Theology in the Raw - Who Really Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Dr. Mark Thiessen Nation

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Dr. Mark Thiessen Nation has authored and edited a number of books, including two books on Bonhoeffer: Bonhoeffer the Assassin? and Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis. For sixteen years he was professor of theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and before that was director of The London Mennonite Centre, London, England. Register for the Exiles in Babylon conference (Minneapolis, April 3-5, 2025) at theologyintheraw.com -- If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel! Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw Or you can support me directly through Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Visit my personal website: https://www.prestonsprinkle.com For questions about faith, sexuality & gender: https://www.centerforfaith.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, friends, the Exiles of Babylon Conference is just a couple months away, April 3rd to 5th. We are talking about all kinds of intriguing topics, gospel and race after George Floyd. We're talking about transgender people in the church. We're talking about is the evangelical church good for this country? And we're also having several talks on social justice and the gospel from different angles, lots of breakout sessions, several different after party options, and it's gonna be a absolute barn burner of a conference. Go to theologyneurah.com to check it out, and I would highly recommend registering sooner than later

if you plan on attending live, especially because space is limited and it is filling up. So theologyneurah.com, check it out. My guest today is Dr. Mark Tyson Nation, who has authored and edited a number of books, including two books on Bonhoeff out. My guest today is Dr. Mark Tyson Nation, who has authored and edited a number of books, including two books on Bonhoeffer. He's a Bonhoeffer scholar. His first book is called Bonhoeffer, the Assassin? and Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis. For 16 years, he was a professor of theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. And before that, he was a

director of the London Mennonite Center in London, England. This episode is all about director of the London Mennonite Center in London, England. This episode is all about Diedrich Bonhoeffer, the man, the myth and the legend. Really fascinating conversation. And Mark is one of the few Bonhoeffer scholars in the world. So I think you'll find if you're into Bonhoeffer, you have questions about Bonhoeffer, you know, was he a pacifist? Did he try to kill Hitler? We talked about those things. I think you'll find Mark very educated on the topic. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Mark Tyson. Mark and I, we've been chatting offline. I was like, man, all this is all the good stuff. I want to make sure my audience hears a bit about who you are.

Obviously we're going to get into Diedrich Bonhoeffer as you are an expert and as I am not at all, so I'm excited to learn from you. But tell us a bit about your upbringing. What's your Christian journey, your denominational journey? And then we'll get to good old Diedrich. Yes. Well, I was raised in a non-Christian home. My mother was very decidedly not Christian because she was reacting to her mother's overbearing religion. So, she married a non-Christian man who ended up being a womanizer and a drunk, which she wasn't expecting. So, that was my father and then she married my stepfather who was fairly similar.

So, my life story is a little complicated and my Christian journey certainly is, but I'll try to keep it fairly brief. I became a Christian at age 17. I was living back with my father and the woman he lived with. There was a revival in my small town in Southern Illinois. I just discovered when Scott McKnight wrote a forward

to my newer book on Bonhoefferer that Scott and I were born two weeks apart In the same hospital in my hometown Scott's dad had happened to be teaching in a school nearby When when his mother gave birth to Scott so we happened to be poor like I said two weeks apart in Hospital in my hometown anyway,, so I became a Christian at age 17 in a small town in southern Illinois. There was a revival in this General Baptist Church and some people, God, Jesus, the church were not on my radar screen. Never occurred to me to think about anything related to all of that. But a couple of girls, as I recall, really, really wanted me to go to this revival.

And I did. And I was powerfully encountered by the love of God. God's power just overwhelmed me and my life was transformed within this General Baptist Church. Really transformed dramatically in one evening, but then, of course, as we all know, that unfolded a lot over the next many years, and it's still unfolding. Within a year of becoming a Christian, I had to register for the draft. I'm barely old enough to have been eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War, and

I became a conscientious objector. These Baptists told me I should read my Bible. I was reading my Bible. I was reading my New Testament. And my Lord, that we were taught we should worship and we should follow faithfully, I saw that my Lord was saying I should love my enemies. And I didn't know how that equaled killing them. I had a father who was not a good man, but I didn't think my love for him equaled killing him. So I wasn't going to

go thousands of miles away and kill the Vietnamese. So I became a conscientious objector. My pastor didn't agree with me. He, like my father, was a World War II veteran, but he was a lovely man and he finally gave me his blessing. I wrote an essay many years ago in honor of Stanley Hauerwas, offering reflections on how I became a pacifist as a Baptist. It really is related to Hauerwas's understanding of virtue theory in some ways, I think, related also to some theological elements that one could add to Hauerwas's understanding of virtue theory.

Anyway, that was 1971 when I became a Conscience Objector. From that point on, I had my sight on those who were committed to non-violence. It was several years, I mean, like I said, my story is complicated, so I have to keep it abbreviated and just highlight some things that are relevant to our conversation today. Five years later, I discovered some Mennonites for the first time. I also discovered ecumenical folk in various denominations committed to nonviolence through the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Louisville, Kentucky. I met Glenn Stassen, who you may be aware of, some of your listeners would be. Glenn and I became friends in Louisville, Kentucky in the mid-70s. I also read The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder in about 1976.

I was already a pacifist, so it didn't make me a pacifist. But one of the things I've come to believe is beginning in the mid-70s to the late-70s, I moved from being a Baptist to being an Anabaptist, is the way I would put it. Which among other things meant that my understandings of peace and social justice, along with later views on sexuality and other things, how I could integrate them into my faith and my theology as a whole. They're not just add-ons. They're not just something I happen to believe because I happen to like this, like I like

bowling or something, but really integrating them into the whole of what it means to be Christian, my understanding of faith, my understanding of the Christian journey, my understanding of theology. Then I went to the Mennonite Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana and did a master's degree in peace studies there. Then I started an ecumenical peace and justice organization in Champaign-Urbana that I directed for six years. Then I did a PhD at Fuller Seminary in Christian Ethics a bit later.

