Article

Theology
2015, Vol. 118(3) 162–171
How to read ! The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:

Bonhoeffer’s peace sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0040571X14564933

statements: Or, tjx.sagepub.com

Bonhoeffer was a
Lutheran and not
an Anabaptist
Michael DeJonge
University of South Florida

Abstract
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s strong statements in support of peace have encouraged Stanley
Hauerwas and other interpreters to read him, explicitly or implicitly, as participating in
the theological tradition of the peace churches. This paper argues that this reading
misinterprets Bonhoeffer’s peace statements, which ought to be interpreted in the
context of the Lutheran theological tradition with which Bonhoeffer identified. In
fact, this misinterpretation of Bonhoeffer’s peace statements is one that he himself
worked hard to avoid by carefully distinguishing his own position on peace from
what he understood as that of the Anabaptists.

Keywords
Anabaptist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Stanley Hauerwas, Lutheran, Mennonite, pacifism,
peace, John Howard Yoder

Introduction
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s peace statements have encouraged a type of interpretation
that reads him, explicitly or implicitly, as participating in the peace church trad-
ition. Stanley Hauerwas has influentially promulgated this interpretation in a
number of publications, closely allying Bonhoeffer with the twentieth-century
Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. More recently, Mark Nation,
Anthony Siegrist and Daniel Umbel offer a strongly Mennonite and pacifist inter-
pretation in Bonhoeffer the Assassin?1

Corresponding author:
Michael DeJonge
Email: mdejonge@usf.edu
DeJonge 163

I argue that these interpretations misrepresent Bonhoeffer’s peace statements in

part because they read them as if they belonged in an Anabaptist theological con-
text when in fact they belonged in Bonhoeffer’s own Lutheran theological context.2
This is a misinterpretation that Bonhoeffer himself worked hard to discourage,
since he carefully distinguished his own position on peace from what he understood
as that of the Anabaptists.
A few preliminary marks are in order. First, I am not offering anything like a full
account of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts about peace, violence and war.3 Rather, I am
making a hermeneutic argument about the appropriate place to start such an
account, an argument about the context for interpreting his peace statements.
Whether to interpret Bonhoeffer’s peace statements through a Lutheran intellectual
lens or an Anabaptist one is important because key terms such as ‘peace’ and ‘the
kingdom’ mean different things in those contexts.
Second, in arguing that Bonhoeffer’s peace statements ought to be interpreted in
his own Lutheran intellectual context, I do not intend to be reductive. I do not
mean to suggest that seeing his peace statements in the Lutheran tradition tells us
everything we need to know about Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on peace, violence and
war. Again, this is because I am not offering a full account but rather an argument
for a certain starting point and interpretive framework. To argue that we ought to
read Bonhoeffer’s peace statements in Lutheran terms does not exclude also recog-
nizing that he was a creative participant in that tradition.

Bonhoeffer the Anabaptist?

Now the hermeneutic question: should Bonhoeffer’s statements about peace be
read in a Lutheran intellectual context or an Anabaptist one? This question
should be easy to answer. As Hauerwas himself repeatedly writes, Bonhoeffer
was a Lutheran and not an Anabaptist.4
Nonetheless, Hauerwas expressly wants to make Bonhoeffer sound more like
Yoder, more like an Anabaptist. So how does he sidle Bonhoeffer away from the
Lutheran tradition and towards the Anabaptist one? He does so in part by
making the following argument in at least three separate publications. He
quotes a passage from Bonhoeffer’s ‘The Presentation of the New Testament
Message’ where Bonhoeffer writes that ‘Luther’s doctrine of grace . . . confirms
Constantine’s covenant with the church.’ As a result, ‘the church vanished into
the invisible realm’.5 Hauerwas goes on to note that this sounds a lot like some-
thing Yoder would say. Thus Hauerwas distances Bonhoeffer from Luther and
associates him with Yoder. The association of Bonhoeffer and Yoder becomes so
strong that they become a single grammatical entity, a conglomerate subject in
sentences such as ‘Bonhoeffer and Yoder were pacifists’.6 (Hauerwas goes on to
qualify what pacifist means, but the qualifications apply to both Bonhoeffer and
Yoder.) In this way, Hauerwas distances Bonhoeffer from Luther, associates
him with Yoder, and then states that Bonhoeffer was a pacifist in the way
that Yoder was.
164 Theology 118(3)

