Bonhoeffer and the Martyr's Method

How do the German pastor's rigorous spiritual disciplines relate to God's grace?

Bonhoeffer with students, 1932. Creative Commons license: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany. Photographer unknown. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

Is It True That All You Need Is Jesus?

I shared in an earlier post that the phrase all you need is Jesus was nearly ringing in my head the night I got saved.

It was part of what a street evangelist had told me years before:

You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to prove anything. All you need is Jesus.

My salvation experience was overwhelming and convincing. Over the years, especially during difficult stretches, my memories of that night have helped anchor me. They’ve assured me that, yes, God is not only real, but he’s also active in our day. He truly does give grace to those who don’t deserve it.

Yet today, around fifteen years later, when I think of that phrase all you need is Jesus, I can’t help but ask:

Is it really that simple?

Are those words a helpful reminder that the Bible is, first and foremost, a story about God and not us? Could the saying help us to remember that we can never outgrow God’s grace?

Or is it a bit misleading? Could it be an oversimplification? Might it be used to justify half-hearted Christian living? After all, it takes a lot of effort to put up a serious fight against sin every day. On the other hand, it’s easy to rattle off a phrase like all you need is Jesus, and just like that, you can whitewash your laziness.

That phrase meant everything to me the night I got saved. But again, is it really that simple?

To think through these questions, I’ll use a contrast. First, I’ll touch on my experience with New Calvinism in the 2010s. At least for the first few years of that decade, all you need is Jesus fit pretty well alongside the preaching I was hearing.

Next, I’ll draw from a sermon that I heard more recently. It was about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was martyred by the Nazis. To strengthen Christian ministers so they wouldn’t capitulate to Hitler, Bonhoeffer organized underground seminaries. He hoped that through rigorous training with prayer, fasting, and psalm singing, believers would remain steadfast—and that they would do so even in the face of extraordinary government pressure to cave.

Although the backdrop of World War II Germany makes Bonhoeffer’s story unique, it raises a question that applies in every era:

If all you need is Jesus, then what’s the purpose of the kind of heavy spiritual lifting that Bonhoeffer urged?

Old Memories of New Calvinism

Although I was Catholic when I got saved, within a couple of years I found my way to a church heavily influenced by New Calvinism. How I got from one to the other might be worth recounting at some point, but that won’t be the focus here.

It was 2010 when I showed up at my new church. Although at that time I hadn’t yet heard of New Calvinism or “Young, Restless, and Reformed,” I happened to arrive right around the peak of that movement’s energy and influence. Names like John Piper, Timothy Keller, and yes, Mark Driscoll, came up all the time.

My church emphasized the futility of trying to earn God’s favor through your own efforts. We were reminded—correctly—that the forgiveness of our sins was only possible because of Jesus’ death on the cross. We were taught that we couldn’t outgrow the good news of the salvation our Lord had made possible. In other words, it was a mistake to think that after trusting in Jesus and receiving his forgiveness, you could simply move on to doing good Christian deeds. No matter how many faithful works we might pile up, we still needed to rely on God’s grace. As one common saying put it, we’d always be at the foot of the cross.

That much, I think, few Christians would take issue with.

So all you need is Jesus after all, right?

The problem is that even essential truth can be distorted. It’s necessary to understand that human efforts can’t earn God’s forgiveness. But when you camp on that particular point, it’s possible to accidentally cast suspicion on good, faithful works.

At least in the New Calvinist circles I knew, this mistaken tendency showed up at times. I think the 2013 observation by Paul Washer, a pastor sympathetic to the movement, is helpful:

The lifestyle of at least some young reformers borderlines on an antinomianism that flaunts its supposed freedoms and shuns rigorous piety as little more than bondage to the Law.

By antinomianism, he means a distorted form of the faith that suggests Christians don’t need to obey any moral laws. According to this misunderstanding, if you trust in Jesus for your salvation, it won’t make any difference whether you manage to break free of sinful patterns in your life. All your sins are forgiven regardless, after all.

Many churches have been influenced by New Calvinism in different ways and to various degrees. I’m not suggesting that all churches touched by the movement threw the importance of moral obedience out the window. Overall, I don’t think that mine did. But at times I saw glimpses of what Washer describes.

And my broader point is that a person could slip into a dismissive attitude toward moral obedience and keep right on claiming what I heard years before from that street preacher:

You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to prove anything. All you need is Jesus.

All You Need Is All of Jesus

Of course, if you read the Gospel accounts, you quickly discover that Jesus was instructing his followers to do lots of things. To take just a few examples from Matthew, believers are to pray,¹ to forgive those who wrong them,² to love their enemies,³ and to make more disciples.⁴

Those particular commands are common knowledge for most who’ve spent some time in church. And they get at the heart of my point:

If all you need is Jesus, wouldn’t it make sense to try to obey all of Jesus, meaning all that he said?

And while we may know we’re supposed to pray, how vibrant are our prayer lives, really? We know we’re supposed to forgive, but it’s so much easier to hold a grudge. And what would it even be like to love our enemies? Does anyone really live like that?

When we realize how difficult it is to obey Jesus, the temptation to settle for a flat understanding of the faith can emerge. An over-simplified understanding of all you need is Jesus has a certain appeal. That’s because living as Jesus instructs us to and making even more disciples who live like that is very, very hard.

Bonhoeffer’s Rigorous Path

If anyone understood the difficulty of making faithful disciples, it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was in fact New Calvinists who introduced me to the martyred German pastor, and Christians in that stream usually hold him in very high regard. But the way Bonhoeffer encouraged Christians to live was distinct from anything I heard the (formerly) young reformers urging.