Then after that, I was the director of the London Mennonite Center for five and a half years. Then I came to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where I really taught a range of courses, theology, ethics, historical theology. I taught a course on Bonhoeffer. I taught a variety of courses, 18 different courses in all, some of them regularly for 16 years. And then I retired in 2018. And for the last year and a bit, I have been an interim pastor at the church I've been a part of, a little Mennonite church here in Harrisonburg that I've been a part of since, for about 18 years, probably 18 or 19 years. Tell us how you got into Bonhoeffer, like, and how long have you been,

I mean, Bonhoeffer is like your main thing, right? Well, has been for some years now, wasn't earlier, but has been for some time. But I have been doing research related to Bonhoeffer for many years. So for somebody my age, I was born in 1953, and for someone my age, there are two wars that are particularly

important. One is World War II, which is my father's war, although my father is barely old enough to have been in World War II, but he was. Most of my best friend's fathers were in World War II. And then the Vietnam War, which was my generation's war. So one of the wars is called the Good War, World War II. When I was at the Mennonite Seminary in Elkhart, I decided that I needed to deal with the Good War, and you can only deal with so much in one master's thesis. So I had to write a master's thesis for my master's degree in peace studies. I decided to look at nonviolent resistance within Nazi Germany. So I wrote a 110-page thesis on nonviolent resistance in Nazi Germany. So I wrote a 110 page thesis on nonviolent resistance in Nazi Germany.

Because I said to myself, okay, I hear Americans say, well, we should have killed the Germans and killed those who were allied with them because we had to stop Hitler. I could say a lot more about that and a lot more about World War II in general, but I won't go into that right now. But I also wondered, well, what about Germans? After I realized that 95% plus of all Germans, when Hitler came to power, would have claimed to be Christian, how were those Christians responding? What did they do?

What did they not do? And why? So I started looking at Germans and how they thought about this, and then I thought, were there those who are resisting what Hitler was doing because of their Christian convictions? So that's what I decided to focus on in my master's thesis. At the same semester that I wrote it, I also wrote a 75-page paper on the Confessing Church, which was the church within the Protestant church that dissented from mainstream Protestant church. Again, I could say a lot more about that, and we'll probably say a little bit more as

we move along. That was when I first did some serious engagement with Bonhoeffer. About three years earlier, I had written a small paper on the Confessing Church for a course in Louisville, Kentucky. I had also written a short paper on Bonhoeffer's little book that used to be called Christ the Center. It's his lectures on Christology that he did in 1933. But those were insignificant. I had read The Cost of Discipleship, like many my generation anyway, back in about 1972. So that was my prior introduction to Bonhoeffer, those three things. But in fall of 1980, I wrote this large master's thesis, and then I wrote this paper on the

Confessing Church. In doing that, I for the first time read the massive biography of Bonhoeffer by Eberhard Bethke, one of his two best friends as an adult and the man who has written what is considered the authoritative biography of Bonhoeffer. Okay. So what's Bethke? That's the authoritative? Bethke.

B-E-T-H-G-E. Okay. And he's the authoritative. He is, in Bonhoeffer studies, he is the standard, the go-to from which everybody is interacting with. Yes. Well, both, especially his biography, but if you see behind me, the blue volumes are all the collected works of Bonhoeffer as translated into English.

And I have a few of the German volumes back there as well. He was one of the main editors on this, but he was also the one who made sure that a lot of Bonhoeffer's writings that were not published during his lifetime began being published. So he was very much responsible for the legacy of Bonhoeffer,

and his biography is clearly the starting point for anyone who wants to do serious research on Bonhoeffer's life. And so I read that because it was also a very good source for understanding the Confessing Church, because Bonhoeffer was actively involved in Confessing Church from its very beginning, when it was called other names besides the Confessing Church. I'm seeing, wait, real quick, I'm seeing what, six or seven volumes in his collected works? Oh, no, there are... Well, there are 16 volumes of

writings and then one volume that's mostly an index that has a few writings. So there's 17 volumes. So it takes a lot. That's not quite as much as the dogmatics, I don't think, but that's a lot. So no, it's probably... Well, dogmatics are 13 volumes, but I think the print is smaller. I think I've read that there are nine million words in the church dogmatics. I don't know how many words are in the 17 volumes of Bonhoeffer's writings. But to be a Bonhoeffer expert, you're having to become very familiar with a lot of... I mean, he's got a lot out there to comb through. He's got a lot out there and there are huge... Given that he didn't write a lot relatively speaking, I mean nothing

like Barth. Carl Barth, who wrote the church dogmatics, yes, wrote this 13 volume work that is huge, but he also wrote about 50 other books. So he was incredibly prolific. Bonhoeffer, because he died at age 39, was not able to write a whole heck of a lot. Certainly didn't publish a lot of what were actual books during his lifetime. A lot of the collected writings are letters and various papers that wouldn't normally be published by anyone who's not important. But there's a slew of writings

always being written on Bonhoeffer. He continues to fascinate people. For obvious reasons, he lived during fascinating times, challenging times. He was an amazing man. He was brilliant as a theologian, but he was also actively engaging in what was going on in Nazi Germany and beyond Nazi Germany. He lived in three other countries besides Germany for periods of time.

He was involved in ecumenical circles from early on in his adult life. He was just – but again, he was interesting in so many different ways that he continues to fascinate people. There's an active Bonhoeffer Society around the globe, including the English language section, which is probably the largest. Books and articles are constantly being published about his writing. So yes, to try to keep up with scholarship on Bonhoeffer is virtually impossible, almost as bad as on Paul. I know you're a Paul scholar.

Yeah. Used to be. Used to be. I just got overwhelmed with how much secondary literature, and for a period of 10 years of my life, that's all I read, and I got a little burnt out. I still love all the, man, it's a lot. So I guess we could just jump right into it. The biggest question I think people often debate, right, is was Bonhoeffer an actual pacifist? The narrative that, and I don't know where I heard this,

is just kind of like, when I think of Bonhoeffer, it's like he was a pacifist, but things got so bad and complex that he had to make an exception to his pacifism and be involved in this plot to assassinate Hitler. So it kind of shows like, yeah, pacifism, great. Love your enemies, great. But there's some cases when you just need to make

an exception to the rule, AKA Bonhoeffer. Is that an accurate representation of Bonhoeffer or where do people get that from? And tell us about how Bonhoeffer scholars debate this. Yes. Well, both of my books, which are sitting behind me, Bonhoeffer, The Assassin, question mark, which was published in 2013, and Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis, both of those books address this subject in somewhat different ways, somewhat overlapping ways, but they're two very different books. Those are questions I have wrestled with for a long time. I mentioned my earlier research.

