Dietrich Bonhoeffer
February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945
One of my favorite theologians,
teachers, and one, who in my estimation should rightly be called a martyr in
Church history, was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi's
on this day in 1945 in Flossenbürg Concentration Camp just days before the
Americans could
liberate the camp. He was by confession a Lutheran, but he worked with
Christians throughout Europe and the United States in an early stage of the Ecumenical
movement. Karl Barth a Swiss Reformed Theologian and the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, George Bell was among
those who regularly corresponded with Bonhoeffer. As a Lutheran Pastor, Bonhoeffer
and many along with all too few other Pastors abandoned the German Church which
had sworn allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer became part of the Confessing
Church and for a time taught and administered an underground seminary at Finkenwalde
until it was shut down and Bonhoeffer’s authority to teach was revoked. Ostensibly
the reason for Bonhoeffer being forbidden to teach was because he was a pacifist. But the Confessing Church opposed
Adolf Hitler, and in the Third Reich Hitler was Führer (guide and leader) not Christ.
Bonhoeffer worked behind the scenes with Bishop Bell and others, hoping desperately
that he might help broker peace with the Allies which would end the carnage and
oust the despot Adolf Hitler. Along with other conspirators including Colonel
Claus von Stauffenberg, hundreds in the German High Command, and others in
civilian life, Bonhoeffer reluctantly became part of a plot to attempt to
assassinate Adolf Hitler in Operation Walküre (Valkyrie). The attempt to kill
Hitler was carried out at Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East
Prussia, on July 20, 1944. Hitler, badly shaken, survived the attack and Over
7000 were subsequently arrested by the Gestapo. Most were quickly executed.
Only later after Bonhoeffer was arrested for subversive activity in aiding Jews
with Admiral Canaris did the Gestapo discover that Bonhoeffer had been involved
in Operation Walküre. Bonhoeffer’s
own parents only learned of their son’s execution when they illegally tuned
into the announcement on the BBC New service in which Bishop Bell reported that
Bonhoeffer and Canaris had been executed. It is strongly suspected that all who
were executed by hanging in Flossenbürg with Bonhoeffer that morning died a
slow painful death by asphyxiation. Bonhoeffer who had been engaged to be
married was only 39 years old. One of my favorite quotes from Bonhoeffer which
I quote here is from his book Cost of
Discipleship. The reality of this statement is as true in the 21st
Century in the United States as it was in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s:
“We Lutherans have gathered like eagles around the
carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk the poison which has killed the
life of following Christ…. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we
baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unmasked and without
condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the
scornful and the unbeliever. We poured forth unending streams of grace. But the
call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard. Where were the truths,
which impelled the early Church to institute the Catechumenate, which enabled a
strict watch to be kept over the frontier between the Church and the world, and
afford adequate protections against costly grace? What happened to all the
warnings of Luther’s against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make
men rest secure in their ungodly living? Was there ever a more terrible or
disastrous instance of the Christianizing of the world than this? What are
those three thousand Saxons put to death by Charlemagne compared with the
millions of spiritual corpses in our country today? With us it has been
abundantly proved that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to
the third and fourth generations. Cheap grace has turned out to be utterly
merciless to our Evangelical Church.” – Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, ed. R. H. Fuller. The Cost of Discipleship. 1st Macmillan Paperback
edition (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1963), 57-58.
Two links which you may wish to examine is one on Canaris
And the other on Bonhoeffer:
