The Pastor Who Went Back

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. JOHN 15:13

A house of music and science. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau, then in Germany and now the Polish city of Wrocław, the sixth of eight children; his twin sister Sabine arrived a few minutes after him. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was one of the leading psychiatrists in Germany, and when he took the chair of psychiatry in Berlin the family moved to the capital. It was a large, gifted household, full of music and conversation, where clear thinking was prized and sentiment distrusted, and which belonged to the church in the way many cultured Germans did — baptised, confirmed, and not much more. His mother, Paula, who came from a family of theologians, taught the children the Bible stories herself. The First World War reached into the house in 1918, when his brother Walter died of wounds received at the front. Dietrich was twelve.

A theologian at twenty-one. As a teenager he announced that he would study theology. His brothers, who were heading for science and law, thought he was wasting himself on a tired institution. He went ahead. He studied at Tübingen and then at Berlin, where the great liberal historian Adolf von Harnack was still teaching, and where he also read, with growing excitement, the very different theology of Karl Barth, which insisted that God speaks and man must listen. In 1927, at twenty-one, he completed his doctorate with a dissertation on the church as a community of persons, Sanctorum Communio. A year as assistant pastor to the German congregation in Barcelona followed, and then a second thesis, Act and Being, which qualified him to lecture in the university. By any academic measure he was a prodigy. By his own later account he was not yet much of a Christian.

Harlem. In 1930 he went to New York for a year of study at Union Theological Seminary. He found much of the theology there thin. What moved him lay elsewhere. A fellow student, Frank Fisher, took him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and Bonhoeffer worshipped there for months, taught in its Sunday school, and heard the gospel preached with a warmth and directness he had not met in the lecture hall. He also saw, at close quarters, what racism did to the people beside him in the pews. In the same year he formed a friendship with a French pacifist, Jean Lasserre, who pressed him to take the Sermon on the Mount as a word to be obeyed. Scholars warn against making that year a single dramatic conversion, but Bonhoeffer himself later described a change in this period: he had been a theologian who used the Bible, and became a Christian whom the Bible addressed.

The young lecturer. Back in Berlin he lectured at the university, was ordained, and took on a confirmation class of rough boys in a poor district of the city, moving into the neighbourhood to be near them. His lectures on creation, later published as Creation and Fall, and on Christ date from these years.

Jamming the wheel. Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Two days later Bonhoeffer gave a radio talk on the idea of the leader, warning that a leader who makes himself an idol becomes a misleader; the broadcast was cut off before he finished, though exactly why is uncertain. That spring the state excluded people of Jewish descent from the civil service, and a pro-Nazi party in the church, the German Christians, wanted the same rule applied to its ministers. Bonhoeffer opposed it at once. In an essay on the church and the Jewish question he argued that the church owed a duty to the state’s victims, whether they were church members or not, and that a time might come when the church must not only bandage the victims under the wheel but put a spoke in the wheel itself. The essay carries some older assumptions of his tradition about Judaism that later readers rightly find troubling; but his stand was early, and it cost him.

London and the Confessing Church. In the autumn of 1933, discouraged by the weakness of the church’s resistance, he went to London as pastor of two German congregations, and there he formed a lasting friendship with George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester. In May 1934 the Confessing Church, the movement of pastors and congregations who refused the Nazified church government, adopted the Barmen Declaration, drafted chiefly by Karl Barth, confessing Jesus Christ as the one Word of God whom the church must hear and obey. Bonhoeffer stood with its most uncompromising wing. That summer, at an ecumenical conference at Fanø in Denmark, he called on the churches to speak for peace.

Finkenwalde. In 1935 the Confessing Church asked him to lead one of its seminaries for training pastors. After a short start on the Baltic coast it settled at Finkenwalde in Pomerania. It was an unusual place: young pastors living together, beginning and ending the day with worship, meditating daily on Scripture, practising confession to one another, studying, working and playing together. The authorities regarded it as illegal. In 1936 his permission to teach at the university was withdrawn, and in 1937 the Gestapo closed the seminary and arrested a number of its former students. Bonhoeffer continued the training secretly, in scattered rural parishes. Out of these years came the two books he is most read for: Discipleship, published in 1937, and Life Together, written in 1938 and published the following year.

The voyage home. In June 1939 friends arranged for him to go to America, where he might teach and be safe. Almost at once he knew he had made a mistake. He wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr that he could have no part in rebuilding Christian life in Germany after the war if he did not share its trials with his people now, and in July he sailed home, weeks before the war began.

The conspiracy. Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi, he was taken into the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, whose leaders included men at the centre of the resistance. Officially his church contacts abroad made him useful; in fact the post kept him from military service and allowed him to carry messages from the conspirators to churchmen overseas, including Bishop Bell. He helped in an operation that brought a small group of Jews to safety in Switzerland. He was forbidden to publish, and he spent much of this time writing his Ethics, which he never finished. He was not an assassin, whatever some retellings suggest; he was a pastor who lent the conspiracy his conscience and his cover, knowing he was stepping into guilt.

Tegel. In January 1943 he became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer. On 5 April 1943 he was arrested, with Dohnányi, on relatively minor charges. For eighteen months he was held at Tegel military prison in Berlin. There he read, wrote, prayed, befriended guards and fellow prisoners, and sent letters — some smuggled — to his family, to Maria and to his closest friend, Eberhard Bethge, who after the war published them as Letters and Papers from Prison.

Flossenbürg. After the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, the conspirators’ papers were discovered, and Bonhoeffer’s part in the plot came to light. He was moved to the Gestapo prison in Berlin, then to Buchenwald, and in April 1945 to Flossenbürg. On 8 April, a Sunday, he led a short service for his fellow prisoners in a schoolhouse at Schönberg, where they had been held on the way. That evening he was taken away. A British prisoner, Captain Payne Best, later recalled that he asked for a message to be given to Bishop Bell: that this was the end, but for him the beginning of life. Best set it down years afterwards, and it is right to hold the words as his recollection rather than a transcript. After a summary trial Bonhoeffer was hanged at dawn on 9 April 1945 with other conspirators. Dohnányi was put to death at Sachsenhausen in the same days; his brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher were shot in Berlin later that month. A camp doctor’s later account of his calm prayer before death is treated by historians with caution.

What he left. An Ethics in fragments, a bundle of prison letters he never meant as a book, and a handful of short works read by millions. Above all, a life in which the question he had asked in his lectures — who Jesus Christ is, and what it means to follow him — was answered by a man who could have stayed safe and went back.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. PSALM 116:15

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Bonhoeffer described a change from using the Bible to being addressed by it. Which describes your own reading this month? Choose one passage and read it this week as a word spoken to you.

2. He learned some of his deepest lessons in a congregation very unlike his own. Visit, or learn from, a church of another culture or background, and listen more than you speak.

3. He stood early for people the state had marked out. Who in your own setting is being quietly pushed to the margins? What would it cost to stand with them?

4. He went home when he could have stayed safe. Is there a place of duty you have left, or are tempted to leave, because it is hard?

5. Pray for Christians imprisoned today for their faith, by name if you can find their names.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You gave Your servant a short life and a costly witness. We thank You for his faith, and we confess that we are often more drawn to his story than to his Lord.

Speak to us through Your word as You spoke to him, not as to scholars examining a text but as to servants waiting for orders.

Give us courage to stand beside those who are pushed aside, and to stay where You have placed us when it would be easier to leave.

And when our own end comes, whenever and however it comes, let us meet it as the beginning of life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who died and rose again. Amen.