From rejection to approval: Bonhoeffer on figural interpretation, 1925 to 1935

Before analysing the annotation in relation to Bonhoeffer's figural practices, I must first detail the context of his appraisal of figural exegesis – especially as it applies to his interpretation of the Psalms. Bonhoeffer's position on figural interpretation shifted notably, from outright rejection of figural exegesis in the mid-1920s to his adoption of figural practices by the mid-1930s.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1925, while a student at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer wrote a paper on the ‘Historical and Pneumatological Interpretation of Scripture’, in which he unambiguously dismisses the validity of figural exegesis.Footnote ¹¹ Bonhoeffer cites figural interpretation as an example of the interpretive ‘abuses’ that result from applying ‘hermeneutical standards external to scripture’ to the exegetical task.Footnote ¹² As Bonhoeffer explains, ‘The method of allegorical interpretation completely ignored historical reality. It used speculative and rationalistic methods that could read into the text whatever one wished.’Footnote ¹³ Nowhere in the paper does Bonhoeffer mollify this rejection.

However, in August 1935, Bonhoeffer delivered a lecture on ‘Contemporizing New Testament Texts’, in which he voices approval of figural exegesis: ‘The right of the allegorical interpretation’, he writes, ‘consists in acknowledging the possibility that God does not allow his word to be exhausted in its grammat[ical], logical, unequivocal meaning, but rather that this word has even other perspectives and can better serve understanding.’Footnote ¹⁴ While preserving the validity of non-figural interpretations, Bonhoeffer concedes that figural readings may additionally be valid: ‘why’, he asks, ‘should the word not also have symbolic or allegorical meaning?’Footnote ¹⁵ Bonhoeffer qualifies figural practices by delimiting conditions under which such exegesis is admissible,Footnote ¹⁶ yet the contrast to his earlier work is clear. Bonhoeffer may have been influenced by the figural practices of Luther or Wilhelm Vischer, but these influences seem inadequate to account for the marked change in Bonhoeffer's position.Footnote ¹⁷ Rather, the key to Bonhoeffer's acceptance of figural interpretation may lie in his conviction that a christological definition of holy scripture at times requires figural practices. In the same lecture, Bonhoeffer explains: ‘Because Scripture as a whole and in all its parts is to be understood as a witness to Christ, and because difficulties do apparently arise in the concrete demonstration of this assertion – the question arises whether it is permissible to employ allegorical exegesis for obscure scriptural passages.’Footnote ¹⁸ Bonhoeffer's qualified acceptance of figural interpretation, then, appears to arise from his view that such practices are necessitated by the conviction that all of scripture bears witness to Christ.Footnote ¹⁹ For Bonhoeffer, it seems, figural interpretation is required in order for a christological construal of scripture to be hermeneutically sustained.

After emerging in 1935, seemingly out of theological necessity,Footnote ²⁰ figural interpretation occupied a prominent role in Bonhoeffer's exegetical work, notably in his treatment of the Psalms. In the same summer of 1935, Bonhoeffer delivered a lecture titled ‘Christ in the Psalms’, which indicates the subsequent direction of his figural approach to the Psalter. In this lecture, he considers the tension that a psalm is the divine word of God yet also a human prayer to God: ‘How can the prayerful word of the church-community’, he asks, ‘simultaneously also be God's word?’Footnote ²¹ Bonhoeffer harmonises these seemingly incompatible functions of the Psalms christologically: ‘God as the one praying and God as the one answering the prayer’ is a problem that, he maintains, ‘is resolved only in Jesus Christ’.Footnote ²² The Psalms can be the divine-human word only insofar as they are the word of the divine-human Jesus, for ‘Christ is the supplicant in the Psalter’.Footnote ²³ Historical considerations regarding the provenance of Psalms are accordingly marginalised for Bonhoeffer since, as Stephen Westerholm and Martin Westerholm observe: ‘What matters to him is that the voice of Christ is to be heard in every psalm.’Footnote ²⁴

Indeed, Bonhoeffer does not apply this christological lens exclusively to Psalms closely associated with Jesus either in the New Testament or in the later Christian tradition. Rather, Bonhoeffer specifies that ‘the whole Psalter can be understood as the prayer of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ²⁵ In Bonhoeffer's understanding, since it is Christ who speaks through every psalm, the frame of reference for interpreting Psalms becomes Christ himself, since ‘[w]hat is important now’ is that ‘we understand and pray together these psalms as the prayers of Jesus Christ in his church-community’.Footnote ²⁶ This christological construal of the ‘I’ of the Psalms decisively shapes Bonhoeffer's subsequent exegesis of the Psalter.

