Dietrich BonhoefferDietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), was a German Lutheran theologian whose life and thought have had increasing influence on the Christian Church since his execution by the Nazis.

early life

Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906 in Breslau, Germany. 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. At the age of eighteen he went to Rome and was powerfully moved by the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1930-1931 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.

the rise of the Nazis

In 1933 Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, became chancellor and then dictator of Germany. Bonhoeffer saw Nazism as an idolatrous counter-religion and a danger to Christianity. He became an active participant in the dispute that broke out in the state-controlled German Lutheran Church between those who sympathized with Nazism and those who sensed that the new politics threatened the integrity of the church.

Because the modern state of Germany was created from of a number of small independent principalities and kingdoms in the late nineteenth century, the Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist) Protestant churches of Germany remained separated as 28 independent regional bodies reflecting their origins as small state-sponsored churches (Landeskirchen) with the local ruler as head. In 1922, they formed a loose federation to participate jointly in mission activities, but they did not come together as one unified church until April 1933 when the German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) was created under the direction of Adolf Hitler. The German term evangelisch more accurately corresponds to the broad English term Protestant rather than to the narrower evangelical (in German called evangelikal), and was a compromise term in the unification of Lutheran and Reformed bodies in Germany.

Only months earlier, in January 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) had appointed Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) as Chancellor of Germany. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler combined the offices of chancellor and president and became the nation’s dictator. Many Christians in Germany openly welcomed Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) party to power as a historic moment of Christ’s work on earth for and through the Aryan Volk (German for people).

Like many conservative evangelicals in the United States who believe that America is God’s chosen nation, the German people believed that Germany was destined for greatness as God’s chosen instrument in the world. As it rose to power in the 1930s, the Nazi message was that in spite of their God-given destiny, the nation was threatened from within by the insidious presence of Communists, Jews, and liberals in their midst, eerily similar to messages espoused today on conservative talk radio and cable TV about the influence on American society by liberals, socialists, feminists, and homosexuals. Hitler told the nation that their duty was to purify themselves of these influences to prepare for their divine vocation as God’s anointed nation.

Just a few months after Hitler’s rise to power, the German Evangelical Church was founded under the strong influence of an anti-Semitic faction called the German Christians (Deutsche Christen) who were proponents of the Nazi party and its belief that the nation could only fulfill its destiny by absolute obedience to a strong leader (Führer). This faction, representing about one out of six Protestant clergy, was not alone in its prejudice against Jews. Anti-Semitism had long been a characteristic of many Christians since the Middle Ages, especially in Northern Europe. Even the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) had contributed to religious hatred in his pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) in which he called the Jews “those miserable and accursed people” after his unsuccessful attempts at their conversion. In 1933, two-thirds of the population was Protestant (about 40 million members) and the remaining third was Roman Catholic (about 20 million). Less than 1 percent (600,000) was Jewish.

In September 1933, Ludwig Müller (1883–1945), a leader of the German Christian faction, was appointed by Adolf Hitler as Reich Bishop (Reichsbischof) of the newly unified church. Müller’s task was to bring the church under the absolute control of the Third Reich and its Führer. Hitler was a Roman Catholic but saw Martin Luther as a true German hero and believed that both Protestants and Catholics were necessary components of German culture and therefore of the Third Reich. Hitler believed that religion, along with other cultural elements, needed to be brought in line with the Nazi vision. He ordered members of the Nazi party to demonstrate a powerful religious presence by filling the pews of Christian churches in uniform on Sundays.

Reichsbischof Müller supported a revisionist view of the historical Jesus which proposed that Jesus had been a member of the Aryan race and was not Jewish at all. The German Christian faction envisioned a more “heroic” and “positive” interpretation of Jesus, who was seen as one who battled against corrupt Jewish influences in his society. Müller and others favored a plan to purify Christianity of “Jewish corruption,” including eliminating large parts of the Old Testament from the Bible, and focusing only on a revised New Testament. They rewrote the gospels, calling the region of Judea “Jewland” and suggesting that the people of Jesus’ native Galilee were of Aryan descent. Under Müller, the church implemented the “Aryan paragraph” of the Nazi-sponsored 1933 Civil Service Law that purged people of Jewish descent and those married to non-Aryan spouses from further participation in government-funded positions. This included clergy of state-supported churches who were considered to be employees and representatives of the state. Non-Aryan clergy were dismissed from their positions.

