Resisting The Bonhoeffer Brand is a short book that is mostly a response to criticisms of Marsh’s biography, Strange Glory by Schlingensiepen, who also has a recent biography of Bonhoeffer.
Earlier this year I read Discipleship in an Age of Nazis which included a discussion about some of the weaknesses of each biography of Bonhoeffer. That discussion is what prompted me to pickup this book because it pointed out backgrounds and biases that as a general reader and not a scholar of Bonhoeffer I missed. This type of meta discussion about the methods and aims of biography that is at the opening of Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand and was the main focus of Haynes’ The Battle for Bonhoeffer and was a smaller discussion in Discipleship in the Age of Nazis is very helpful to a lay person interested in the minutia but not educated in it. But even as a lay person I can see weaknesses in all of the biographies of Bonhoeffer.
I am not sure if Marsh should have responded to criticisms or not. I can’t judge the seriousness of the critiques and the method of response. I do know that as a reader, Marsh appears pretty defensive. But in spite of his clear defensiveness, he also appears to be broadly right. This quote I think gets that his point that a biography has to consider the forest, not just individual trees.
“The pedantry of his assertations—“ X gets mentioned only once or twice”; “there is no mention of”; “what Marsh ought to have written”; “Marsh didn’t really understand”—obscures the more important point at hand. Selectivity is biography’s principal virtue—and necessity.” (p29)
Marsh points out that in many cases Schlingensiepen is defending the Confessing Church even though Bonhoeffer thought the Confessing Church was compromised. Schlingensiepen’s father was a Confessing Church pastor. In a similar way, Mark Nation (Discipleship in an Age of Nazis) is pointing out that Bethge (the standard biography from Bonhoeffer’s close friend) seems to want to make Bonhoeffer more palatable to Germans by making Bonhoeffer more of a patriot. And Nation thinks that Marsh made Bonhoeffer too much of a Neibuhrian realist. And everyone thinks that Eric Metaxas got Bonhoeffer wrong.
In part this type of pointing out that people’s biases impact their writing and views of the evidence is why we need multiple authors writing from different perspectives. Marsh is pointing out that if the biography of Bonhoeffer is always told from a framework of Bethge’s original biography (as Schlingensiepen says is proper) then nothing new can actually be said. I think that is right. But at the same time, the amount of actually new evidence is often minuscule. The change is not in new evidence, but in new understanding of previously discovered evidence.
For Bonhoeffer, his engagement with the resistance is one of the big points of contention. Mark Nation believes that he was a full pacifist and remained a pacifist and never participated in the actual assassination attempt, but only in trying to get the Allies to understand that there was going to be an attempt at a regime change. Bethge doesn’t really think that Bonhoeffer was really a pacifist at any point, or if he was, it was a brief period (pacifism is very discouraged in Lutheran Germany.) I think most others believe that there was a change where Bonhoeffer rejected his earlier beliefs as too pietistic or naive and that embraced a more realist approach (Marsh) or if not a realism approach, then simply did not follow his ideals, Schlingensiepen and Haynes.
There is just limited evidence. In many ways I think that Mark Nation has the hardest time because his position is a direct contraction to Bethge, who was Bonhoeffer’s best friend and curator of much of the documentation we have of Bonhoeffer. But I still would like Nation’s position to be the right one, even though I suspect that it is more in line with one of the others who are identifying either a change or a submission to doing what he thought was the wrong thing because he felt that there was no other choice.
This is one of those many books that I am glad I read, especially since it was so short. But that I am not sure I would recommend to many unless you have also read at least three of the above mentioned books.