The Third Reich and a Church of Disenchantment: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christological Imagination as Resistance to Spiritual Abuse
For most of his life as a theologian, one question gnawed at the mind of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During his time studying with colleagues of Berlin or Union Seminary in New York City; his time worshiping in the lively Black Churches of Harlem or the Catholic Churches in the inexhaustible and magnificent Rome; his time pastoring in vibrant Barcelona or sprawling London; or leading an underground seminary in Finkenwalde with dearest friends—he always found himself coming back to one question: Who is Jesus Christ for us today?¹ But in July 1944, writing poetry from a prison cell in Tegel Prison, isolated, lonely, hungry, and nine months before the Nazis would hang him for treason at Flossenbürg concentration camp, he asked another question: Who am I?
“Who Am I?” is a poem in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer explores “true individualism, as opposed to the fictional selves fostered by the will to power and the technological and bureaucratic age.”² The poem explores the question of the self’s identity with answers provided by others throughout. Others tell him he is cheerful, friendly, and that he bears “the days of misfortune / equably, smilingly, proudly, / like one accustomed to win.”³ However, who Bonhoeffer appears to be and who he is within are far from the same: “Am I then really all that which other men tell of? / Or am I only what I know of myself, / restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage.” Applying a word to himself that he reserved for some of his harshest criticisms, Bonhoeffer asks, “Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, / and before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?” The poem is a struggle of hypocrisy.
Throughout his writings, Bonhoeffer critiqued hypocrisy—especially in the Church and her leaders. Had he too become a shepherd peddling cheap grace? Inwardly wrestling with the cost of following Christ while outwardly exhibiting “grace without the cross,”⁴ living as if he were outside the sovereign and costly rule of Christ? The poem ends to answer this question: “Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. / Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.” Whoever he is, he is under Christ’s rule, and even in prison, remains one with the community, the Body of Christ: his identity, not in what others or even he himself thinks, but in what God knows him to be in Christ, as one with the Church. Herein lies the crushing blow to ecclesiological hypocrisy and abusive churches found throughout Bonhoeffer’s corpus, just as it lays a blow to his own wrestlings: the sovereign rule of Christ in the Church, or, put simply: Christ existing as church-community. As the German Christians wrestled with the sovereign rule of Christ over their community, and such rule was empirically replaced by the Führer,⁵ so they lost their identity as a Church that existed for others. While preaching of a Christ who came, died, and rose again as a substitute for the vulnerable under the reign of Satan and sin, the Church lived with eyes turned aside to the persecution of the vulnerable under Germany’s Third Reich; a hypocrisy that rendered the Church’s identity blurred in the shame and comfort of state acceptance. Michael Northcott is right to highlight, “More than anything else, it is this that can explain how it was that German Christians could celebrate word and sacrament in a Church located just across the road from the gates of Auschwitz.”⁶ Who are we? Who is the Church? Are we defined by others or by Christ, by the rule of our abusive shepherds or by our Good Shepherd? The question must be asked: how can we as Christians celebrate word and sacrament in a Church bombarded by accusations of abuse, as if the problems were merely across the street? But before we can address that question, and the courage to even ask it, we must first ask Bonhoeffer’s question of ourselves. If the Church is Christ to the world, what does that say about our abuses and hypocrisy? To answer this question, we’ll need to understand what Bonhoeffer meant when he wrote, “The Church is Christ existing as community;”⁷ and we’ll need the imaginative tenacity to explore what Bonhoeffer’s Cäcilie, a character in the short story he wrote from Tegel Prison, meant when she said “You mustn’t confuse Christianity with its pathetic representatives.”⁸
