Bonhoeffer and Other Movies About Theologians
Not Quite a Review
It’s not very often that we get films about theologians. Let’s face it, the life of a theologian is typically not very cinematic. One theologian whose life could translate well to the silver screen, however, is the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the founders of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in the early 1930s who was arrested and eventually executed by the Nazi government during the Second World War. This past weekend, the film Bonhoeffer was released in the United States, and while it takes advantage of the dramatic nature of Bonhoeffer’s life, it controversially takes liberties with certain details of his biography in ways that experts have claimed distorts the theologian’s ultimate commitments.
As a caveat, I have not yet seen the film, and so I’m relying on secondhand sources for my assessment. That being said, the International Bonhoeffer Society and other experts on his life and work have criticized the film, and so I trust I am on firm ground here in sharing these concerns!
Theologian (and Window Light reader) Myles Werntz, in his review of Bonhoeffer for Christianity Today, points out that in the film, Bonhoeffer gradually abandons his original Gospel-based idealism and nonviolence as he realizes that a grittier realism is needed to successfully resist the Nazi regime. He ultimately becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Although as an undergraduate *unintelligible* years ago I was taught that Bonhoeffer was involved in such a plot, I learned from Werntz that today this conclusion is fiercely debated among historians and Bonhoeffer scholars, with no direct evidence that Bonhoeffer participated in the plot to assassinate Hitler attempted by others, including his brother-in-law, even if he likely knew about it. More importantly, however, Werntz points out that the suggestion that Bonhoeffer eventually placed political expediency ahead of the demands of the Gospel does not correspond to the consistency in his core values throughout his life. Such a reversal would reflect the very idolatry of the political that Bonhoeffer and others condemned in the Barmen Declaration, for example.
Writing at Slate, Lutheran pastor Angela Denker raises similar criticisms of Bonhoeffer. Denker sees the film as part of a larger effort to coopt Bonhoeffer in support of Christian nationalism and in opposition to contemporary progressivism. Interestingly, she explains how this effort centers on Bonhoeffer’s theological concept of “cheap grace.” For Bonhoeffer, cheap grace refers to attempts to appropriate forgiveness or salvation without “taking up one’s cross,” without personal transformation or sacrifice. In Bonhoeffer’s words, from his book The Cost of Discipleship, “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Denker points out that in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the playbook for a conservative agenda that received lots of attention during the 2024 presidential campaign, its author, Kevin Roberts, associates Bonhoeffer’s notion of “cheap grace” with the more recent term “virtue signaling.” Roberts argues that progressive stances on welcoming refugees and protecting the environment are forms of “cheap grace,” ways of signaling righteousness while placing the burdens of these policies on others. Although political stances on any issue can become cheap and self-serving, as Denker rightly argues:
I see this as quite the Orwellian twist. To me it’s the definition of “cheap grace” to suggest that righteous Christians have no compulsion to care for migrants and those in need, and should instead spurn the desperate poor who approach America’s borders, as well as treat the Earth, God’s creation, as merely another means of capitalist production and wealth creation.
Bonhoeffer’s warning against cheap grace should inspire us to together make the necessary sacrifices to welcome refugees into our communities and address climate change, making sure those sacrifices are made equitably, not to abandon our responsibilities to the poor and to the Earth.
In his review, Werntz explains that it is difficult to dramatize the life of a figure like Bonhoeffer because the complexity of his life and writings admit of multiple interpretations. With the medieval theologian John Duns Scotus, we have the opposite problem. Although his philosophical and theological work is highly complex (and subtle!), we know very little about his life, especially when compared to the medieval theologians of similar stature: Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and William of Ockham. Unlike Bonhoeffer, it would be difficult to translate Scotus’s life into a movie.
Nevertheless, back in 2011, Italian filmmakers produced Blessed Duns Scotus: Defender of the Immaculate Conception. Rather than narrating the complete biography of Duns Scotus, which as I mentioned would be impossible given our lack of knowledge, the film focuses on three episodes in the theologian’s life: his calling to the Franciscans as a boy, his temporary expulsion from the University of Paris after his refusal to support King Philip IV in a dispute with Pope Boniface VIII, and a disputation with a Dominican theologian over the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
Blessed Duns Scotus is by no means a Hollywood blockbuster, but it is an inspiring look at how a great theologian integrates faith and intellect. For example, throughout the film, Duns Scotus interacts with a student named William (perhaps, anachronistically, meant to represent William of Ockham?) who struggles with his faith. Theologians and historians may be dissatisfied with the film’s portrayal of the dispute over the Immaculate Conception, but it still provides some insight into what theological debate in a scholastic context might have looked like and highlights Duns Scotus’s role in the development of this important doctrine.
Finally, in 2010, a group of Italian and German filmmakers produced Restless Heart: The Confessions of Saint Augustine, originally a two-part television miniseries, about the fourth and early fifth century theologian and bishop. To the unfamiliar, the title might suggest a soap opera romance, but of course it’s a reference to Augustine’s famous line from his Confessions that “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Unlike Duns Scotus, we have an abundance of information about Augustine’s life, much of it provided in his Confessions. Despite the title, Restless Heart does not cover all of the events portrayed in the Confessions, but like Blessed Duns Scotus, it focuses on select episodes in the bishop’s life. In this case, the film hones in on Augustine’s studies as a young man in Carthage, his falling in with the Manichees, and his journey to Milan (then the imperial capital) as an imperial rhetorician, where he meets the bishop of the city, Ambrose. The film also focuses on the end of Augustine’s life when, as bishop of Hippo, he stands alongside his people as the Vandals (the Germanic group) sacked the city.
Restless Heart, in a way like Bonhoeffer, perhaps errs by making political drama the main attraction, centering on the emperor’s dispute with the Church in the person of Ambrose and then later the Vandal invasion of North Africa. Nevertheless, its message is quite the opposite of that in Bonhoeffer. Augustine, through his encounter with Ambrose, learns to look beyond political ambitions and influence to something more transcendent, the God of Christianity, to whom he commits the rest of his life, and similarly realizes that, while empires rise and fall, our true home is the City of God.
Coming Soon…
Window Light will be on a bit of a hiatus for the rest of this week for some family affairs and the Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully it will be back on a normal schedule beginning next week.
Soon after Thanksgiving, the Window Light podcast will feature a conversation I had with Taylor Patrick O'Neill, a theologian and professor at Thomas Aquinas College and co-founder of the Sacra Doctrina Project, a group of theologians focused on recovering the speculative and sapiential dimensions of Catholic theology. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the Sacra Doctrina Project, the state of contemporary Catholic theology, and O’Neill’s own work on the doctrine of predestination in the Thomist tradition, among other things. It was a great conversation, and I know you will enjoy it.
The Vatican finally produced an English translation of the Synod on Synodality’s final document a few days ago. I’m in the process of working through that, and one of my top priorities is to provide some commentary on the document and the synodal process as a whole. Stay tuned!
Have a great Thanksgiving and a well earned hiatus!