Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential, and his book The Cost of Discipleship became a modern classic. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel prison for one and a half years. Later he was transferred to a Nazi concentration camp. After being associated with the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, he was quickly tried, along with other accused plotters, including former members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office), and then executed by hanging on 9 April 1945 as the Nazi regime was collapsing.
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‘Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.’ profiles well-known Christian martyr In crafting the biopic “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” (Angel), writer-director Todd Komarnicki can be credited with being scrupulous about historical truth. Yet, despite the film’s provocative full title—which suggests that he had a lot of interesting material to mine from his subject’s life—there’s a ponderous tone to his profile. Komarnicki’s is the latest in what have so far been a dozen documentaries about—and dramatizations of—the life of Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who is one of the best-known Christian martyrs of the 20th century. After two years of imprisonment, Bonhoeffer—an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime—was executed on April 9, 1945. Bonhoeffer’s reputation as a scholar, however, does not rest on his heroic death. His 1937 volume “The Cost of Discipleship,” a study of the Sermon on the Mount, is renowned as a classic of modern theological writing. (Georgia Bulletin 12/18/24) READMORE>>>>> My take: What Bonhoeffer gets right—and wrong The new film Bonhoeffer has put the German theologian in the news again and has sparked plenty of controversy. The International Bonhoeffer Society and members of the theologian’s family have warned that it portrays him as someone who advocates violence. The movie does carry the tagline “Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” Although he was ultimately executed in a concentration camp for his involvement in efforts to overthrow the Nazi regime, labeling him as an assassin is misconstrued and dangerously misguided. I don’t consider myself a Dietrich Bonhoeffer scholar. I’m more of an evangelist, teaching, preaching and telling whoever will listen to Google “Bonhoeffer” and be inspired. In that context, I tried to keep an open mind as I listened to an interview with the film’s writer-director Todd Komarnicki, who asserted that he wasn’t influenced by characterizations of Bonhoeffer made by writers such as Eric Metaxas, author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson, 2011). Many Bonhoeffer scholars have accused Metaxas of manipulating the theologian to fit his far-right agenda. Regardless of one’s perspective, I recommend that everyone takes time to see the movie and judge for themselves. (Living Lutheran 12/16/24) READMORE>>>>> Film review: Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin THE film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin (Cert. 12A), about the German theologian who opposed the Nazi government and was executed only weeks before its surrender, well illustrates the notion that for evil to prosper good people need only do nothing. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (played by Jonas Dassler) is a Lutheran minister who could not be accused of that. His despair centres on the State Church, and adherents who strive to maintain personal ethical standards without questioning what is happening socially. The writer-director Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay asserts that there were enough people begging for bread to believe that Hitler was a prophet. Witnessing the complicity of his Protestant Church, Bonhoeffer was instrumental in forming the Confessing Church, an act that, in effect, drew a target on his chest. But we are left in no doubt regarding his fate, as most of the story is told retrospectively when Dietrich is in prison. We learn of his privileged childhood in a deeply humane family. It remains central to his Christian development as an adult. We see him reading children the Pinocchio story. “It’s difficult to be a real boy,” he tells them. “If you live by love your strings get cut.” This is exactly what happens, Dietrich wielding the scissors himself. “What we need is Christ without religion, not a Church without Christ. (Church Times 12/13/24) READMORE>>>>> Bonhoeffer: a legacy of courage and love A recently released cinematic masterpiece tells the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and his role in the plot to take down the leader of the Nazi regime. While Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death by hanging, he did not die in vain. He lived a life defined by courage and love. The opening scene conveys the strong bond not only between Bonhoeffer and his mother, which we see depicted throughout the movie, but also the influence that Dietrich’s older brother Walter, who was killed on the front lines, had on Dietrich’s life.Bonhoeffer pursued theological studies at Union College in New York City. One could infer that Walter was the reason that Dietrich pursued theology, as after Martin’s passing, the movie depicts a scene in which their mother gave Dietrich his brother’s bible and relayed a message from Walter: “Tell my brother I underlined the good parts.” (Carolina Journal 12/13/24) READMORE>>>>> The strange grace of struggling with Bonhoeffer on what it means to be a ‘good’ person As a Christian, I am bound to the unending task of faith seeking understanding. And as a Christian ethicist, tasked with discerning and deliberating with others what human behaviors are good and evil, I always have understood moral knowledge to be a good — not something to forbid or avoid. It was not until I came to know Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I began to make some sense of this ancient story. Not complete sense, since we all read Scripture and interpret our faith through a mirror dimly. But in a way, that incompleteness is the very point Bonhoeffer teaches us. (Baptist News Global 12/9/24) READMORE>>>>> |
