On April 9, 1945, at Flossenbürg concentration camp, the Nazis executed the talented pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer by hanging, on suspicion of his involvement with the Abwehr conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was 39 years old. Two weeks later, the U.S. Army liberated Flossenbürg. Hitler took his own life on April 30, just three weeks after Bonhoeffer’s unjust and so untimely death.
What did the German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose work continues to engage us decades after his execution, have in common with the Dutch neo-Calvinists? Enough to make for some great ecumenical discussions today.
Edited by George Harinck and Brant M. Himes
(Pickwick Publications, 2023)
Perhaps any Christian with the courage of Bonhoeffer would inspire even Protestants to saintly veneration. But Bonhoeffer left a body of intellectual work that academics would have engaged even if he had fled to Switzerland to teach theology in peace and protest the Nazis in safety through the Second World War. Indeed, if his life hadn’t been cut short, he would likely have written far more and at least finished his Ethics. Instead, scholars must extrapolate trajectories of theological development from books, articles, letters, and fragments that remain.
Such scholars have not been limited to Bonhoeffer’s German Lutheran tradition. Christians of all churches have engaged his works, and his call to authentic and costly Christian discipleship rings all the truer due to the life he lived and the death he died. Among this ecumenical scholarly interest, we now have a handy reference book for a single tradition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Neo-Calvinism in Dialogue, edited by George Harinck and Brant M. Himes.
In their introduction, Harinck and Himes suggest that such ecumenical scholarship “is a valuable resource for both Bonhoeffer and Neo-Calvinist scholars to discover more about their respective traditions.” Furthermore, they note, “While the essays do not directly engage with each other, we do see generative themes emerging around questions of historical and theological application.”
Harinck begins the book with a chapter on the Dutch reception of Bonhoeffer’s works, showing that only after WWII did interest in Bonhoeffer exceed a few scattered reviews and references. The German Bonhoeffer, despite international travels, for his part does not reference Abraham Kuyper or Herman Bavinck, the two principle neo-Calvinist theologians he might have known in his time. Herman Paul does rightly—and refreshingly—note in his chapter that both Kuyper and Bonhoeffer had a common influence in German idealism. But still, the lack of direct influence helps better frame the other contributors’ chapters. Berend Kamphuis even pushes back against Georg Huntemann’s thesis that Bonhoeffer has become an evangelical “church father.” “I would be glad to call Bonhoeffer a neo-Calvinist church father if it meant that the church today would be eager to learn from this theological giant in the kingdom of God,” writes Kamphuis. “Yet Bonhoeffer was no evangelical, no Calvinist, no neo-Calvinist.” Thus, Bonhoeffer and Neo-Calvinismtruly is a conversation, one between different theological perspectives with common Reformational and philosophical roots, not a work of charting historical influence of one upon the other.
That said, I would categorize the other chapters in terms of three “generative themes”: (1) common grace and orders of preservation; (2) discipleship; and (3) ecclesiology—the doctrine of the church. The book contains a mix of international perspectives as well, with roughly half the contributors being Dutch and the other half American. While each of the chapters makes a strong contribution to this interconfessional conversation, the book could reach a wider audience with only a few small revisions. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer and Neo-Calvinism achieves its stated goal, and in that spirit I’ll conclude with a question of my own to spur continued dialogue.
Despite readings of Bonhoeffer in the line of his older contemporary Karl Barth, who rejected natural law, Jordan J. Ballor argues that “both Kuyper and Bonhoeffer are natural-law thinkers.” Even though both emphasize the fallenness of the natural world due to human sin, both still believe that God ordained an order and trajectory for creation that he upholds despite our sinfulness. For Kuyper, these orders were the spheres of common grace—God’s continual work, beyond Providence, to prevent the full effects on creation of humanity’s fall into sin. Bonhoeffer, similarly, recast the Lutheran creation orders of family, state, and church (to which he added work or culture) as “orders of preservation,” mandates from God, rather than estates to be honored no matter their current trajectory.
Given Bonhoeffer’s context as a pastor and theologian of the German Confessing Church, which refused to compromise with the Nazis, we can see why this development mattered. The state church, a union of the Reformed and Lutheran traditions, had used the idea that the state was ordained by God to justify capitulation to National Socialism. As Matthew Kaemingk notes in his chapter, “Under the call of responsibility, during a crisis such as the Nazi terror, a follower of Christ must take on the spiritual and political burden of actually ignoring Christ’s mandated boundaries between church, state, culture, and family in an effort to restore them to Christ’s command.” Not only do the orders of society have God-given natures, but each of those natures has its own God-oriented telos or purpose, either honoring God or rebelling against him. And Christians, whatever their vocation, have a calling to help orient all these spheres toward the glory of God.
