Pastor. Spy. Assassin.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. is an urgent film for our moment

Our extended family went to see Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. on Thanksgiving weekend. We saw it on the first Sunday of Advent: the Christian season of waiting for the coming of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer became an Advent movie for us, and I recommend it to you. Our nation needs the love of Christ now in practical and courageous ways, and this new film is a compelling testimony to that love and its unknown consequences.

“Is this a Bonhoeffer moment?” is a question I was asked many times during this election. It often came from pastors and seminarians who knew something about the young German pastor and brilliant theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who became a pivotal leader in the “Confessing Church”. This was the movement which rose up in opposition to the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, after the election of Adolf Hitler to the role of Chancellor in 1933.There were many complicated reasons why he was elected (as there often are with autocrats), but, in Germany, Hitler quickly moved to establish his power as the leader, “The Fuhrer,” and brutally brought every sector of society into line with his will, agenda, and power– including the German Church.

Because the church must belong to God, and not a nation-state or its leader, some Christian voices began to rise up to say no to this nationalist German idolatry. But there were only a few due to the enormous pressure and fear that Hitler’s regime brought to the church’s institutions in Germany. Even fewer were willing to stand up for the most vulnerable who would come under increasing attack motivated by the racial vision of a white Aryan nation that deserved to rule; focusing on the Jews, and finally culminating in the Holocaust. The Barmen Declaration declared by the early Confessing Church leaders that God is God and any other worship must be denounced as false worship.

Bonhoeffer’s story can be found in several comprehensive biographies including Bonhoeffer: A Biography by his best friend Eberhard Bethge, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Charles Marsh, and many others. So many of us have been shaped by the many magnificent writings of Bonhoeffer like The Cost of Discipleship, Letters and Papers from Prison, and Life Together, and countless more books he managed to write in his short and conflicted Christian pilgrimage.

But the classic Bonhoeffer biographies pay little attention to how much the young German scholar and pastor was shaped and inspired by his exposure to and engagement with the Black Church and culture of Harlem during his one year of study at Union Seminary in New York City. The young white German theologian became deeply involved with the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church led by Rev. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell and it changed his life. This white German theological student even taught a Sunday School class to Black teenagers in Abyssinian!

The best book on that critical period in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life is Bonhoeffers’ Black Jesus, by Dr. Reggie Williams, which documents how the power of the preaching, music, worship, and fellowship of the Black people of God made a deep impression on the young German’s own Christian development and profoundly shaped his formative influence on the Confessing Church when he went back to Germany.

There have been documentaries on Dietrich Bonhoeffer before, but never a movie in the theatres. I was touched throughout the film by the centrality of the teachings of Jesus in the young pastor's mind and heart, and how his encounter with the Black Church took all that to even a deeper level for him. The Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Eucharist come to life in this movie and were a profound and moving beginning to Advent for our family.

The unexpected timing of Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. is also very relevant for our moment. It was very quite striking how so many of the statements of the German Church leaders in the film, in their acquiescence to the new German regime, were alarmingly similar to the statements of the white Christian nationalists of today. And in the end, the film powerfully shows how the teachings of Jesus were so antithetical to German nationalism then as they are to American Christian nationalism today.

I called my friend Reggie Williams right after seeing the movie. He had been on the set for two days of the filming and offered some advice to the film makers along the way. Williams wrote a review in The Christian Century, which lays out important critiques of how African Americans are often portrayed and “troped” by white film makers. He also distinguishes a documentary (which his own book about Bonhoeffer’s life-changing encounter with the Black Church really is) with the creative license of filmmaking where all the events didn’t always happen in the ways they are shown, but the empathy and impact of the Black Church and culture on this young white German theologian is dramatically portrayed. And we both hope that many people see the movie.

So I encourage you to see Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. during Advent, and reflect even more deeply on how our ways of expressing the love of Christ are more important than ever.