December 5, 2024: Joel Looper at First Things wrote: This “history-distorting” depiction of Bonhoeffer prompted eighty-six members of the Bonhoeffer family to write an open letter bemoaning the “tasteless trivialization” of their forebear’s legacy. Members of the International Bonhoeffer Society have likewise spoken out against the film. Even the film’s cast members have publicly repudiated
“misuses” of their work and Bonhoeffer’s theology. Metaxas imprudently responded to the Bonhoeffer family’s letter by smearing them as “guaranteed pro-Hamas lunatics” and “Jew-hating lunatics.” The movie’s subtitle echoes his biography’s, but Komarnicki made no direct use of Metaxas’s work. December 9, 2024: Baptist News Global posted: The real Bonhoeffer, so to speak, did not see the assassination plot as morally justified. His participation was a sin that required repentance and haunted him until his death. He flung himself before the grace of God but understood that any action or inaction in that situation would require the same. In fact, for him, knowledge of good and evil, or any form of moral justification, remained ever elusive as the Christian seeks to be formed into “Christ for others” within a dimly lit world. Bonhoeffer asks, “Who is Christ for us today?” and it is the disciple’s job to seek the Christly action without feeling justified by it. 1970: Rev. Eberhard Bethge: “Americans make him a saint without seeing him as a man who had a dirty job to do....Yes, he is a modern saint. But it has little to do with the old idea of sanctity and purity. He was a man of action whose sharp theological insights and Christian responsibility compelled him to act decisively in the real world of dirt, difficulty and danger.” April 8, 1945: Bonhoeffer said: “Every act of courage comes with a cost; I made mine 12 years ago."
April 9, 1945: Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging on as the Nazi regime was collapsing. July 20, 1944: In the aftermath of the July 20, 1944, attempt on the Fuehrer’s life, in which former Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was implicated, several prisoners connected to the now-disbanded agency were condemned to death, Bonhoeffer included. April 5, 1943: Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in Tegel Prison, where he remained until 9 April 1945, when - on Hitler's direct orders - he was hanged. August 5, 1936: Bonhoeffer's permission to teach at university was withdrawn,he who had a very strong influence upon young people. This is testified by the beautiful Life Together, a sublime text that collects his teachings addressed to the seminarians of Finkewald, near Szczecin, where the future pastors of the Confessing Church were trained (it was closed in 1937 on Himmler's precise orders). 
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Bonhoeffer: "God is not a stopgap”
Highly symptomatic of how much Bonhoeffer had understood the true nature of Hitler's regime is the fact that exactly the day after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor in Berlin (30 January 1933), Bonhoeffer himself (whom Pope Francis described as "a great Protestant theologian and martyr") wrote these words: "The State can also assume the form of the evil. It can be and do the greatest possible evil". Together with other members of the Evangelical Church, Bonhoeffer soon developed the idea of a "confessing" Evangelical Church, that is, one that would not blindly put itself at the service of Nazi ideology, but would retain its own independence of judgement. (Communion & Liberation 6/2/21) READMORE>>>>>
Highly symptomatic of how much Bonhoeffer had understood the true nature of Hitler's regime is the fact that exactly the day after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor in Berlin (30 January 1933), Bonhoeffer himself (whom Pope Francis described as "a great Protestant theologian and martyr") wrote these words: "The State can also assume the form of the evil. It can be and do the greatest possible evil". Together with other members of the Evangelical Church, Bonhoeffer soon developed the idea of a "confessing" Evangelical Church, that is, one that would not blindly put itself at the service of Nazi ideology, but would retain its own independence of judgement. (Communion & Liberation 6/2/21) READMORE>>>>>
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Files
“This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.”
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not just placing stupidity on the backs on the uneducated. He had seen too many intellectuals and well-educated fall under the spell of Hitler and the Nazis.
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not just placing stupidity on the backs on the uneducated. He had seen too many intellectuals and well-educated fall under the spell of Hitler and the Nazis.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader in the German Confessional Church, was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943. A year later, he was jailed in Berlin’s Tegel prison. He was hanged by the Nazis at Flossenbürg concentration camp only two weeks before the camp was liberated by Allied armies.