The Church today is dealing with a plague of moral blindness, just the same. We too are far too muted, and totalitarianism has taken hold in many areas of Christ’s beautiful bride. In all her different stripes, she seems to be colored as one: a catholicity of tyranny, a unity of universal abuse, an unholy people looking the other way as their leaders cause unimaginable harm. According to a 2018 study led by Lisa Oakley, 63% of survey respondents reported having experienced spiritual abuse.⁹ To put that in perspective, 66% of the voters in the 1933 church elections supported the integration of Nazism and Christianity.¹⁰ Besides statistics, the stories are numerous: Catholics¹¹ and Protestants¹² are dealing with an ecclesiological rot in the ministry, and accusations of spiritual abuse abound.¹³ However, as Oakley and Kinmond have observed, “Although there is now some official recognition of [spiritual abuse], understanding and coverage of this issue is still very limited.”¹⁴ Michael Kruger writes about this same silence: “Despite the pileup of churches wrecked by domineering leaders—not to mention the merry-go-round of abuse scandals in just the last decade—some churches and pastors still take a posture of defensiveness.”¹⁵ According to Kruger, this posture of defensiveness, rather than from a heart of humble self-reflection, comes from “a spirit of self-justification designed to minimize the concern over abuse.”¹⁶ Like in Bonhoeffer’s day, the Church today, coveting security and honor, has largely been mute when it should be crying out. The Church has looked on while injustice and violence have been done, under the cover of the name of Christ. But there remains a hope: this is neither the case for all the Church nor is it the future of the Church. The Lord has promised one, holy, catholic Church, and so today the Church is holy, and he will see to it that she remains so tomorrow. It is this renewing work of God within the Church that has led to the growing outcry, from the Church and her leaders, regarding spiritual abuse.¹⁷ But the Church is also in need of a reassessment of who we are today and a reimagining of who we need to be. When 63% of those surveyed report experiencing spiritual abuse, while the Church remains holy, something is very obviously wrong. This is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer can serve us, if we are willing to listen. Without comparing abusive pastors or church cultures to the trope of “Hitler” or “Nazis,” the moral blindness and hypocrisy that leads to both is too similar to pass by the wisdom of the Lutheran martyr.
Christ and the Church for Others
“The church is church only when it is there for others.”¹⁸ What justification could Bonhoeffer have for such a statement? Before we explore what he meant by this, and what this “for others” might look like, we must first find the warrant for this new mark of the Church where Bonhoeffer would have placed it: his Christology. According to Andreas Pangritz, the resonant melody, the chorus-foundation, the “cantus firmus,” of Bonhoeffer’s theological development “from the beginning to the end” was the question, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?”¹⁹ Pangritz goes on to write that for Bonhoeffer, “The centrality of Christ serves as the decisive motive for opening the horizons of the church towards the world in its concrete reality.”²⁰ We cannot understand Bonhoeffer’s theological development or his historical opposition to Hitler without his Christology, and, according to his German editor, Christoph Strohm, we do not understand his Christology if it does not “characteristically determine” his ecclesiology.²¹
Student notes²² from Bonhoeffer’s Lectures on Christology, given in Berlin in 1933, open with Bonhoeffer’s words, “Teaching about Christ begins in silence.”²³ In the heart of Germany, two months after the Enabling Act effectively formalizing Hitler’s dictatorship and the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was established, Bonhoeffer began his Christology lectures with a call to silence; a reminder that, according to Marsh, “The truth concerning Christ’s nature and person placed moral demands on humanity and the individual.”²⁴ The first of these moral demands was a recognition of our humble state, and therefore posture, before the all-glorious Christ. In his announcement of the Enabling Act, Hitler had sounded a very similar theme, “the Government of the Reich. . . regard[s] Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation.”²⁵ However, for Hitler, this morality was not one of silent humility but declarative dictatorship and blind submission to the Führer. Unlike the Nazis who proclaimed a God revealed “through the means of Volk, race and the nation,”²⁶ Bonhoeffer proclaimed a Christ beyond mere reason; a Lordship over politics, tyrants, and all human attempts to understand the Divine apart from God’s self-revelatory condescension (Rom 10:14-17).²⁷ The Nazi propaganda was simple: silence the dissenters. Bonhoeffer answered: be silent before the Word of Christ.
