ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

LENT 1, 2006 EVENSONG & BENEDICTION

Fr Alan Moses

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AND EDITH STEIN

In this Lenten series of sermons at Evensong, Fr. Ivan and I are engaging in what we might call theology by biography; lives as examples of the Christian life. Tonight I begin with two people who left behind significant writings, but whose lives and deaths have been at least as important, if not more so.

Bonhoeffer and Stein were born in the same city, Breslau. If you were to look for Breslau on a contemporary map of Germany, you would search in vain. Breslau is now called Wroclaw and is in Poland – the result of the events and forces which would claim the lives of both Bonhoeffer and Stein. Both have been “canonised”: Edith by Pope John Paul II; Dietrich less officially as a ‘protestant”martyr. He is commemorated in the Church of England’s calendar. Both these canonisations have been controversial.

Both were major Christian intellects who left behind a surprising amount of writing, given their disrupted academic careers - 16 volumes in Bonhoeffer’s case. He continues to exercise a major influence on theology today. But much of their influence is due to biography rather than bibliography; to theology lived out as much as written. So let’s look briefly at their lives.

Edith, the eleventh child of Orthodox Jewish parents, was born on October 12, 1891. It was Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement, a fact she would later see as significant. Dietrich was born of Lutheran parents in 1906. His father was an eminent psychiatrist who would go on to chair at the University of Berlin and its Charite Hospital..

Edith was independent natured and prodigiously intelligent. She had abandoned her family faith by the time she was thirteen - declaring herself an atheist - only the first of a series of blows to her devout mother.

One of the first women admitted to the University of Gottingen, she studied under the brilliant Edmund Husserl, father of the philosophical school known as Phenomenology. She became his star pupil and when he moved to Frieburg, she went too as his assistant and completed her doctorate on the subject of empathy at the age of 23.

Phenomenology had a strong ethical dimension and a number of Husserl’s pupils were practising Christians. In the years after the Great War Stein began to feel a growing interest in religion. This culminated one night in 1921 when she happened upon the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Fascinated, she read it through the night and by morning had concluded that “This is the truth”. She was baptised on January 1, 1922. Edith continued to accompany her mother to synagogue, feeling that in accepting Christ she had been reunited, by a mysterious path with her Jewish roots. She gave up academic work for some years to teach in the Dominican Girls School but continued to work on Aquinas and as a result of her writing, she was offered a teaching post at the University of Munster in 1932.

The Nazi’s rise to power meant that this post would be short-lived as Jews were excluded from the learned professions. With clearer foresight than most she recognised the destination of this campaign. She wrote to seek an audience with Pope Pius XI to alert him to the peril facing the Jews. Her request received no reply. Meanwhile, she was dismissed from her post.
Already she understood the terrible storm that was approaching and she felt in some way that her Jewish-Christian identity imposed a unique vocation. After praying at the Carmel in Cologne, she wrote:

“I spoke with the Saviour to tell him that I realised it was his Cross that was now being laid upon the Jewish people, that the few who understood this had the responsibility of carrying it in the name of all, and that I myself was willing to do this, if he would only show me how.”

The loss of her job meant that she was free to follow her sense of call to the religious life and she entered Carmel. Her mother, who had wept at her conversions, wept again and accused her daughter of abandoning her people during a time of persecution. After spending a final evening with her mother in the synagogue, they parted. She took as her religious name Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce – Blessed by the Cross. It was a name chosen to refer to the fate of the people of God, which even then was beginning to reveal itself.”

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, believing that her presence in the convent endangered her sisters, she allowed herself to be smuggled out of the country to a Carmelite convent in Holland. She had no thought of escaping the fate of her people. In fact, she prepared a solemn prayer which she delivered to her prioress, offering herself “to the Heart of Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement” for the Jewish people for the aversion of harm and for the sanctification on her Carmelite family.

In 1940 the Nazis overran Holland. Stein was required to wear the Star of David on her habit. Soon the deportations began. All the while, she worked to finish her study of the mysticism of St. John of the Cross, She was consoled by the presence of her sister Rosa, who by this time had also converted and joined her in the convent as a laywoman.

The Germans had indicated a willingness to spare Jewish-Christians, provided the Churches kept silent. When on July 26, 1942, a statement by the Dutch Bishops denouncing the persecution of the Jews was read from pulpits throughout the country, the Nazis retaliated. All Jewish Catholics, including religious, were rounded up. For Edith and her sister the end came on August 2, when the Gestapo arrived at the convent. Rosa was distraught, but Edith reassured her: “Come, Rosa. We’re going for our people.”

Survivors of the following days have described her courage and composure despite her clear certainty of the fate that awaited her. She occupied herself with prayer and caring for terrified children and consoling mothers separated from their husbands. From a detention camp in Holland she followed the same route as millions of others: the journey in sealed cattle trucks, the arrival half-starved at a strange camp; the selection before the last walk to the shower room from which none emerged alive. Edith Stein died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born into a comfortable, cultured and privileged background – very much part of the intellectual establishment of Imperial Germany. His devout grandmother ensured that the children were taught the faith but the family was not noticeably religious. There was considerable surprise when Dietrich elected to study theology and was eventually ordained. His early academic work showed great promise and he completed his doctoral dissertation at the age of 21. He became something of a disciple of the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth in his critique of the liberal protestant establishment theology in Germany which had supported the Kaiser’s war aims. They would later collaborate in opposing the protestant Church’s capitulation to Nazism.