the Confessing Church

In May 1934, Protestant Christians opposed to the Nazi vision and infuriated by the Aryan Clause, met at the industrial city of Barmen in the Rhineland region of Germany. Known as the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), the defiant pastors denounced Müller and his leadership and declared that they and their congregations constituted the true Evangelical Church of Germany. The Theological Declaration of Barmen (Die Barmer Theologische Erklärung)—primarily authored by Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), with the consultation and advice of other Confessing Church pastors like Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)—opposed the theological ideas of the German Christian faction and affirmed that the church owed its ultimate allegiance to God and not to the leader of any state. They protested that the church was not an organ of the state and needed to be independent of political ideologies to be true to its calling. The declaration stipulated that any state—democratic or totalitarian—was under the judgment of God’s commandments. No person and no nation could be above the law of God. However, to their discredit, the Confessing Church only protested state manipulation of religious affairs. They did not take up defense of the Jews.

During the first six years of Hitler’s dictatorship, from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939, Jewish citizens felt the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives. In September 1935, Nazi leaders announced the Nuremberg Laws that excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of German or German-related blood. They were deprived of most political rights, denied the right to vote, and not allowed to hold public office.

It is estimated that there were about 18,000 Protestant clergy in Germany at this time, ministering to 40 million church members. About 3,000 pastors were part of the German Christian faction and about 3,000 participated in the Confessing Church movement. That left the vast majority, about 12,000 pastors, who remained in the Nazi-controlled church and, not voicing strong opinions either way, simply went along to get along. To a great extent, they believed that their calling was a purely spiritual one and thus took an apolitical stance. And so they remained silent in the face of increasing tyranny. For a time, this seemed like a very safe position, but ultimately it was destructive to the life of the church.

Bonhoeffer quickly became a leading spokesman of the new church body. In 1935, Bonhoeffer was appointed to organize and lead an underground seminary for the Confessing Church on the Baltic Sea at Finkenwald in the region of Pomerania. The Gestapo shut it down in October 1937.

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.

Bonhoeffer began to see that the church could not continue to be concerned simply with the purity of its own life and practice. He believed the church was the church only when it lived for others. Therefore, he voiced his distress about the narrow scope adopted by the Confessing Church. He strongly condemned the church for failing to move beyond its very limited concern for religious civil liberties and called on the members to focus instead on helping the suffering Jews. In 1937, Karl Barth admitted, “For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.”

Years later Martin Niemöller reflected on this great sin of the Confessing Church.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The Confessing Church was of course suppressed by the Third Reich. As pressure increased, Karl Barth returned to his native Switzerland in 1935, Bonhoeffer’s authorization to teach at the University of Berlin was revoked in August 1936 when he was denounced as a “pacifist and enemy of the state,” and Martin Niemöller was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1937. In 1940, Bonhoeffer was forbidden to speak in public and was required to regularly report his activities to the police. In 1941, he was forbidden to print or to publish. By 1941, Germany had been at war for two years. As the war raged on, and oppression of the Jews worsened, Dietrich Bonhoeffer realized he needed to do more.

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

conspiracy

Members of Bonhoeffer’s family had for some time been on the fringe of circles that were opposed to the Nazi regime. He was increasingly implicated in the work of groups committed to the overthrow of the government. To Bonhoeffer, true discipleship now demanded political resistance against this criminal state.

Bonhoeffer joined an underground resistance movement opposed to Hitler through a brother-in-law who was already involved. He became increasingly engaged in the work of a conspiracy committed to the overthrow of the Nazi government, especially within the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office), that planned to assassinate Adolf Hitler and take over the government in order to broker a surrender to the Allies before Germany’s destruction was complete.