A closer look at the passage in ‘The Presentation of the New Testament

Message’, however, shows how weak this argument is. The edition that
Hauerwas consults, No Rusty Swords, mistranslates what should be ‘the
Lutheran doctrine of grace’ as ‘Luther’s doctrine of grace’, an error corrected in
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, volume 14.7 Bonhoeffer is not criticizing ‘Luther’s
understanding of grace’, as Hauerwas puts it, but ‘the Lutheran doctrine of
grace’.8 The importance of the distinction between ‘Luther’s understanding
of grace’ and the later ‘Lutheran doctrine of grace’ is clear in the first chapter of
Discipleship, where Bonhoeffer contrasts Luther’s own experience of grace, which
was costly, with later Lutheranism’s doctrine of grace, which was cheap.9
Bonhoeffer, both in Discipleship and in the passage that Hauerwas frequently
quotes, did not distance himself from Luther and move closer to Anabaptism.
He attempted to call the Lutheran tradition back to Luther.

Bonhoeffer on Anabaptists
But I do not want to spend too much space criticizing various particular attempts
to pull Bonhoeffer from the Lutheran tradition into the Anabaptist one. Rather,
I argue for the implausibility of any such attempt, and I want to do so based on
how Bonhoeffer positioned himself in relationship to the Anabaptist tradition.
So, what did Bonhoeffer have to say about Anabaptists?
The term that Luther himself most frequently used to refer to Anabaptists was
Schwärmer.10 This term is usually translated as either ‘fanatics’ or ‘enthusiasts’,
which is in keeping with Luther’s Latin terminology (fanaticus, enthusiasta). Luther
first deployed this term in his various disputes with the Zwickau prophets, Thomas
Müntzer and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt. When Luther later encountered
the groups that we might today call the sixteenth-century Baptists or Anabaptists,
he eventually concluded that they shared the same spirit, and therefore came to call
them enthusiasts as well. This broad, polemical use of the term enthusiast was
appropriated into the Lutheran confessions and came to mark a confessional
boundary. On a number of issues, Lutheran identity was articulated in the space
between the ‘papists’, on the one side, and the ‘enthusiasts’, on the other.
Recent historiography of the ‘Anabaptists’ or ‘the left wing of the Reformation’
or the ‘Radical Reformation’ has worked hard – though without much consensus –
to recognize the often significant differences among the sixteenth-century groups
that fell outside the Catholic, Reformed and Lutheran traditions, and to label them
in non-polemical terms.11
On this issue, though, Bonhoeffer was much closer to Luther’s broad, polemical
and derogatory language than the precise and neutral language of recent historians.
Although Bonhoeffer used a variety of terms to describe Anabaptists, including
‘Baptists’ (Täufern)12 and ‘Anabaptists’ (Wiedertäufern),13 he most frequently used
Luther’s own derogatory term, Schwärmer, which Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works trans-
lates sometimes as ‘fanatics’ but usually as ‘enthusiasts’. Most often, then, when
Bonhoeffer talked about the Anabaptists, he called them Schwärmer or enthusiasts.
DeJonge 165

Substantively, for Bonhoeffer, one of the defining characteristics of enthusiasm

was its attempt through human effort to build the kingdom of heaven on earth.14 In
defining enthusiasm in that way, he could group together sixteenth-century militant
groups, who tried to build the kingdom on earth through force, with the sixteenth-
century pacifist groups, who tried to do so through love. He even identified as
enthusiastic later movements such as the French Revolution,15 the American
social gospel movement16 and even National Socialism.17
That Bonhoeffer grouped pacifist Anabaptists together with such disparate
groups under the umbrella of enthusiasm means, of course, that contemporary
Anabaptists will rightly feel his description to be a caricature. But the fact that
Bonhoeffer caricatured pacifist Anabaptists rather than trying to understand them
sympathetically on their own terms shows that for him they were not a real theo-
logical dialogue partner. Rather, as did Luther, the Lutheran confessions and much
of later Lutheranism, Bonhoeffer treated the Anabaptists as a symbol, as a way to
mark the boundary between true Reformation or Lutheran theology and some-
thing beyond the pale.18
And, indeed, for Bonhoeffer the line between enthusiasm and Lutheranism was
clear and strong. As he explained in a 1940 letter to his sister and brother-in-law,

