The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump by Stephen R. Haynes (review)

This book combines important historical material with current events and issues. Haynes is professor of religious studies at Rhodes College and a well-respected scholar of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and legacy. Two of his earlier books, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (2004) and The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post- Holocaust Perspectives (2006), are highly respected surveys of Bonhoeffer’s reception and following, mostly in the United States. This book extends these surveys by unfolding the multiple ways Bonhoeffer’s theological/political legacy is being used and misused in more recent years, specifically by conservative/Evangelical people, leading up to and including the “Age of Trump.” It was specifically the popularization and misuse of Bonhoeffer’s theology by Eric Metaxas in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy; A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich (2010), combined with Metaxas’ unequivocal endorsement and subsequent support of Donald Trump, that moved Haynes from a more academic reserve and scholarly detachment to an all-out confrontation. Haynes, in about 2017, came to believe that customary reserve and respectful critique needed to step aside because too much was at stake; the use and misuse of Bonhoeffer’s theology to buttress the nationalistic and narrow agenda of President Trump required a response. Haynes is not only professionally qualified, but also personally well-suited for this task, since he began his life as an Evangelical.

As the battle for Bonhoeffer has evolved, the more popular renderings of Bonhoeffer’s legacy often display disregard of nearly five decades of serious scholarship regarding the context and content of Bonhoeffer’s legacy, what Haynes calls a “suspicion of academic elites” (3). The author’s grasp of the plethora of contemporary expressions and uses of the Bonhoeffer legacy (books and blogs, conferences and cinema, drama and documentaries) is nothing short of encyclopedic; he monitors the internet for virtually every Bonhoeffer entry, being passionate about the ways this twentieth-century witness for Jesus Christ is being interpreted. After a brief excursus through the earlier, more liberal interpretations of Bonhoeffer in the 1960s, the author commences a journey through the early Evangelical distrust of parts of the legacy, especially regarding Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison, then on to Evangelical appreciation for Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a “Christian hero, cultural warrior, internal critic, and ecclesiological guide.”

Eric Metaxas’s publication of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2010) helped to launch his next project of taking Bonhoeffer on the road, from small town America to the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. In those public forums, Metaxas often took aim at neuralgic issues like sexuality, abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research, employing (misusing?) the words and actions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Woven throughout virtually every one of Metaxas’ presentations was his passion to enlist Dietrich Bonhoeffer to confront the “liberal erosion” in America, a passion that he shares with many Evangelicals; he aggressively promoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an American-style Evangelical. The academic guardians of the Bonhoeffer legacy are quick to point out that Bonhoeffer was many things to many people, but an American-style Evangelical he was not.

In an interview on American Family Radio in 2015 Metaxas said, “I really believe the story of Bonhoeffer is the gift of God to the American church today.” In June of 2016, Metaxas elaborated more specifically: Despite “all of his foibles, peccadilloes, and metaphorical warts . . . [Trump is] nonetheless the last best hope of keeping America from sliding into oblivion . . . the dustbin of history” (105). Later, Metaxas, while admitting Trump’s moral flaws, states, “Bonhoeffer would have voted for Trump. You should too.”

At about this time Haynes put his scholarly detachment aside and entered the fray: “Studying Metaxas’s portrait of Bonhoeffer and his ongoing attempts to use him for partisan political purposes has caused me to rethink my role as an observer of what might be called the American Bonhoeffer. . . . Today I no longer believe...