How then can one come to know this transcendent Divine? From his earliest work of fiction as a young man living with his parents, to his later work as the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Gorebelles found the only answer to this question in Hitler. In his 1936 speech, “Our Führer,” Goebbels spoke of Hitler’s visit to Cologne and described it as “religion in the deepest and most mysterious sense. A nation affirmed God through its advocate, and put its fate and life confidently in his hands.”²⁸ Throughout his time with the Nazis, Goebbels would call the people to put their faith in Hitler, to look to him as the man of fate and the assurance of God’s provident work in history, to know God’s work through the hand of the Führer. In his Lectures on Christology, Bonhoeffer would agree in part: we come to know the Divine through his work in history (Heb. 1:1-4). In part, however, because this work was not at the hands of the dictator, but the incarnate Christ and his Church; not in the leader over us, but in the God who comes down to us and for us. The Christ above us must be known as the One for us, or he will not be known, or at least truly spoken of, at all. We need a Special Revelation from God; a Word from the Divine that condescends to our weakness, and before this Word, we must gather to live out his call.
For Bonhoeffer, then, it is never simply a question of who Christ is, but of who Christ is for us. The former is a question of metaphysics that can never be fully answered; the God who is above us. The latter is a question of revelation that, while not comprehending Christ, seeks to know Christ through his works for us; the incarnate Word of God. Therefore, how we come to know God is not through the study of metaphysics (words about transcendent divinity)²⁹ or political speeches on the Third Reich, but through silence (receiving the revelation of Christ, and receiving as worship). So too, the question of the Church—the place in which Christ is present—is never merely one of theology, but of a community presently living for others (Isa 1:17).³⁰ Therefore, how we come to know the Church is not through obsessive introspection (digging for seeds of divinity in one another) or rooting out the weeds of dissent, but through our living in the world (worship, like a prayer, for others). To think otherwise, as Bonhoeffer would famously write in his Discipleship, is to adopt a cheap grace Christology; a cut-rate doctrine of the Church; the grace of Christ present with the Church “as doctrine, as principle. It means forgiveness of sins as a general truth; it means God’s love as merely a Christian idea of God.”³¹ Theology, for Bonhoeffer, never exists for its own sake, and this goes for his Christology as much as for his ecclesiology. Therefore, who the Church is is a question of who Christ is for us, and who Christ is for us today will dictate what the Church is today.
What does it mean for the Church to be there for others? In direct opposition to the German Christians, Bonhoeffer called the Church to imitate Christ. Not to hide a suffering Christ behind the triumphs of the Reich and the Aryan race, but to expose and illuminate Christ in their own stellvertretung (vicarious representative action).³² In his unfinished work, Ethics, Bonhoeffer defined such action as responsibility: “This life, lived in answer to the life of Jesus Christ (as the Yes and No to our life), we call ‘responsibility’ [‘Verantwortung’].”³³ Here, we begin to see a thread to our thesis on abusive pastors as pathetic representatives of Christ. To be responsible for our actions and particularly for others is to be human; to bear the image of God in Christ. However, to the extent that we abdicate that responsibility or use that responsibility to harm, we are no longer human in the truest sense of the word: no longer reflecting the image of Christ, but disfiguring it with our own (Micah 6:8). While German Christians ignored Christ’s call to take responsibility for their actions and the injustice around them, Bonhoeffer called them back to Christ; it is this stellvertretung that brought the Body to be; and therefore it is such vicarious living that gives the body both its form and its life in the world.³⁴ This is the life of Christ through the Church in the world. This is what Bonhoeffer meant when he spoke of Christ existing as community, and this is what we mean when we speak of the Church as Christ for others.³⁵
We can call this act of resistance, to summarize Bonhoeffer’s point, responsible advocacy. As Bonhoeffer was teaching the Church that to understand Christ is to understand him as advocate, as representative, he was calling the Church to embrace this true humanity of responsible action. It is only as the Church imagines what Christ himself would do, that they then can act accordingly. This is Christological imagination as resistance, and it calls and forms the Church to be an advocate. How often, however, the German Christians turned their responsibility to use their ecclesiological authority to speak up in advocacy for the weak into an abuse of that authority to praise the abusers, to excuse their actions, and to even rebuke those who spoke out. As Joel Lawrence has written, instead of being unified around oppositions to the abuse of authority by the State, “the church instead made its goal self-preservation.” This, Bonhoeffer saw, was “the fundamental error that caused the church to fail in its resistance to Hitler.” While the Church was called to exist for others, as Christ himself did, “Her desire to keep a slice of power and respectability meant that she sacrificed her true calling of being for those who were victims of the Third Reich.”³⁶
