Bonhoeffer Today

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian who was born in 1906 and executed at the direct orders of Adolf Hitler on April 9, 1945, at the Flossenberg prison in Bavaria. On this centenary of his birth, we offer a series of excerpts from the writings of a man who is justly honored as one of the great witnesses—as in “martyrs”—of the century past.

Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Bonhoeffer was studying in the United States and became personally acquainted with Reinhold Niebuhr and other major American thinkers. Convinced that his duty required him to share the fate of his people, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany—to life and death under a regime he conspired to overthrow. From Pastor Bonhoeffer we have a number of books, all happily in print in English and some of them undoubted classics: Life Together, The Cost of Discipleship, Letters and Papers from Prison, and his Ethics. The following is from the last work, published by Macmillan: “Our forefathers are for us not ancestors who are made the object of worship and veneration. Interest in genealogies can all too easily become mythologization, as was known already to the writers of the New Testament (1 Timothy 1:4). Our forefathers are witnesses of the entry of God into history. It is the fact of the appearance of Jesus Christ nineteen hundred years ago, a fact for which no further proof is to be sought, that directs our gaze back to the ancients and raises in our minds the question of our historical inheritance. The historical Jesus Christ is the continuity of our history. But Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah of the Israelite-Jewish people, and for that reason the line of our forefathers goes back beyond the appearance of Jesus Christ to the people of Israel. Western history is, by God’s will, indissolubly linked with the people of Israel, not only genetically but also in a genuine uninterrupted encounter. The Jew keeps open the question of Christ. He is the sign of the free mercy-choice and of the repudiating wrath of God. ‘Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God’ (Romans 11:22). An expulsion of the Jews from the West must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”