Here’s what’s on my mind: about a year ago, I heard a sermon that centered on Bonhoeffer’s life and practices. Early on, the pastor brought up 1 Timothy 4:7b-8:

Train yourself for godliness. For while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

In a typical sermon today, you might expect this verse to be used along with a modest encouragement like, “Now please go home and read your Bibles a little more.” But in this particular message, the pastor connected the idea to Bonhoeffer’s courageous life and his rigorous style of ministry.

The pastor drew from a story in Jon Tyson’s book Beautiful Resistance. The book recalls a historian named Wilhelm Niesel, who traveled to the seminary near Finkenwalde, Germany for a firsthand look at what Bonhoeffer was doing.

In 1935, Bonhoeffer had founded a Christian community meant to reflect the ethic of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Participants also had to develop the spiritual tenacity to resist capitulation to the Nazis. As one writer puts it, “Hitler did not merely want to rule Germany politically; rather he wanted to control the hearts and souls of its citizens.”⁵ In response, seminary life was strenuous. It required prayer, Bible study, and communal worship at set times. Some, like Niesel, wondered whether so much rigor was really necessary.

To make a vivid case for his approach, Bonhoeffer took Niesel to a hill where they could see German soldiers training for battle. Fighter planes were taking off and landing. Soldiers were marching in formation. Bonhoeffer explained to Niesel that the Nazi soldiers were practicing disciplines that trained them “for a kingdom . . . of hardness and cruelty.”⁶ His view was that Christians needed to respond with a life of biblical discipline. Bonhoeffer summed it up bluntly:

What we're doing at the seminary has to be stronger than what Hitler's doing in forming his army.⁷

Grace and Grit

If you’re hoping I’ll tie all of this together with a bite-sized takeaway, you’re going to be disappointed. A deep dive into the topics here (grace, Christian obedience, Bonhoeffer’s story, Christians caving to ungodly government, etc.) could fill many books. My hope is simply that you’ll come away asking deeper questions about both grace and obedience.

That being said, given the New Calvinist influences I’ve known, I can’t resist the urge to wrap up with a handful of points:

• Understanding God’s grace is essential.

• The Bible doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned that steadfast obedience will erode a believer’s grasp of God’s grace.

• Bonhoeffer isn’t infallible because of his courage or the fact he was martyred. His writings can be considered in light of Scripture like any other Christian’s words and legacy.

• We shouldn’t assume that we don’t need to take Christian obedience as seriously as, say, believers under Nazi Germany. This is not because we’re necessarily going to live through something that bad. It’s because all of human history reflects an unseen battle between good and evil. The same demonic powers that are behind the worst chapters in history will continue to lurk in our midst until Jesus returns. We need to be sober-minded about that reality, and we need to live our lives accordingly.

Here are those four points built out with a little more detail:

First, we can’t overstate the importance of God’s grace. Whatever efforts we make to obey God, these are only possibly because of the gift of grace that God gave us first. There’s good reason why many Christians regularly bring up Ephesians 2:8-9:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.

Second, I’d suggest that the inspired authors of the Bible don’t seem particularly concerned that vigorous efforts at obedience will undermine our appreciation of God’s grace. At times, I’ve heard it said that believers generally lean toward legalism (over-emphasis on godly obedience) or license (laxness with regard to obedience).

I think this is an oversimplification, personally. But even if it’s a fair generalization, the idea can still nudge us in the direction of a serious mistake. It can lead to the assumption that if a believer makes a lot of effort to obey God’s word, that person probably has a legalistic streak. This, in turn, sets the stage for making mediocre, half-hearted Christian living seem like the ideal.

After all, as the logic goes, too little obedience might be a sign of spiritual carelessness or license. But on the other hand, too much obedience might be a sign of equally dangerous legalism. Splitting the difference then can be assumed to be the sweet spot. The safe option then seems to be making some effort to grow in Jesus but not too much, to avoid being labeled a legalist.

I’m going to pick this idea up again in a future post because I think it’s widespread, and more needs to be said about it. But for now, I’ll highlight a couple of Scriptures that challenge the notion that zeal for good works is a warning sign of legalism.

I brought up Ephesians 2:8-9 earlier. This time I’ll include verse 10 [emphasis mine]:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Another good example is Colossians 1:29:

For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

The author of Colossians, the apostle Paul, pours extraordinary effort into his ministry, but he knows that it’s ultimately God’s power working through him. If it was possible that what disciples at Finkenwalde were doing was more powerful than the Third Reich army, that was only because of the power of God.

Third, Bonhoeffer’s extreme courage and willingness to lay down his life for God’s kingdom don’t place him above critique. He was a God-fearing man in extremely challenging circumstances, and there’s much the modern church can learn from him. But as George Marsden’s excellent biography shows, the German pastor had his frailties and contradictions.

Fourth, Bonhoeffer’s era is not as unusual as it seems. Those of us who’ve known relative peace in our lives might view something like the rise of Nazi Germany as a terrible exception. And thankfully, in many ways, it was.

But the Bible presents an unseen battle between good and evil unfolding throughout all of history. The demonic powers that made Hitler possible might be restrained or more subtle in some eras, but they’re still around.

Christians always rely on God’s grace in all things. Yet, we should also approach life with the discipline of an athlete, as the apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 9:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Run the race, brothers and sisters. Train like the heroes of the faith. And by the grace of God, receive the everlasting prize.

1. Matthew 6:9-13

2. Matthew 6:14

3. Matthew 5:44

4. Matthew 28:19-20

5. Gaylon Barker, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theological Education at Finkenwalde 1935-1937 (quoted in Jon Tyson’s Beautiful Resistance)

6. Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (quoted in Jon Tyson’s Beautiful Resistance)

7. Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (quoted in Jon Tyson’s Beautiful Resistance)