Charles Marsh (1)Rezensionen

Marsh focuses on the events and religious convictions that led each person into the political upheaval of 1964. He presents an unforgettable American social landscape, one that is by turns shameful and inspiring. In conclusion, Marsh suggests that it may be possible to sift among these narratives and lay the groundwork for a new thinking about racial reconciliation and the beloved community. He maintains that the person who embraces faith's life-affirming energies will leave behind a most powerful legacy of social activism and compassion.

This is an accessible biography of Bonhoeffer that gives you both a sense of his theological underpinnings and his personal life. A good job by the author of combing the two.

An ideal biography; there's not much more to say. Marsh is very good on almost everything, from social history to theology. The picture of Bonhoeffer moving from reactionary German to anti-Nazi saint is beautiful. Why Metaxas's awful book sells so much better than this one is a mystery even greater than that the God of Karl Barth.

I'm joking, of course. That one sells better because it helps people feel better about themselves. This one points out that, to be worthy of feeling good about yourself, you actually have to try to be a better person.

While I suspect Bonhoeffer's martyrdom ensured that he could be recreated in the image of any theologian (etc) seeking corroboration of theologies wise or otherwise, he is nevertheless one of the great theological minds of the twentieth century. A work purporting to "reclaim" him must have caught my attention 21 years ago, so I forked out a considerable amount of money and bought it. At last I've read it.

I read it as a theologian (or sorts), bot as a philosopher. I wanted to know who/what Bonhoeffer was reclaimed from, and how he might be released yet again to speak to the church today. I am none the wiser, though that may be because I'm particularly dull rather than through any fault of Marsh. I find philosophical discourse fraught at the best of times, and the moment the perpendicular pronoun starts popping up willy-nilly through the clauses and sub-clauses of a sentence I lapse into catatonia. Bonhoeffer himself was necessarily a dense writer. Marsh is clearly a keen devotee of the Heidegger School of Communication.

Consequently a sentence such as

"Human identity conceived as self-identification approximates the anthropological postulate of humanity ruled by the will to self" [138]

is likely to have me reaching for my Prozac. Better still, when Bonhoeffer says something reasonably comprehensible like "Our relation to God is a new life in 'existence for others' through participation in the being of Jesus" is relatively comprehensible in a way that Marsh's explanation, "Bonhoeffer envisions a motion of the self toward the other and of the other toward the self that recreates both in agapeic fellowship" [also 138] is not. But this is a more or less accessible example. Or, perhaps, "'... the practical-political side of authentic Dasein consists ... in "the perlocutionary effect of a diffuse readiness to obey in relation to an auratic but indeterminate authority." Amen, I say.

A few pages later I discover a sentence to rival James Joyce's finest efforts: it's on page 142. But I'll spare you. When theologians interpret other theologians by making them less comprehensible I begin to despair. I found this a bitterly out of my depth book. Or maybe just disappointing. But either way I wish I'd saved seventy bucks all those years ago,

Babelia, 07.01.2019 https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/01/04/babelia/1546625077_464758.html

Summary: A renewed call for the church to pursue Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of a "beloved community" even in a day of increased white nationalism and polarization.

When this book was first published in 2009, the first African-American president had been elected. Nine years later, the vision of "beloved community" that appeared to be on the horizon, now feels like a distant memory. Charles Marsh, in his new preface acknowledges the current circumstances in the events in his home town of Charlottesville where Heather Heyer, simply standing in solidarity against the demonstrations of white nationalists, died when struck by a vehicle driven into the crowd by a white nationalist from Ohio.

Yet Marsh, and his co-author, John M. Perkins, a leader in Christian community development work, have not given up on the vision of Dr. King. Both believe that despite appearances, there is a movement of God afoot toward "beloved community. In alternating chapters, the two authors share why they are still hopeful, and what they believe needs to happen.

Marsh leads off with the contention that the Civil Rights movement lost its vision and cohesion as a movement when it lost its connection to a church-based and gospel based vision of "beloved community." At the same time, he sees movements, like that which Perkins has led at Voice of Calvary, continuing this gospel-based vision in its focus on relocation, redistribution, and reconciliation. Perkins, however, contends that the church, to realize such a vision, needs to give up its captivities to culture which has so divided it. He makes the fascinating observation that the neglect of outreach to a white underclass has made them open to the counterfeit community of the Klan. The challenge is to forsake the dividing lines of our captivities to reach out across those lines in the power of Christ.

