Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 29, 2014

A good biography will grip you, move you, and challenge you. In really getting to know someone in all the dynamics that make him or her the person he or she was, you find out things about yourself and, perhaps, what you would like to be. When Mr. Marsh takes pen in hand on Bonhoeffer that is exactly the experience you have.

Mr. Marsh can write–that is obvious. He delved into his subject until he had something to say. He took a multifaceted view and hid nothing. Even what could have been mundane information, like certain academic pursuits, was woven together to show us the man progressing to become what he finally became in magisterial prose.

As you go along you find Bonhoeffer to be a spoiled kid far into adulthood, indulgent, lazy in physical work, and a lover of extended travel, and at times, a man with a temper. Still, you could not help but admire him. There is duplicity in us all, yet Christ can raise us above it. Though his theology was a good bit to the left of mine, I firmly believe he was a believer who not only loved the Lord, but grew to love Him more.

As with any of us he wrestled with some of the hard choices of life. In the end, he far more came down on the right side, a side fraught with danger and pain. I do not know what he died thinking, but he died a victor.

The only negative of the book was the suggestion that, perhaps, there was a homosexual attraction for his dear friend Bethge. That seemed a cheap gimmick for our ages’ fascination of homosexuality. The friendship was as close as possible, but Bethge always clearly refuted this suggestion.Read more ›

Having read much on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, including Bethge's seminal work, I didn't find much new in Marsh's treatment. The one area which was new was also disturbing. To come out and say that Bonhoeffer had some sort of erotic feelings toward Bethge is a stretch, to say the least. When I read about the relationship between Bethge and Bonhoeffer, I see kindred spirits living in a very difficult and dangerous time. They were living a monastic life while in Finkenwalde. It would not be uncommon for two men with common interests (theology) and the camaraderie developed while facing extremely perilous times to develop an extremely close friendship. The friendship of David and Jonathan comes to mind. Have we come to the place in which two people of the same sex can no longer have a kindred spirit relationship without it being painted with the brush of homosexuality? Bethge was married to Bonhoeffer's niece and Bonhoeffer was engaged at the time of his death. He was looking forward to experiencing sex after marriage, according to his letters to Bethge. In addition, Bethge outright denied that there was anything erotic about their relationship. I read absolutely nothing in Marsh's book that indicates anything other than a very close friendship. In my opinion, it is disrespectful of a man who deserves so much respect to make this kind of an insinuation which would be a complete break with his character as revealed in his own writings.

Charles Marsh's account of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer achieves everything it sets out to accomplish. In lucid and engaging prose, Marsh provides the reader a sense of the man and his times that simultaneously refuses the temptation to overdraw points of similarity between Bonhoeffer's day and our own (as some are wont to do) while also rendering Bonhoeffer's thought and life generative for a new generation of scholars and readers. He accomplishes this through attention to detail that, like a cup of tea, could, in the hands of the unskilled, suffer from either over or under extraction. Here we get Bonhoeffer the human being, the man whose love of the outdoors and a fine dinner jacket were not at odds with his convictions on Kant, Hegel, Barth, and others. We also get a Bonhoeffer whose life was sustained by friendship. Happily, Marsh makes this explicit, and while readers may be surprised by the intimacy that marked Bonhoeffer's attachment to the friends that constituted his life, this reader (at least) learned a great deal about the capacity of friendship to sustain a life and, coordinately, the paucity of theological work done on the matter in our day. This is an excellent work, one that deserves all the plaudits it will undeniably receive.

Charles Marsh's biography is full of insightful surprises, largely because he insists on going beyond standard interpretations of Bonhoeffer's life and thought to offer a portrait that sometimes startling in both detail and interpretation. As other commentators have pointed out, the Bonhoeffer he presents us isn't a plaster saint. He was the pampered son of a well-to-do family who remained throughout his life something of a sartorial dandy and a lover of the comfortable pleasures of life. He could be peevish and self-occupied, and he sometimes made hasty judgments about both ideas and people. But in offering us this fuller profile of his subject, Marsh helps us appreciate the genuine grandeur of a man who, notwithstanding his all-too-human foibles, nonetheless re-thought what it meant to be a Christian in the troubled 20th century, and who was willing to die for his convictions.

For my money, the most interesting section of the book is Marsh's analysis of Bonhoeffer's radicalization during his year-long stay at Union Theological Seminary. Initially contemptuous of Union's "practical" approach to theologizing that eschewed, in his estimation, rigorous dogmatics, Bonhoeffer gradually became convinced that his own earlier theology was too abstractly indifferent to issues of social justice. Through the influence of Niebuhr's emphasis on ethics, the pacifism of friends like Lassure, and the deep incarnationalism of the black spiritual tradition, Bonhoeffer emerged a new man after his year in the States. Marsh, some of whose earlier work focus on the religious antecedents and dimension of the Civil Rights movement, wonderfully provides background information on Christian social justice thinkiing of 1930s America that so influenced Bonhoeffer.

Well worth reading and thinking about. Going through Marsh's bio has inspired some friends and me to re-dive into Bonhoeffer's works this summer.