Here was the great contrast between Enthusiasm and Luther. The Enthusiasts wanted
to build the world upon love, upon the Sermon on the Mount. Luther saw in this a
confusion of God’s kingdom and the earthly kingdom, which was bound to have the
most dangerous chaotic consequences.19

Thy kingdom come!

For an example of Bonhoeffer systematically contrasting his own Lutheran under-
standing of the kingdom of God with that of the enthusiasts we can look at his
1932 essay, ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’, which aims to explain how we should pray for
the coming of God’s kingdom.
The essay includes Bonhoeffer’s account of God’s kingdom, which he presents
with reference to Luther.20 In the ultimate, consummated kingdom, he writes, there
will be no sin and no need for either Church or State.21 But because that kingdom
has not yet fully come, he describes the kingdom of God in its present, penultimate
form. That kingdom, he writes, ‘is among us in no other way than a dual form. . .
Miracle and order . . . The form in which the kingdom of God is attested as miracle
we call—the church; the form in which the kingdom of God is attested as order we
call—the state.’22 In other words, God rules the present, penultimate kingdom in
two related ways, by maintaining order, which is the mandate of the State, and by
miracle, the proclamation of which belongs to the Church.
For Bonhoeffer, then, there is a restricted place for violence in God’s kingdom.
The ultimate kingdom is of course peaceable. The current witness to that ultimate
kingdom, though, has a twofold form. One fold is the Church, which proclaims the
166 Theology 118(3)

ultimate peace by peaceful means. The other fold of the penultimate kingdom, no
less an anticipation of the coming kingdom than the Church, is a legitimate State,
which maintains order, when necessary through coercion and violence.23
In ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’, Bonhoeffer locates his own understanding of God’s
kingdom between two opposing alternatives, ‘otherworldliness’ and ‘secularism’.
What matters for our topic is the secularists, whom Bonhoeffer defines as ‘pious[,]
Christian’ secularists who try to build the kingdom of God on earth. As such, he
calls them enthusiasts.24 Their mistake is a lack of faith in the coming kingdom.
Lacking faith, they try to perform themselves the miracle of its coming.25 They
make into a matter of works what should be a matter of faith, they try to make
visible what is invisible except to the eyes of faith.26 In doing so, they in fact
undermine the penultimate kingdom by disregarding the divine order of the
world through which God restrains the effects of sin.
What ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’ presents, then, is an expanded account of the dis-
tinction between Enthusiasm and Luther as Bonhoeffer explained it to his sister
and brother-in-law in the previously quoted letter.

The ‘two kingdoms’

It should be clear that in both the letter and ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’ Bonhoeffer
relies on two-kingdoms thinking, that Lutheran way of thinking that sees God
governing the world in two interrelated ways: the preservation of the sinful
world from falling into total chaos and the redemption of that preserved world.
Indeed, the logic of God’s twofold governance was for Bonhoeffer one of the issues
that separated Lutherans from Anabaptists. For this reason, it is necessary for
Anabaptist interpretations of Bonhoeffer to explain away his two-kingdoms think-
ing. Thus Hauerwas attempts to show that ‘Bonhoeffer’s political ethics . . . are
expressed primarily by his critique and attempt to find an alternative to the tradi-
tional Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms’.27 Hauerwas is wrong, though, to
say that Bonhoeffer breaks from the Lutheran tradition on this count; the idea of
God’s twofold governance deeply shapes Bonhoeffer’s thinking through to the end
of his career. I do not have the space to demonstrate this here but I can show again
how weak Hauerwas’s argument is.
At the culmination of Hauerwas’s argument that Bonhoeffer’s political ethics
moves away from two-kingdoms thinking, Hauerwas approvingly identifies in
Bonhoeffer a critique of political liberalism. But in illustrating Bonhoeffer’s critique
of liberalism, Hauerwas quotes a passage from the Ethics essay ‘Heritage and
Decay’ in which Bonhoeffer in fact articulates and defends the two kingdoms.28
In ‘Heritage and Decay’ Bonhoeffer explicitly states that one of the causes of
secularisation is ‘an insufficient distinction, rooted in enthusiasm, between the
offices and kingdoms of the state and church’.29 So Hauerwas’s argument that
Bonhoeffer’s political ethics are an attempt to find an alternative to two-kingdoms
thinking, an argument necessary for shifting Bonhoeffer’s thinking from a
Lutheran context to an Anabaptist one, ends by affirming a passage in which
DeJonge 167