Marsh then writes of the need for true conversion in our lives, a conversion that is always personal, even as it has social implications. He movingly recounts his first encounter with Perkins as a student staying with his segregationist grandmother. Perkins answer came not in an argument of what was wrong with segregation, but to send a gift of blueberries from his garden as his gift to her. Marsh in reflection writes:

"The existence of a compelling Christian witness in our time does not depend on our access to the White House, the size of our churches or the cultural relevance of our pastors. It depends, instead, on our ability to sing better songs in our lives. True conversion is always personal, but it is never sole about the individual who experiences God's love and knows the good news of salvation. True conversion is about learning to sing songs in which our life harmonizes with others'--even the lives of those least like us--and swells into a joyful and irresistible chorus" (p. 78).

Perkins responds with stories of the young men and women he has the joy of working with, and the hope this gives him for awakening. He doesn't speak of programs but of loving people, those of his own community, and those who come to learn, and then go and pursue a vision of community development across the country. Marsh in turn writes about the inner life of silent embrace of the gospel of the kingdom that sustains the practice of peace over the long haul. Perkins writes the final chapter calling for a re-building of our cities, interrupting the brokenness of our cities as churches re-assert their own love of the places and people to which they are called, forming the character of their young.

The question I had as I read this in the light of the present time is how Marsh and Perkins can be so hopeful. I think the difference between them and writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates (whose Between the World and Me I reviewed yesterday) comes down to the former's belief in the gospel of the kingdom. Perkins knows the violence against blacks as well, or perhaps even better than Coates, growing up in Mississippi. He was beaten and thrown in jail unjustly by police. Perkins has experienced the power of the love of God in his own life, and devoted a life to loving his place and pursuing reconciliation. What he and Marsh describe seems to be illustrative of the parable of the mustard seed, where small, seemingly insignificant efforts, like Perkin's work in Mendenhall, not only bring local healing and reconciliation, but spawn movements of people committed to King's vision of the beloved community. Perhaps the real question is not how Marsh and Perkins can be so hopeful, but will we forsake our cultural captivities and join them in their hope and embrace God's movement toward "beloved community?"

_____________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Charles Marsh is a professor of religion/theology. John Perkins is
the founder of Voice of Calvary Ministries and the Christian
Community Development Association (CCDA). Chapter by chapter these
two authors, one an academic the other a practitioner, lay down what
it means to follow Jesus in the context of loving the poor. Marsh
sets the historical background of Martin Luther King's vision of
"Beloved Community" during the civil rights movement in the 1960s,
which was sidetracked and lost it's spiritual base after his
assassination. He then demonstrates how in many ways John Perkins,
now in his 80s, has taken up that mantle.

John Perkins is known for his "3 Rs" approach to working with the
poor and under-resourced communities.

1. Relocation (incarnational evangelism, living among the poor) Phil. 2: 6-7

2. Redistribution (sharing resources, changing public policy, undoing
economic brokenness in

order to break the cycle of both poverty and wealth to create
something more equitable.) Acts 4:32-37

3. Reconciliation (tearing down walls that create divisions, such as
racism. Truly living out our oneness in Christ.) Eph. 2:14-16

Perkins talks about how our American culture has co-opted our
churches. He call us to be un-co-opted. (to not be conformed to the
world.) He says Jesus did not come to preserve the status quo, nor
did he come to preach a prosperity gospel. Rather, Jesus came to
redirect the eyes of God's people to being a blessing to all nations.
He calls us to reconciliation. This is not an optional part of our
following Jesus. It's an essential part of discipleship. Rather than
living the status quo, he calls us to "create spaces where new life
can happen."

Both Marsh and Perkins comment on how American evangelicalism has
been so focused on individual salvation and transformation, that it
has forgotten it's other call to transform society. ("Thy Kingdom
come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.") In fact, he
says that God himself does the evangelism as his people live out the
kingdom of God.

Perkins shares his vision of what a healthy community looks like out
of the book of Zechariah. Two frequent characteristics of poverty are
broken famlies and broken communities. Healthy families depend on
healthy communities and vice versa. Working with poor communities to
break this cycle requires both commitment to a place and commitment to people.

