"STRANGE GLORY, Awakening Man's Latent Powers", was a 1977 publication edited by Gerry Goldberg. It was published by St. Martin's Press and contained 151 pages of illustrations and text of the 'New Age' variety. Lovecraft and his creations are cited several times in the book, but certainly he is not a primary feature. All the interior illustrations are in B+W, but some artworks by Virgil Finlay, Stephen Fabian, and others of the pulp craze era are included too. (Exhibit 473)
"Bonhoeffer came to embody some of the contradictions modernity imposed on the faith. I could happily spend the rest of my life sorting through this."
Another fascinating and reflective interview with Charles Marsh... Particularly helpful are his comments on Bonhoeffer's notion of 'religionless Christianity.'
A conversation with Charles Marsh, author of Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (INTERVIEW)
(Photos by Gudrun Senger)
I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Charles Marsh, Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, about his 25-year interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his terrific recent book, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Here is our conversation:
You’ve been interested in Dietrich Bonhoeffer for some time. What initially drew you to write a dissertation on his philosophical thought over 25 years ago?
He threw me a life-line when I was drowning in the theory-drenched academic culture of the 1980’s. I mean, his writing and legacy illuminated, when I really needed it, a pathway back to terra firma—to Jesus.
In my graduate student years at Harvard and UVa, I tried with ever maddening ferocity to bridge what felt like an inseparable divide between intellectual life and compassionate service, theological inquiry and Christian mission. From September to May, I read Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Fichte, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault; in the summers, I worked in inner-city Atlanta, in a neighborhood called Reynoldstown, in a community-building program for minority youth. For five summers there I ran a day camp called Body and Soul, combining basketball, Bible study and poetry, but my return to Cambridge or Charlottesville every Fall undid whatever fragile unity was achieved in the summer months.
In fact, I came to Bonhoeffer late in my studies. I’d heard his story in sermons, and read sections of Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison. I did not realize, until I included a section on his thought in my doctoral comps, that he’d struggled to break free of the same suffocating intellectual inheritance. His writings were a liberation; here was a young philosophical theologian shaped by familiar influences who experienced, as I had, the liberal Protestant tradition as an enervating weight, but in the lived realities of faith and in his own immersion in the “church of the outcasts of America” found the grace that turned him from the “phraseological to the real”.
The philosophical discourse of interiority grows grim and gray, and I knew I wanted to be outside, in the sunlight, where you can walk and move and grow and feel and love.
What kept you interested in him over the years?
Though I was trying to make sense of the civil rights movement as theological drama, writing about Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Ed King, Victoria Gray Adams, Rosa Parks, Johnny Carr, Charles Sherrod, and Ella Baker, it was Bonhoeffer who remained my guide on this journey without maps.
The challenge of interpreting the civil rights movement as theological drama meant capturing the particularity of its stories and characters, trying hard to make them vivid, honest and inspiring, and asking the question of God with appropriate suspicion. I learned to write theology as story, and doing so in the company of Bonhoeffer meant that eventually he would say, “It’s my turn now.”
One of Bonhoeffer’s quotes that always stood out to me is, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That quote always bummed me out a bit. However, in your book, Bonhoeffer comes across as a man ferociously in love with the things of life, like, art, music, vermouth and soda, clothes, food, et cetera. How would you describe this tension of dying for Christ and his zest for life?
Yes, it bummed Bonhoeffer out too when he thought about the line years later.
The quote comes from The Cost of Discipleship, a book that originated as lectures given at an illegal, anti-Nazi seminary in 1935. His intention was to correct the Lutheran tendency to portray faith as a refuge from obedience.
From the disciple's first hearing of the call to his taking up his cross and following, existence meant lived devotion to Jesus. Saying “yes” to the call of Christ throws the disciple into a new world; and Bonhoeffer, seeing the Nazified German Christian church as veritable incubator of cheap grace, sought to remind Jesus-followers of the inescapable moment of personal decision—and responsibility for the here and now—that Protestant theology had effectively abjured. And so in reconsidering the obligations of discipleship the book was revolutionary. There is no grace without obedience; no remission of sin without the turning away from sin toward truth; no freedom without the burden of the cross.
Karl Barth famously wrote, in the final section of his Church Dogmatics, that with regard to a theology of discipleship, he could not do better than reproduce long passages from Bonhoeffer’s book, which had been published in 1937.
But Bonhoeffer would later acknowledge dangers in The Cost of Discipleship, a certain hint of spiritual heroism, which laid too much weight upon the individual, too little on Christians shared life together. The will to make oneself an exemplar of faith might too easily yield to unforgiving perfectionism and sanctimonious bravado.
Still, though many of the words were certainly a bummer, Bonhoeffer stood by the book. These, he felt, were the right words spoken at the right time, when only a rare ardor and rectitude, an almost saintly support of suffering on the part of all the faithful, could distinguish the church as authentic, exemplify the true from the heretical.
Discipleship finally meant joy; and for Bonhoeffer, genuine joy required deliberate and practiced discipline.
One of the most surprising (and comforting) anecdotes in the book for me was the struggle Bonhoeffer had in getting college students to come to his Bible studies when he was starting out in pastoral ministry. At one point he had to agree to meet a bunch of fraternity guys in a pub and he had to pay for the beer! What was the most surprising story from Bonhoeffer’s life that you discovered in researching and writing the book?