Psalms of suffering in Bonhoeffer's figural exegesis

The manifold interpretive implications of Bonhoeffer's christological understanding of the Psalter became evident in two later works, one written shortly before Kristallnacht and the other written just over a year afterward. These works offer a valuable glimpse of Bonhoeffer's figural approach to the Psalms around the time of Kristallnacht, which will help illuminate the correlation that his annotation implies between Psalm 74:8 and the pogrom of 1938. Significantly, the figural exegesis in these two works includes particular attention to the voice of lamentation and suffering in the Psalms, of which Psalm 74:8 is an example.

In Life Together, written just prior to Kristallnacht in September and October 1938, Bonhoeffer reiterates the figural claim that the one who prays the Psalms is Christ himself: ‘The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter, and now it has become his prayer for all time.’Footnote ²⁷ Bonhoeffer had previously stated that ‘Christ in the Psalms is Christ the Crucified’,Footnote ²⁸ and in Life Together he elaborates by clarifying how the voice of the suffering Christ speaks in psalms of suffering. The one ‘who has come to such infinite depths of suffering’ in the Psalms, Bonhoeffer declares, ‘is none other than Jesus Christ himself’.Footnote ²⁹ Accordingly, Bonhoeffer reasons that those who pray psalms of suffering ought not to feign personal familiarity with such suffering, but rather must recognise the suffering of the Psalms as an expression of – and indeed inscribed in – the suffering of Christ. Bonhoeffer explains:

Thus, Bonhoeffer's earlier claim that the Psalms express the voice of Christ takes on interpretive specificity in Life Together, as he explains that psalms of suffering in particular must be heard as the despairing cries of Christ himself. As Patrick D. Miller remarks, this realisation proved momentous to Bonhoeffer: that ‘[t]he Psalms were the prayers of a suffering and dying Christ’ was, to Bonhoeffer, ‘the most important thing to say about the Psalms’.Footnote ³¹

In Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms, published in 1940, we see Bonhoeffer's figural approach to the Psalter receiving its most extensive treatment. In this work, Bonhoeffer leaves historical-critical considerations aside as he explores the interpretive reach of figural exegesis. Bonhoeffer restates his prior conclusion that Christ prays the Psalms,Footnote ³² then premises his exegesis on christological considerations: ‘we must not, therefore, first ask what [the Psalms] have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ’.Footnote ³³ Basing his approach in Prayerbook on the figural framework already established in 1935 and 1938, Bonhoeffer moves systematically through types of psalms, showing how each psalm can – and, in his understanding, must – be interpreted primarily as the prayer of Christ.Footnote ³⁴

In this context, Bonhoeffer applies his christological approach to interpreting psalms of suffering. He repeats his caution against reading such psalms as expressions of one's own suffering: ‘No single human being can pray the psalms of lamentation out of his or her own experience.’Footnote ³⁵ Rather, Bonhoeffer advocates hearing these psalms as the prayers of Christ, who ‘has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than we have’.Footnote ³⁶ Accordingly, in psalms of suffering such as Psalm 22, ‘we always hear Jesus Christ praying’.Footnote ³⁷ Bonhoeffer had previously established these themes, but here he extends this christological reach into the present, claiming additionally that the voice of Christ in psalms of suffering discloses the presence of Christ in human suffering today: ‘psalms of lament’, he states, ‘proclaim Jesus Christ as the only help in suffering, for in Christ God is with us’.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, in the same context Bonhoeffer adds: ‘Now we know that there is no longer any suffering on earth in which Christ, our only helper, is not with us, suffering and praying with us.’Footnote ³⁹ Thus, Bonhoeffer concludes that, inasmuch as Christ is the one praying psalms of suffering, Christ promises his presence in the midst of all contemporary suffering.

