We Don't Need Heroes

We need Bonhoeffers

Coming from the same company that produced The Chosen and Sound of Freedom, the newest film from Angel Studios is that rare “faith-based” movie that has an overall positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes.¹ Of course, it helps that it’s a biopic about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Christian martyr whose “fascinating but sad story about sacrifice and staying true to your moral beliefs and faith” San Jose Mercury critic Randy Myers calls “a potent message that we need to hear time and again.” RT top critic Linda Marric agrees: “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin succeeds in painting a respectful and nuanced portrait of a man whose convictions led him down a path of dangerous resistance.”

Interestingly, two negative reviews have come from Christian magazines. In World, Collin Garbarino complains that the new movie doesn’t delve deeply enough into the beliefs of a Lutheran theologian: “…it might capture the extraordinary busyness of Bonhoeffer’s fight against Nazism. But it feels rushed when depicting his primary calling to minister to God’s church.” Moreover, in making a pastor into a spy and assassin, writer-director Todd Kormanicki overemphasizes “Bonhoeffer’s role in the attempt on Hitler’s life.”

Both critiques also show up in Myles Werntz’s longer review for Christianity Today. Rather than emphasize Bonhoeffer’s attempts at non-violent resistance, Bonhoeffer plays up his supposed role in an assassination plot against Hitler, which Werntz finds both historically and ethically dubious, turning “a man of deep theological convictions and subtle intellect” into “a man for whom moral convictions are a flexible and useful tool, a man whose actions are determined not by concerns for the church’s witness but by perceived historical necessity.”²

Setting aside the real debate that historians and biographers have about Bonhoeffer’s role, if any, in a plot against Hitler’s life³… it’s possible that there’s an even deeper problem with this way of telling the Bonhoeffer story.

While he thinks Kormanicki’s “script fails to do justice to this complicated hero,” Garbarino still believes that “World War II created a host of heroes, and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of the most renowned.” But if the scholar who edited the Bonhoeffer papers is correct, we shouldn’t think about him as a hero at all.

Which doesn’t make his life any less important, or his witness any less timely.

After working for many years at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Barnett recently served as visiting professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Virginia

As she explains in a new essay for The Christian Century, Victoria Barnett didn’t mean to become a Bonhoeffer expert. Her 1992 book on the Confessing Church focused on other figures and was particularly interested in its women — whose push for ordination Bonhoeffer opposed. But many of the sixty people she interviewed talked about him, and she ended up helping to edit the 17-volume series of Bonhoeffer’s collected works.

What Barnett found was “a decent man, a good person, a kind person.” But not “the widespread, overly simplistic image of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a Christian activist and hero, moved by conscience and faithfulness to his Lord, who singlehandedly led his church in its fight against Hitler and was ultimately executed for rescuing Jews and trying to overthrow the Nazi regime.”