A common way to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer to an unknowing audience is to say something like, ‘Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pacifist pastor who in the last days of World War II entered into a conspiracy to kill Hitler’. The juxtaposition of ‘pacifist’ with ‘killer’ – and particularly of the monster, Hitler – seems to capture the attention of almost any audience. But how true is this attention-grabbing statement? Was Bonhoeffer really a pacifist? Or if he was a pacifist, how willing, really, was he to kill Hitler? And if even part of the fascinating statement is true: how did Bonhoeffer himself think about this? How did he come to hold that such an unethical act was the will of God?
These are the questions that Kevin O’Farrell explores with precision in his Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception. O’Farrell’s slim volume is immensely helpful. As the title communicates, O’Farrell’s attention is on the exception. Ethics is never done in a hermetically sealed and sterilised place. Ethics is always done in the world, confronting the world’s contradictions and conundrums. Therefore, there is always a place to reflect on the exception to our ethical rules. How do we think about those moments when the right, even just, action demands breaking the law? The end of Bonhoeffer’s life seems a paradigmatic case. In O’Farrell’s work, Bonhoeffer is spotlighted to examine the exception from multiple angles, but always through Bonhoeffer. Ultimately, O’Farrell wants readers to explore how Bonhoeffer’s ethics and moral vision allowed him to accept the exception of murder.
To this end, all six chapters are successful and engaging. Each chapter broadens the reader’s purview. In chapter 1, O’Farrell places significant Bonhoeffer interpreters and schools of thought into conversation. The reader is given a sense of the debates pitting Clifford Green against Larry Rasmussen on the one hand, and Michael DeJonge against Stanley Hauerwas on the other. The centrality of pacifism is at stake. Yet, what is most important is O’Farrell’s discussion of the post-2016 ‘Bonhoeffer moment’ that has arisen since Donald Trump. This discussion gives the whole book important gravitas.
Chapter 2 turns from discussions of schools of interpretation to Bonhoeffer himself. O’Farrell delves into the biography. No Bonhoeffer book can escape a chapter on biography. O’Farrell explains that what makes Bonhoeffer compelling is how thought and life fuse, focusing on the late stages of Bonhoeffer’s life (i.e., the period after 1939).
While concentrating on the later years of Bonhoeffer’s life, O’Farrell does follow the ‘orthodox’ interpretation of Bonhoeffer, which claims continuity across his oeuvre. In chapter 3, O’Farrell offers an interesting discussion on the place of history in Bonhoeffer’s first book, Sanctorum Communio. This shows that much of Bonhoeffer’s later thinking on the exception has its origin in Bonhoeffer’s earliest work.
In this reviewer’s mind, the centre of book, and the place where new ground is broken, is in chapter 4. Here the author explores Bonhoeffer’s long fragment (later included in the posthumously-published Ethics) ‘History and Good [2]’. O’Farrell explores this text beautifully, especially the important discussion of Machiavelli. The focus on freedom and the law in chapters 5 and 6, respectively, add nicely to the analysis of ‘History and Good [2]’.
Overall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception is a helpful volume. Anyone interested in Bonhoeffer’s ethics will find it enriching. Its one downside is that it continues a bias that is latent within Bonhoeffer scholarship: a tendency to abstract Bonhoeffer’s thought from his relationships. This is seen most clearly in chapter 2, where there is a lack of any discussion of real people in Bonhoeffer’s life. When he is portrayed solely as an individual, we end up with an abstract picture of Bonhoeffer. We get no sense of those to whom Bonhoeffer is bound: his family, friends and the people to whom he ministers. To really understand Bonhoeffer’s actions (and his reflections on these actions) is to take seriously his own commitment to a theological anthropology that claims that persons are beings bound within the actions of care and friendship. To truly know Bonhoeffer is to know him as son, brother, friend and – most importantly – pastor. For Bonhoeffer, the exception is bound up in the concrete humanity of people with whom he ministers. Yet no space is spent discussing these relationships in O’Farrell’s text.
Overall, O’Farrell, like other Bonhoeffer scholars, seems to assume that Bonhoeffer is first an academic; but as a pastor first and foremost, Bonhoeffer’s central concern is the concreteness of revelation. How is it that we, and those we love, encounter the living Christ? Stellvertretung (or place-sharing) is for Bonhoeffer a near mystical category that brings one into direct encounter with the very presence of Jesus Christ. But, as such, it is fundamentally a concrete and lived category. Therefore, Bonhoeffer almost never thinks outside of roles and relations (e.g., that of children to parents or siblings). The exception must be understood inside this primary and direct relationship, and thus from inside a pastoral theology, more than as the conclusions of an academic ethicist.
This is what makes the poem ‘After Ten Years’ so powerful. It’s written to people Dietrich loves. When Bonhoeffer names the younger generation in the poem – a line O’Farrell discusses – Bonhoeffer is not thinking generically of the next generation (as O’Farrell leaves it) but of concrete and specific young people he loves and ministers to. He is thinking of his nieces, the boys in Wedding, Christoph von Dohnanyi (whom he writes in prison), and of Eberhard Bethge’s child, who will carry Dietrich’s name.
Because those writings about Bonhoeffer most often are university-based academics, his pastoral and relational life has been underappreciated. More attention to the office of pastor and the primary identity of son and brother would have opened new dimension in discussions of the exception.
Overall, O’Farrell’s work is an important contribution to Bonhoeffer scholarship, and well worth reading.