The Church and the One Above Others
While already having the answer hinted at above, let us now turn to the question at hand: what does all of this have to do with spiritual abuse and abusive pastors? As referenced in Part I, spiritual abuse within the Church is a reality that desperately needs to be addressed with greater clarity. Spiritual abuse is real, and as Matthew Henry wrote, “Church-power and church-censures are often abused.”³⁷ Collin Hansen has written that the problem of spiritual abuse “is the next pressing issue our churches must face. For far too long we’ve tolerated this kind of leadership that should plainly disqualify pastors by several standards in Titus 1:7–8.”³⁸ Patrick J. Knapp has shown that religious and spiritual abuse has existed since Genesis, to the time of the Lord’s incarnation, and up to today.³⁹ Michael Kruger pointed to the problem of spiritual abuse throughout evangelicalism.⁴⁰ As Kruger shows throughout his book by the use of examples, there are countless stories of such abuse, found in smaller churches and denominations that go without any press of celebrity.
So what is spiritual abuse? The term was first popularized by David Johnson and Jeff Vanvonderen in 1991 with the release of their book The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse. They define Spiritual abuse as “The mistreatment of a person who is in need of help, support or greater spiritual empowerment, with the result of weakening, undermining, or decreasing that person’s spiritual empowerment.”⁴¹ Michael Kruger offers a more intimate definition, and ties it more essentially to authority, when he writes,
“Spiritual abuse is when a spiritual leader—such as a pastor, elder, or head of a Christian organization—wields his position of spiritual authority in such a way that he manipulates, domineers, bullies, and intimidates those under him as a means of maintaining his own power and control, even if he is convinced he is seeking biblical and kingdom-related goals.”⁴²
Finally, David Ward’s definition can be used to summarize: spiritual abuse is “a misuse of power in a spiritual context whereby spiritual authority is distorted to the detriment of those under its leadership.”⁴³ To be clear, this is not Hitler, nor do we want to impose a Hitler-perspective on an issue out of context. However, when Bonhoeffer wrote his Life Together during 1938, the comparisons between the self-centered Church and the Führer were unmistakable. Writing broadly and referencing beyond the walls of Church, Bonhoeffer made this connection between self-centered pastors and Hitler clear: “Every personality cult that bears the mark of the distinguished qualities, outstanding abilities, powers, and talents of an other, even if these are of a thoroughly spiritual nature, is worldly and has no place in the Christian community of faith.”⁴⁴ The German Christians wanted authority figures who ruled with charisma and strength, and herein is why they supported Adolf Hitler. German Christians, still reeling from the post-war treatment of Germany, longed for a leader who would take charge, be forceful and authoritative; they longed for a fighter, and that brought them a war. Sounding Michael Kruger’s often repeated note regarding the Church’s longing today for such leaders,⁴⁵ Bonhoeffer wrote, “The longing we so often hear expressed today for ‘episcopal figures,’ ‘priestly people,’ ‘authoritative personalities’ often enough stems from a spiritually sick need to admire human beings and to establish visible human authority because the genuine authority of service appears to be too insignificant.”⁴⁶
For Christ and his Church, however, “Genuine spiritual authority is to be found only where the service of listening, helping, forbearing, and proclaiming is carried out.”⁴⁷ This is stellvertretung (“vicarious representative action”), where the self is de-centered from reality by practices of listening, serving, forgiving, and sharing the gospel, and where all relationships within the community are imaginatively seen and known as mediated by Christ. To expand on this idea, Bonhoeffer posits a contrast between spiritual and self-centered communities, and it is this distinction that brings us to the face of our topic on spiritual abuse. The language Bonhoeffer uses throughout Life Together to describe the self-centered pastor is pregnant with images that bear the reality of spiritual abuse as the opposite reality of vicarious representative action.
For Bonhoeffer, the misuse of authority within the Church is a domineering leadership, contextualized by a condescending and defensive approach in which power is used manipulatively in the place of genuine love, for the purpose of centering the empowered self. It is self-centered, always refusing to represent the other at the cost of its own reputation. It is anti-christ and a pathetic representative of the Lord of the Church.⁴⁸ Will the Church hear Bonhoeffer’s words today? In the face of German Christians largely ignoring the atrocities of the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer highlighted the need for servants in the pastorate. Not brutes like Hitler, or cowards who would look the other way. We need to hear this word today. The Church then and the Church today “does not need brilliant personalities but faithful servants of Jesus and of one another. It does not lack the former, but the latter;”⁴⁹ the Church today must “place its confidence only in the simple servant of the word of Jesus, because it knows that it will then be guided not by human wisdom and human conceit, but by the word of the good shepherd;”⁵⁰ The Church today must settle the question of spiritual trust, something she has lost due to her complicity and cover-ups of spiritual abuse, “By the faithfulness with which people serve Jesus Christ, never by the extraordinary gifts they possess.”⁵¹ To hear these words, and to long for pastors who vicariously represent the weak, the suffering, the sinful—all of us—we need the imagination.
Christological Imagination as Resistance
How often have we seen pastors, whose authority has been given by God to be used to advocate for the vulnerable (Prov. 31:8-9),⁵² use that power to harm the vulnerable? How often have spiritual abuse victims turned to presbyteries and associations only to be rebuked for speaking up? Letters sent go ignored, constitutions are written to protect pastors and not the vulnerable, pastors who try to advocate get threatened or blackmailed, and those in power stay in power. The Church today must heed this call of Christ: to be responsible advocates for the vulnerable, and to resist, rather than ignore or excuse, abusive pastors in their midst. To heed this call of resistance, we must imaginatively see Christ and habituate his actions as an essential mark of the holy, catholic Church. This is Christ for us, and the Church existing as Christ for others.
As the world of German culture was crumbling around him under the weight and ravages of abuses by the State, Bonhoeffer saw the Church excuse, ignore, and even participate in the harm. His response was to teach on Christology. As we too watch many of the Church refusing to confront the abuses of its own leaders, what are we to do, but look to Christ, and remind ourselves that these abusive pastors, and those who cover for them, are “pathetic representatives.”⁵³ To be sure, every pastor will harm others—will sin against the Church—but not every pastor will abuse his authority to harm. While the Church must acknowledge the place of sin, we must not excuse abhorrent or unrepentant sin. God hates abusive shepherds and he calls us to flee them (1 Tim 3:1-5).
This means that somebody’s experience of spiritual abuse and cover-up does not define Christ or Christianity, but rather, shows a pathetic image of what Christians really are; an image that must not be excused nor imposed on every church or pastor. To impose that experience upon every Christian, pastor, and church is to misuse the imagination to, as Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together, “[Construct] its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become.” However, “Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ.”⁵⁴ Innumerable occasions show us that “a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image.”⁵⁵ Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community [because] those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, or by themselves.”⁵⁶ The imagination is not the problem, but rather, how it is used. We must not imagine that every Church is abusive, and at the same time, we must not imagine that our own pastors could never be abusive. The Church, then, must advocate for spiritual abuse victims in their vulnerability by not excusing the reality and truth of their experience or by defining the Church catholic by that experience. This takes imaginative resistance. It is a faith-driven exercise of the imagination to believe that abusive pastors do not represent Christ, the Good Shepherd, and so we must resist abusive pastors with a Christology that upholds both his transcendence (abusive pastors are not God) and his immanence (victims of spiritual abuse have Christ’s nearness in their hurt).
Finally, this imaginative Christology calls us to hope in what is not seen, to picture what we cannot see (Rom 8:24): someday the Church will be made complete and holy in Christ. To work to that end takes the imaginative resistance to pursue her sanctification even if it costs us our celebrities and our reputation. Having fled Germany in 1939 for America, Bonhoeffer soon concluded, “I made a mistake in coming to America. I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people.”⁵⁷ The Church must have the audacious hilaritas, that joy Bonhoeffer had even in prison, a joy in spite of reality,⁵⁸ to look forward and work forward for the day to come. We must say to those who have experienced spiritual abuse that they should flee that particular community, but not the Church, for she is beautiful and could use their love. Who better to help individual churches and the Church to ward off the wolves than those who have been bitten by them? Who else could help our churches hold cowardly shepherds who cover sin accountable than those who have had their hurts sinfully hidden from view? Those who have experienced abuse must be listened to and given a voice. The reports of abuse and cover-up, or church communities sinfully and unrepentantly harming others—these reports are manifold across the Church. In the same vein, by 1938, 85% of Confessing Church pastors (the Church confessionally opposed to Hitler and the Third Reich) swore an oath to Hitler for his forty-ninth birthday.⁵⁹ Yet, Bonhoeffer had hope for the future and wanted to help. If 85% of all Protestant churches were abusive and only 15% were faithful and true: that 15% would need the help of those who have been spiritually abused, for it is those who have faced the darkness of this evil who can have the imaginative courage to see what many of us can’t today or won’t tomorrow: that the Son of God who call his Church to live for others, is for us—for his Church.
Conclusion
Imagine it’s June, 1940. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his student Eberhard Bethge are enjoying an afternoon coffee in an open-air café on the peninsula of Memel, a Baltic village on the Sea (now part of Lithuania).⁶⁰ It's a clear afternoon, and the 34-year-old Bonhoeffer has just finished a poorly attended pastors’ meeting. To get to this serene spot for an afternoon break before a Confessing church service, Bonhoeffer and Bethge had to ferry to the peninsula “past submarine tenders and minesweepers,”⁶¹ and now they sit basking in the sun by the Baltic sea. Suddenly, the café’s loudspeaker comes on and announces that France has surrendered to Nazi forces. The crowded café erupts in celebration with people climbing on chairs and singing "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" (“Germany, Germany above all”). Bonhoeffer stands to his feet and raises his arm, the Hitler salute. Since February 1, 1933, just days after Hitler was appointed chancellor of the German Republic, Bonhoeffer had criticized the Führerprinzip and the moral blindness of German Christians who joined in praising their Leader. And now, to the confusion of his student and dear friend, Bonhoeffer is showing himself to be a member of the masses. Bonhoeffer quickly leans over to his dazed friend, “Raise your arm! Are you crazy?” He would later tell Bethge, “We shall have to run risks for very different things now, but not for that salute!”⁶² It was there in that sun-baked café, Bethge would write, “that Bonhoeffer’s double life began.”⁶³ One month later, Bonhoeffer would begin his service as a V-Mann (Verbindungsmann), a secret agent in military counterintelligence, working with a network of conspirators against Hitler and the Third Reich. While presenting as a member of the Inner-Ring of Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer was working to dismantle it, and many of his writings and sermons sought to do the same. Just three months after Bonhoeffer raised the Hitler salute, he would write, “[The Church] was mute when it should have cried out . . . The church has looked on while injustice and violence have been done, under the cover of the name of Christ.”⁶⁴ What, for Bonhoeffer, led the Church to such silence? “It has coveted security, tranquility, peace, property, and honor.”⁶⁵ In other words, as Bonhoeffer would critique in much of his writings and sermons, a desire for the security, prosperity, and honor that the Inner-Ring offered, led to great moral blindness. This is that hideous strength of desired inclusion which led to the moral blindness of many of the German Christians; a moral blindness that would allow and even encourage the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is this hideous strength that leads to spiritual abuse within our churches and it is the greater strength of a Christological imagination that can help us fight it.