To summarise: Bonhoeffer did not claim merely that certain psalms prefigure Christ or find their full meaning in Christ, but instead made the more radical claim that all psalms must be interpreted as the very prayers of Christ. And, importantly for the purpose of analysing his Kristallnacht annotation, Bonhoeffer emphasised the need to hear the suffering Christ as the voice speaking in psalms of suffering, revealing Christ's presence amid contemporary suffering, lamentation and abandonment.

Reinterpreting the Kristallnacht annotation

Bonhoeffer's figural engagement with the Psalms – and with psalms of suffering, in particular – suggests striking theological implications for the Kristallnacht annotation. Nonetheless, the scholarly discourse has tended to register the historical and political implications of the marginalia while overlooking the context of Bonhoeffer's figural approach to the Psalter. Influentially, Bethge construes the annotation specifically in terms of historical parallels. According to Bethge, the annotation indicates that Bonhoeffer discerned similarities between the ancient historical context of Psalm 74 and the recent history of Nazi Germany, a historical correspondence that purportedly evoked in Bonhoeffer a heightened sympathy for the Jewish victims of Kristallnacht. Bonhoeffer ‘was struck’, Bethge writes, ‘by the shattering experience of abandonment felt by the desperate victims of the pogrom two and a half thousand years earlier, when the Babylonians laid waste the Temple and deported the people, and now, through the strength of his identification with them, he was similarly struck by the acute and real cries of abandonment of that night’ in November 1938.Footnote ⁴⁰ To Bethge, the Kristallnacht annotation is a historical rather than a theological comment.

Scholars are indebted to Bethge's work on this topic, since without his personal recollections and historical reconstructions we would have little knowledge of Bonhoeffer's private responses to Kristallnacht. Nonetheless, it seems that Bethge analyses the Kristallnacht annotation in isolation from Bonhoeffer's figural interpretation of the Psalms during that period. This approach, I suggest, yields a narrowly historical construal that is incommensurate with Bonhoeffer's contemporaneous approach to the Psalter. Since in the late 1930s Bonhoeffer interpreted the Psalms through a radically ahistorical lens, privileging christological resonances over historical-critical considerations, it seems inadequate to read the Kristallnacht annotation as implying a purely historical correlation between an ancient event and its contemporary counterpart.

Still, Bethge's analysis of this subject in the early 1990s influenced subsequent scholarly discussions of the annotation. Miller, for instance, reiterates Bethge's historical position, describing how ‘there came to [Bonhoeffer] this shattering awareness of the loneliness of the despairing Jews in the pogrom over two thousand years before when the Babylonians destroyed the temple and deported the people’, which resonated with ‘the burden of a solidarity he felt with the despairing cries of the Jews on that Crystal Night of the later pogrom’.Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, Martin Rumscheidt maintains that, for Bonhoeffer, Psalm 74 ‘described the utter desolation felt by Jews in Germany over the Nazis’ desecration of the Holy, the action that manifested their idolatrous veneration of blood, soil, fatherland, their nationalism, xenophobia, patriotism, their veneration of the Führer’.Footnote ⁴² The profound connections Rumscheidt suggests between Psalm 74 and Nazi Germany again preserve Bethge's appraisal of the essentially historical correlation between the psalm and Kristallnacht.

Scholars have usefully examined the place of this annotation in the matrix of political and historical forces that shaped Bonhoeffer's context; however, I suggest that our understanding of the Kristallnacht annotation will be enriched by attending more closely to Bonhoeffer's figural work, which reveals the deeper theological resonance of connecting Kristallnacht with Psalm 74. As David McI. Gracie states in his brief discussion of the annotation: ‘It is important to note at the outset that Bonhoeffer taught that the psalms were to be prayed, prayed with Christ, whose prayers he believed they really were – in this case with the Christ who was being driven out of Germany when the Jews were driven out.’Footnote ⁴³

Particularly problematic to a purely historical understanding of the Kristallnacht annotation is that it assumes Bonhoeffer construed connections between psalms and the present-day in terms of linear, temporal and historical correlation. Scholars such as Bethge have read the annotation as a claim about similarities across time, a comment on correspondences between two temporally remote events. However, in Bonhoeffer's figural approach, the time between these events can effectively be collapsed. Friedrich Ohly describes figural interpretation as ‘the rendering visible of a simultaneity of what is not simultaneous’,Footnote ⁴⁴ and this feature of figural exegesis seems especially operative in Bonhoeffer's work. As Harvey observes:

This ‘real connection’, as Harvey explains, does not merely involve noting parallels across time, but indeed entails the compression of temporal distance: figural interpretation draws together what historical distance would seem to separate. It is in this way that, as Jeremy Worthen observes, when Bonhoeffer reads Psalm 74 in the context of Kristallnacht, the subject of the psalm is not ‘merely “some ancient Israelites”’, but indeed ‘might be extended to include the Jewish people’ of 1938.Footnote ⁴⁶

I conclude, then, that a more plausible reading of the Kristallnacht annotation is that Bonhoeffer is making a stronger claim than a historical reading would imply. The connection Bonhoeffer discerned between Psalm 74 and November 1938 seems unlikely to consist only in historical parallels, but rather entails christological presence: Bonhoeffer heard the voice of Christ praying in despair in Psalm 74:8, and – in keeping with the revelatory simultaneity of figural interpretation – he heard this voice not in the distant past of Israelite history but in the contemporary persecution of present-day Jews. Kelly argues that Bonhoeffer's theology implies ‘the presence . . . of Jesus Christ himself’ in the victims of the Holocaust,Footnote ⁴⁷ and something similar may be discerned in this context, as the annotation testifies to a connection that is more appropriately understood as christological than historical. Bonhoeffer did not, I suggest, view Psalm 74 only as a historical precursor to November 1938, but rather heard in Psalm 74 the voice of Christ crying out in human suffering amid the Jewish victims of Kristallnacht.

Concluding note: assessing the stakes

This article may appear to give inordinate attention to brief marginalia, so I will conclude by attempting to clarify the stakes involved, as I wish neither to exaggerate nor to minimise the importance of this marginal artefact. As noted at the outset, Bonhoeffer made no public comments on Kristallnacht, a historical circumstance that leaves scholars scouring margins for hints of his private reflections. At least in terms of the historical and biographical reconstruction of Bonhoeffer's life and thought, then, the annotation requires scholarly attention.Footnote ⁴⁸ And indeed, the Kristallnacht annotation is frequently cited in Bonhoeffer scholarship, especially in two contexts: Bonhoeffer's reading of scripture, and Bonhoeffer's relationship to Jews and Judaism in Nazi Germany.Footnote ⁴⁹ With respect to the former context, this article may highlight the importance of reading this marginal note within the wider framework of Bonhoeffer's figural exegesis of the Psalms. With respect to the latter context, this article may problematise attempts to invoke the annotation as a clear illustration of Bonhoeffer's personal solidarity with Jews, since his christological reading of the Psalter introduces added complexities in this regard.Footnote ⁵⁰

At the same time, it is important not to exaggerate the gravity of Bonhoeffer's act itself, and I do not intend to lionise this annotation as some sort of resistance by marginalia. As Stephen R. Haynes underscores:

For his part, Bethge makes clear that Bonhoeffer's – and indeed, his own – response to Kristallnacht ought not to be likened to those of rare Christian leaders who reacted by publicly decrying the Nazi barbarity.Footnote ⁵²

My more modest objective is to offer an interpretation of the annotation that, simply put, fits with Bonhoeffer's treatment of the Psalms during this period. Previous discussions, including Bethge's influential work, have foregrounded historical perspectives, suggesting that Bonhoeffer connected Psalm 74 with Kristallnacht on the basis of historical parallels. Historical resonances likely figured somewhat into Bonhoeffer's construal of Psalm 74, but – as we have seen – historical considerations occupied a relatively minor role in Bonhoeffer's reading of the Psalter in this period. Accordingly, I suggest that a more plausible interpretation, which more adequately accounts for Bonhoeffer's figural exegesis of the Psalms in the late 1930s, is that Bonhoeffer understood Psalm 74:8 and Kristallnacht not as incidentally related by the accidents of history, but as profoundly and timelessly yoked in Christ, the one who knew the fullness of human suffering and who, in Bonhoeffer's understanding, was present and praying the psalm alongside the Jewish victims of November 1938.Footnote ⁵³