This book presents a strong prophetic call to to American Christians
and the American Church to remember it's calling and to live it out.

If you've not yet read a book by John Perkins (we have several in the
NCF library) I would recommend this one as a good one to start with.
It's the first one I've read by Perkins. Though I really liked the
entire book, the chapters written by Perkins really shine with both
their practical, down-to-earth wisdom and his prophetic vision of
what God's people are meant to be. He manages to communicate this
vision without inducing guilt but rather inspiring God's people to
have a bigger vision of what it means to live out our faith. Remember
Jenna's wonderful teaching on "seeing?" John Perkins helps us to "see."

(Carolyn Vance)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer seems sometimes a modern-day ‘patron saint for hire.’ Famously, the Death of God movement drew on Bonhoeffer’s description of ‘religionless Christianity’ to underpin their theological claims. More recently Eric Metaxas’s biography paints Bonhoeffer in the image of a Neo-Con Crusadader. One of my professors in seminary, John G. Stackhouse, draws heavily on Bonhoeffer in developing his realist ethic in Making the Best of It. Stanley Hauerwas draws on Bonhoeffer in his decidedly more Idealist ethic (see Performing the Faith). Stackhouse and Hauerwas are both astute readers of Bonhoeffer but his legacy allows for divergent interpretations. This is due in part to the occasional nature of his later writings, Bonhoeffer’s moral quagmire in ‘getting involved’ in Hitler’s assassination plot, and the supposed development in his theological thought in the face of National Socialism.

Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Knopf, 2014) promises to remove the veil from Bonhoeffer’s face and show us the real person. Unlike other biographies, this is not hagiography. Marsh paints Bonhoeffer as the somewhat spoiled son of aristocracy. However Marsh isn’t trying to tarnish Bonhoeffer’s legacy either. He is simply trying to show that the ‘real’ Bonhoeffer was more complex than many earlier portraits which were each heavily dependent on Eberhard Bethge’s biography. Marsh’s Bonhoeffer is proud, preoccupied with fashion, dependent upon his parents for money (and laundry!) into his mid-thirties, enjoys leisure, and has an ambiguous relationship with Bethge. But he remains stalwart in his faith commitment and loyal and courageous to the end.

The events of Bonhoeffer’s life are a matter of public record. What makes Marsh’s biography an important and interesting contribution to the literature on Bonhoeffer is his ability to unearth and interpret Bonhoeffer’s life. So, for example, when Bonhoeffer writes home to complain about the quality of American theological education after his year at Union (1930), Marsh delves into Bonhoeffer’s relationship with fellow students and his hearing ‘the gospel preached in Negro churches,’ and his subsequent exploration of the African American experience. Marsh has written several books on the Civil Rights Movement so is great at filling in the details and showing their impact on Bonhoeffer. But he doesn’t always take young Dietrich at his word and shows how several professors at Union helped shape his later legacy (Harry Ward, Charles Webber and yes, Reinhold Neibuhr). Not only does the African American experience aid Bonhoeffer in resisting the dominant culture in Hitler’s Germany, but he gains the skills at organizing and resistance from Ward and Webber (and grows more realistic in his Ethical commitments). This will later aid him in his work with the eccumencial movement, the confessing church and Finkenwalde.

Perhaps the most controversial claim that Marsh makes is Bonhoeffer’s unrequited love for Bethge. Marsh doesn’t ascribe an awareness of homosexuality to Bonhoeffer or imply that his relationship with Bethge was ever consummated, but he does probe the fact that Bonhoeffer corresponds with Bethge in giddy, emotive language. The two lived together, had a joint bank account, signed their Christmas cards ‘Dietrich & Eberhard,’ took vacations together, and Bonhoeffer left most of his earthly belongings to Bethge. Bethge for his part, was more conservative in his expressions of mutual affection, often put off by Bonhoeffer’s over-the-top, affectionate words. I think Marsh is right to raise questions about the ambiguities here but I think he overstates his case. Male friendships can be intimate without being sexual and I am wary in pressing Bonhoeffer into the role of ‘patron saint of the LGBT community.’ As someone with strong male friendships I wonder how ‘gay’ my correspondence with friends may sound to an outside observer. Same-sex friendships can me intense and intimate, without being sexual. Marsh is trying to get behind why Bonhoeffer and Bethge communicate the way they do. It raises interesting questions, but I don’t think we can speak conclusively here. In other places, Marsh talks matter-of-factly about Barth’s affair with Charlotte von Kirschbaum (without footnote). Here again, all but the most devoted Barthian apologist would see the oddity of Barth having a live-in assistant in the Barth family home, but the nature of their relationship is not as clear and known as Marsh makes it.

But the interpretive leaps makes for an interesting biography which should generate more discussion and inquiry. I really enjoyed reading this book. I was not at all put off by Marsh’s portrait of Bonhoeffer. When Marsh shares Bonhoeffer’s letters home (about money, about wanting new clothes, or laundry), it didn’t make me think Bonhoeffer shallow. Instead I saw a man in his twenties learning to navigate the world. If Marsh wants to paint a picture of Bonhoeffer as a patron saint, perhaps Bonhoeffer is the patron saint of late adolescence. I give this book four stars. ★★★★

Notice of material connection: I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for my honest review.

The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2014/sepoct/full-this-worldliness-of-lif...

Bonhoeffer was Bethge's senior by three years, not to mention his instructor, but the two men soon became emotionally attached and inseparable.

Marsh demonstrates, in other words, how the separate, parallel lines of Bonhoeffer's role as monastic abbot and advocate of prophetic, progressive political action and his role as friend to Bethge and music-loving bon vivant did eventually merge. Marsh takes those two unconnected lines and uses them to form a circle, picking up the unfinished line from Bonhoeffer's childhood, tracing it through the disquieting, unsettled years of his early resistance to the Nazi takeover, and finally looping it back around and connecting it with the mature theology of Bonhoeffer's last years in prison.

"[T]he most important things in life are human relationships," Bonhoeffer concluded, and "the full this-worldliness of life." In Marsh's words, "Discipleship was but a stage in the journey, one that he had now moved beyond." What mattered now was what was disappearing, or rather being forcibly taken, from Europe—"all that is human," "personal life secure with … loved ones and … possessions," the togetherness and tenderness of the quiet joys of friendship, marriage, and extended family. Christian theology and practice must be aimed at preserving and hallowing those things, rather than inculcating any ethereal kind of self-denial.

"The Full This-Worldliness of Life"
On Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Wesley Hill | posted 8/20/2014
When the theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned from England in 1935 to his native Germany, to the town of Zingst on the southern side of the Baltic, he took up the role of spiritual disciplinarian with gusto. He had spent the last several months visiting various pacifist communities and monastic enclaves in Britain, endeavoring to glean as many insights as possible from Anglican and Free Church experiments in Christian discipleship. He observed Benedictine Anglo-Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers. He grew more enthralled by the discipline of praying the Psalter as he saw it done among these groups. He became fascinated by how self-denial in the form of the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience thrived alongside games of ping-pong and cigarette breaks. One gains the impression, reading Charles Marsh's new biography Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—by turns elegant, harrowing, awe-inspiring, and sermonic—that Bonhoeffer was already aware in those days of the potential dissonance between a spirituality of rigor and a recognition of human buoyancy and joie de vivre, a dissonance that would make itself heard and felt in less than a year when he arrived back in Germany to found his own iteration of such an alternative community.

It would be facile to say that Bonhoeffer was "conflicted," but in retrospect it is possible to discern a fissure in his theology and life, in those years on the eve of European cultural collapse and war, that would only be consciously bridged later, in his final theological writings. On the one hand, in spearheading the newly formed Emergency Training Seminary of the Confessing Church, the famous school founded at Zingst and later moved to the Polish town of Finkenwalde that aimed to be a site of resistance to the Nazification of the German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, Bonhoeffer embraced the Benedictine ethos wholeheartedly. He drew from the stockpile of Catholic devotions when he came to try to inculcate his own form of the imitatio Christi, adopting the posture of an abbot.

His famous book The Cost of Discipleship—rendered more accurately, though not entirely literally, in a recent translation as simply Discipleship—was a call to interpret the Lutheran sola fide (a shorthand term for "justification by divine grace, received and acknowledged by faith alone, apart from works") as necessitating ethical action. Or perhaps that's putting it too pacifically; Marsh describes the book as "a polemic against the Lutheran tendency to portray faith as a refuge from obedience." It was a collection of "exercises actualizing the Sermon on the Mount" for dark times. Bonhoeffer was calling his students not only to denounce Nazi ideology but to steel themselves for prophetic actions of opposition to Hitler's regime to which they would all, eventually, be driven.