Even though he was committed to nonviolence, Bonhoeffer believed that true Christian discipleship demanded political resistance against a criminal state. He became a civilian member of German Intelligence (exempting him from the draft) and used his position to get deferments for other pastors in the Confessing Church. He drew up a report documenting the treatment of Jews in Germany. He acted as a double agent traveling to ecumenical conferences in Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway, where he shared sensitive information with international church leaders. In 1942, Bonhoeffer met with Bishop George Bell (1883–1958) of the Church of England in Stockholm and asked him to pass a message to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden (1897–1977) sounding out the Allies’ response to a potential coup in Germany.

imprisonment and execution

In March 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo because documents found in the Abwehr offices linked him to various subversive activities, specifically to his participation in “Operation 7,” an undercover activity that spirited fourteen German Jews across the border to neutral Switzerland under the pretext that they were Abwehr agents. In July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler. It failed disastrously, and hundreds of political prisoners were executed afterwards. Bonhoeffer was eventually hanged at the Nazi concentration camp at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945 only a month before the end of the war in Europe. He was 39 years old and had spent the last two years of his life as a prisoner.

religionless Christianity

Nearly a year after his imprisonment, in a letter written on April 30, 1944 from cell 92 in Berlin’s Tegel penitentiary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described his thoughts about the state of Christianity to his good friend Eberhard Bethge (1909–2000), who later edited Bonhoeffer’s writings.

You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to . . . What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, for us today.

In light of the depravity of the Nazi state and the horrific violence of the Second World War, perpetrated by religious people on all sides, Bonhoeffer questioned what Christianity represented any more. Why are Christians so unquestioningly captive to their culture? Why did German Christians not protest the persecution of the Jews? Why were they so unwilling to stand up to evil authorities and unjust laws? Bonhoeffer began struggling with what it means to claim to be religious in any real sense. And he saw a time coming in which religion would prove to be fundamentally irrelevant.

We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious” . . . And if therefore man becomes radically religionless—and I think that is already more or less the case (else, how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any “religious” reaction?)—what does that mean for “Christianity”?

Traditional Christianity—the church of Constantine—had proven to be morally bankrupt and incapable of dealing with the evils of the modern world, including violence, oppression, and racism. The religious practices of Christianity had become personal and private and were largely divorced from social ethics and politics. The mainstream churches in the so-called “Christian nations” proved to have no prophetic voice. Bonhoeffer was disappointed that religious people—lay and clergy alike—were not speaking out or taking a stand, and their social and political struggles were conducted without drawing on their faith—or more likely, that their faith had become so disjointed from social and political conditions that they saw no connection.

Eleven years earlier, in 1934, when Adolf Hitler appointed himself as Führer of the German Reich, he held a national referendum to confirm his usurpation of political power. Ninety-five percent of the registered voters went to the polls, and 90 percent of them (over 38 million people), voted “yes.” In Germany, the majority of Christians—Protestants and Roman Catholics—fully supported the Third Reich and its policies until the Second World War brought terror and destruction to their cities and homes. In German churches, the twisted cross of the swastika was proudly displayed as Nazi flags replaced the cross of Christ.

In the United States, the same kind of national idolatry was occurring, but to a lesser extent. American flags increasingly appeared next to altars and pulpits, indicating an unwavering support for the country in time of war, but also suggesting that the symbol of the nation had an equal value with the cross, the symbol of the church. Just like their counterparts in Germany, American churches had become chaplains for their nations’ political policies and war machines.

If religious institutions in every nation were willingly transforming themselves into servants of the state, and not raising a prophetic voice for peace and justice, was there another possibility for Christianity in the world? In his prison cell Bonhoeffer questioned:

Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity—and even this garment has looked very different at different times—then what is a religionless Christianity?

What would Christianity look like when it is stripped bare? Bonhoeffer began to struggle with what remains when the typical traits of a religion—clergy, religious institutions, sacred rites, orthodox beliefs, and an absolute morality—are eliminated. How would that redefine Christianity? What would be left?

What bothered Bonhoeffer was that a person could confess doctrinally correct beliefs, observe its moral codes, and follow the accepted behaviors and practices of the church, while simultaneously hating and oppressing other human beings. We have witnessed the same thing in the American South—the so-called “Bible Belt”—where for over a century after the Civil War, legalized segregation, harassment, humiliation, persecution, oppression, and lynching of African-Americans were social norms for many mainline and evangelical white Christians. The apartheid system of racial segregation in South Africa was likewise created and enforced by their white Christians of Dutch and British descent.

