Charles Marsh has published a long piece at The Other Journal in which he engages virtually every dimension of writing and publishing his book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He touches on his choice of subjects, the art of doing biography, the reviews of the book, and his errors and omissions.
Here is Marsh on what is like to write a biography of a theologian:
At the level of craft, telling a theological life should beno different than telling any other kind of life. Every good biographer maintains the desire to save a personality from the clutch of familiarity. The challenge is in determining how to enlist the tenets of belief in service to story. The infinite does not appear in the dramatis personae; instead, theologians enumerate transcendence under the terms of specific doctrinal commitments. It may be said of the theological biography that it tells a life out of a “higher satisfaction” (to borrow a phrase from Bonhoeffer), but this should not be taken as a method or dogma. The theological biographer writes with the hope of rendering the character’s faith as vivid and credible elements of the story. Otherwise I feel rather agnostic toward the idea of a theological biography.
Biographies written about theologians make up a modest canon. Theologians writing biographies about other theologians—take a moment to make a list—make up an even smaller canon. After a quick look in my library, I can count ten. Biography inconveniences dogma. Finding truth in a particular life is not readily available through theological reflection; it needs a certain bracketing of doctrine (e.g., God, the Trinity, the divine, the church, the holy) to discern the idiosyncrasies that form a life. Moreover, theologians are not generally inclined to tell secrets. We’ll happily take on the Big Questions but not so much our own misbehavior.
Wilhelm Paulk abandoned his biography of his friend Paul Tillich, I’ve been told, because he said he couldn’t make sense of the Schelling. But it’s more likely that Tillich’s extramarital affairs and rumored sexual advances to students presented an insurmountable challenge.
Ferdinand Schlingensiepen—whose criticism of Strange Glory I discuss later in this essay—may think it’s clever to call my biography a novel (Roman).Too much character, it would seem, and not enough attention to the inner workings of the “Deutsche Evangelische Kirche and its 28 Landeskirchen.” Biography is built on historical reality, of course, but its purpose is finding the truth in the life. This does not mean finding the authentic or essential self but the patterns and manners, “the doubts and vulnerabilities, ambitions and private satisfactions that are hidden within the social personality.”
Scholars, pastors, and students routinely enlist Bonhoeffer as an example of how a theologian’s ideas are best understood in the context of “lived life.” But the way this plays out in most critical studies is by treating his life as a placeholder for his thought. Decades of theological engagement with Bonhoeffer have produced mostly one-dimensional biographical account. His life is made a compendium of theological insights and historical events.
In a lecture some years ago to my Bonhoeffer seminar, the scholar Victoria Barnett made an interesting remark on the difference between doing historical research and writing biography. She said that after serving as the general editor of the sixteen-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, translating thousands of pages of his writings into English, editing and translating critical and historical studies of Bonhoeffer and the German church crisis, and producing the unabridged English translation of Eberhard Bethge’s 1,048-page masterwork, she still didn’t have a clear sense of who he was, as a person or a character.
Biography came to me as a quest to capture what Hermione Lee describes as “the ‘vital spark’ of the human subject.” To readers familiar with Bonhoeffer’s story, I wanted to create a sense of discovery so that they could encounter him as if for the first time, encounter him in his strange glory. For those unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer, I wanted to do all the things biographers hope for when they write well: approximate in narrative nonfiction “the presence of recognizable, approachable life . . . to catch the special gleam of character”
Read the entire piece here.