The firm foundation in the face of war, the hope in the darkness of abuses of authority, is to imaginatively look back to who Christ is and to look forward to the promised blessings of sanctification. It is to this imaginative function that we must appeal when asking the question of how we are to address spiritual abuse in the Church. Bonhoeffer gives us both a picture of Christ as Pastor to imagine and hope in the future to dream of. In this, we have a christo-resistance to spiritual abuse. And for that, Bonhoeffer is of great help. He rebukes us all, and calls the Church to be for others, and he sets before us the image of God radiant in Christ loving his own to the end (John 13:1), and the Church made beautiful in him until then (Phil. 1:6).
¹ Kelly and Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eerdmans, 2003, 30.
² “Who Am I?”: Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry, ed. Bernd Wannenwetsch (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 17.
³ Translation by John Bowden, found in Who am I, 13.
⁴ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, vol. 4 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 44.
⁵ Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979).
⁶ “Who Am I?”: Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry, 19.
⁷ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, vol. 1 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 141.
⁸ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fiction from Tegel Prison, vol. 7 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, trans. Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 71–99.
⁹ Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys, Understanding Spiritual Abuse in Christian Communities (Bournemouth, UK: The National Centre for Post-Qualifying Social Work and Professional Practice, 2018), 3.
¹⁰ Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2001), 14.
¹¹ Doris Reisinger, “Victims Are Not Guilty! Spiritual Abuse and Ecclesiastical Responsibility,” Religions 13, no. 5 (2022): 427. See also Doris Reisinger, “The Loss of the Self—Spiritual Abuse of Adults in the Context of the Catholic Church,” Religions 13, no. 6 (2022): 509.
¹² McIlroy, David. “Abuse within Evangelical Churches and Organisations: Addressing the Vulnerabilities.” Cambridge Papers, May 2, 2025. See also Michael J. Kruger, Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2022).
¹³ As will be detailed in a later article, the definition of spiritual abuse we are adopting for this article is: “A misuse of power in a spiritual context whereby spiritual authority is distorted to the detriment of those under its leadership.” See: David J. Ward, “The Lived Experience of Spiritual Abuse,” Mental Health, Religion, & Culture 14, no. 9 (2011), 913.
¹⁴ Lisa Oakley and Kathryn Kinmond, Breaking the Silence on Spiritual Abuse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
¹⁵ Michael J. Kruger, Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2022), xvi.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ See Michael J. Kruger, Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2022); Wade Mullen, Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse and Freeing Yourself from Its Power (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2020); Lisa Oakley and Kathryn Kinmond, Breaking the Silence on Spiritual Abuse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 89–119; Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys, Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse: Creating Healthy Christian Cultures (London: SPCK, 2019); Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020); Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer, A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2020); David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen, The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse: Recognizing and Escaping Spiritual Manipulation and False Spiritual Authority within the Church (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1991); and Ken Blue, Healing Spiritual Abuse: How to Break Free from Bad Church Experiences (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993).
¹⁸ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, vol. 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 503.
¹⁹ Andreas Pangritz, “‘Who Is Jesus Christ, for Us, Today?,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 134.
²⁰ Ibid. 134-135.
²¹ Christoph Strohm, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” in Ecumenical, Academic and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, vol. 11 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 484.
²² Bonhoeffer’s Lectures were published based on the student notes of Zimmermann, Sperling, Gadow, and Pfeiffer, all of which share extensive agreement as to their contents.
