![\"2017](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2017\/04\/Bonhoeffer-Lectures-300x300.png\")
<\/a>Today\u00a0Union Theological Seminary concludes\u00a0its annual\u00a0lecture series<\/a> in honor of one of its\u00a0most distinguished former students, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed in a Nazi concentration camp\u00a072 years ago tomorrow.\u00a0Coinciding as it does\u00a0with the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, this particular installment of the Bonhoeffer Lectures is entitled \u201cRe-Forming the Church of the Future: Bonhoeffer, Luther,\u00a0Public Ethics.\u201d<\/p>\nYesterday\u2019s sessions featured a stellar line-up of historians, including Carlos Eire (\u201cThe Protestant Reformation Legacy through Catholic Eyes\u201d), Hartmut Lehmann (\u201cFatal Coincidences 1933: Nazism\u2019s Triumph and Luther\u2019s 450th Birthday\u201d), and Victoria Barnett (\u201cLooking for Luther: 1933-1939\u201d), who is general editor of the English translation of Bonhoeffer\u2019s works. Today looks more to the future of the church, with the speakers including South African theologian Allen Boesak (\u201cChurch, Racism and Resistance \u2014 Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Critical Dimension of Theological Integrity\u201d).<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure\u00a0whether or not you\u2019ll be able to watch or listen to recordings of those talks, or if they\u2019ll be published. But I do know that you can watch the new Bonhoeffer movie that\u00a0is being screened at Union as part of the lectures,\u00a0Come Before Winter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n (Full disclosure: Blount is\u00a0the stepfather of my colleague Amy Poppinga, interviewed here<\/a> in January. She has a small part in the film.)<\/em><\/p>\n In an interview with\u00a0Spectrum<\/em><\/a>, a Seventh-day Adventist magazine, Blount explained the focus of the film:<\/p>\n Our story is about the final chapter in Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u2019s life and what must have been the aching for deliverance by the Allies, who were rapidly closing in.\u00a0 We felt our time frame might extract something of the essence of his life and the perspective which he seemed to seek \u2014 \u201cthe view from below.\u201d\u00a0 This view now includes more uncertainty, wartime cruelty, and vengeance.<\/p>\n Bonhoeffer had long been an outspoken foe of Hitler, and we chose to tell the story with the help of a couple of other anti-Nazis: seriously broken vessels Sefton Delmer and Otto John.\u00a0 The latter has been called \u201cthe living link\u201d between Bonhoeffer\u2019s last days and the storyteller in England.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Like Bonhoeffer, John was connected to conspiracies against Hitler, but he escaped to Britain, where he worked on \u201cblack propaganda\u201d operations alongside Delmer and future James Bond creator Ian Fleming. While this story becomes the framing device for the film, I\u00a0invariably found myself waiting for those scenes to end. For the film is predictably\u00a0more compelling\u00a0when it focuses on Bonhoeffer (played by Argentine-American actor Gus Lynch).\u00a0Some scenes are\u00a0shot on location in Berlin, the former sites of the Buchenwald and Flossenb\u00fcrg camps, and the island of R\u00fcgen, where Bonhoeffer\u00a0had a long\u00a0conversation with fellow anti-Nazi resister Helmuth James von Moltke in April 1942. (Moltke was\u00a0also executed before war\u2019s end, in January 1945.)<\/p>\n Marsh and Metaxas have dragged Bonhoeffer into cultural and political disputes that belong in a U.S. context. The issues did not present themselves in the same way in Germany in Bonhoeffer\u2019s time, and the way they are debated in Germany today differs greatly from that in the States. Metaxas has focused on the fight between right and left in the United States and has made Bonhoeffer into a likeable arch-conservative without theological insights and convictions of his own; Marsh concentrates on the conflict between the Conservatives and the gay rights\u2019 movement. Both approaches are equally misguided and are used to make Bonhoeffer interesting and relevant to American society. Bonhoeffer does not need this and it certainly distorts the facts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [UPDATE, 4\/10: Please note that I\u2019ve\u00a0rethought my decision to include this quotation, at least without a bit of critical response. I did write it this way and so will leave it in the post, but please read my follow-up<\/a> if you\u2019re taken aback by the claim that Metaxas\u2019 and Marsh\u2019s treatments of Bonhoeffer are\u00a0\u201cequally misguided.\u201d]<\/em><\/p>\n By contrast, says historian Kyle Jantzen<\/a>, Schlingensiepen\u2019s Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u201ccombination of curiosity, moral courage, and theological creativity makes him so utterly unpredictable, so full of paradoxes (perhaps even contradictions), and so impossible to pigeonhole.\u201d<\/p>\n If you\u2019re interested in seeing\u00a0Come Before Winter<\/em>, you can buy the DVD here<\/a>, or arrange for a screening at your church or college using this form<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How you can purchase or screen Come Before Winter, a new docudrama on the last days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2794,"featured_media":23496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2974],"tags":[471,2969,3178,2821],"class_list":["post-23481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chris-gehrz","tag-dietrich-bonhoeffer","tag-historical-film","tag-nazism","tag-reformation"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Come](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2017\/04\/Come-Before-Winter-DVD-300x226.png\")
<\/a>Directed by Kevin Ekvall and written by Hellmut Schlingensiepen,\u00a0Come Before Winter\u00a0<\/em>was the brain child of producer Gary Blount, a psychiatrist here in St. Paul, Minnesota whose fascination with Bonhoeffer grew after watching Martin Doblmeier\u2019s 2003 documentary<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Schlingensiepen,](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2017\/04\/Schlingensiepen-Bonhoeffer-200x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Even more\u00a0valuable\u00a0are the film\u2019s\u00a0interviews with leading Bonhoeffer scholars,\u00a0including European experts like Schlingensiepen\u2019s father, Ferdinand. In this country, at least, his Bonhoeffer biography<\/a> was overshadowed by those written by Charles Marsh and Eric Metaxas,\u00a0both of which Ferdinand Schlingensiepen has criticized for wrenching the German martyr out of his historical and theological context:<\/p>\n