutical grid. Having confirmed that the movie was not a documentary, and that PR features like a depiction of Bonhoeffer in a trench coat holding a Luger (pistol) were signaling to prepare for a film unafraid of artistic license, I suppressed my mental list of what was wrong with the movie. I compiled instead a list of defensible features—aspects of the movie that could be justified on the supposition that it’s better for a movie audience in late 2024 to be reminded of things that are largely (and frequently totally) true about Bonhoeffer than for no movie airing these things to be produced at all.

There is a charm, an appeal, a justification, in showing how profoundly affected Bonhoeffer was by his interaction with African American Christians during his Union Seminary semesters. True, the movie downplays Bonhoeffer’s disdain for Union’s liberalism, which his neo-orthodox orientation (like that of Karl Barth) repudiated. And it fails to highlight the connection between the African American Baptists’ spiritual vitality and their high view of Scripture, a conviction Bonhoeffer later replicates in The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. An example from the latter: “Only in the Holy Scriptures do we learn to know our own history . . . But one who will not learn to handle the Bible for himself is not an evangelical Christian.”[3]

But the deep spirituality of the disadvantaged yet vibrant Black church undoubtedly gave impetus to much that was wholesome in Bonhoeffer’s theology and ethics, at the time and subsequently. It might have even marked a quantum leap in Bonhoeffer’s apprehension of the living Christ in a personal way. This is highlighted in the movie when the venerable black pastor asks Bonhoeffer at a large dinner of congregants how he, Bonhoeffer, had come to know the Lord. Bonhoeffer answers something like: “I have no idea what you mean.” It is possible that those were days when Bonhoeffer was moving from a more academic and ecclesial faith commitment to one in which his vaunted christological focus was taking on more powerfully personal form.

There is a charm in rehearsing the lesson repeated frequently in church history that faithful Christian life and witness often drives one into grave ethical quandaries. Back in the 1920s, a Swiss German professor who influenced Bonhoeffer, Adolf Schlatter, remarked that he never had to seek out challenges in the Christian life: they found him. God’s hand of blessing on Bonhoeffer in the form of the home that nurtured him, giftedness that favored him, and contacts who promoted him thrust him into no-win situations from the standpoint of personal comfort and survival. His training, talents, strong will, and deep sense of right and wrong marked him, it seems, as an agent (though neither a bona fide spy nor assassin) for God to pour out his grace to great effect in many lives, then and since, but also to require from Bonhoeffer agonizing decisions. These eventually proved to have lethal results.

There is a charm, and enduring importance, in recalling the widespread capitulation to Hitler and the Nazi movement that churches in Germany, liberal and conservative, did too little to check. The movie does well to highlight Martin Niemöller who later famously confessed his sin of not speaking up early and stridently enough. The same could be said of hundreds of other pastors and theologians at the time. If we watch the movie aright, we are stricken by the question: how am I guilty of similar cowardice or complicity in my personal, social, and perhaps political location?

There is charm in reaffirming the warning inherent in the Second Commandment (Exod. 20:4) that we should be wary of making idols or likenesses of God: don’t expect more from the medium of film (= images) than it can deliver when it comes to the thought and life of a man rightly regarded as a Christian martyr, who with sophisticated training and profundity pondered the deep things of God, and whose published thoughts occupy 17 volumes (in either the German or English editions; the movie’s statement that his writings fill 34 volumes mistakenly adds those two translations together).

The movie’s flaws and shortcomings do not negate its value as a means to refresh acquaintance with a church leader and Bible interpreter that every generation does well to engage anew. “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin” ensures that many in the 2020s will take up that engagement who otherwise would have not.


Notes:

[1] Martin E. Marty, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011). This book graces an innovative series called Lives of Great Religious Books.

[2] Peter Frick, on the back dust cover.

[3] Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1954), 54, 55. By “evangelical” (evangelisch) Bonhoeffer means “Protestant” and not Roman Catholic, not evangelical in the current American sense.

Image Credit: Angel Studios

Robert W. Yarbrough

Robert Yarbrough (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary. He is author of 1, 2, and 3 John in the Baker Exegetical Commentary Series, which he co-edits. Other books include The Salvation-Historical Fallacy? Reassessing the History of New Testament Theology; and The Gospel of John. With Walter Elwell he authored the widely used textbook Encountering the New Testament: A Historical and Theological Survey, which has been translated into numerous languages. At the popular level Dr. Yarbrough is author of The Kregel Pictorial Guide to the New Testament. Dr. Yarbrough and his wife, Bernadine, have two sons.

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