Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Boy Who Chose the Church

Imagine a big, comfortable house in Grunewald, a leafy suburb on the western edge of Berlin, around the year 1920. It is full of people: a large family of brothers and sisters and their friends, a father who is one of the most respected doctors in Germany, a mother who runs the household like a small school. In the evenings there is music. Someone is always at the piano. At dinner the talk is quick, clever and sometimes sharp, because in this family you are expected to say what you mean and to be able to defend it.

The youngest boy, Dietrich, is about fourteen. He has fair hair, a serious mind, and a gift for the piano so great that some people have wondered aloud whether he will become a professional musician. Everyone expects great things of him. And he has just told his family that he is going to be a theologian: to study God, and serve the church.

His brothers thought he was throwing himself away. The family remembered the scene for years afterwards, and the story they told runs something like this. The older brothers told Dietrich that the church was a poor, feeble, dull institution, small-minded and dying, and not worth a gifted young man’s life. And Dietrich answered that, in that case, he would reform it.

We do not know exactly how the conversation went, or whether it happened all at once or over many evenings. It comes to us through the family’s memories, retold by Dietrich’s friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge. But it fits everything else we know about him. He did not argue his brothers down. He simply did what he said he would. And in the end the church he chose would cost him his life.

Eight Children in Berlin

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau, then a city in eastern Germany, now Wrocław in Poland. He had a twin sister, Sabine. They were the sixth and seventh of eight children. When Dietrich was six, his father, Karl Bonhoeffer, became professor of psychiatry (the medical study of the mind) at the university in Berlin, and the whole family moved to the capital.

It was a privileged family, and a remarkable one. Karl was a scientist through and through: careful, reserved, distrustful of anything he could not observe and test. He was not hostile to religion, but he had no use for it in his own life, and the family hardly ever went to church. Dietrich’s mother, Paula, was different. She was a trained teacher, the granddaughter of a well-known church historian, and she taught her younger children at home in their early years. She read them Bible stories, sang hymns with them, and wanted them to know the faith, even though the household did not practise it in public.

The older brothers followed their father’s path. Karl-Friedrich became a scientist, Klaus a lawyer. The house was full of argument, music and books, and the children were expected to think for themselves. Sloppy reasoning was laughed at. Showing off was laughed at too.

Sabine later remembered that she and Dietrich, as small children sharing a room, would lie awake at night talking about death and eternity, trying to imagine what “for ever” could possibly mean. It is a small detail, but it tells you something. Long before he studied theology, Dietrich was a child who asked the biggest questions there are.

Walter

In 1914 the First World War began. At first it seemed far away. The younger Bonhoeffer children played at soldiers and followed the battles on maps. Then the older brothers came of age.

In the spring of 1918 the second son, Walter, eighteen years old, went to the front in France as an officer cadet. Within weeks he was badly wounded, and at the end of April he died of his wounds. Dietrich was twelve.

The family was devastated. Paula Bonhoeffer was so overwhelmed by grief that for weeks she could hardly function, and for a long time afterwards she was not her old self. Karl, the calm scientist, was shaken in a way his children had never seen. The quick, confident household had met something that no amount of clever argument could fix.

We do not know exactly what went on in Dietrich’s mind that year; he did not write about it. But it is hard to believe it had nothing to do with what came next. Walter’s death put death and eternity, the questions he and Sabine had whispered about in the dark, right at the centre of the family’s life. When Dietrich was confirmed in 1921, his mother gave him Walter’s Bible. According to his family and friends, it was the Bible he used for his daily reading for the rest of his life.

A Waste of a Good Mind

It was not long after this, at around fourteen, that Dietrich made his announcement. He seems to have decided quietly first and told his family later. At school he chose to learn Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, so that he could read the Bible in its original words.

Why theology? We do not have a neat answer from him at that age, and it would be dishonest to invent one. Some of it may have been a teenager’s wish to go his own way in a family of high achievers: his brothers had science and law, and he wanted something of his own. Some of it was certainly intellectual. Theology, for him, was the hardest and most important subject there was: questions about God, about truth, about what a human being is for. Some of it, perhaps, was Walter.

What is clear is that his family thought it was a mistake. His brothers saw the church as an institution in decline, on the wrong side of modern science and modern life. His father was disappointed but did not stand in his way. Years later, after Dietrich had become caught up in the church’s struggle against the Nazis, Karl wrote to him admitting that when Dietrich first chose theology, he had privately thought it a pity that such a gifted son should settle for the quiet, uneventful life of a minister. He had been wrong about the quiet, he said.

What makes Dietrich’s choice interesting is that he did not make it in spite of his family’s way of thinking. He made it with their way of thinking. He did not become a Christian by turning his mind off. He chose the subject precisely because it demanded the whole of his mind. He would spend his life insisting that faith has to be thought through, honestly, and then has to be lived.

But there is one more thing to be honest about. At fourteen, Dietrich wanted to study God. That is not quite the same as wanting to follow him. It would take him more than ten years to discover the difference.

Questions in Tübingen, Rome and Berlin

Dietrich finished school in 1923, at seventeen, and went to the university of Tübingen, in southern Germany, as his father had done. Germany was in chaos: the country had lost the war, and that year its money became almost worthless, so that prices rose by the hour. He studied hard anyway.

In the spring of 1924, aged eighteen, he travelled to Rome with his brother Klaus. It was his first real encounter with the church outside the quiet Lutheran Germany he knew. In St Peter’s on Palm Sunday he watched people from every nation worshipping together, and he wrote in his diary that he was beginning to understand what the word “church” meant. It was not a building, or a German institution, or a fading club for the old-fashioned. It was a worldwide people. That idea would stay at the centre of everything he wrote.

That summer he moved to the university in Berlin, one of the great centres of theology in the world. Some of its professors were famous “liberal” theologians: they treated the Bible mainly as a human book and Christianity mainly as a moral and cultural tradition. The most famous of them, Adolf von Harnack, was an elderly neighbour of the Bonhoeffers in Grunewald, and Dietrich joined his seminar. Harnack liked him. But Dietrich was also reading, with growing excitement, the work of a Swiss theologian named Karl Barth, who insisted that God is not a human idea at all: that God speaks, and we listen; that the Bible is where God’s word reaches us, not just a record of human religious feeling.

So here was a young man in his late teens sitting between two great arguments, taking both seriously, and working out for himself which one was true. He did not simply take sides with the teachers he liked. He tested them.

In 1927, at only twenty-one, he was awarded his doctorate. His dissertation was called Sanctorum Communio, Latin for “the communion of saints,” a study of the church as a real community of people bound together in Christ. It was an astonishing piece of work for someone so young. Karl Barth, reading it many years later, called it a theological miracle. Dietrich then spent a year as an assistant pastor to a German congregation in Barcelona, Spain, and came back to Berlin to write a second thesis that qualified him to teach at the university.

By any measure, he was a success. But by his own later account, something was missing.

Harlem

In 1930 he was twenty-four and too young to be ordained as a pastor in his church, which required candidates to be twenty-five. So he crossed the Atlantic to spend a year studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

He was not impressed by the lectures. He thought the American students talked a great deal about society and very little about God. But in New York he met a fellow student named Frank Fisher, an African American, and Fisher took him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, one of the largest Black churches in America.

Dietrich went back again and again. For months he worshipped there most Sundays and helped teach a Sunday school class. He heard preaching that spoke plainly of sin and grace and the love of God, with a passion he had not met in the lecture halls of Berlin. He heard the spirituals, songs born out of slavery, and he bought records of them to take home to Germany. And he saw, close up, what racism did to people: the insults, the segregation, the constant humiliations that his friends lived with. He was horrified, and he never forgot it. When, a few years later, his own country began to single out a whole people as inferior, he had already seen where that led.

In New York he also became friends with a French student, Jean Lasserre, a pacifist who took Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount with complete seriousness. Jesus told his followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Lasserre believed Jesus meant it, literally, and expected his followers to do it. Dietrich had studied the Sermon on the Mount as a text. Lasserre made him ask whether he had ever obeyed it.

Scholars are careful not to call the New York year a sudden conversion. But something shifted in Dietrich in the early 1930s, and he described it himself a few years later in a private letter to a friend. Looking back, he said that he had thrown himself into his work in a very unchristian way, driven by ambition. He had preached and written about the church, he said, but he had not yet become a Christian. He had turned the teaching of Jesus into something for his own advantage. Then the Bible, and especially the Sermon on the Mount, set him free. He began to read it every day, to pray, and to see that following Christ was not an idea but a life.

That is what a theologian at fourteen became in his mid-twenties: a disciple. Jesus Christ was no longer, for him, a subject to master but the living Lord, who had died for him and now called him to follow. He had spent years asking questions about God. Now he heard God asking a question of him.

What Came After

He returned to Berlin in 1931, was ordained, and began teaching at the university and working with young people. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power. Two days later Bonhoeffer gave a radio talk warning that a leader who makes himself into an idol becomes a misleader; the broadcast was cut off before he finished, though exactly why is not certain. When the new government barred people of Jewish descent from public jobs, and a powerful pro-Nazi party in the church wanted to do the same to its own pastors, Bonhoeffer opposed it at once. He wrote that the church must not only help the victims crushed under the wheel of the state, but might one day have to jam the wheel itself.

He joined the Confessing Church, the Christians who refused to let the Nazis take over their faith. From 1935 he led one of its seminaries for training pastors, at Finkenwalde, in what is now Poland; it was illegal, and the secret police closed it in 1937. Out of those years came his two best-known books, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. In the first he attacked what he called “cheap grace,” forgiveness that asks for no change, and set against it “costly grace”: grace that cost God the life of his Son, and that calls a person to follow Jesus with everything. Jesus said, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24). Bonhoeffer believed him.

In 1939 friends arranged for him to go to New York, where he would have been safe. Within weeks he decided he had made a mistake, and sailed home before war broke out, saying he could have no part in rebuilding the church in Germany afterwards if he did not share its trials now. Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi he was drawn into the circle in German military intelligence that was secretly working against Hitler, and he came to support a conspiracy that included plans to kill Hitler. He was not a gunman or a bomb-maker. He was a pastor who believed that standing by while the innocent were murdered was a greater guilt than acting, and who did not pretend the choice was clean. He also helped smuggle a small group of Jews to safety in Switzerland.

In January 1943 he became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer. On 5 April 1943 he was arrested. For eighteen months he was held in Tegel military prison in Berlin, where he wrote letters, prayers and poems, later published as Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the poems is called “Who Am I?” In it he asks whether he is really the calm, cheerful man the guards see, or the restless, frightened prisoner he feels like inside. He does not answer the question. He ends by telling God that whoever he is, God knows him, and he belongs to God. The boy who lay awake asking about eternity was still asking honest questions at thirty-eight, and still bringing them to God.

After the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, documents were found that exposed the conspiracy. Bonhoeffer was moved from prison to prison, and at last to Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria. He was condemned by a brief court with no real defence, and at dawn on 9 April 1945 he was hanged, at thirty-nine, about two weeks before American soldiers reached the camp and a month before the war in Europe ended. His brother Klaus and two of his brothers-in-law were also killed by the regime that month. A British prisoner who was with him in the last days remembered that, as he was led away, Bonhoeffer asked him to carry a message to a friend in England: that this was the end, but for him the beginning of life.

The boy whose brothers said he was wasting his mind on a dying church had followed Christ all the way. He did not find the church easy, or comfortable, or always right; he spent his life trying to call it back to Jesus. But he never decided it was a waste.

In Their Own Words

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), in its English translation

Think It Through

1. Dietrich chose theology in a family that thought it was a waste of a good mind. Have you ever been made to feel that taking faith seriously was not very intelligent? How did you respond?
2. Walter’s death brought the biggest questions into the Bonhoeffer house. How can grief make questions about God more urgent rather than less?
3. Bonhoeffer later said he had studied and preached about the church for years before he really became a Christian. What is the difference between knowing about God and following him?
4. In prison he wrote a poem asking “Who am I?” and gave his answer to God. What questions about yourself would you want to bring to God, even without an answer yet?

Read More on Ochorus

Bonhoeffer’s own books are still in copyright and are not in the Ochorus library. The Key Teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a guide to what he taught, from costly grace and the Sermon on the Mount to life together in Christian community and his last letters from prison; its chapter “The Pastor Who Went Back” tells the story of his return to Germany in 1939. His full biography, from the house in Grunewald to Flossenbürg, is on his author page.