Home page
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Pastor, Theologian and Martyr
d. 9 April 1945
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on
4 February 1906 in Breslau. A twin, he grew up in a comfortable professional
home. His father was an eminent psychiatrist and neurologist. It was nominally a
Lutheran, though not a profoundly religious, environment and the young Bonhoeffer
caused something of a stir when he announced, at thirteen, that he would go into the
church. After school he enrolled as a student at the University of Berlin, the
city in which the family now lived and in whose university there gathered a host of
brilliant thinkers. Intellectually, Bonhoeffer was striking. But he was determined to
expand his horizons, too. At the age of eighteen he went to Rome and was powerfully
moved by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1930-1 he studied in New York, at Union
Theological Seminary, and regularly attended services at the Abyssinian Baptist
Church. Here too he became increasingly drawn to ecumenism. Three times he made plans
to travel to India and visit Gandhi, whose life and teachings he
found compelling.
In 1933 the leader of the radical, racialist Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler, became chancellor and then dictator of Germany. In power, the Nazi movement sought to create a new totalitarian state: the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer saw Nazism to be a counter- religion and a danger to Christianity. He became an active participant in the dispute which broke out in the Protestant churches between those who sympathized with Nazism and those who sensed that the new politics threatened the integrity of the church. In October 1933 Bonhoeffer moved to England to be pastor to two German-speaking parishes in the London area. Here he searched for allies and met his greatest British advocate, Bishop Bell of Chichester.
On his return to Germany, Bonhoeffer ran an illegal seminary for the so-called Confessing Church at Finkenwalde. It was shut down by the state security police in October 1937. He continued to write. In 1939 he sailed to the United States, and once again to New York. But war was imminent. He chose to return to his own country, knowing what costs may lie before him, and remarking that the victory of Nazism in Europe would destroy Christian civilization.
By then he and members of his own family had for some time been on the fringe of circles that were opposed to the Nazi regime. To Bonhoeffer, true discipleship now demanded political resistance against this criminal state. He wrote that the Christian must live maturely and responsibly in the world, and live by God’s grace, not by ideology.
Everything that Dietrich Bonhoeffer said and did revolved around the question: "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" As he asked this question, he began to see how dangerous "religion" could be to Christianity. He saw how religious people tend to restrict God to the outer limits of life, where humanity is confronted by its weaknesses: death, illness, and moral failings. But Bonhoeffer insisted that God is more than just the answer to problems and weaknesses. "The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village."
Rather than exile Christ to the periphery of life, where he becomes man's medicine but not his life's blood, Bonhoeffer saw that Jesus belongs directly in the centre, right in the middle of the world:
"The . . . Christian hope of resurrection . . . sends a man back to his own life on earth in a wholly new way which is even more sharply defined than it is in the Old Testament. The Christian . . . has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself, he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs. . . . This world must not be prematurely written off. . . . Christ takes hold of a man at the centre of his life."
He was increasingly implicated in the work of groups committed to the overthrow of the government. In March 1943 he was arrested and incarcerated. On 20 July 1944 a final attempt was made by German citizens to destroy the Hitler regime for themselves. It failed disastrously, and hundreds of political prisoners were executed afterwards.
Bonhoeffer himself survived as a prisoner until 9 April 1945. At the same time, in a Nazi concentration camp behind the battle lines, a German doctor was witnessing a martyrdom. Ten years later, the event still vivid in his memory, he wrote:
I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer . . . kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this loveable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.
His works include the following:
The Martyred Christian (MacM)
Letters and Papers from Prison (MacM)
Creation And Fall and Temptation (bound together) (MacM)
Meditating On The Word (Upper Room)
Life Together (Harper)
The Cost Of Discipleship (MacM)
Ethics (MacM)
Spiritual Care (Augsburg Fortress)
The Psalms: Prayer Book Of The Bible (Augsburg Fortress)
Christ The Centre (Harper)
Acknowledgements:
Text adapted from James Kiefer's Christian Biographies, Westminster Abbey
Image from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum