Why I am not disturbed by the new book on Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was gay. Well, maybe.

Having same-sex desire is very different from what the gay-obsessed culture today calls “gay.”

If Bonhoeffer really had this desire, which reviewer Christian Wiman says is clear from the new bio, he certainly was chaste, as the bio makes clear.

That would make him all the more heroic, and all the more relevant to today’s debates over sexuality.

But Wiman himself is not sure if Bonhoeffer really was gay. After all, there was his engagement to Maria. And all the evidence for this supposed same-sex desire comes from his first biographer and friend Eberhard Bethge—second-hand—and comes from Bethge’s reporting they had deep love for each other, and that Bethge told Bonhoeffer that Bethge could not give Dietrich all the love Dietrich wanted from him.

As Wiman concedes, these things could be said by heterosexuals today. All of these things. The only reason we have a hard time believing this is that our crazy culture at this crazy moment in history has brainwashed us into thinking that if you have love for an individual of the same sex, you must be “gay.”

Think of David and Jonathan. They said they loved each other with a love greater than that of a man for a woman.  Except for those who want to see in the story what is not, everyone knows this was not homosexual love.

Then Wiman says that Marsh (the author) attributes much of this to Dietrich’s loneliness. To me, this is a weak argument. What single person is not lonely? Especially when in prison? Aren’t we all lonely to some degree? Even our spouses cannot relieve the psychic and spiritual loneliness we all feel when we are naked before God.

So . . . Bonhoeffer was a man with emotional stresses and strains and perhaps unresolved conflicts. He was also a saint. Not just a saint like all of us ordinary saints. But a saint in the way Catholics speak of saints—great heroes of the faith from whom we can and should learn, and be inspired.

And there is no conflict or contradiction whatsoever between these two things—saint and sinner, strength and weakness.

Gerry