The first time I did serious research on that subject was in the summer of 1989. There was a visiting Czech Bonhoeffer scholar from Czech Republic of Czechoslovakia, from the Czech Republic, I guess it came to be called. He was teaching at the seminary where I got my master of divinity degree. Anyway, in the summer of 1989, I did a directed study course with him on Bonhoeffer and pacifism. A brief form of that essay was published in the Journal of Theology for South Africa. So that was my first essay on Bonhoeffer and pacifism published in 1991. Again, a brief version of it. About a 47-page essay was the essay I wrote for him. And then I wrote a second essay under Ray Anderson at Fuller

Theological Seminary in 1994, which was published in 1999. So anyway, that's a little bit of my journey before I move to these, and then I've written two other essays besides the two books. But the common understanding is, well, there are basically two different common dominant understandings. One is that he was never a pacifist. I think, well, it's funny, some scholars seem to say both that he was never a pacifist. I think, well, it's funny, some scholars seem to say both that he was never a pacifist and that he was maybe

a pacifist, but whatever he was, he abandoned it by the time he got involved in attempts to kill Hitler. Both Eberhardt Betke, the biographer I mentioned before, his friend, and Eric Metaxas both say Bonhoeffer was never a pacifist. The problem with that claim, well, there are a number of problems, I mean, earlier I had mostly said that the key evidence against that is Bonhoeffer himself

said he was a pacifist, which is absolutely true. As it happened, he wrote a letter to his longtime friend, Elizabeth Zinn, in January of 1936, which is now in the Collected Works. And he says to her, he talks about the transformations that happened to him when he was living in New York City in 1930-31. So in 1930 and 31, he took an opportunity that he was given to study at Union Theological Seminary.

This was after he already had a PhD. He had already written his thesis, and he had written what in Germany was called a habilitation thesis, which qualified him to teach in a German university. He had done both of those degrees, but he wanted to do study in New York City. So he went to New York City in 1930 and was there in 3031, studying at Union Theological Seminary. When he writes his letter to Elizabeth Zinn in January of 1936, he's reflecting back on the time before Hitler came to power, which is in January of 1933. And he is telling her that sometime before Hitler came to power, there were about five different transformations

that happened in his life. One of the transformations he named specifically is that he came to see pacifism as self-evident, which he says he used to argue against. So he says that explicitly in this letter, he also gave about six public peace lectures at ecumenical conferences. In one of those, he says, we should not hesitate to refer to what I'm naming as pacifism. Those are two clear examples of him saying he was a pacifist.

That's that evidence. But also for anybody who's read The Cost of Discipleship or what's now in a new translation just called Discipleship, which is a more literal translation of the German title, Nachfolge, in that book he has about 15 pages making an argument for what to anyone being honest sounds like pacifism. He is arguing that Christians should be committed to nonviolence. But also I discovered a little more recently and I have it in my newer book in the first appendix, I realized that there are witnesses from every segment

of his adult life after 1931 or after 1930, that testified to the fact that what they heard him saying sounded to them like pacifism. And I could give a few of the names, I'm not sure I could remember all of them. But there are people from 1931 when he gave a lecture on pacifism in Mexico, right after his time in New York City, with Jean Lissere. Jean Lissere was a French Reformed pastor studying at Union Seminary with him. He's probably the one who converted him to pacifism. Betkay talks about this in some detail. And he certainly turned him toward the Sermon on the Mount, and it appears that he converted Bonhoeffer to pacifism. Le Serre himself was a fairly newly formed pacifist, which was fairly unusual in the

Reformed Church in France, but not unheard of. André Trocmi is another, maybe more famous, pacifist from the French Reformed Church about the same time. Anyway, he's the first witness we have that says clearly that in the summer of 1931 in Mexico, Bonhoeffer was advocating for pacifism. But you can see it in his lectures that he gives beginning in 1932 when he returns to Germany. One can see it then in his book Discipleship.

Then, as I said, there are his students at the seminary who say in 1935, so he began directing this seminary, Finkenwalde Seminary, a seminary in 1935. In the spring of 1935, Bonhoeffer started directing a seminary for the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany. He directed the one at Finkenwalde from 1935 to 1937. At least three of his students have testified to the fact that when Hitler came on the radio announcing that he was reintroducing the draft, which was a violation of the Versailles Treaty, but he didn't care, that most of the students were excited.

Betky also reports this in an article that I've read. Most of the students were excited, which surprises people who think that the Confessing Church was mostly like Bonhoeffer, but they weren't. Most of the Confessing Church students who are affiliated with the Confessing Church, who were students at this seminary, they were perceived as not being patriotic Germans by many people because they were part of the Confessing church, but they still saw themselves as patriotic Germans. So they wanted to be perceived as patriotic Germans, and none of them had any qualms about

going into the military. So this was again, this was in the spring of 1935 when Hitler came on the radio. But Betky reports this, that when they looked over at their director, Herr Bonhoeffer, or brother Bonhoeffer as they came to call him, that Bonhoeffer was not excited. He was the opposite of excited. And then he talked to them about conscientious objection. So he encouraged his students to be conscientious objectors. And he had one or two of his friends who were pacifists.

There were not very many pacifists in Germany by 1935, but he had one or two of his pacifist friends come also and speak to his students about conscientious objection. Then he continued to teach, I assume he continued to teach the same thing to seminary students once they had to meet in other locations. In 1937, the Gestapo shut down the seminary. But only a couple of months after they shut down the seminary, Bonhoeffer found other places to meet and continued to train seminary students. And continued to give them the same lectures on discipleship,

which became the book that was first called The Cost of Discipleship. So what we have is the Cost of Discipleship. So what we have is the cost of discipleship were originally lectures to his seminary students on discipleship. I'm sorry, let me circle back around to the original simple question, was Bonhoeffer a pacifist? He claims he was a pacifist. His life indicated he was a pacifist. And then I will talk in a few minutes about his involvement in the conspiracy, which happened later. One of the things I want to address for those who particularly who have seen the new movie about Bonhoeffer or have read the Metaxas biography or even other biographies, but this is especially highlighted in this new film called Bonhoeffer, what? Pastor-Spy-Assassin.

Bonhoeffer is barely portrayed as being a pastor at all in this new film. He certainly isn't portrayed as being much of a theologian. In fact, he specifically says in about, in 1933, that he no longer wants to be a theologian, which is absolute nonsense. In the film? In the film. Oh, that's just not accurate at all. No, it's not accurate at all.

He was preoccupied with theology for the rest of his life, which anyone can see who reads his writings after 1933. So that's certainly not true. But also he is mostly portrayed as being a spy and then morphs into being an assassin, or at least helping an assassin to do his assassinating of Hitler. This episode is brought to you by Mitopure by Timeline. Mitopure is the only urolithium A supplement on the market that's clinically proven to target the effects of age-related cellular decline.