Bonhoeffer explicitly defends two-kingdoms thinking and does so against

Anabaptists.

Bonhoeffer’s peace statements

It is clear that Bonhoeffer was not especially sympathetic to Anabaptist thinking
and that arguments attempting to read him through the Anabaptist tradition rather
than his own Lutheran tradition have been weak. Bonhoeffer’s various peace state-
ments should be interpreted through his own Lutheran categories rather than
Anabaptist ones. In some cases, this takes more work than I have space for because
it requires explaining the Lutheran conceptions surrounding particular peace
claims. So I will focus on places where Bonhoeffer explicitly distinguished his
position on peace from an Anabaptist account of peace.
Bonhoeffer did this in his 1932 lecture ‘On the Theological Foundation of the
World Alliance’. Hauerwas opens his book, Performing the Faith, with a long
quotation from this lecture.30 Bonhoeffer makes a strong appeal for international
peace, but he is careful that this appeal should not be misinterpreted as enthusi-
astic. On three occasions he explicitly contrasts his position on peace with enthu-
siasm. On the first he says that the Church must find a way to proclaim peace
without ‘falling away . . . into Enthusiasm’.31 On the second he describes an
approach to peace that ‘must be rejected as Enthusiastic and therefore not
Protestant’.32 The third occasion is especially important, as it comes a mere four
lines above the frequently quoted statement, ‘We should not balk here at using the
word ‘‘pacifism’’.’ Bonhoeffer the Assassin? quotes this passage at length33 but
omits the crucial phrase where Bonhoeffer says that peace should come, ‘Not out
of the Enthusiast establishment of a commandment—for example, the fifth above
all others . . . ’ So immediately before embracing the word pacifism Bonhoeffer
explicitly states that the pacifism he has in mind is not that of the Anabaptists.
Just one more example, this time from Discipleship. What is often ignored in
Anabaptist interpretations of Discipleship is how the opening chapter on cheap
grace establishes the work as, in part, an intra-Lutheran argument. As already
mentioned, Bonhoeffer accuses contemporary Lutherans of adopting cheap grace
rather than Luther’s costly grace. In arguing for costly grace, Bonhoeffer knows that
he will draw from other Lutherans the charge that he is being enthusiastic. Part of
what Bonhoeffer has to do in Discipleship, then, is argue against other Lutherans
about what the proper distinction is between Lutherans and Anabaptists.
This intra-Lutheran dialogue is active when Bonhoeffer comments on Jesus’
statement, ‘Do not resist an evildoer.’ After discussing this statement, Bonhoeffer
raises an objection that could come from a pseudo-Lutheran interlocutor, namely,
is not the interpretation Bonhoeffer just offered ‘an enthusiast’s ignoring of sin’?34
Bonhoeffer counters that objection before going on to say,

Indeed, what Jesus says to his disciples would all be pure enthusiasm if we were to
understand these statements as wisdom for life in this world. That really would be an
168 Theology 118(3)

irresponsible imagining of laws which the world would never obey. Nonresistance as a
principle for worldly life is godless destruction of the order of the world which God
graciously preserves.35

What Bonhoeffer does here is correct his hypothetical pseudo-Lutheran interlocu-

tor about the proper distinction between Lutheranism and enthusiasm before rear-
ticulating his description of enthusiasts as those who threaten the order God uses to
preserve the world. In commenting on Jesus’ statement not to resist evil,
Bonhoeffer takes it for granted that an enthusiast or Anabaptist interpretation is
to be avoided, and he distinguishes his own interpretation from it.