The question thus becomes “how is it possible that the practice of Christianity can become divorced from loving our neighbors in any real sense?” How is it that religious practice—including word and sacrament—can leave a person ultimately unchanged at the core of his or her being? Perhaps it is because typical Christian religious practice does not guarantee a transformation of the heart nor does it necessarily provide a personal encounter with the God of love. For many Christians, religion is simply a secondhand experience, passed on by family and tradition, and thoroughly integrated with the prevailing culture.

a life of contemplation and action

Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed that, in the future, a new form of Christianity, stripped of its religious garments, would be limited to two things: contemplative prayer and righteous action in the world. He described his thoughts in a letter to the infant son of his good friend Eberhard Bethge on the occasion of the child’s baptism in May 1944. Bonhoeffer had been asked to be godfather for his namesake Dietrich Bethge, a duty he could perform only from a jail cell.

Today, you will be baptized a Christian . . . By the time you have grown up, the church’s form will have changed greatly . . . Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its own self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to [humankind] and the world . . . Our being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among [humanity]. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action.

Bonhoeffer believed that through contemplation and action, the Christian would learn a new way of thinking and seeing: to view the world from the perspective of those at the bottom of society.

It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering. If only bitterness and envy have during this time not corroded the heart; that we come to see matters great and small, happiness and misfortune, strength and weakness with new eyes; that our sense for greatness, humanness, justice and mercy has grown clearer, freer, more incorruptible; that we learn, indeed, that personal suffering is a more useful key, a more fruitful principle than personal happiness for exploring the meaning of the world in contemplation and action.

In the life of Jesus, we can clearly see the two dimensions of religionless Christianity—contemplative prayer and righteous action. The gospels describe Jesus continually moving between these two polarities. He often withdraws to the wilderness or to a quiet, lonely place to meditate and pray alone. And then he jumps back into the life of the world with healing actions and a bold prophetic voice. Prayer and righteous action were the key features of the life of Jesus. This is where Bonhoeffer believed that Christianity was heading in the future. Religionless Christianity is a life of caring for people and responding in concrete ways to heal wounds and alleviate the causes that lead to people who are hurting. That has been part of the church’s mission over the centuries, but sometimes it seems to forget that it is central, not just a peripheral activity.

Bonhoeffer is important for his firm belief in the need for a reinterpretation of Christianity for the modern secular world. He believed that religion is not an abstraction, but a way of life. It was his opinion that a man of God must care for all of his fellow human beings, and reach out to support them when they are in need.

Bonhoeffer urged a conformation to the form of Jesus as the suffering servant in a total commitment of self to others. He wrote that the church should give up its inherited privileges in order to free Christians to “share in God’s sufferings in the world” in imitation of Jesus, “the man for others.”

published writing

  • Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (1927 dissertation, published in 1930)
  • Act and Being (1930 dissertation, published in 1931)
  • Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1-3 (1933; 1959 English translation)
  • The Cost of Discipleship (1937; 1949 English translation)
  • Life Together (1939; 1954 English translation)
  • Ethics (1943; 1955 English translation)
  • Letters and Papers from Prison (1951; 1953 English translation)
  • No Rusty Swords (1965)
  • Christ the Center (1966)
  • The Way to Freedom (1966)
  • A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1990)
  • Fiction from Tegel Prison, edited by Clifford Green (1999)
  • The Young Bonhoeffer 1918–1927 (2002)
  • Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940–1945 (2006)

film resources

bonhoeffer_dvdBonhoeffer is a 90-minute documentary film directed by Martin Doblmeier. The film uses footage of Hitler’s reign, interviews with Bonhoeffer’s friends, family, and students, and analysis from historians to vividly tell his story. These individuals describe Bonhoeffer as an inspiring teacher, a thoughtful writer of theological treatises, and finally, an active resister who took part in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.

 

Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace is a dramatization of the adult life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

printed resources

Among the many books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an excellent novel based on his life:

additional resources

 

 

Clarence Jordan