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Timeline is offering 10% off your first order of Mitopure. If you just go to timeline.com forward slash theology. Okay, that's timeline.com forward slash theology. Okay. That's timeline.com forward slash theology. Go check it out. Can I ask a quick question? So you've made what seems to be a good case that he said he was a pacifist. There's multiple ways in which he said that. So, but you're saying the, the definitive biographer, a, Betky says he wasn't what evidence does he, and that's, that's a pretty, so you're going against like the main guy.

What evidence does he give that he never was a pacifist? I don't know if that might be a big, you might take an hour. What's the quick sound bite summary of, I don't think he really, he doesn't. Well, the main evidence is the alleged involvement in attempts to kill Hitler. And so if he was really a pacifist, would he have done that? So the question is, was he ever a pacifist or did he change from being a pacifist to being something else? So there's nothing really in his own writings that would indicate that he, that he himself said he wasn't a pacifist or even was early on making exceptions

to the rule? Like in terms of just take away his alleged involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler, if you take that away, there's no other kind of evidence that he made exceptions to his pacifism? Nothing obvious. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote both of these books that I wrote, especially the newer one, although really both of them, but the newer one, I have a chapter on the first four chapters of Bonhoeffer's book, Ethics.

It's Bonhoeffer's book that was published posthumously. It was a book he was working on from 1940 to 1943 when he was arrested. It was a manuscript of several different essays. Scholars have made judgments about what order he would have put the essays in eventually and therefore how the argument unfolds. So I have taken their suggestions seriously and then I've written a chapter in my newer book, Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis, on what I think ethics, particularly the fourth chapter, which is called History and the Good. There are two different versions of that chapter, and I deal with both of them in that essay.

I mention that because really it's in ethics where there's the only place where there are these passages that are a little opaque and hard to know exactly what he means. But it's certainly not obvious that he's referring to any involvement of himself or anybody else in attempts to kill Hitler and that he's somehow justifying that. There's nothing like that in ethics. So I try to give my explanation of what I think he is saying in the first four chapters of the book Ethics, which is again, the most important part of that book for understanding in terms of the question you're asking. One of the things one of my students said, which I've never mentioned in either my books, I keep forgetting

to mention it, is that one of my students said one day, you know, if he had wanted to distance himself from pacifism, since he certainly sounded like a pacifist, nobody would have objected to him simply saying, I was naive back then, I'm not naive anymore, I don't embrace pacifism. Anybody like you and I who are pacifist know that almost very few people, I mean, there are those people in certain circles, but the majority would not object to us saying pacifism is silly, it's naive, it's ridiculous, just get with the game. So nobody would object to him doing that, but he didn't do that. In fact, from prison, in one of his letters in the summer of 1944, he specifically

affirmed the basic thrust of his book discipleship. And that seems to me to affirm the fact that he was, what he was basically arguing for in that book, which included an argument for being willing to die for the sake of the gospel rather than kill. So, okay, so was he then involved in an assassination attempt with Hitler? Give us the, for those who know more than just that, like, yeah, I heard Bonhoeffer was involved in assassination to Hitler. What are we going on there? Is that true? What are the different views on that?

Yeah. Again, the reason why I wrote the first chapter in my newer book is because Eberhardt Betkey implies that Bonhoeffer was involved in one way or another with attempts to kill Hitler. So do virtually all, I think all of the other biographies. I've read about seven biographies of Bonhoeffer. I've read the Eberhardt Betkey biography twice all the way through and the 250 pages or so on the conspiracy, his involvement in the conspiracy, I've read at least five times. Bedke implies that he was involved without giving any specific details or really giving

explanations for what his involvement would have meant. It's just that he just implies that that sounds Yes. fairly weak. It's not like there's like a detailed, yeah. He could have told us what that meant because again, he didn't write the, I think he wrote the initial German version of the biography in 1967.

So it was long after World War II. There's no reason why he couldn't have been specific, couldn't have specified what this involvement meant, but he doesn't give details. He just implies that he was involved. What the new film does is it shows Bonhoeffer actually meeting with one of the assassins. So he's meeting at this table, planning the assassination. It's one of the first suicide bombers that I've ever heard of anyway, because that is what this guy was doing.

It is portraying, well, the actual assassination attempt is one of the actual assassinations that was attempted. It is a suicide bombing. The guy carried a couple of bombs on his person, and he was slated to lead Hitler through captured Russian weapons. This was something that Hitler did every year. He would typically take about 30 minutes to go through this display of captured weapons. By this time, Hitler had become very nervous about people trying to kill him, and they were realistic.

He wasn't being paranoid. They were realistic worries. So he often would not announce when he was going somewhere or if he did announce when he's going somewhere, he didn't tell them how long he would be there. So he actually only stayed about a minute and a half. I believe that's right. So this man had the bomb set to go off in about nine minutes, which he thought would be about right.

But of course, Hitler left in about a minute and a half, so he had to undo the weapons. Anyway, this attempt is shown in the film, but he specifically shows Bonhoeffer meeting with this guy. There is no evidence Bonhoeffer did anything like that. But I'm glad it's in the film in a way because I don't know what people imagine when they think Bonhoeffer was involved. So what I've done a little more clearly maybe in my newer book than I did in the first one is I get the details of what I think Bonhoeffer was involved with.

And some pacifists don't like this. I'd be interested in knowing whether you would see him as still a pacifist. I don't have a problem with it myself. Bonhoeffer was from an aristocratic family. There were aristocrats on both sides of his family. His father was one of the most famous psychiatrists and neurologists in all of Germany. They were a relatively wealthy family. He had contacts in very high places. So he knew a number of conspirators. He knew the mayor of Berlin when he was first imprisoned in the Tegel prison in Berlin.

The mayor came to visit him. He was a relative. He was an uncle, I believe. So he knew lots of people in high places. He knew conspirators. Plus his brother-in-law, Hans von Denani, was a conspirator, was involved in attempts to kill Hitler, and they were very close friends. So he knew a lot about the conspiracy.

I've never denied that. And apparently they asked him to be willing to use his ecumenical contacts to ask some of the ecumenical contacts to have their government refrain from attacking Germany if Hitler is removed from power, because Germany will be at its weakest moment and they don't want the Allies taking advantage of them while they're at their weakest moments. So Bonhoeffer met at an ecumenical gathering, I think, but at some meeting. He met with Bishop Bell from England, who was a friend of his because of his ecumenical relationships and because of having pastored in England.