Following his studies, he served a curacy in Barcelona, studied at the prestigious Union Theological Seminary in New York, was ordained and ministered in Berlin and began to teach at the university there.

Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933 , Bonhoeffer, came to London where he served to German congregations until 1935. The escalating Church struggle in Germany led to his return home and his appointment as director of the illegal seminary of the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde. His little book “Life Together” describes the spiritual disciplines he taught there as necessary to maintain Christian identity in the face of Nazi paganism. He had learned something of this discipline from visits to Mirfield and Kelham, two Anglican religious communities which ran theological colleges.

After the seminary was closed by the Gestapo he returned to New York and could have remained in safety there through the war which was about to begin. He spent the month of June in anxious soul-searching. “I do not know why I am here”, he wrote. He decided he must return to Germany. “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share in the tribulations of this time with my people.” This was, I think, his equivalent of Edith’s “going for our people”.

While he would not accept the luxury of exile, he did not court martyrdom. On his return to Germany, family connections got him a job in the Abwehr Military Intelligence in which his brother-in-law Hans Dohnanyi was a high-ranking member, He was also, as Bonhoeffer knew, a key figure in the clandestine military conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. Bonhoeffer was immediately drawn into this conspiracy.

In 1943, the plot began to unravel and Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi were arrested and held in a military prison where conditions were not to bad. Bonhoeffer could have books and write and letters could be smuggled out by sympathetic guards. It was only after the failure of the July Plot in 1944 that they were transferred to Gestapo Headquarters, then to Buchenwald and finally to Flossenburg concentration camp.

On April 9, 1945 he conducted a service for his fellow-prisoners, following which he was summoned to his execution, He entrusted a final message to fellow-prisoner: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life…” The next day he was hanged with five other members of the resistance group. He was 39 years old.

Why were the martyrdoms of these two figures controversial? Well, that of Edith Stein caused consternation among Jews who argued that she was not executed as a Christian but as a Jew. As we have been reminded in the last weeks by the reaction to the General Synod’s vote to investigate its investments in the Caterpillar Company whose bulldozers are used by the Israeli Defence Forces to demolish Palestinian houses, there are wounds which are far from healed. No one could accuse the Archbishop of Canterbury of being anti-Semitic and Pope John Paul made enormous strides in improving relationships between the Roman Catholic Church and Judaism, but centuries of prejudice are not wiped out so easily.

I think Christians have to accept that Edith’s death was primarily because she was a Jew, but it was also because she made a deliberate act of dedication on behalf of her people. She had seen her baptism after years of unbelief as in some way a reunion with her people and their faith - and she certainly saw he impending death that way. She went for her people. It was an atonement – an at-one-ment. In that she still has a lesson to teach a church which has not entirely shed its anti-Semitic ways.

Like Edith Stein, Bonhoeffer’s status as a martyr is not without controversy. Can someone who has taken part in a plot to murder – for that is what he was engaged in – be considered a Christian martyr? After the war, some German Christians were reluctant to call him a martyr, since he was executed for political rather than religious charges.

Our problem, I think, is that we too easily think of saints as people who are antiseptically perfect in a world of clear-cut choices. Neither Bonhoeffer nor Stein lived in such a world. Theirs was a world of unparalleled evil. She lived out her empathy with Christ and her people by dying in Auschwitz. We can I think recognised that she died as both Jew and Christian. Bonhoeffer was for most of his life a pacifist. His greatness lies in part I think in the fact that he never believed that taking Hitler’s life, necessary as it was, was a sinless act. He realised that he was bound up with the evil.

Bonhoeffer wanted to impress on his church that the neutrality in political conflicts which it liked to claim ceased to be neutrality when it de facto tolerated existing power and prevailing injustice because it did not fight against these actively, even with force. It had become clear to him that his own ethical rigorism no longer worked; that it was too bound up with his own personal search for perfection. Now he faced the question which was the greater guilt, that of tolerating the Hitler dictatorship or that of removing it. In particular, anyone who was not ready to kill Hitler was guilty of mass murder, whether he liked it or not.

He even went so far as to declare himself ready to make an attempt on Hitler’s life. He left no doubt, however, that any use of force is and remains guilt. But he insisted that there can be situations in which a Christian must become guilty out of love of neighbour.

Hardly anyone has posed as consistently as Bonhoeffer the question of incurring guilt in borderline political situations and had then reflected on it. He did so on behalf of many Christians in the resistance who had been abandoned by their church.

One of the most misinterpreted aspects of Bonhoeffer’s theology - forged in his confinement and contained in letters smuggled out to his friend and later biographer Eberhard Bethge - was what is called “religionless Christianity”, a way of talking about God in a secular language appropriate for a “world come of age”. Traditional religious language tended to speak of a stop-gap deity occupying a religious realm on the boundaries of day-to-day life. This attitude, which would set the “holy life” apart from the world and its concrete demands, exemplified the religious mentality that Bonhoeffer rejected. Instead, Bonhoeffer wrote,

“I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weaknesses but in strength, and therefore not tin death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. God is beyond in the midst our life. The Church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the midst of the village.”

For him, following Christ was a matter of engagement in this world, “living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemani. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia.”