Conclusion
I close by returning to the hermeneutic question. Bonhoeffer made a number of
strong statements in favour of ‘peace’ and ‘pacifism’. But the meaning of those
terms is in part dependent on the intellectual-historical context in which he articu-
lated them. If we are going to try to understand those statements in their original
context, which interpretive framework makes the best starting point? The work of
Hauerwas, Nation, Siegrest and Umbel interprets these statements, sometimes
implicitly, sometimes explicitly, as if they belonged to an Anabaptist intellectual
context. I argue that a Lutheran intellectual context is more likely to generate
better interpretations. This is because Bonhoeffer identified himself with the
Lutheran tradition and did so in part by defining that tradition in opposition to
Anabaptism. He did this in general and in particular instances. To interpret his
peace statements in Anabaptist terms is a misinterpretation that Bonhoeffer himself
worked hard to discourage.

Notes
1. Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the
Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2013).
2. Recent treatments of Bonhoeffer’s relationship to Luther include Klaus
Grünwaldt, Christiane Tietz and Udo Hahn (eds), Bonhoeffer und Luther: Zentrale
Themen ihrer Theologie (Hannover: Amt der VELKD, 2007), and Wolf Krötke,
‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther’, in Peter Frick (ed.), Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual
Formation: Theology and Philosophy in His Thought (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), pp.
53–82.
3. For a fuller account of these issues, see Clifford J. Green, ‘Pacifism and Tyrannicide:
Bonhoeffer’s Peace Ethic’, Studies in Christian Ethics 18.3 (2005), pp. 31–47. Green’s
piece as well as his review of Performing the Faith (Modern Theology 20.4 (2005),
pp. 674–7) are expert engagements with Hauerwas’s reading of Bonhoeffer. Green
argues that Bonhoeffer’s peace ethic should not be described as pacifist since that term
is generally understood to involve principled non-violence. As Green shows, his ethic
explicitly ruled out principles. Green’s arguments do not rely on confessional categories
(i.e., Lutheran and Anabaptist) as the present argument does.
DeJonge 169

4. Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence
(Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), p. 43; Hauerwas, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John
Howard Yoder’, in Timothy Larsen and Stephen R. Spencer (eds), The Sermon on the
Mount through the Centuries (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007), pp. 207–22; Hauerwas,
‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, in Peter Scott and William T. Cavenaugh (eds), The Blackwell
Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Wiley, 2008), pp. 136–49 (139).
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The Presentation of the New Testament Message’, No Rusty
Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1928–1936, ed. Edwin H. Robertson, trans. John
Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 324, quoted in: Hauerwas, Performing
the Faith, p. 43; Hauerwas, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder’, p. 207; and
Hauerwas, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, p. 139.
6. Hauerwas, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder’, p. 221.
7. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The Contemporization of the New Testament Message’,
Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English,
vol. 14, ed. H. Gaylon Barker and Mark S. Brocker, trans. Douglas W. Stott
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), p. 432. Hereafter, DBWE stands in for Dietrich
Bonhoeffer Works English.
8. Hauerwas, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder’, p. 208 (my emphasis).
9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, DBWE 4, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey,
trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), pp. 43, 53.
For more on the contrast Bonhoeffer draws in Discipleship between Luther and later
Lutheranism, see Christian Gremmels, ‘Rechtfertigung und Nachfolge: Martin Luther
in Dietrich Bonhoeffers Buch Nachfolge’, in Rainer Mayer and Peter Zimmerling (eds),
Dietrich Bonhoeffer heute: Die Aktualität seines Lebens und Werkes (Giessen: Brunnen,
1992), pp. 81–99.
10. Christian Peters, ‘Luther und seine protestantischen Gegner’, in Albrecht Beutel (ed.),
Luther Handbuch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), pp. 121–34. Also, Volker Leppin,
‘Schwärmer’, in Gerhard Müller (ed.), Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 30 (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1999), pp. 628–9.
11. For a recent summary of the historiography, see Karl Koop, ‘Anabaptist and
Mennonite Identity: Permeable Boundaries and Expanding Definitions’, Religion
Compass 8.6 (2014), pp. 199–207.
12. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sactorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the
Church, DBWE 1, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), p. 222.
13. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Paper on the Historical and Pneumatological Interpretation of
Scripture’, The Young Bonhoeffer: 1918–1928, DBWE 9, ed. Paul Duane Matheny,
Clifford J. Green and Marshall D. Johnson, trans. Mary C. Nebelsick with Douglas
W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), p. 288.
14. For examples, Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 222; Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBWE 6,
ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West and Douglas W. Stott
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), p. 57; Bonhoeffer, ‘Letter to Sabine and Gerhard
Leibholz’, Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940, DBWE 15, ed. Victoria J.
Barnett, trans. Victoria J. Barnett, Claudia D. Bergmann, Peter Frick and Scott A.
Moore, with Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), p. 302.
170 Theology 118(3)

