On February 4, 1906, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw), Poland.
He was the sixth of eight children of the famous doctor and university professor Karl Bonhoeffer.
A German pastor, theologian, writer, musician, and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived a life whose every day bore witness to his faith. In the darkest times of the world’s history, he was a light to the world and led an underground evangelical church in Nazi Germany. He spent the last days of his life in the concentration camp of Flossenbürg, Bavaria, awaiting execution, where he held his last worship service.
On April 8, 1945, the first Sunday after Easter, his cellmates requested that Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer conduct a divine service. He read from Isaiah 53: “…He was tormented, but He suffered willingly and did not open His mouth; like a lamb, He was led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth… Two Gestapo men in plainclothes entered the cell and ordered the pastor to follow them. Bonhoeffer knew that he was being led to his execution, but he was calm. He told his friends, “This is not the end, this is the beginning of a new life.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer had dreamed of learning to believe as a young man. That Dietrich at the age of 17 decided to devote himself to the study of theology was a great surprise to his family, which, although respectful of church tradition, did not go to church. Four years later, Dietrich defended his degree at the University of Berlin. Then, after several years of study and ministry abroad, he returned to Germany and became a pastor and taught systematic theology at Berlin University. Dietrich was not most concerned with abstract theological reasoning, but with the ethical questions, believers ask themselves. What should be done when both decisions can be justified by Scripture? When should we humble ourselves and when should we openly confront evil? He was always honest with himself and was not afraid to ask tough questions. Meanwhile, the clouds of fascism were gathering over Germany, and his faith was about to be severely tested.
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was 27 years old, Hitler came to power. He said, “Germans! You are the chosen people, all nations will come and worship your greatness, and those who will not come will know our strength and our weapons.” The German people accepted Hitler as the messiah, the “savior of Germany. The church, too, recognized his power. How else could it be? Isn’t it written in Scripture, “…every authority is of God”? Soon Nazi banners appeared over churches, and portraits of Hitler hung next to crucifixes in Catholic classrooms. The Führer did not doubt that he would easily subjugate the church. The Vatican, by that time, was so politicized that it was easy to agree with it, well, Hitler said about German Protestants: “They would betray anyone as long as they did not lose their miserable parishes and salaries”.
Though Hitler tried to look like a religious man in the eyes of the people, during his speeches he often waved a shabby Bible and claimed to be a true Catholic, in conversations with clergymen he did not hide his plans concerning the future of the church. “Christianity will disappear in Germany just as it did in Russia,” Hitler declared. – The German race existed a thousand years before Christ, and in the future, we will do just fine without Christianity. The Church must not interfere with us, otherwise, she would simply be left out of history.
One of the major Nazi officials at the convention of the “German Christians” (an association of Christians loyal to the Führer) urged the audience to “…get rid of the Old Testament with its Jewish morality and all those stories about cattle dealers. The “unheroic” theology of the Apostle Paul, suffering from an “inferiority complex” should be purged from the New Testament, and the place of the humiliated slave should be taken by the invincible and proud hero Jesus. Nor should He overshadow the image of the great Führer, who leads his people into the “millennial kingdom,” paradise on earth.
It seems crazy to us now, but back then only a few pastors were able to oppose the ideas of the Nazis, and they were immediately deprived of their parish and all opportunities to earn money, and if even that did not help, they were arrested, sent to prisons and concentration camps. These men, among them Dietrich Bonhoeffer, founded the “Confessing Church,” totally condemning fascism and those Christians who supported it. To those who tried to maintain their parish through compromise with the authorities, Dietrich said: “Whoever distances himself from the confessional church distances himself from salvation.
In 1935 Bonhoeffer became director of the small seminary of the Confessing Church, which trained pastors. He was disqualified from teaching, fired from the university, and banned from preaching. When even this failed, the Nazis closed the seminary. But within two years the movement gained strength and the seminary produced more than a hundred pastors, many of whom later died in concentration camps.
It was during this time that Bonhoeffer decided to join the conspirators who were going to overthrow Hitler. His sister’s husband, Hans von Dohnanyi, a personal assistant to the Reich Minister of Justice, closely associated with Admiral Canaris, “enlisted” Dietrich as an agent of the Abwehr. This freed Bonhoeffer from Gestapo surveillance and conscription and allowed him to travel abroad. According to the legend, he collected intelligence. In fact – actively contributed to the preparation of a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler.
It was at this time that his major but unfinished work, Ethics, was written. He accused the church of passivity in the struggle against evil: “The church is responsible for the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless… An attempt to remove Hitler, even if it meant killing the tyrant, would in fact be a matter of religious obedience; new methods of oppression by the Nazis justify new ways of defiance… If we claim to be Christians, there is nothing to quibble about expediency. Hitler is the Antichrist.”
“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I kept quiet, I’m not a Communist.
Then they came for the Social Democrats, I kept quiet, I’m not a Social Democrat.
Then they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet, I’m not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, I kept quiet, I’m not a Jew.
