Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (born February 4, 1906, Breslau, Germany [now Wrocław, Poland]—died April 9, 1945, Flossenbürg, Germany) was a German Protestant theologian important for his support of ecumenism and his view of Christianity’s role in a secular world. His involvement in a plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler led to his imprisonment and execution. His Letters and Papers from Prison, published posthumously in 1951, is perhaps the most profound document of his convictions.

Early training

Bonhoeffer grew up amid the academic circles of the University of Berlin, where his father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a professor of psychiatry and neurology. His father also was one of the most prominent psychiatrists to oppose the T4 (euthanasia) Program initiated by Hitler in 1939.

From 1923 to 1927 Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied theology at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin. At Berlin he was influenced by the historical theologians Adolf von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg, and Karl Holl but also was strongly attracted to the new “theology of revelation” propounded elsewhere by Karl Barth. His interest in Barth is seen in his doctoral thesis, Sanctorum Communio (1930; The Communion of Saints), in which he tried to combine a sociological and a theological understanding of the church, and in Akt und Sein (1931; Act and Being), in which he traces the influence of transcendental philosophy and ontology—as well as Kantian and post-Kantian theories of knowledge and of being—on Protestant and Catholic theologies.

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After serving in 1928–29 as assistant pastor of a German-speaking congregation in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer spent a year as an exchange student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. On his return to Germany in 1931, he became a lecturer in systematic theology at the University of Berlin.

Opponent of the Nazis

From the first days of the Nazi accession to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer was involved in protests against the regime, especially its anti-Semitism, and despite another 18-month absence, during which he served as pastor of two small German congregations in London (1933–35), Bonhoeffer became a leading spokesman for the Confessing Church, the centre of German Protestant resistance to the Nazi regime. Nazi ideology defined Jews by blood, based on the religion of an individual’s grandparents, and Bonhoeffer was fierce in his defense of a nonracial definition of Jews, first protesting for the rights of practicing Christians of Jewish ancestry. His insistence that Jews who had converted to Christianity were entitled to the same rights in the church as other Christians put him at odds with many other Christian leaders. His stance on Jews who remained Jews was less well developed.

In 1935 Bonhoeffer was appointed to organize and head a new seminary for the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde (Pomerania), which continued in disguised form until 1940, despite its proscription by the political authorities in 1937. Here he introduced the practices of prayer, private confession, and common discipline described in his book Gemeinsames Leben (1939; Life Together). From this period also dates Nachfolge (1937; The Cost of Discipleship), a study of the Sermon on the Mount and the Pauline epistles in which he attacked the “cheap grace” being marketed in Protestant (especially Lutheran) churches—i.e., an unlimited offer of forgiveness, which in fact served as a cover for ethical laxity. It was in this rigorous and even ascetic guise (to which his later theme of “Christian worldliness” seemed to provide a contrast if not a contradiction) that Bonhoeffer first became widely known. His views on international affairs at this time were close to pacifism.

After attending the ecumenical conference at the University of Cambridge in 1931, Bonhoeffer was appointed to be a European youth secretary of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, and he remained an active participant in ecumenical affairs despite the increasingly nationalistic mood in Germany. In his efforts to interpret to Christians elsewhere the significance of the German church struggle, he found a sympathetic advocate in G.K.A. Bell, bishop of Chichester, England. Bonhoeffer’s own involvement became increasingly political after 1938, when his brother-in-law, the jurist Hans von Dohnanyi, introduced him to the group seeking Hitler’s overthrow. In 1939 Bonhoeffer considered taking refuge in the United States but returned after only two weeks in New York City, writing to his sponsor, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, that “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.” The next year Bonhoeffer charged that “the Church was silent when it should have cried out because the blood of the innocent was crying aloud to heaven. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers of Jesus Christ.” Bonhoeffer and von Dohnanyi responded personally by helping some Jews move to neutral Switzerland.

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Despite the restrictions imposed on him, Bonhoeffer was able to continue his work for the resistance movement under cover of employment in Germany’s Military Intelligence Department, which in fact was a centre of the resistance. In May 1942 he flew to Sweden to convey to the British government, through Bishop Bell, the conspirators’ proposals for a negotiated peace; these hopes were thwarted, however, by the Allies’ “unconditional surrender” policy. Bonhoeffer was arrested on April 5, 1943, and was imprisoned in Berlin. Following the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, the discovery of documents linking Bonhoeffer directly to the conspiracy led to his further interrogation and eventual execution by hanging.

Bonhoeffer never married; his engagement had been announced just before his imprisonment.