The call of Christ, of course, is the call to discipleship. Himes focuses on the role of confession in discipleship in both Kuyper’s and Bonhoeffer’s thought and practice in his chapter. Kuyper offended his onetime collaborator Alexander F. de Savornin Lohman when they differed on the issue of expanding the franchise to working-class heads of households. (Kuyper supported it.) Kuyper sought forgiveness, but because he reasserted his position while apologizing, and the bill to expand the right to vote ultimately passed, Lohman never reconciled with him. Bonhoeffer, for his part, mentored the seminarians he taught for the Confessing Church, emphasizing the importance of confession and forgiveness when they fell into youthful temptation. “Kuyper advocated for a political and social program from the Sermon [on the Mount],” writes Himes, “while Bonhoeffer emphasized the necessity to follow Jesus ‘in simple obedience’ in whatever the circumstance. In this sense, Kuyper and Bonhoeffer were committed to pursuing the reconciliation with the world that they traced as a central vision of the Sermon.”
Gerard den Hertog, meanwhile, focuses on discipleship’s implications for a Christian ethical approach to war in Bavinck and Bonhoeffer. I already had some familiarity with Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, but being more familiar with Kuyper than Bavinck among the neo-Calvinists, this side of Bavinck was new to me, fulfilling the promise in the introduction of informing even those already familiar with either neo-Calvinism or Bonhoeffer. “For both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer, the radical change that occurs in a person when he or she meets Jesus Christ is crucial and fundamental,” says den Hertog, “but whereas the change in Bavinck is hidden in regeneration, Bonhoeffer works out that it takes place in the call of Jesus and in a disciple’s obedience and following.” Applied to war, both insisted discipleship meant membership in the catholic—i.e., universal—Church. They agreed God can use what men intend for evil for good, but both theologians generally opposed war, especially between Christians, whose citizenship belongs first to the kingdom of heaven that transcends national allegiances.
Bonhoeffer left a body of intellectual work that academics would have engaged even if he had fled to Switzerland to teach theology in peace and protest the Nazis in safety.
Indeed, the role of the church is the last “generative theme” I gleaned from these chapters. Garcia demonstrates the important role of preaching, both in theory and practice, for Bavinck and Bonhoeffer. Both agree that the church has a ministry of Word and Sacrament, and thus her preaching, one of the primary tools of discipleship, ought to be central. For Bonhoeffer, furthermore, preaching is one way in which the church is Christ and in which the Christian encounters Christ in the Church.
Last, Dekker and Harinck trace the common emphasis on the church as institute, rather than just the organism of all church members, for social witness. It is as institute, nevertheless, that the church administers the Word and Sacraments, and in this role it is “of essential importance to the world, because it … offers an impulse towards Christian life and aims for the preservation of this world and humanity.” Both Kuyper and Bonhoeffer warn against the politicization of the church, on the one hand, and the clericalization of life, on the other.
While the quality of the chapters remains consistent throughout the book, and I would recommend it to any scholars working on interdisciplinary studies between neo-Calvinism and Bonhoeffer, the book does have a few regrettable flaws. In particular, the chapters by authors for whom English is not their first language needed a native English speaker to copyedit them. Misuse of prepositions especially—one of the trickiest differences between languages—makes reading some of these chapters harder than it should be. As an academic press, Pickwick leaves the copyediting to editors and authors, so unfortunately this criticism must fall upon the contributors.
Where does the Lutheran doctrine of vocation fit into neo-Calvinism and Bonhoeffer’s theology?
Furthermore, for some unknown reason Dekker and Harinck’s chapter—the English of which is comparably good on the whole—quotes Huntemann twice in German, despite Kamphuis consistently quoting him in English in his own chapter. Their chapter also seems to rely on original—and again, quite good—English translations of most sources, even though many works of Kuyper and Bonhoeffer they quote have suitable English translations available. While readability does not suffer in this regard, Anglophone scholars—presumably the target audience of this English-language book—cannot easily look up any of these quotes in context in the editions they might have on their own shelves.
Sure, scholars will—and should—still cite Bonhoeffer and Neo-Calvinism despite these flaws. But with a little extra care, this might have been a book for more than scholars. It is a slim volume (about 200 pages), consisting of 10 chapters and an introduction. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is fairly well known and popular. And it successfully and compellingly puts him in dialogue with another Christian tradition, neo-Calvinism, that has a growing influence outside traditionally Calvinist circles today. Some better copyediting, some reorganizing of the chapters around a few “generative themes” (as I have done in this review), and perhaps discussion questions after each chapter, might have made this book a go-to resource for courses on ecumenical theology, Christian ethics, neo-Calvinism, and/or Bonhoeffer.
The point is that perhaps this book is better than the editors realized. Yes, that is a criticism, but it’s also a compliment. Indeed, it inspired me to reflect on my own questions I would pose: Where does the Lutheran doctrine of vocation fit into neo-Calvinism and Bonhoeffer’s theology? Certainly there is some connection to the spheres, orders, or mandates of social life, but how does the Christian, whose principal vocation is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, faithfully live out that calling in the many different vocations they occupy in this life? How does one discern such specific vocations? How does knowing them help us embody the duties and boundaries of our life together? This book may not have answered those questions, but it helped me raise them, which is all it proposed to do. On that score, and despite my criticisms, I recommend Bonhoeffer and Neo-Calvinism. And I hope that next time I see those contributors whom I know, we’ll continue the conversation they so effectively began.
