Bonhoeffer and the Church That Had to Confess

In the early twentieth century, Germany produced one of the most gifted young theologians of his age. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was the son of a respected family, a brilliant student who could have spent his life in quiet lecture halls and comfortable pulpits. The doors of an easy career stood wide open before him. Instead, he walked into the storm. For the world he lived in had begun to confuse a nation with a god, and a man with a saviour.

When Adolf Hitler rose to power, the pressure fell hard on the German church. The new regime wanted the church to fall in line. It wanted pastors who would bless the state, exclude Jews from the pews, and let the cross stand quietly beside the swastika. Many bent. Many were silent. But a remnant of Christians refused, and they gave themselves a name that was itself a stand. They were the Confessing Church. They drew up a declaration that said, in effect, that the church had only one Lord, and his name was not Hitler. Bonhoeffer was among them.

He taught his students that grace is not cheap. He wrote that grace bought at the price of Christ's blood cannot be claimed without cost to the one who receives it. And then he was asked to pay. The regime closed his seminary. They forbade him to teach. They forbade him to publish. Friends in America found him a safe post far across the ocean, away from the danger. He went. And then, in the summer of 1939, he could not stay. He boarded a ship back to Germany, knowing what waited there. He said that he had no right to share in the rebuilding of his nation after the war if he did not share in its trials during it.

So he went home to a country at war, and he went further than most pastors ever imagined going. He joined the resistance. He became part of a circle that conspired against Hitler himself. It is one of the hardest questions a Christian conscience can face, and Bonhoeffer faced it with open eyes. In 1943 he was arrested. For two years he sat in prison cells, writing letters that have moved millions, praying, and quietly caring for the men around him. Guards remembered him as calm. Calm in a place built to break men.

Then the plot against Hitler failed, and the regime took its revenge. In April 1945, in the final weeks of the war, with Allied armies closing in, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was led out at the Flossenburg camp and hanged. He was thirty-nine years old. A doctor who witnessed it later wrote that he had rarely seen a man die so submissive to the will of God. Days later, the camp was liberated. He had come within a breath of survival, and he did not survive.

What did it mean, this life cut short before its prime? Bonhoeffer left no great institution, no movement bearing his name. He left letters from a prison cell and a handful of books, and a single, piercing example. He had seen the church tempted to hand its Lord over to a flag and a fuhrer, and he had refused. He had insisted that the church must know who its master is before the crisis comes, not after, because in the hour of pressure there is no time to decide. He warned against a grace so cheap it costs nothing and changes no one. And then he proved, with his own death, what costly grace looks like. The man who wrote that when Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die, was finally asked to do exactly that. And he came.