Bonhoeffer, Dietrich

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany in 1906, the son of an eminent psychiatrist.  He became a Lutheran pastor and lectured at Berlin University.

He belonged to a section of the German Lutheran Church which frequently attacked the specific policies of Hitler's government, and especially its anti-Jewish laws.  He believed that his country's involvement in the war was unjust and, although he was working in the United States and could have remained there, he deliberately chose to return to Germany when war was declared, so that he might be totally identified with his nation's sufferings.

In 1942, he was appointed spokesman for the Confessional Church, and the German resistance.  He tried, unsuccessfully, to win the cooperation of the British War Cabinet to overthrow the Hitler Government.  To this end, he met with George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester in Stockholm.

Eventually he was arrested on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy against Hitler, and the central government of the Third Reich.

He almost survived the war, but after a semblance of a trial, he was hanged at Flossenburg on the 9th April 1945.

The camp doctor later wrote, 'I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God.  I was most deeply moved...In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God'.

Bonhoeffer is remembered for two particular books which he wrote.  One is called. 'Letters and Papers from Prison', which is an eloquent testimony both to his faith and his suffering.  In one letter to a friend, he wrote, 'we must throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings but those of God in the world, watching with Christ in Gethsemane.'

Elsewhere he wrote, 'When a mad man is tearing through the streets in a car, I can, as a pastor who happens to be on the scene, do more than merely console or bury those who have been run over.  I must jump in front of the car and stop it.'  How true.  So often, the church is good at the ambulance side of ministry, but hesitant about tackling the causes of sin.

But perhaps Bonhoeffer is best known for his book, 'The Cost of Discipleship', which is a study of the Sermon on the Mount.  In it he castigates the church for selling Christianity short.  He calls it 'cheap grace', 'the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.'

And those words, I would suggest are as relevant today as they were way back when Bonhoeffer first wrote them.  The church still often sells Christianity on the cheap, offering people what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear.  And so our faith becomes compromised and no one takes it too seriously.  We want to keep Jesus and his teaching at a distance, and avoid upsetting or challenging people concerning their faith.  Personal popularity gets in the way of Jesus and his demands.

Bonhoeffer is commemorated in the Anglican Church on the 9th April.  There is an effigy of him in one of the niches above the west door of Westminster Abbey which recognise some twentieth century martyrs.