Fifteen years ago, scholar Stephen Haynes mapped out the many interpretations of the life of 20th-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a conservative who sought to restore Germany—or perhaps he was a progressive who wanted to move past stale dogmatism. Bonhoeffer was a closet Anabaptist, concerned with questions of the church first and society second. Or maybe he was the model of a theologian who cared primarily for social action here and now.
Figures as complex as Bonhoeffer are notoriously difficult to interpret well. Bonhoeffer left behind numerous monographs, sermons, correspondence, and theological writing, and since his death, there have been as many volumes of personal remembrances by friends and colleagues. All of this creates a complex and at times elusive figure, difficult to categorize within contemporary ideological movements. If we aren’t careful, situating Bonhoeffer in our own moment can be an exercise in wish fulfillment.
This is the trap into which the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. falls. In the latest offering from Angel Studios, the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an empty container into which our own desires—in this case, desires for a faith that serves political ends—are poured.
In one sense, Bonhoeffer is straightforward biography and is to be commended for introducing us to influences on his life that are frequently underplayed in the popular imagination: his family, his friends in the United States, his contacts in church bodies across Europe.
We watch as Bonhoeffer is educated in the finest German universities and becomes deeply concerned with the political direction of the country. He teaches at a freestanding seminary in Finkenwalde amid the rise of Nazi influence on the German church. After the seminary closes, he joins the Abwehr, a German military intelligence agency. Viewers meet his brother-in-law, also involved in the Abwehr, who took part in a Hitler assassination plot. We see Bonhoeffer arrested and dying in the Flossenbürg concentration camp days before the prisoners there were liberated by the Allies.
These facts are uncontroversial. But Bonhoeffer is more speculative than circumspect. Atop the familiar scaffolding of the theologian’s life, the film constructs the story of a man who, from childhood, seems destined to leave behind prayer for conspiracy, Bible teaching for political espionage, and theology for activism.
Rather than depicting a man of deep theological convictions and subtle intellect, Bonhoeffer tells the story of a man for whom moral convictions are a flexible and useful tool, a man whose actions are determined not by concerns for the church’s witness but by perceived historical necessity.
It is the story of a Bonhoeffer willing to do anything—including disavow the teachings of Jesus as he understood them—to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
Let us acknowledge that any biopic takes liberties with its subject. Screenwriters fill in gaps with imagined conversations and encounters not only to make a good film but also to demonstrate the individual’s character.
In this respect, Bonhoeffer is a typical film of its genre—even if the liberties it takes are a bit fanciful. For example, Bonhoeffer as a young man spent a year in New York at Union Theological Seminary, where he became acquainted with American racism and worshiped at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church.
The film stretches these facts, depicting Bonhoeffer as leading his own jazz combo at a Harlem nightclub, being beaten in a confrontation with a racist hotel owner, and becoming an impassioned advocate for the rights of African Americans. These embellishments, entertaining as they may be, are designed less to fill up airtime than to depict Bonhoeffer as a crusader developing an appetite for justice.
Theologian Bonhoeffer is further eclipsed by political agent Bonhoeffer as the movie unfolds. As the Nazis rise to power, he says things like “I can’t pretend that praying and teaching is enough,” and “My dirty hands are all I have left to offer.” His well-known underground seminary at Finkenwalde is treated not as a place to faithfully train ordinands in the Confessing Church but as a launching pad for a political counterattack on the Nazis. Toward the end of his life, he gives a sermon in which his famous “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” quote is interspersed with footage of a conspirator planting a bomb.
In one howler of a scene, Bonhoeffer disavows his pacifist teaching in Discipleship, insisting “I was right … before Hitler.” His friend and student Eberhard Bethge immediately challenges his teacher, asking whether Hitler was the first evil leader since Scripture was written. Bonhoeffer replies ominously: “No. But he’s the first one I can stop.”
If this scene included fireworks and a montage of Dietrich doing calisthenics to prepare for the weeks ahead, it could not have been more perfectly written for a spy thriller.
At the heart of Bonhoeffer is the overconfident depiction of the theologian as a would-be assassin. We know that Bonhoeffer was initially arrested not for an assassination plot (as the film depicts) but for his involvement in Operation 7, a scheme to smuggle Jews into neighboring Switzerland. We know that his primary intrigue through the Abwehr was passing information about the Nazis to his ecumenical church contacts in England and elsewhere—not, as the film depicts, trying to convince the English to supply a bomb to kill a dictator.
And finally, while Bonhoeffer undoubtedly knew of plans (which included family members) to assassinate Hitler, evidence surrounding his direct involvement remains murky and contested.
Among historians, the theologian’s relationship to an assassination attempt is a hotly debated question—less a matter of Bonhoeffer’s own words than informed conjecture about what he knew of his brother-in-law’s activities. But for the Bonhoeffer movie, there’s no debate: Dietrich Bonhoeffer not only knew of a plot to kill Hitler but also was intimately involved, his earlier convictions about how to understand Christ’s teachings rendered irrelevant by the rise of the Nazis.
Bonhoeffer’s real-life words complicate this narrative. “To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way,” he wrote in Discipleship. Years later, awaiting his execution, he doubled down: “Today I can see the dangers of that book [Discipleship], though I still stand by what I wrote.”
It is likely that Bonhoeffer knew of a plot to kill Hitler. But based on his writings, it also seems that his own forms of Christian resistance—spreading information to international contacts, assisting with sending Jews to Switzerland—were consistent with his long-standing convictions.
Undermining the Nazis with paperwork and diplomacy is far less cinematic than explosives, and the makers of Bonhoeffer may have changed their main character’s worldview for mere dramatic effect. But the ideological thrust of the film feels too on the nose to be justified by drama alone. What kind of connection is the film making by suggesting that Bonhoeffer changed his mind about the “narrow way”?
Perhaps it’s suggesting that the audience should also lay down their political naiveté and take up arms. Perhaps it’s suggesting that the way of Jesus is too soft for the hard realities of modern conflict and should be replaced by a more “realistic” approach. Ironically, this is the very approach the Nazis themselves take—replacing crosses with swastikas and Bibles with copies of Mein Kampf, turning to a stronger version of church when the old ways, governed by Scripture and sacrament, no longer fit the bill.
Early reactions to the film, particularly by the Bonhoeffer family, have identified a distorted legacy. The source of some of these distortions seems easy to identify. Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. plays off the title of conservative pundit Eric Metaxas’ 2011 Bonhoeffer biography. (Metaxas’ website references the movie in the context of plans for a forthcoming Bonhoeffer streaming series, and he’s promoted it on X.)
The similarity between this rendering of Bonhoeffer’s life and Metaxas’ own trajectory is telling. Though Angel Studios has downplayed any connection between Metaxas and this project, consider the similarities (beyond the film’s subtitle). Both movie Bonhoeffer and Metaxas begin as religious thinkers, become primarily concerned with political life, and ultimately dally with the use of force in service to their ideals.
Early on in the film, Bonhoeffer’s Harlem friend says that sometimes a punch is necessary; in 2020, Eric Metaxas made news when he punched a DC protester. The parallel is too spot-on to be mere coincidence. In his most recent book, Metaxas continues to marshal Bonhoeffer’s work toward his project of politics as the ultimate end of theology. His inflammatory rhetoric consistently equates the American left with the Nazis.
The portrait offered in Bonhoeffer does not square with the man who—even in the midst of the Confessing Church’s collapse—would speak of baptism as God’s way of creating a new kingdom, who desired “the resistance tasks of the church [to] terminate in word and discipleship.” In Bonhoeffer, we see an imprisoned Dietrich returning to preaching about Christ’s sacrifice and taking Communion only after his own attempts to save Germany’s soul through an assassination plot have failed.
Perhaps judgment of the film’s message should come from Bonhoeffer himself. From Ethics:
Radicalism always springs from a conscious or unconscious hatred of what is established. Christian radicalism, no matter whether it consists in withdrawing from the world or in improving the world, arises from hatred of creation. … On both sides it is a refusal of faith in the creation. But devils are to be cast out through Beelzebub.
Put differently, one cannot drive out evil with evil. Any attempt to bend the world through evil means is to refuse to believe that God is ultimately God, even in the age of Hitler.
The ultimate failure of Bonhoeffer is not just that it gets the history wrong. It also misunderstands how Bonhoeffer’s life was already an extraordinary example of Christian courage.
Especially in the aftermath of two assassination attempts on a former president, we do not need an argument for theologically motivated government overthrow; we do not need further justification for political violence. What we needed was a film about a man concerned with how God might be calling the church to be steadfast amid the great temptation to mold our faith to our politics.
Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