²³ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology, trans. John Bowden (London: Collins, 1966), 27.
²⁴ Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Knopf, 2014), 170.
²⁵ Adolf Hitler, speech at the Reichstag, Berlin, 23 March 1933, in The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922–August 1939, ed. Norman H. Baynes, vol. 2 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), 1018.
²⁶ Joel Lawrence, Bonhoeffer: A Guide for the Perplexed (Edinburgh: Bloomsbury Academic/T & T Clark, 2010), 19.
²⁷ See Tim Boniface, Jesus, Transcendence, and Generosity: Christology and Transcendence in Hans Frei and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (London: T&T Clark, 2023), 129.
²⁸ Joseph Goebbels, “Our Hitler, 1936” (birthday speeches) Calvin College German Propaganda Archive.
²⁹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Lectures on Christology,” in Berlin: 1932–1933, vol. 12 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best and David Higgins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 302.
³⁰ See Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (New York: Dutton, 2010)
³¹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, vol. 4 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 43.
³² Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, vol. 6 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 404.
³³ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 254. [Italics in original].
³⁴ Tim Boniface, Jesus, Transcendence, and Generosity: Christology and Transcendence in Hans Frei and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (London: T&T Clark, 2023), 101-103.
³⁵ To be sure, this representative action of the Church is not like that of the Protestant Liberalism of America in Bonhoeffer’s day and much of today. For Bonhoeffer’s Protestant Liberal contemporaries, the representative action of the Church is always social and political, grounded in the need of others who cannot act on their own behalf in their sufferings. Bonhoeffer would critique this idea in his essay, “Memorandum: The ‘Social Gospel.’” For Bonhoeffer, however, the representative action of the church is always informed by the redemptive act of God in Christ, grounded in the every-day need of the weak and the ultimate need of man to be redeemed by God and brought into the Kingdom of Christ.
³⁶ Lawrence, Bonhoeffer: A Guide for the Perplexed, 36.
³⁷ Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary (New York: Revell, 1975), 6:1105.
³⁸ Collin Hansen, “Editor’s Choice: The Best of 2019,” The Gospel Coalition, December 16, 2019, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/editors-choice-the-best-of2019/
³⁹ Patrick J. Knapp, Understanding Religious Abuse and Recovery: Discovering Essential Principles for Hope and Healing (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), 1-20.
⁴⁰ Kruger, Bully Pulpit.
⁴¹ David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen, The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1991), 20. [italics original]
⁴² Kruger, Bully Pulpit, 24.
⁴³ David J. Ward, “The Lived Experience of Spiritual Abuse,” Mental Health, Religion, & Culture 14, no. 9 (2011), 913.
⁴⁴ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, 106.
⁴⁵ Bully Pulpit, conclusion to chapt 3
⁴⁶ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, 106.
⁴⁷ Ibid.
⁴⁸ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fiction from Tegel Prison, 71–99.
⁴⁹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, vol. 5 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, trans. James H. Burtness (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996 paperback ed.; 1st published 1938), 107.
⁵⁰ Ibid.
⁵¹ Ibid.
⁵² See: Jonathan Leeman, Authority: How Godly Rule Protects the Vulnerable, Strengthens Communities, and Promotes Human Flourishing (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, September 12, 2023).
⁵³ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fiction from Tegel Prison, vol. 7 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, trans. Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 71–99.
⁵⁴ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, 44.
⁵⁵ Ibid., 35
⁵⁶ Ibid., 36
⁵⁷ Charles Marsh, Strange Glory, 284
⁵⁸ Ibid., 366.
⁵⁹ Matthew D. Kirkpatrick, Bonhoeffer for the Church: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2024), 35.
⁶⁰ Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 681.
⁶¹ Ibid.
⁶² Ibid.
⁶³ Ibid.
⁶⁴ Later published in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, vol. 6 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 138.
⁶⁵ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 140.