He met with Bishop Bell twice, I believe. One of those times is better known and was potentially more effective. He got Bell to make contacts with officials in the British government to try to ask them to do exactly what I just said. They wouldn't listen to Bell because they didn't believe they could trust any German, so they wouldn't trust Bonhoeffer. They wouldn't trust Bell's word that Bonhoeffer was trustworthy. It didn't really go anywhere.

That's what Bonhoeffer did. So, he did that on behalf of the conspiracy, on the behalf of trying to kill Hitler. No, on behalf of trying to have fewer people be killed than greater numbers. As Betky admits in his book, and I quote him again in my newer work, Bonhoeffer says the conspiracy was not dependent on what Bonhoeffer was doing. It was sort of a parallel effort. In fact, there's at least one other pacifist, a man that's well known as a pacifist, who was also involved in these efforts, this sort of effort. There's another man who explicitly said that he was not willing to have Hitler killed,

who was also involved in the specific efforts that Bonhoeffer was involved in. So you don't have to be willing to kill Hitler to be involved in that kind of effort. So that's something Bonhoeffer did, which is connected to the conspiracy. So he was aware of conspiracies to kill Hitler. He knew people that were involved with the effort, but would it be right to say there's no evidence that he was directly involved in that conspiracy? That he was planning it, helping them out, for it on a mental level?

I guess that last, yeah, for it on a mental level might be hard to show, but he was not directly involved in the conspiracy. He's certainly not directly involved. In fact, Clifford Green, who's the general editor, general director of all 17 volumes of The Collected Works in English, has said that no serious student of Bonhoeffer believes he was personally involved in attempts to kill Hitler.

That's what he has said, even though Clifford and I don't quite agree on some of this. He sees Bonhoeffer as consistently, strongly for peace, but not quite a pacifist, which was what I argued for in my very first essay back in 1989. I changed my mind. One of the things that's different about me is I changed my mind after 30 years, because for the first 30 years I was doing research on Bonhoeffer, I thought, who am I to question Eberhardt Betke's views? He's the authority and I'm not.

But finally I just decided he was wrong. The only evidence that really is significant that counts against my argument as far as I'm concerned are memories of conversations in living rooms. There are conversations that have been reported where Bonhoeffer is supposed to have said, I would be willing to kill Hitler. And I quote these in both of my books. But I've been told by a couple of people who have done biographies that if you're going to interview people who have memories of whaties that if you're going to interview

people who have memories of what happened, you need to realize they're often not accurate. You can't depend on such memories. In fact, Sabina Drom, who's a German theologian who's written a book called Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Conspiracy, she says basically the same thing. In fact, the efforts that I mentioned that Bonhoeffer was involved in, she said when she did interviews with people about those events, she came to realize that you cannot rely on people's memories of what happened because they contradict each other and people's memories are distorted by their own biases and so on.

Given that nobody around Bonhoeffer was a pacifist like he was, even his close family members that he was very close to, they had a very close-knit family, they didn't agree with his pacifism. None of them had believed in the Sermon on the Mount in the way that he did. None of them had ever given lectures for pacifism. None of them had written 15 pages in a book on that. So they're not going to understand his ways of understanding it. One of the things I mentioned in my newer book is that one of my colleagues at the Mennonite Seminary, who used to live in an African country, he said that he used to be in conversations with friends of his who were Africans, who hated the man who was in charge, was the prime minister or whatever

of their country, and they were willing to kill him. He would express empathy with them and would understand why they had this passion to get rid of this man. He could imagine that given his empathetic reflections and venting with them, that they imagined he was also willing to kill this man or would have been willing. But he said, I wasn't because he was a lifelong pacifist. So the best direct evidence is secondhand information of other people who were in rooms with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And they recollected, they said, we kind of heard him say he would be willing to kill Hitler.

But there's nothing within Bonhoeffer's own recorded talks or writings where he himself said that. No, not only that, as I said, I would argue that in all of his writings up through the end of his life, well, when he was still writing through 1944. He's basically affirming the views he's always held, including, I would argue, in ethics. I mean, I'm surprised some people, including Eberhard Betting, say what they say about the book Ethics. And again, I try to make this clear in my chapter on ethics and discipleship in a world full of Nazis. I think he's quite clear. He refers repeatedly to the Sermon on the Mount in the book Ethics in the first three chapters, and, well,

in the first four chapters, and he refers to nonviolence and says that Christians should be committed to nonviolence. He continues to say that in 1940 through 1943. Pete Has anybody, has anybody interviewed the people who say they were in the room and this is what he said? Like have they ever been talked to since then? Maybe. I mean, my favorite documentary on Bonhoeffer is the 1983 one called Dietrich Bonhoeffer Memories and Perspectives.

And there's one of his farmer students that is interviewed in that film that in fact I decided to transcribe what he says in the interview and the clips that are in the film. He wasn't one of the people in one of those rooms, but he is very clear that Bonhoeffer was a pacifist and even says it in reflecting on his encounter with Bonhoeffer in 1942. In the summer of 1940, yes, in the late summer of 1942, he was on leave from the military. He was in the military as most of Bonhoeffer's students were, did finally go into the military, because it was a capital offense after 1939 to refuse to serve in the military. Oh, we haven't dealt with Bonhoeffer and the military

intelligence agency, which is the other big issue related to pacifism. Can we, I'm curious, I'm sure people listening are also curious, you know, probably the most widely read book, certainly the most widely sold book on Bonhoeffer is by Eric Metaxas, who's I've not read the book. So from what I hear, it's a very well-written book because the reason why people really love it. Eric, I think is a really good writer. I've also heard from Bonhoeffer scholars that this isn't the most accurate book. How has Metaxas's book been received among Bonhoeffer scholars who have read it? And then we'll have your opinion on his book.

