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From the Pastor
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Germany in 1906 to a prominent family of doctors, government officials and university professors. He became a Lutheran pastor and started his work in the early 1930’s when Hitler and the Nazis grabbed power. Bonhoeffer reacted to those events in ways that still are important guides for Christians and the Church. Here are some major events of that time and Bonhoeffer’s actions in response to them.
A very effective way to rally people to your side is to make them afraid of some enemy. It doesn’t matter if the ‘enemy’s’ threat is real or not. Throughout the 1930’s the Nazis gained support by increasingly using Jewish people as Germany’s enemies. It started with racial slurs. After a while the government required special ID cards for Jews. Then the government called for boycotting Jewish businesses, followed by forcefully segregating Jews into certain parts of cities (ghettos). Next, the government confiscated Jewish people’s money, property and passports. All of this progressed and escalated to rounding up Jews and putting them into labor camps, which later became death camps.
A sizable majority of German Christians, including most Lutherans, supported Hitler. In fact, the Lutheran Church in Germany officially called itself the “National Church in the National Socialist State” (abr. Nazi). The church overwhelmingly supported the Nazis, and almost completely failed to stand up in any way for Jewish people.
A very few German Lutherans did speak up and resist. This small group was called the ‘Confessing Church’. Bonhoeffer was active in this group. He openly and often spoke against people’s blind, nationalistic obedience to the state while they ignored what was happening to their personal Jewish friends and neighbors. Bonhoeffer kept coming back to the Blessings in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5): Blessed are the poor, the outcast, the weak, and the persecuted. He coined the now famous phrase, ‘cheap grace’ to describe faith that refuses to do anything in behalf of the very people Jesus called ‘blessed’. Bonhoeffer pointed out that Christ fed hungry people. He healed sick people. He took in outcasts and protected persecuted people. Bonhoeffer always insisted, “Being Christian means being there.” He practiced what he preached. He was there for people in many ways: He bought bicycles for the poorest kids in his Berlin inner city church. The bikes let them get jobs delivering bread for bakeries and earn money and buy food for their hungry families. He regularly defended Jews and spoke against their persecutors in his widely heard, weekly, nationally broadcast radio sermon. He openly did all of this while Germany increasingly made sure that Jews, Slavs and other non-Aryan outcasts went hungry; while Germany made ‘mercy’ killing of severely handicapped people public policy and while Germany then systematically killed Jews.
In the 1940’s Bonhoeffer started and ran an underground seminary to train pastors who served the few congregations that still resisted the Nazis. He joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. He reasoned that while it was wrong to kill Hitler, it would be even more wrong to let him live. The assassination attempt failed. Its planners were arrested and sentenced to death. While in prison waiting for his execution Bonhoeffer became deeply admired for the powerful ways he ministered to inmates and guards. The Nazi SS doctor who oversaw Bonhoeffer’s hanging wrote this. “Through the half open door of the cell I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer kneeling on the floor praying to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds”
Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘’Faith without cost leads to death, period. However, paying the cost of discipleship leads through all of its small and big deaths to new life, to resurrection.” At age 36 he experienced the ultimate cost of discipleship. Some of the last recorded words we have from Dietrich Bonhoeffer are in a letter he wrote to a friend of his in England, Bishop Bell: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.”
I did my internship in the German city where the Confessing Church was centered. I was fortunate enough to meet and spend time with people there who were Bonhoeffer’s friends, colleagues and relatives.
This is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s core formula: Being Christian + an active faith community + cost of discipleship = being there = making God present in the world. These insights still give us a restless, strong way to make God present in the world, right here and right now.
Pastor Will Mowchan
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