Dietrich Bonhoeffer

What He Did

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was, by every external measure, set up for an easy life as a respected German theologian. Brilliant. Privileged. Well-connected. He could have spent his career in lecture halls.

Hitler took power in January 1933. Within months, Bonhoeffer was on a Berlin radio broadcast warning that any leader who turned himself into an idol made a mockery of God. Two days later, the broadcast was cut off mid-sentence.

The German Protestant church, in the main, did not resist. By summer 1933, most of it had merged into a unified Reich Church under Nazi-aligned leadership. The new church endorsed the “Aryan paragraph,” barring Christians of Jewish descent from ministry — that is, removing fellow believers from pulpits because of their ancestry.

Bonhoeffer would not accept this. He helped organize the Pastors' Emergency League. He co-authored the Barmen Declaration in 1934, the founding statement of the Confessing Church — the dissident German Protestant body that refused to acknowledge Hitler as having any authority over Christ's church.

The Confessing Church paid a price. Many of its pastors were arrested. Bonhoeffer's seminary at Finkenwalde, where he trained an underground generation of dissident pastors, was eventually shut down by the Gestapo.

By 1939 the war was imminent. Bonhoeffer was offered a teaching position in the United States and traveled to New York. Within weeks of arriving, he knew he had made a mistake. He wrote to his American friend Reinhold Niebuhr:

He sailed back to Germany. He was, in a sense, signing his own death warrant. He knew it.

Once back, he went further. Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, a senior figure in the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer joined the German military intelligence service as a double agent. He used the cover to help Jews escape Germany and to carry resistance messages to Allied contacts in Sweden and Switzerland. He knew of, and supported, the conspiracy that culminated in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

He was arrested in April 1943 on a separate matter, before the assassination plot. As the Reich collapsed in early 1945, the Gestapo discovered documents linking him to the conspiracy. He was moved from prison to prison ahead of advancing American forces. On 9 April 1945, by direct order of Hitler, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote that he had rarely seen a man die so submissive to the will of God.

The American Third Army liberated Flossenbürg fourteen days later.

Why It Belongs Here

Bonhoeffer's story is the test case for what a Christian man does when his country's church goes wrong, his country goes wrong, and quietly going along would cost him nothing.

He did not go along. He paid for it with his life. But the costlier question is the one he wrote about in his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship, several years before any of this happened.

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace as the doctrine, the principle, the system. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937)

The German church of his era had taken cheap grace and made an entire institutional life out of it. Belief without obedience. Forgiveness without repentance. Christ without a cross. Bonhoeffer saw what cheap grace produced. It produced a national church that could fold itself into Nazism without losing a wink of sleep.

Costly grace, by contrast, is the kind that has to be asked for daily and that costs you something every time you receive it.

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Bonhoeffer wrote that as a young man, before he had any idea Christ would, in fact, bid him come and die. He wrote it as the basic theological grammar of being a Christian. Then he was given the chance to live it out, and he did, and the manner of his death was an exact obedience to the sentence he had written years earlier.

Most Christian men can quote that sentence. Few have ever tested it.

When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.