15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The Führer and the Individual in the Younger Generation’,
Berlin: 1932–1933, DBWE 12, ed. Larry R. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best and David
Higgins with Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), p. 278.
16. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The Social Gospel’, Berlin, p. 241.
17. Bonhoeffer, ‘The Führer and the Individual in the Younger Generation’, p. 278.
18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘On the Theological Foundation of the World Alliance’,
Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932, DBWE 11, ed. Victoria J.
Barnett, Mark S. Brocker, and Michael Lukens, trans. Anne Schmidt-Lange, with
Isabel Best, Nicolas Humphrey and Marion Pauck (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012),
p. 365.
19. Bonhoeffer, ‘Letter to Sabine and Gerhard Leibholz’, p. 302 (translation altered).
20. Bonhoeffer, ‘Thy Kingdom Come!, Berlin, p. 296.
21. Bonhoeffer, ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’, p. 296.
22. Bonhoeffer, ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’, pp. 292–3. For an example of Luther’s own articu-
lation of the twofold character of God’s kingdom, see Martin Luther, ‘Temporal
Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed’, The Christian in Society II,
Luther’s Works, vol. 45, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T.
Lehmann, trans. J. J. Schindel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1962), pp. 77–129. The secondary
literature on Luther’s understanding of the two kingdoms is voluminous. A recent dis-
cussion can be found in Eike Wolgast, ‘Luther’s Treatment of Political and Societal
Life’, in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and L’ubomı́r Batka (eds), The Oxford Handbook of
Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 397–413.
23. For a later example of the place of violence in the State’s mandate, see Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, ‘State and Church’, Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940–1945, DBWE 16,
ed. Mark S. Brocker, trans. Lisa E. Dahill with Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2006), pp. 514–15. Luther’s own thinking on violence can be seen, for example,
in ‘Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved’, The Christian in Society III, Luther’s Works,
vol. 46, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann, trans.
Charles M. Jacobs (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), pp. 87–137.
24. Bonhoeffer, ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’, p. 290. Schwärmer is here translated as ‘fanatic’.
25. Bonhoeffer, ‘Thy Kingdom Come!’, p. 291.
26. It is notable that Hauerwas makes much of Yoder and Bonhoeffer’s shared emphasis on
visibility but cannot find in Yoder Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on invisibility: ‘Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder’, p. 219.
27. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, p. 48. On its own, this claim is open to the interpret-
ation that Bonhoeffer rejected a traditional version of the two-kingdoms doctrine (what-
ever that might be) in favour of some other version. But later Hauerwas says that
Bonhoeffer ‘reject[s] the two-kingdom tradition’, p. 48. For that reason I take
Hauerwas’s claim to be that Bonhoeffer rejects that entire tradition of the two king-
doms, not just some version of a two-kingdoms doctrine.
28. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, p. 53. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Heritage and Decay’,
Ethics, p. 132.
29. Bonhoeffer, ‘Heritage and Decay’, p. 127.
30. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, p. 13.
31. Bonhoeffer, ‘On the Theological Foundation of the World Alliance’, p. 359.
DeJonge 171

32. Bonhoeffer, ‘On the Theological Foundation of the World Alliance’, p. 365.
33. Nation, Siegrist and Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin?, p. 33; Bonhoeffer, ‘On the
Theological Foundation of the World Alliance’, p. 367.
34. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 135.
35. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 136 (translation altered; my emphasis).

Author Biography
Michael DeJonge is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of South
Florida.