Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, theologian, friend, son and brother, student. That's the Bonhoeffer of Charles Marsh's new biography, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
As someone who has spent nearly two decades of his academic life reading and learning from Bonhoeffer, I was excited to read Marsh's biography. Marsh's previous book on Bonhoeffer -- Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford, 1994) -- had been such an earthquake in Bonhoeffer studies, that a biography by Marsh had such high hopes to fulfill.
And Marsh doesn't disappoint.
His biography of Bonhoeffer avoids so many of the pitfalls of recent Bonhoeffer biographies. There's no agenda (like in Metaxas' Bonhoeffer). And while Marsh's biography will never replace Bethge's monumental works, Charles Marsh has written an accessible work that presents the real Bonhoeffer -- a real person with real faults as well as real gifts.
Bonhoeffer, the pacifist, may have been involved with the Abwehr and its conspiracies against the Third Reich, but his role is rightfully written as unclear. Bonhoeffer may have died a gruesome death, but he did so as a friend and a theologian. There were most likely no apocryphal prayers at the end, but he was never abandoned by, nor did Bonhoeffer abandon, God. Marsh writes clearly about real events in researched and scholarly fashion.
Bonhoeffer does indeed love Maria von Wedermayer, and Marsh writes very delicately of their tortured and surprising engagement. But Marsh is also fair to highlight Bonhoeffer's life-long sense of estrangement and isolating depression. Hence, Bonhoeffer's relationship to Eberhard Bethge takes a great deal of attention.
And it's here that I wish Marsh had given us less supposition and more historical reflection.
True, Bonhoeffer and Bethge were the closest of friends. What Marsh fails to distinguish is that friendships can have strong desires without turning sexual. He's careful to insist that neither ever admit to homosexuality, but not careful enough to leave the reader with no scandalous overtones.
What Marsh does best, though, is explore Bonhoeffer's formative experiences in America, particularly the impact of Bonhoeffer's encounter with black Christians in Harlem and during his travels in the South. He refutes the notion once-and-for-all that Bonhoeffer was just a stuffy German theologian content with his bourgeoisie German experience.
Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., his Abyssinian Baptist Church, and Negro spirituals and blues, as well as the indefatigable campaigner Reinhold Niebuhr -- they all have such a massive and forceful impact on Bonhoeffer's theological vision. They brought the ivory tower into action on the street. And thereby enabled and ennobled Bonhoeffer's resistance in Germany.
I think that's Marsh's greatest contribution through this biography. In Marsh's Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we were introduced to Bonhoeffer's unique Christological response to the German idealistic philosophy (like Kant and Husserl). In Strange Glory, we get the rest of the story.
While I think Marsh still falls short in connecting all the dots, there's so much to this biography that it can't be dismissed.
I wish Marsh had dealt more with the contents of Bonhoeffer's books in the biographical context. He does this, to some degree, with Discipleship and Life Together (pp. 242-258), but there's so much more that might be said about the other, less "popular" works.
Bonhoeffer ultimately learned so much more of his theology outside the academy than inside it. That reality makes Bonhoeffer so accessible to pastors and Sunday School teachers. And it helps to see how so much of the glory of God is to be found in strangeness, not just in the normalcy of ivory towers. And it helps inspire a new freshness to faith.
That's why I can't over-encourage this book's reading. It's that good!
This is a beautiful, even if strange, book. Because it's more than the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's the story of God in Jesus Christ, too. We can't tell one without telling the other.
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I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this honest review.