Yeah, it's certainly not been received well among scholars. I don't know of any scholars who totally affirm it. There might be such people, but I don't know of any. I'm not quite as critical of the book as some others are. As you said, he's a very good writer. I was rereading, I reread more than half of it. I've read the whole thing, but that's soon after it was published. I reread about the first half or so after seeing the new film, and it's much better than the new film. I mean, he's not a scholar. He doesn't claim to be a scholar. He's done a fair amount of reading for somebody like him. I think many of the strong objections to Eric Metaxas' book on Bonhoeffer is related to

Eric Metaxas' own politics and the way he connects those politics to his faith, which certainly wouldn't comport with most Bonhoeffer scholars. Yeah, one of the things, I mean, this is maybe I'll just signal this. I won't go into it because it would take me into too many theological weeds probably. But I would say most Bonhoeffer scholars are either committed to a social gospel approach, to use a term that needs to be defined and maybe I'll define it a little bit, but to a social gospel approach that's not one that Bonhoeffer resonated with or a Reinhold-Neiburian realist approach, which Bonhoeffer certainly did not resonate with. For both of those approaches, certainly the social gospel approach as attached to progressivism. Eric Metaxas obviously is the

alternative to that, in a way. Neburean realism is a funny kind of thing because really people of all different theological and political stripes adopt Neburean realism. You may know that both Jimmy Carter and Obama claimed that he was their favorite theologian. He was one of Bonhoeffer's teachers, Reinhold Niebuhr was, but he did not agree with his. He liked his teacher. I've read, I think, the best biography in English on Reinhold Niebuhr. I think I would have liked the man. He was very likeable and he was very gifted at what he did, but I would not have resonated with his thinking and neither did Bonhoeffer. I would say for lack of better terms, like Niebuhr would hold to more of like a just war type approach, right? To things.

Just war theory, if it's taken seriously, has specific criteria that one needs to go by, although usually the just war theory is not taken in a serious way. But if it's taken in a serious way, they're, you know, depending on how you lay it out, something like a half dozen major criteria, and then a bunch of sub criteria. Right. Whereas Niebuhr's approach is much sloppier than that, because it's just realism. It's just pragmatism, basically.

You do what you have to do. And that's basically what this new film is saying. It's just pragmatism, basically. You do what you have to do. That's basically what this new film is saying. I think it's not unusual for some Bonhoeffer scholars who basically try to make Bonhoeffer into that sort of pragmatist. Once you find out that millions of Jews are going to be killed, you do what you've got to do to stop this. You become a realist or a pragmatist.

I'm drawn to that. There's a part of me that's drawn to that. I understand the lure of it. I just think it's theologically and spiritually irresponsible for Christians if they really know the gospel. I think Bonhoeffer believed the same thing. That's certainly the way I read him. He had almost nothing but criticisms to

say of Niebuhr's social ethics, which he thought were just social ethics and not theological ethics. And the social gospel was still influential when Bonhoeffer was at Union Seminary at the beginning of the 1930s. Yeah, well, it grew out of, I mean, it grew out of like a Rouse and Bush, right? In the 19-teens or something. So that was very much in the air when Bonhoeffer was in New York. So with Betaxis's book, does he basically line up with Betke then? And I mean, in that case, if he does, then it's not like he's just making stuff up out of thin air.

He's relying on the most established biographer of Bonhoeffer? Yeah. I mean, all of us rely on Eberhardt Betke's biography. I do too. I mean, it is the place to begin and one has to take seriously Betke's detailed work on Bonhoeffer's life. And he knew him and knew most of the people who knew Bonhoeffer. Yeah.

I think he takes Betke seriously. I've never, I mean, I haven't bothered. I couldn't be bothered to try to, I'd have to lay the two biographies beside each other and compare them in detail. I don't know where he departs from Betky. The other criticism, the main criticism I've read besides just people not liking Metaxas' politics and how he joins it to his theology. The other criticism I've read is that he tries to make Bonhoeffer into an American-style evangelical. I don't know.

This is tricky business. I have one chapter where I'm mostly writing on Bonhoeffer's letters and papers from prison, where I work the hardest to show some of Bonhoeffer's piety. Bonhoeffer was a very pious man. I'm using a daily devotional right now that's all excerpt from Bonhoeffer. And Bonhoeffer had this kind of warm faith, which in addition to acquiring a deeper social conscience while he was at Abyssinian Baptist Church,

the large African-American church in New York City when he was there. He was very much – this is emphasized in this new film, that Bonhoeffer was a part of – the only church he really liked that he encountered in New York City was Abyssinian Baptist Church, the largest black church in New York City, one of the largest churches in America at the time probably. The pastor at the time, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., was a dynamic preacher. He both had an obviously warm, biblically rooted faith and also was concerned about

social justice issues, obviously racism. They would address such issues. They had ministries that cared for the poor among them and so forth and so on. It was a dynamic church and Bonhoeffer was actively involved in it. In addition to acquiring a social conscience, which was emphasized in the film and is often emphasized today, which I think is absolutely true, he also, I think, maybe deepened his sense of pietism while being there. If pietism is the right word, I never know quite what word to reach for. But he was very, for a theologian, he, especially in certain writings and certain

letters, he's very personal in the way that he talks about his faith. That was not real common for German academic theologians in the 1930s. In the remaining minutes we have, I am curious about just the Hitler question, right? Like, this is, those of us who advocate for nonviolence, especially you and I both advocate for like absolute nonviolence, that this is always the right thing to do. What do we do with the, what about Hitler question? Like, if killing Hitler would prevent the murder of six million Jews, among many other horrible things Hitler did, is this not a good practical argument against absolute pacifism?

Yeah. Again, there's, as you know, there's so many ways one could go in response to such a question and so many different things to deal with. A friend of mine has written a book on World War II trying to name all of the horrors that came out of World War II. I have probably half a dozen books in my large library that name a lot of those things. My father was a World War II veteran. Most of my friend's fathers were World War II veterans. It is true that, as I said, part of me understands why people want to affirm being on the allied

side during World War II. But it is true also that, I don't know if the numbers vary, but somewhere over 55 million people died in World War II, more than all of the wars throughout the history of the world. More than 50% of that number were civilians. It was a horrible war. If we had alternatives to that, would we not want to try to invest a lot of time and energy and money into working on those alternatives? I would think so. But the other thing is more specifically related to Bonhoeffer and looking at him in this story, is one of the things I don't like about the new film and the way Bonhoeffer is portrayed in some ways in all of the biographies.

And that is that Bonhoeffer, to my mind, is an exemplar of what pacifists should do in a situation like Nazi Germany. So let me just give a brief account of what he was doing. See, what the new film implies is that while Bonhoeffer was a pacifist and a pastor, he was merely naive. He didn't know much about evils and certainly wasn't engaged in trying to do battle with them or trying to war against the evils in society and speaking out against acting against the evils. But let's pause for a minute. World War I was also a horrible war. And one of his brothers died, and something that is portrayed in this new film,

what's not portrayed is his mother was put out of action for about a year and a half because she was in grief for that long because of her son dying in World War I. It was a horrible war. Bonhoeffer realized the deep pain and agony connected to World War I, which is probably one of the reasons that he began in the summer of 1931 giving these public lectures advocating for nonviolence. That is acting against an evil in the world,

which he knew what evil the World War I was. And if even one wants to justify World War II, how do you justify World War I? Which also was horrible. It was probably the most horrible war in human history before World War II. It killed a lot of people. There were a lot of new chemicals, gases that were introduced so that you could kill people in even more horrible ways.

Bonhoeffer gave a number of lectures arguing against that with some details and speaking about wars happening in various countries. Then when Hitler comes into power, what does Bonhoeffer do? One of the things that the director of this new – I listened to six or so interviews with the director of this new movie. One of the things that he said in one of the interviews is that the most powerful institution in Germany was the Protestant Church. And it's true.

But again, his film claims – and so do most of the biographies really, claim that before Bonhoeffer got involved in the conspiracy, he was not really doing anything that was actively helping, actively doing anything to work against Nazism. But Bonhoeffer, at the beginning of 1933, started getting actively involved in trying to prevent the Protestant church from being taken over by the Nazis, by Hitler. He worked tirelessly through 1933, helped to compose a confession of faith in August of 1933. He did a lot of things. In April of 1933, even before the legislation came into effect, he composed an essay, one

of the most powerful essays in the history of Nazism, against anti-Semitism, calling on four different ways that Christians and the church should respond to anti-Semitism once it becomes a reality in Nazi Germany. He's acting as a pacifist, but what people want to do is to show this pacifist as naive and not acting and not speaking because we all know that's what pacifists are like and they have to get realistic about the ugly, evil world. But Bonhoeffer was acting all the way through, and he continues to. He continues to act on behalf of Jews, both in and outside of the church, and he continues to act. In

fact, in 1934, while he's pastoring in the film, he goes to England to be a spy. In reality, he went to England to be a pastor of two small German-speaking churches, just like he had been an assistant pastor in a German-speaking church in Spain earlier in Barcelona. Anyway, while he's in England in 1934, he tries to get an invitation from Gandhi to study with him because he wants to study nonviolent resistance so that he can resist Hitler in a Christian way. Again, Betky reports this honestly in his biography of Bonhoeffer. What would have happened if Bonhoeffer had decided to go and study with Gandhi and then come back to Germany? I don't know, but it's an interesting thought. But that was his desire. He wanted to act, he wanted to speak, and he did from the time he entered into things when Hitler came to power.

So he was still embodying nonviolent resistance in the midst of the events leading up to World War II and even during World War II. It's one thing to denounce the slaughtering of civilians in order to achieve the greater good. You know, dropping two nuclear bombs, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, tens of thousands of Christians in Nagasaki in particular. Like when people say, yeah, but that was necessary to end the war. I'm like, ah, that's a clear violation of just war. So don't call it a just war. Like the targeting of non-combatants, hundreds of thousands of them. It's like, okay, I think that's a bad argument. The leveling of

Dresden, same thing, like just mowing down tons of civilians to achieve the greater good. I'm like, that's pretty ethically complicated to say the least. And I would say not. I think there's, to me, that could be denounced. But if someone had a chance to not kill a single civilian, but to simply put a bullet through the head of Hitler, that's where I'm like, I can't get there theologically. Like, I can't build a good case theologically, biblically, that that's the way to fight evil. But practically, would I have pulled that trigger if I had the chance? No, wait, let's just say, hindsight's 20-20, you know, if I do this, millions of people are going to not die.

Although that's the assumption. Maybe you shoot and you miss, and now you empower him to even, you know. In fact, I even heard that there were some assassination attempts that went south on Hitler that emboldened him. Like, that was part of the catalyst in him wanting to kill all the Jews and like expedite all of the evil that he was engaging in. I don't know if that's... My main question is more, yeah, I'm just kind of dancing around, but would you still not put a bullet in the head of Hitler if you knew it would prevent all this from happening? I wrestle with that. I really do.

Yeah, yeah. I wrestle with it too. I understand the wrestling, totally. But two things, I would say at least two things. One is, the first question we should ask, it seems to me, is the question that most of us have to confront. Because most of us would not have that opportunity and would not be in a place to do it to try to kill someone like Hitler. So for most of us, the question is the kind of question I was wrestling with back in 1980

when I wrote my master's thesis, and that is, why did most Germans who were Christians simply go along with what Hitler wanted them to do? That was the default setting, and that tends to be the default setting for most Christians most of the time in the United States. It's very few Christians. I've done a lot of speaking in various churches on peace and social justice because I used to direct a peace and justice organization. I've done my doctoral thesis on somebody who spoke in a lot more churches than I have.

It's my impression that most Christians in the United States do not in any serious way go by the just war theory. No, they do what their country asked them to do. So that's the first thing to keep us honest. That's the first question for most of us. But to go back to your direct question, the problem is that somebody like Bonhoeffer, if he had, well, since it's believed that he did do that, are you aware that his name is invoked to justify killing doctors who perform abortions, to justify killing dictators in Latin America by presidents of the United States? I could go down a list of at least a half a dozen people that I know who have... It's also justified World War II in general, killing 55 plus million people because of

who Bonhoeffer was, because his willingness to kill, to do what has to be done to stop people who are evil. I can imagine somebody who would try to kill our president at the present, someone has tried to kill him recently, somebody who tried to kill certainly the head of a drug company that is taking money irresponsibly. Why not use Bonhoeffer to justify doing that? This is an evil man doing horrible things. One of the problems with this new film is, I assume the film director is aware of this,

that he actually has this assassination attempt happening while Bonhoeffer is in Union Seminary again in the summer of 1939. In the summer of 1939, World War I, World War II has not started. Certainly the plan to kill all of the Jews has not been put into place. Nothing, Hitler is quite popular. You're telling me that you want in the year 2024, when at least two assassination attempts in the US were undergone, that you want to encourage people to assassinate people they

believe to be evil, even though that person is popular. And even though they haven't yet done horrible, evil things that everybody would agree are horrible and evil, the problem is we have hindsight with Adolf Hitler. In 1939, neither the Nazis nor Hitler were perceived to be unequivocally evil the way they are now. Not by Germans, anyway. They might have been by other people, but not by Germans. Do we want to encourage people in countries to kill off, to execute their evil leaders, even though again they're very popular, they haven't yet done anything that's obviously evil that most

people would agree on and so forth and so on? I mean, if I can be provocative, I mean, this is the very question I raise in my book on nonviolence when I had to wrestle with it, right? What about Hitler? And I'm like, well, are we being consistent? I mean, this does come close to the logic of Osama bin Laden, who warned America for many years before 9-11, you keep bombing all of our civilians in Iraq. There was tons of bombings carried out,

tons of civilians being killed by America. You had America empowering several dictators in the Middle East, and you had this massive American military presence in the Middle East, and even the American overthrowing democratically elected leaders like in 1953 in Iran, which led to the installment of the Shah, which was a brutal dictator.

So you have all of this from his perspective, all of this evil that America is doing. And that was in his own words, why he bombed the Twin Towers. Obviously, it's like, that's horrible. No, that's not the answer. But I don't see how the logic is terribly different. Or if you add up all the innocent civilians who have died as a direct or indirect result of the CIA overthrowing many countries around the world, I even, I did, I kind of added up these numbers and it comes to about 6 million. So do we go bomb Langley because of all the evil they're doing? You know, it, yeah. Or you think, you know, you know, you could make a case to shoot Biden because he's funding Israel's illegal opi occupation and bombing of Gaza. You can shoot Trump because he's doing all, you know, anyway,

it's like, where does it end? Like what word is, where is that line? It's not, it's not okay. Yeah, but would you still put a bullet in the head of Hitler? I'm like, well, I just want to pull back and say, is that really one sound Christian logic, the way to confront evil? And number two, like pragmatically, who decides who's the Hitler? I mean, Trump's been called a Hitler many times, right? I mean, so should we brood on the assassination of the attempted assassination of Trump? So yeah, I think I just, it's a tough question. I do wrestle with it, but I want, it's, to me, it's just not such a simple like, ah, gotcha, pacifism isn't realistic, you know. It's like, well, what kind of world are we trying to create as Christians? But I got a question here

from one of, oh, a bunch of questions are coming in here from our theology and Ra fans here. What, Misha wants to know, what challenges do you, in this bite, we kind of maybe have already talked through this, but what challenges do you feel you currently have in your pacifism? Like what's the number one challenge to a pacifistic view, would you say? Well, is this number one challenge? I don't know if I can think of what I believe is the number one challenge, but one of them is that I'm with you, Preston, in that I do empathize with those who want to take up weapons and deal with people who are directly responsible for horrible evils that are being perpetrated. I empathize with the early Malcolm

X and other black leaders who didn't like that King was totally committed to nonviolence. I get that. In fact, it's always strange to me that a lot of white Christians I know have no empathy with those people at all because it's domestic killing rather than killing in other countries. But man, the horrible violence, the horrible racism, the horrible treatment that African Americans have had to endure, I understand the rage that wells up. I can't understand that in a way that a black person can, especially someone who has lived through that.

But I do want to empathize with it. But I still think Martin Luther King and John Perkins, if I have to choose between the two of them, John Perkins is I like better for myself because I think his theology is more Anabaptist, if you will, than Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King joined together God and country a little too much for me. But nonetheless, I admire both of them a whole lot. And both of them said powerful words and I think helped us to see what nonviolence can accomplish, and especially King, in some very self-sacrificial, extraordinary ways. And so now we can imagine things that we couldn't imagine back then.

But I never want to look down on those who can't get there and can't imagine how you can be that patient and how you can not just take violence into your own hands, even though for Christians, certainly, for others, for other, one can give other rationales, I wouldn't want to encourage it. Another question from John here, and I resonate with this, personal nonviolence makes sense as you risk your own life. Violence to protect the life of another seems right to do. You make me think about, you know, pacifism, but letting others die when you can slow it down. Yeah. I mean, I think we've kind of,

I wrestle with that too, you know, that like practically, practically, if I'm just like, I don't have my Bible with me, I'm just on the streets and I see somebody getting harmed, killed, whatever. And from my vantage point, violence is the only way to stop that. Like I practically do wrestle with that. I just think as a broad framework, is that how we're gonna go about producing good and beauty and truth in the world? Going around using violence to stop what we see as perceived evil.

That as a consistent framework, I'm like, ah, I could see where that would be not good. But do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, again, I do understand. I mean, I've heard these arguments my whole pacifist life. And I do understand the power of the arguments. Most people who feel the need to give any rationale at all are typically more concerned about defending others than defending themselves. One of the things many Christians are unaware of is that Augustine and Luther both argued that individuals as individuals, as opposed to individuals who are, say, police officers

or soldiers in official offices or capacities. Individuals as individuals should live by the Sermon on the Mount, and therefore they don't have the prerogative to kill other people to protect their loved ones or their property. So it's not just pacifists who have said that, but it's also, like I said, Augustine and Luther. I've never looked carefully to see whether Calvin said something similar, but I've read quotes from Luther and Augustine that suggest that. Yeah. I think Augustine even argued against violence and self-defense too.

I think he was pretty adamant about that, if I remember correctly. Well, Mark, I've taken you over your time. Thank you so much for the intriguing conversation. I learned a ton. You've given us a lot to think about and a lot of books to read. Tell us really quickly again, the two books you've written are,

I see them behind you right there, if you're, for those watching. Bonhoeffer, The Assassin? Published by Baker Academic Books in 2013 and Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis published by Cascade, Wipfenstock, in 2022. Okay, that one seems, that's a provocative title. I hope they're both, well, especially with the new movie, the first one is also a provocative

title now. Right, right. All right, thanks so much for being a guest on The Al Jirah. I really appreciate getting to know you, Mark. Thank you, Preston. It's been good to get to know you a bit too. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hi I'm Haven and as long as I can remember, I have had different curiosities and thoughts and ideas that I like to explore, usually with a girlfriend over a matcha latte. But then when I had kids, I just didn't have the same time that I did before for the one-on-ones that I crave. So I started Haven the Podcast.

It's a safe space for curiosity and conversation. And we talk about everything from relationships to parenting to friendships, to even your view of yourself and we don't have answers or solutions But I think the power is actually in the questions. So I'd love for you to join me Haven the podcast Hey friends Rachel Grohl here from the hearing Jesus podcast Do you ever wonder if you're truly hearing from God? Are you tired of trying to figure it all out on your own? The hearing Jesus podcast is here to help you live out your faith every single day and together

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