This vision was fleshed out in lectures on the Gospel of Matthew's Sermon, but it also, as Bonhoeffer's students recalled, led to a particularly stringent form of communal life outside the classroom. Each member of the seminary felt "the weight of the world, the entire crisis of the Christian community." There were enforced hours of silence and an expectation that all would join in manual labor. A daily office of morning and evening prayer, including personal meditation, punctuated by monthly Communion, bookended the community's days. Bonhoeffer would have carried the regimen right through mealtimes, reading chapters of the Bible aloud while students ate, but the howls of protest caused him to relent from adding that extra burden, at least. Keeping time with the liturgical hours and abiding by the ascetic regimens was, Bonhoeffer felt, the way to fortify oneself for the sacrifices that the age would exact.

But it was during these same years that Bonhoeffer broke faith with some of monasticism's ideals. One of the seminary's first students, a member of the initial class of 23, was Eberhard Bethge, whom Marsh describes as "a slender, gentle young man." Bethge had been expelled from ministerial training in Wittenberg for his anti-Nazi sentiments and had found his way to Finkenwalde to begin his studies anew. Bonhoeffer was Bethge's senior by three years, not to mention his instructor, but the two men soon became emotionally attached and inseparable. From their initial meeting over white wine on the lawn to their sessions in the seminary music room, where Bonhoeffer passed on his love of Brahms and Chopin to Bethge, Marsh portrays Bonhoeffer as "smitten" by the younger student and, thereby, forced to qualify his acceptance of the communal rules he'd tried to import from England. A historic stricture in monasteries is the rule against "particular friendships." Pairs of friends, it is thought, can too easily break away from the community and lag in their commitment to the collective if they become too attached to one another. Then, too, there is the matter of sexual attraction, which can be fanned into flame in groups of two but better held in check through full immersion in the wider community. Whatever Bonhoeffer may have thought of this rule, he didn't observe it. He and Bethge continued to grow closer, though they were not, as far as we can tell, sexually intimate (Bonhoeffer apparently died a virgin).

This tension during Bonhoeffer's years at Finkenwalde—between the rigorous and politically engaged discipline of the resistance seminary's communal life and the tender affection of friendship with Bethge—is, in many ways, a microcosm of the larger story Marsh tells in this splendid biography. Marsh's book is a full life of his subject (originally he had planned to write only on Bonhoeffer's stay in America earlier in the 1930s, but that limited aim was abandoned for a bigger canvas), and one way of tracing its development is to read it as a narrative of an emerging humanistic, world-affirming Christian spirituality. Having tried to observe a certain kind of Christian discipline in the shadow of one of the twentieth century's most horrific regimes, he later left it behind for "a faith more open, munificent, and sensuous."

The seeds of that later spirituality were sown in Bonhoeffer's childhood and adolescence. Marsh describes the young Bonhoeffer as well bred, at ease in the worlds of fashion, art, travel (he swooned over Italy), and especially music. His university years were shaped by his experience of studying with the most accomplished scholars of religion in the 20th century, Adolf von Harnack chief among them, and his dissertation and later Habilitationsschrift (or second dissertation, generally of higher quality and displaying more independent research) received the highest marks and met with wide acclaim. When he served as a pastoral assistant for a year at a church in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer's sermons engaged many young listeners in a way their permanent pastor never had, while his athletic prowess impressed them outside the confines of the sanctuary. On hot summer nights he would stay up late, drinking wine and attending the cinema. Marsh renders his subject as urbane and popular, writing home to request new clothes and expensive shoes. He was not, apparently, free from the vices of arrogance and flippancy that so often accompany the kind of privileged upbringing he had enjoyed.

But in time Bonhoeffer became increasingly conscious of the sense of obligation brought on by that privilege. As war came to seem increasingly unavoidable and the church, puppy-like, trailed Hitler obediently at each fork in the road (one of the great achievements of Marsh's biography is to depict, in sickening detail and with fresh attention to subtlety and nuance, the degree of the church's complicity in Hitler's consolidation of dictatorial power), Bonhoeffer came to see his own road narrowing to a point of decision. After his time as a visiting fellow at Union Seminary in New York, his most enduring memory of the U.S. was of the African American church, Abyssinian-Baptist, he frequented in Harlem. There he had glimpsed the grounding of the struggle for social justice in passionate preaching and enacted communal solidarity, and he knew he had to find some similar way of life for himself. When Bonhoeffer couldn't resist heeding the alarm bells sounding in his native Germany, he returned home, in Marsh's fine phrase, "a theologian of the concrete."

