Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Methodism

on August 6, 2014

Commentary about the new Dietrich Bonhoeffer biography by Charles Marsh, Strange Glory, has predictably focused on the book’s speculation about the German theologian’s sexual bent, although Marsh agrees that Bonhoeffer was chaste. Getting less attention is the fascinating account of the influence of New York and Union Seminary on the young Bonhoeffer, who came to America in 1930 for one year.

At Union two Methodist professors influenced the future anti-Nazi martyr, one of whom also exerted a deep impact on Methodism that continues today. Harry Ward helped to found the Methodist Federation for Social Service in 1907, which crafted Methodism’s Social Creed, and which marinated Methodism in the Social Gospel. It later became the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), which is Methodism’s oldest enduring caucus. He led it for over 30 formative years.

(Above photo from Marsh’s book shows Ward, with Reinhold Niebuhr to the right covering his face, and Bonhoeffer reputedly at left.)

Ward became renowned as an intense social activist focused on labor rights, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, a fierce critic of capitalism, and an early and zealous apologist for Soviet Communism. Lavishing praise on Stalinist rule in the 1930s during its most murderous years, Ward reputedly never joined the Communist Party but never abandoned his enthusiasm for Bolshevism. His persistent Soviet sympathies, shared by much of MFSA, helped persuade the 1952 Methodist General Conference to disavow MFSA, which had retained semi-official status. Methodism created a new official public policy voice for Methodism that ironically became eventually an echo of MFSA.

In 1930, Ward’s zeal for the Soviet Union may not have been directly apparent to his student, Bonhoeffer. The visiting German found much if not most of liberal Protestantism at Union Seminary and at New York congregations like Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Riverside Church to be intellectually and spiritually vapid. Marsh’s biography recites Bonhoeffer’s famous quote: “In New York they preach about virtually everything except the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

But Marsh claims Bonhoeffer appreciated the dedication of activist professors of the Left like Ward. Bonhoeffer called Ward “Union’s point man in the most radical socializing of the Gospel.” Marsh notes Ward was the seminary’s most famous teacher until soon overshadowed by Reinhold Niebuhr. Bonhoeffer took an ethics course jointly taught by Ward and Niebuhr that had students examine current events through the lens of “Jesus and the proletariate.” Of course the two professors later sharply parted ways ideologically, Niebuhr becoming an anti-Communist liberal and Ward hailing the Soviet Union as the “repository for his hopes of humanity’s ascension to a higher plane of spiritual and social life, atheism notwithstanding.”

Another Methodist minister teaching at a Union who deeply influenced Bonhoeffer was Charles Webber, an avid community organizer whom Bonhoeffer called a “radical socialist.” Webber took the class to “site visits” throughout Depression era New York, spotlighting faith-based organizing. Meanwhile, the better known Methodist, Ward, in his classroom assailed American liberalism and commended socialist revolution. Bonhoeffer admitted he, Webber and Niebuhr among others at Union offered “sobriety and seriousness,” which was “determinative for me for a long time to come.” But he also thought that liberalism’s rejection of orthodoxy undermined the Social Gospel’s ambitions to reshape the world for Christ.

Ward was a lifelong pacifist, which he never seemed to reconcile with his sympathy for police state Communism. Niebuhr abandoned his pacifism to create his own school of Christian realism. Bonhoeffer achieved his martyrdom when he set aside pacifism to give moral nurture to the anti-Hitler plot. He had appreciated several Methodist Social Gospel pacifists while at Union Seminary but ultimately gave his life adhering to more traditional Christian understandings of political responsibility.

  1. Comment by Prentice Durwood Worley on August 6, 2014 at 3:56 am

    Mark, I appreciate this article. I heard all these theologians quoted and often talked about in lectures back when I was in seminary, but never really knew all that much about them – other than Bonhoeffer was a martyred for opposing Hitler and Nazism.

  2. Comment by virginiagentleman on August 6, 2014 at 10:26 am

    An excellent critique of the ultimate vapidity of the social gospel. Too bad their grandsons/granddaughters survive to this day in the form of Sojourners and other fellow-travelers within the dying Mainstreamers.

  3. Comment by CDGingrich on August 10, 2014 at 8:33 am

    Very informative. Thank you. Bonhoeffer was a giant. The others, not so much. I am afraid I have given up on the UMC and am now attending a wonderful Wesleyan church.

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