But on April 30, 1944, Bonhoeffer was still very much alive, though imprisoned. He was mulling over the significance of what it meant to be a Christian in such trying times. Nazi Germany was testing Christian discipleship in a direct and crushing way. We in today’s Western society have not been tested in the same way.
Bonhoeffer had seen a tragic appeasement among Christians in Nazi Germany. Most church leaders and their flocks had gone along with the pagan and anti-Christian sentiments at the heart of Nazism. Only a few had spoken out, like those Germans who formed the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer’s Christian faith as a member of this group was on the line, and so was his life.
When Bonhoeffer sat down to write a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge on that day in 1944, the meaning of the Christian faith was uppermost on his mind. “You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to,” he wrote. “What is bothering me incessantly is the question: what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today” (Letters and Papers From Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge, page 279).
Christianity in Germany had become, in Bonhoeffer’s view, nothing more than pious talk and a sterile repetition of creeds. Those who call themselves Christians “do not in the least act up to it,” he wrote. Bonhoeffer was dismayed at the many German Christians who had sold out.
What about us?What happened to Christianity in Nazi Germany should send chills through us who call ourselves Christian. But it’s easy for those of us who live in democratic and nominally Christian nations to take Christianity for granted. Well more than half of Americans call themselves Christian. Some even consider the practice of Christianity be patriotic. It seems easy to be a Christian.
We may not be forced to face human tragedy and madness in the profound way Bonhoeffer and his community, the Confessing Church, did. But we can be overcome by the world in more subtle ways. For this reason, we all need to ask ourselves a basic question: What is Christianity? When we say, “I am a Christian,” what do those words mean for us who were born into a Christian world?
The word Christ is the foundation and basis of the words Christian and Christianity. It is logical to assume that Christ would also be the foundation and basis of Christianity, and of each Christian’s life. But as Bonhoeffer asked, who is Christ for us today? Where does he fit into our Christianity?
--Paul Kroll; Grace Communion International; THE MESSAGE OF JESUS: NEW LIFE IN CHRIST
But on April 30, 1944, Bonhoeffer was still very much alive, though imprisoned. He was mulling over the significance of what it meant to be a Christian in such trying times. Nazi Germany was testing Christian discipleship in a direct and crushing way. We in today’s Western society have not been tested in the same way.
Bonhoeffer had seen a tragic appeasement among Christians in Nazi Germany. Most church leaders and their flocks had gone along with the pagan and anti-Christian sentiments at the heart of Nazism. Only a few had spoken out, like those Germans who formed the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer’s Christian faith as a member of this group was on the line, and so was his life.
When Bonhoeffer sat down to write a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge on that day in 1944, the meaning of the Christian faith was uppermost on his mind. “You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to,” he wrote. “What is bothering me incessantly is the question: what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today” (Letters and Papers From Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge, page 279).
Christianity in Germany had become, in Bonhoeffer’s view, nothing more than pious talk and a sterile repetition of creeds. Those who call themselves Christians “do not in the least act up to it,” he wrote. Bonhoeffer was dismayed at the many German Christians who had sold out.
What about us?What happened to Christianity in Nazi Germany should send chills through us who call ourselves Christian. But it’s easy for those of us who live in democratic and nominally Christian nations to take Christianity for granted. Well more than half of Americans call themselves Christian. Some even consider the practice of Christianity be patriotic. It seems easy to be a Christian.
We may not be forced to face human tragedy and madness in the profound way Bonhoeffer and his community, the Confessing Church, did. But we can be overcome by the world in more subtle ways. For this reason, we all need to ask ourselves a basic question: What is Christianity? When we say, “I am a Christian,” what do those words mean for us who were born into a Christian world?
The word Christ is the foundation and basis of the words Christian and Christianity. It is logical to assume that Christ would also be the foundation and basis of Christianity, and of each Christian’s life. But as Bonhoeffer asked, who is Christ for us today? Where does he fit into our Christianity?
--Paul Kroll; Grace Communion International; THE MESSAGE OF JESUS: NEW LIFE IN CHRIST
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Files
"At this moment God is quite unreal to us, he loses all reality, and only the desire for the creature is real; the only reality is the devil. Satan does not here fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God. And now his falsehood is added to this proof of strength. The lust thus aroused envelopes the mind and will of man in deepest darkness. The powers of clear discrimination and od decision are taken from us."
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Temptation
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Temptation
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Files
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Files
“Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field, for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price for which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.”
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, The Cost of Discipleship (P. 47)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God's word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself …. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Life Together)