Working in the Bonhoeffer archives at the Berlin City library, which I did in the spring of 2007, brought surprises on a daily basis. The collection had been recently obtained from the estate of Bonhoeffer’s biographer and dearest friend Eberhard Bethge and filled more than twenty-five cases; it is were lectures, letters, books, photographs, notebooks, and journals; and while many of the documents appeared in the sixteen volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the singularities of Bonhoeffer’s life, the evidence of which I held in my hands illuminated an intriguingly different image than the one I had carried with me since writing my doctoral dissertation 25 years earlier:
—there were registration papers for a new Audi convertible, a bank slip from the joint account he shared with his best friend Eberhard, voluminous files of articles, notes pamphlets on race relations in the U.S., inventories of his wardrobe and library, gorgeous, austere landscape photographs he had taken during his two trips to North Africa, photos of Bonhoeffer watching Eberhard making vaudeville-esque gestures on the Baltic seaboard, postcards from Texas, a brief correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi.
The size of this project blows my mind. What kind of organizational system did you use to keep track of the letters, postcards, and stuff of Bonhoeffer’s life while keeping in mind the overall narrative shape of the book?
I signed a contract initially for a smaller book, Bonhoeffer in America. Had I known then what I was getting into I might have bowed out gracefully. A project I thought I could knock out in a few years turned into a cradle to grave account that consumed me for nearly a decade.
The difficult business, in my experience, is borrowing the courage, or willpower, and money!—and learning to trust a process that often feels unreliable, if not vaguely catastrophic. Honestly, I can’t understand that process apart from the Holy Spirit, the mysterious, miraculous presence of God that lifts the skunk hours and days enough for the work to get done. I am not a pious man, but I recall times late at night when I fell on my knees before climbing into bed and thanked God –out loud!—for the strength to survive another day of writing. This may sound theatrical. I don’t mean it that way. But understand now how a writer can get to the point of saying, “That’s it for me.”
Writing biography also means trying to paying attention to atmospherics, so over the years of research and writing, I made a point of spending time in every place Bonhoeffer had lived or influenced him; and this meant trips to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), Tübingen, Rome, Paris, the Baltic seaboard and the Pomeranian plains, Barcelona, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, New York, Geneva, Ettal, Prague, Friedrichsbrunn in the eastern Harz Mountains, and the village and concentration camp of Flossenburg, where Bonhoeffer was executed on April 9, 1945. When circumstances forced me to cancel my trip to Tripoli and Tetouan, I read Paul Bowles’ books, or at least passages. I still haven’t finished Under the Sheltering Sky and probably never will.
As far as the organizational system goes, I’m fairly old school. I keep boxes for each chapter; I fill notebooks with sketches, words, phrases. I tape maps and photos and newspaper clippings all over my office. I monitor my word count obsessively.
Most biographers have relied on Eberhard Bethge’s biography to write their own biographies of Bonhoeffer over the years. However, you took a different course and relied on other materials for your book. This meant casting Bethge’s and Bonhoeffer’s relationship in a new light. How would you characterize their relationship in the end?
I wanted to tell the story anew by relying primarily on a treasure of recent archival and scholarly discoveries, on letters, journals, and other documents, as well as my own interviews. I took all the Bonhoeffer biographies in my library and hid them in the basement, including Eberhard Bethge’s 1200-page giant, which has remained the touchstone of all Bonhoeffer scholarship since it was published in 1967. I wanted to wrestle Bonhoeffer free of his best friend’s protective grasp and to look at aspects of character he had ignored. This did mean looking more closely at the Dietrich and Eberhard’s friendship.
As you know, Bonhoeffer allows in one of his final prison letters that he never experienced the pleasures of sexual consummation. I take that as a truthful revelation; and thus it was my challenge to reconstruct the seven year partnership of Dietrich and Eberhard in its singular and heartbreaking beauty. To portray their friendship in what felt like a natural unfolding of affection and longing, even if that approach risked seeming at times maddeningly coy. I’m being coy now, I know, but that’s all I have to say for now.
Bonhoeffer once said that the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Who is Christ for us today?” How might he answer that question looking at the American church today?
To live in the world in the hope that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, this is most beautiful and consequential conviction I can possibly imagine, and it changes everything. I tried to answer these kinds of questions in my book Wayward Christian Soldier: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity. I still stand by that anguished jeremiad, though like Bonhoeffer and his The Cost of Discipleship, mindful of a certain tone and pitch that I might no longer find helpful.
If a person reads Strange Glory and wants to continue to explore Bonhoeffer by reading his primary works, what would you recommend them to start with? Where should they go from there?
I’d go straight to Letters and Papers from Prison, then to Ethics, especially the sections on the church and the world and the astonishing chapter, “Christ and Good People”, and then to Life Together, keeping in mind this little classic is not meant to be read as a how-to manual on Christian community, but as a poignant meditation on the gift of Christian fellowship. I’d then read Bonhoeffer’s triumphant narrative of his first journey to Italy (he was 19 years old and enthralled by the color and pageantry of Holy Week in Rome), his sermons from London, his early speech to the ecumenical movement “Christ and Peace”, his letters to his mother Paula and his grandmother Julie, and his journal entries from the summer of 1939, when he moved to New York City thinking he might sit out the war in the security of American academe, only to be overwhelmed by guilt and the conviction that he must return to Germany, and there suffer, bear witness, practice dissent, and work actively for the destruction of the Hitler regime.
Thank you for writing such an accessible, engaging, and delightful book about a towering Christian and amazing human being!
You can purchase Strange Glory here. Also, make sure and check out the Project on Lived Theology that Charles runs at the University of Virginia.
You're in good company if no one shows up to your Bible study
I came across this passage yesterday in Strange Glory, Charles Marsh's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I promise to never complain again about lack of attendance at anything church-related.
And for those who think they've just discovered that they can study theology in the pub over a couple of pints, think again. Over 80 years ago these enterprising frat boys got Bonhoeffer to teach them ecclesiology and got him to pay for the beer!