What Marsh shows, in a thread that unifies his biography from its opening chapter until its close, is how this aim—to be a socially engaged, grounded, expressive theologian—was concretized for Bonhoeffer not simply in his prophetic speeches (he regularly and publicly denounced the church's capitulation and, equally, the Nazi government that demanded it) and not only in the contemplative ascesis of the Finkenwalde cloister but, gradually and with more and more self-awareness, in the "rich and multilayered worldliness" he had tasted in his earliest years. Marsh demonstrates, in other words, how the separate, parallel lines of Bonhoeffer's role as monastic abbot and advocate of prophetic, progressive political action and his role as friend to Bethge and music-loving bon vivant did eventually merge. Marsh takes those two unconnected lines and uses them to form a circle, picking up the unfinished line from Bonhoeffer's childhood, tracing it through the disquieting, unsettled years of his early resistance to the Nazi takeover, and finally looping it back around and connecting it with the mature theology of Bonhoeffer's last years in prison.

Late in his life, Bonhoeffer recounted a conversation he'd had with his friend Jean Lasserre years earlier, during their drive across America, in which they shared with each other their highest aspirations. Lasserre wanted sainthood, and he eventually became a pastor and joined the French resistance. Bonhoeffer thought he wanted something equivalent—to learn to have faith—but it dawned on him later that Lasserre's and his answers weren't identical, or at least that he had misunderstood Lasserre in his own quest for spiritual perfection. For a long time, Bonhoeffer said, he tried to achieve sanctity through rigorous discipline. "I suppose I wrote Discipleship at the end of this path," he mused. But the kind of faith that mattered now, with the seepage of corruption into every crevasse of the German church's life, was a faith that took its stand against the encroachment of ambition, hubris, and shattering abuse and torture in Germany. "[T]he most important things in life are human relationships," Bonhoeffer concluded, and "the full this-worldliness of life." In Marsh's words, "Discipleship was but a stage in the journey, one that he had now moved beyond." What mattered now was what was disappearing, or rather being forcibly taken, from Europe—"all that is human," "personal life secure with … loved ones and … possessions," the togetherness and tenderness of the quiet joys of friendship, marriage, and extended family. Christian theology and practice must be aimed at preserving and hallowing those things, rather than inculcating any ethereal kind of self-denial.

On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. The charges didn't initially include his involvement in a plot on Hitler's life (those details would emerge later); they were, rather, lackluster accusations related to his trip to the UK, his avoidance of military service, and other "minor" offenses to do with incendiary speech and assistance to the non-state sanctioned church. Soon he was transferred from a Gestapo cell to the military prison at Tegel. And it was there, finally, that Bonhoeffer tried to put into words the faith he had come to embrace.

Much of what he wrote was centered around Bethge, whom Marsh's portrayal foregrounds. Bonhoeffer loved Bethge in a way he never loved anyone else, not even his (much younger) fiancée, Maria. "[T]he human," he wrote, "is created in such a way that we seek not the many but the one particular." (Again, Bonhoeffer rejected the monastic preference for companies rather than pairs.) One could speculate that Bonhoeffer was a homosexual, albeit a celibate one, but Marsh wisely avoids any clear-cut verdict on that score. He lingers over the relationship, revealing its depth and intensity in a way no other scholar has attempted. But what emerges most clearly from that close attention is not a homoerotically inclined Bonhoeffer to the exclusion of a "quite normal" one (to use Bethge's designation for his friend) but a Bonhoeffer whose zeal for intimacy and filial, spiritual closeness complicates and overflows the categories by which we often classify such things. I think here of Rowan Williams' conclusion that romantic love and the love of same-sex friendship are best understood as "different forms of one passion—the passion for life-giving interconnection."