And then they came for me, and there was no one else to protest.”
Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor and one of Germany’s most prominent opponents of Nazism
In 1939, Bonhoeffer briefly left for New York. World War II begins in Europe. Friends advised him not to return, offering him a job at the theological university where he once interned. But Bonhoeffer looked to the future. He wrote to his friends, “I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christians in Germany. I will have no right to participate in the revival of Christian life after the war if I do not share with my people the trials of this time…”
In 1943, the recalcitrant pastor was arrested. Prison did not break him – he was only worried about his family and his fiancée, to whom he had been engaged two months before his arrest. While in prison, he did not stop working. He asked his relatives to pass him books, read a lot, and continued to write. Surrounded by grief and despair, he pondered how to bring the gospel to a godless, “adult” world that did not need God or religion, how to separate Christianity from the “religious husk” and make it available to people. From the many notes and letters he wrote in prison, his friends later compiled Resistance and Submission, a collection that had a profound influence on twentieth-century Protestant theology.
Bonhoeffer spent two years in prison. Allied troops were moving closer and closer to Germany, giving hope to him and other prisoners. But a failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944 spurred the judicial mechanisms, and in April 1945 an order was given to destroy several active participants in the plot. Among them was Bonhoeffer.
Ten years after his death, the former concentration camp doctor Flossenburg wrote: “Through the half-open door of the barracks building … I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer kneeling in innermost prayer before the Lord God. The selfless and heartfelt nature of this very sympathetic man’s prayer shook me greatly. And at the scene of the execution itself, after saying a brief prayer, he courageously climbed the stairs to the gallows… In all my nearly 50 years of medical practice, I have not seen a man die in greater devotion to God…”
In twenty days Hitler would commit suicide. God does not favor those who put themselves above Christ and attack His church. And the Church of Germany still exists today, and among its martyrs, one of its glorious places is occupied by Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who was faithful unto death.
12 quotes by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Silence in a moment of evil is evil in itself: God will not approve of such a thing. To say nothing is to say in silence. To do nothing is to do zero.
- Condemnation blinds, but love enlightens. In condemning others, we first fail to see our own evil, and second, we fail to see the grace to which everyone apart from us is entitled.
- We usually do not realize how much more we receive than we give, and that life would not be complete without gratitude. It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own merit and underestimate the magnitude of others’ help to us. (“Letters and Notes from Jail.)
- We must not only bandage the wounds of those hurt by injustice, but we must stick the sticks in the wheels of injustice in every way possible.
- Don’t try to make the Bible “current.” Its relevance is axiomatic. Don’t defend God’s Word, but a witness to it. Trust in the Word. It is a ship filled to the brim.
- You can gauge the morality of a society by what it leaves behind for its children.
- When all is said and done, a life of faith is nothing more than an endless war of the spirit against the flesh by every available means.
- First and foremost in a relationship, we must learn to listen to the person we are talking to. Just as love for God begins with hearing His Word, so love for brothers and sisters begins with listening and listening to them. (“Living Together.”)
- If God allowed us to be convinced of His existence, it would not be God, but an idol.
- Achieving security by peaceful means is impossible. Peace is a challenge to all mankind, a gamble in which one will never feel safe. Demanding some kind of guarantee is a desire to protect oneself. Peace is a complete surrender to God’s commands, without demanding any guarantee of safety. It is only through faith and obedience that we surrender the destinies of nations to the power of Almighty God, without trying to decide them for our own selfish ends. The battle is won not with weapons, but with God. Victory comes when we walk the path to the cross.
- God loves not some ideal person, but people as a whole, as they are; not the ideal world, but the real world. (“Reflections on the Cross.)
- To be a Christian is not so much to be careful not to sin as to be courageous and active in doing the will of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “On Foolishness”.
Foolishness is an even more dangerous enemy of the good than evil. Evil can be protested against, it can be exposed, at most, it can be suppressed by force; evil always carries within it the germ of self-degradation, leaving behind in man, at least, an unpleasant residue. Against stupidity we are defenseless. There is nothing to be gained here by either protest or force; arguments do not help; facts that contradict one’s own judgment are simply not believed – in such cases the fool even turns into a critic, and if the facts are irrefutable, they are simply dismissed as a meaningless accident.
That said, the fool, unlike the villain, is perfectly content with himself; and even becomes dangerous if, in the irritation to which he easily gives in, he turns to attack. Here is the reason why one approaches a foolish person with more caution than an evil one. And under no circumstances should you try to change a fool’s mind with reasonable arguments – it is hopeless and dangerous. Stupidity is often accompanied by stubbornness, but this should not mislead about its lack of independence. When you talk to such a person, you feel that you are not talking to him, not to his personality, but to the slogans and appeals that have taken possession of him. Having now become an unwilling instrument, the fool is capable of any evil, and at the same time, unable to recognize it as evil. Here lies the danger of the devil’s use of man for evil, which can ruin him forever.
