Memorial of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in front of St. Peter's Church, Hamburg.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on a weekend getaway with confirmands of Zion's Church congregation (1932).
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Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), into a large family. His father was a leading professor of neurology and psychiatry; his mother was the granddaughter of a distinguished church historian. When Dietrich was 6, his family moved to Berlin.
Bonhoeffer studied theology at the University of Tübingen,Tubingen, then under Adolf von Harnack at the University of Berlin, where he obtained his doctorate in 1927.
In 1928-1929 Bonhoeffer served as assistant to the pastor of a German-speaking congregation in Barcelona, Spain. He spent a year in 1930-1931 at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he made a critical study of U.S. Protestantism. In 1931 he began teaching theology at the University of Berlin and was ordained a Lutheran minister. He also became the chaplain at a vocational high school, where his contacts opened his eyes to the condition of the Berlin working class during the Great Depression.
In April 1933 the Nazi government banned people of Jewish ancestry from holding office not only in the government but in the church as well. Bonhoeffer protested strongly. Although he moved to England late in 1933, he took part in the formation of the Confessing Church, which resisted Nazi influence in German Lutheranism. In 1935 Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to teach at a Confessing Church seminary. After a brief second visit to New York in 1939, he became active in the underground resistance to Hitler. He was arrested in April 1943 and was hanged.
Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to Nazi dictatorship. Bonhoeffer raised the first voice for church resistance to Hitler's persecution of Jews, declaring that Christ, not the Führer, was the head of the church. His main work - The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together.
Bonhoeffer is commemorated in the liturgical calendars of several Christian denominations on the anniversary of his death, 9 April. This includes many parts of the Anglican Communion, where he is sometimes identified as a martyr, and other times not. His commemoration in the liturgical calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America uses the liturgical color of white, which is typically used for non-martyred saints. In 2008, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church, which does not enumerate saints, officially recognized Bonhoeffer as a "modern-day martyr." He was the first martyr to be so recognized who lived after the Reformation, and is one of only two as of 2017.
The Deutsche Evangelische Kirche in Sydenham, London, at which he preached between 1933 and 1935, was destroyed by bombing in 1944. A replacement church was built in 1958 and named Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche in his honor.
He served in Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union (1906–1933), Confessing Church (1933–1945). Bonhoeffer believed that a Christian should not be narrowly "religious" but should be fully involved in the world.
Bonhoeffer was one of the first German Protestants to see the demonic implications of Nazism. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer helped organize the Pastors' Emergency League, which became the nucleus of the Confessing Church of anti-Nazi German Protestants.
The central idea of his writings - Christ's whole being is His being-for-man, and His powerlessness and humiliation for man's sake are the fullest disclosure of the power and majesty of God.
Quotations:
"I do not do something again today because it seemed good to me yesterday, but because the will of God points out this way to me today. This is the great moral renewal through Jesus, the renunciation of principles, of rulings in the words of the Bible, of the Law."
"If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver."
"Your life as a Christian should make non believers question their disbelief in God."
"There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve - even in pain - the authentic relationship."
"Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong."
"Silence in the face of evil is evil itself."
"The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go."
"Being a Christan is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will."
"The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them."
"Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."
"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children."
"The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake."
"We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts."
Bonhoeffer became a member of the German resistance movement, convinced after much soul searching that only by working for Germany's defeat could he help save his country.
On 13 January 1943, Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer. But suddenly he was arrested. Once he was in prison, however, Maria's status as fiancee became invaluable, as it meant she could visit Bonhoeffer and correspond with him.
