Jamin Bradley

While the January 6th insurrection was happening, I made a brief post saying, “We told you this was coming.” I was baffled when an adamant Trump supporter liked my post. At first, I thought, “Wow, this has finally gone far enough for them to realize what’s happening!” But then it occurred to me that they were reading my comment as a rallying cry rather than a rebuke. I had intended the statement to be heard with a facepalm emoji, but they heard it with a fist emoji.

When our words are disconnected from our person, they can become the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean. No one knows this phenomenon better than Jesus, who has been directly quoted to make a thousand points and endorsements that would have never left his mouth. When we don’t study Jesus as a person and get to know his character, his words become weapons, like they did for Gary Oldman’s character in the movie, The Book of Eli. “People will come from all over, they’ll do exactly what I tell them if the words are from the book. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again,” the villain concluded.

This dynamic is currently happening to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pacifistic German pastor and lecturer who worked against the nazis of his time. The misapplication of Bonhoeffer has partially come from the work of Eric Metaxas, an author, speaker, and conservative radio host who wrote a large and popular biography on the man. In Metaxas’ moldable hands, Bonhoeffer has become a right-wing conservative ready to fight against nazi liberals no matter the cost—an incredibly strange takeaway if you have studied Bonhoeffer’s life. Bonhoeffer scholars are not only confused and upset by Metaxas’ application of Bonhoeffer’s legacy, but they also think his scholarship is bad. Years ago, Stephen R. Haynes called Metaxas out on how he used Bonhoeffer to endorse Trump:

You were grossly irresponsible to use your role as an influential interpreter of Bonhoeffer to endorse someone whom Bonhoeffer would have found repulsive. You are entitled to your political opinions of course. But you used credibility gained largely from Bonhoeffer’s estimable humanity to imply that voting for Donald Trump was incumbent on American Christians. You thus gave them permission to ignore their spiritual intuition that the man was a repudiation of everything they held dear. In the process you did a disservice to Bonhoeffer, to Americans and to the cause of Christ.

Want to know what’s really bizarre? Before I knew all of this about Metaxas, I read his whole book, which gave me great concern for what Trump was doing to our country. How could I walk away from Metaxas’ book with the exact opposite application that he carried from his own writing? It’s strange how we hear things…

Bonhoeffer’s family has also condemned this kind of misapplication in a recent letter.

We are horrified to see how the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is increasingly being distorted and misused by right-wing extremists, xenophobes, and religious agitators. As direct descendants of the seven siblings of the theologian and resistance fighter executed by the Nazis, we can testify based on what we learned from our families that he was a peace-loving, freedom-loving humanitarian. Never would he have seen himself associated with far-right, violent movements such as Christian Nationalists and others who are trying to appropriate him today. On the contrary, he would have strongly and loudly condemned these attitudes.

If you want to know Bonhoeffer, read his works. If you want to know Jesus, read the gospels. Once you get to know the person the words belong with, you can sniff out misapplication. For example, I’ve read almost everything C.S. Lewis has written, and I can always tell when a fake Lewis quote appears online, or something he said is being wielded incorrectly. Know your heroes, lest you read the wrong emoji into their words.