Interested in the new Bonhoeffer movie? Please don't go!
My review at Christianity Today
My review of the new Dietrich Bonhoeffer movie is out today with Christianity Today. Without exaggeration, I’ve been more anxious about this going live than I’ve been about anything that I’ve written.
The ultimate irony of the film is that it rightly diagnoses when the Nazis substitute theology for politics—and in quite blatant and stylized ways!—but it misses that this is precisely what it does as well. There’s a scene where they depict Nazis swapping out crosses for swastikas and Bibles for Mein Kampfs—a thing which certainly did not happen on any large scale. But the point is “look at how the government is taking over Christianity!” What they fail to realize is that in offering us a Bonhoeffer for whom every theological act was really a political act in disguise, they’ve missed their own point.
The line which got cut at the last minute, which I still stand by, was “This film’s relationship to the historical Bonhoeffer is the relationship of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to the historical Lincoln.”
Skip the film. Cuddle up by the fire with a far more dry biography, like the granddaddy of them all, a newer revisionist account, or maybe a more nuanced one by a German scholar. Or better, pick a volume from his collected works—16 volumes!—and get to know the man. My recommendation is always to start with Life Together, because in that, you see the fruits of what lay before and the seeds of what lay ahead. After that, read his Creation and Fall, or perhaps Discipleship, or wade into the deeper waters with Act and Being or Sanctorum Communio. Letters and Papers from Prison is overrated, and Ethics is good, but unfinished. He has volumes of sermons available, if that’s more your speed.
But whatever you do, go slow. Resist the sexy slimmed down version which too easily transmutes theological conviction into political convictions. Life isn’t that easy, and neither is any thinker worth spending time with.
Thank you for this. You actually saved me from going to see it with people tonight.
Just read the whole thing. Thank you for it, Myles. Grateful for a clear and wise caution against creating the true stories of humans in our own image.