Perhaps it was the austerity of the war years that made Bonhoeffer eschew the timidity of expression he might otherwise have disciplined himself to observe in his friendship with Bethge ("[I]n the months here in prison I have had quite a terrible longing," he exclaimed in one of his letters). Or perhaps the reason for his pursuit of such a friendship was deeper than merely a consciousness of time having grown short. Perhaps it was owing, more fundamentally, to what Bonhoeffer had come to see as the way to embody the faith and spirituality he had long sought. "God, the Eternal," he wrote to Bethge in 1944, "wants to be loved with our whole heart, not to the detriment of earthly love or to diminish it, but as a sort of cantus firmus"—the primary musical voice to which other voices in a polyphonic composition relate in counterpoint. God is found and known and loved in the world, in relationships, in the love between human beings, "in a few people one wants to see and with whom one wishes to be together," Bonhoeffer said. If true, it was an experience of God he would only know for a few months longer. He was executed in April 1945, just before the Allied forces arrived to liberate the Nazi prisons but not before he had asked Bethge to save his prison letters for possible publication. It was one of the last exchanges Bonhoeffer had with "the man who was his soul mate," and, thus, it seems to be the most natural, the most intimate, lens through which to view Bonhoeffer's entire life.

Wesley Hill is assistant professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. His next book, Paul and the Trinity, is forthcoming from Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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A new type of Christian pervades America today- the kind who sings “God Bless America”, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and “Onward Christian Soldiers” with the unending patriotic zeal formally reserved for religious zealots. They wear flag pins on their lapels, bald eagles festoon their ties, and Old Glory makes a surprise appearance as a scarf about their necks. Standing to attention before the flag, they proudly proclaim America to be “one nation under God… with liberty and justice for all”. In his book Wayward Christian Soldiers, Charles Marsh takes a step back from the politics in Christianity and challenges his readers to think about what values, truths, and standards Christians may be giving up in their ardor towards supporting the American way.

Marsh bases his book on the assumption that American Christianity has so inundated itself in the political realm that it no longer has a proper place for true spirituality. With that viewpoint firmly implanted in his mind, Marsh asks a valid question of his readers: “how can Christians begin to rebuild the church’s shattered witness after a time of compromise and accommodation?” Marsh is purporting a cry for silence, citing Bonheoffer’s writings as an example of the kind of silent faith Christians should embody- a faith, though silent, that can still speak volumes through lifestyle and actions. More to the point, he criticizes Americans in particular with destroying the tenuous credibility of Christianity. Americans have so meshed their spirituality with their patriotism that they “have turned God into an appendage of the American way of life”. Marsh reminds his readers that to be a Christian is to lose all sense of citizenship, to the point where Americanism must find itself buried within a strong sense of citizenship in Christ’s kingdom.

Marsh is an excellent writer and rhetorician. So precisely chosen are his words that he leaves the reader in no doubt as to his opinions on not only his own thoughts, but also the thoughts of others. The benefit of such prose is a book that is highly readable and engaging, with radical ideas couched in emotional terms which the reader should have little trouble embracing. However, there is a negative aspect to his impassioned appeals. By using language that so clearly articulates Marsh’s own feelings, the reader may find it difficult to cut through the rhetoric in order to decide for himself whether the claims that the book makes are valid.

In conclusion, Wayward Christian Soldiers is worth reading for the reason that Marsh is unafraid to state his thoughts about Christians and politics, even when those thoughts do not match up with what the Christian Right and mainstream media purport them to be. The discerning reader should easily be able to carve away Marsh’s opinions in order to weigh fully facts against facts without bias. Ultimately, this book puts forth a much-needed call to Christians for righteousness, truth, holiness, and silence in a noisy, Godless world.

A very good, well researched book about the lives of five people who crossed paths during Freedom Summer 1964.

In this book, Marsh offers a new way of reading the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian theologian who was executed for his role in the resistance against Hitler and the Nazis. Focusing on Bonhoeffer's substantial philosophical interests, Marsh examines his work in the context of the
German philosophical tradition, from Kant through Hegel to Heidegger. Marsh argues that Bonhoeffer's description of human identity offers a compelling alternative to post-Kantian conceptions of selfhood. In addition, he shows that Bonhoeffer, while working within the boundaries of Barth's theology,
provides both a critique and redescription of the tradition of transcendental subjectivity. This fresh look at Bonhoeffer's thought will provoke much discussion in the theological academy and the church, as well as in broader forums of intellectual life.