The anniversary of the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred by Nazi Germany on this day in 1945. His efforts to resist Hitler and fight against the Nazis from within Germany’s borders earned him a place in history, while his books and teachings ensure his impact will be felt for all eternity. However, to fully appreciate all that Bonhoeffer accomplished, it’s important to understand who he was as a person as well. 

Born in 1906 to a father who was a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer was an outstanding student. He served for two years as an assistant pastor of a German-speaking congregation in Barcelona, then a year as an exchange student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Upon his return to Germany in 1931, he became a lecturer in systematic theology at the University of Berlin at the age of twenty-five. Along the way, he became proficient in at least seven languages.

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, many church leaders in Germany supported him. The 1920 Nazi Party Platform stated that the party “upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without tying itself confessionally to any one confession.” A movement called “German Christians” arose that embraced many of the nationalistic and racial aspects of Nazi ideology, sought the creation of a national “Reich Church,” and supported a “Nazified” version of Christianity.

Bonhoeffer, by contrast, helped lead the Confessing Church, the center of Protestant resistance to the Nazis. This commitment would cost him his life.

Why Bonhoeffer never married

Bonhoeffer formed an underground seminary and eventually joined those plotting Hitler’s assassination and the overthrow of the Nazis. In 1939, he spent two weeks in New York City and considered taking refuge there, but chose to return to Germany.

He explained to his sponsor, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”

Bonhoeffer was arrested on April 5, 1943, and imprisoned in Berlin. Following the failure of an attempt on Hitler’s life the next year, documents were discovered linking him to the conspiracy. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Schoenberg Prison.

On Sunday, April 8, 1945, he had just finished conducting a worship service there when two soldiers came to him saying, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, make ready and come with us.” This was the standard means by which they summoned condemned prisoners. He was hanged the next day, less than a week before the Allies liberated the camp.

He was never married; his engagement had been announced just prior to his imprisonment.

Today a statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer stands above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey as one of the ten Modern Martyrs of the twentieth century.

“The wisest course for the disciple”

Of all his works, The Cost of Discipleship has had the most impact on my life and thought. Its most famous sentence declares, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Bonhoeffer was right: Jesus stated bluntly, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

In the first-century Roman world, the cross was an instrument of tortured death and nothing else. Centuries before it became jewelry around our necks and symbols atop our steeples, it was only and always a means of execution. To make Jesus’ words contemporary, we might say that he calls a disciple to “take up his electric chair” or “take up his lethal injection needle” daily.

And yet, as Bonhoeffer notes in his book, “It will always be true that the wisest course for the disciple” is “to abide solely by the Word of God in all simplicity.” Here we find the paradoxical path to joy available only to those who trust unconditionally in Christ as their Lord and King.

Because “God is love” (1 John 4:8), his unchanging nature requires him to want only our best. As a result, when we pay a price to worship and serve him, the benefit of such faithfulness must outweigh its cost, in this life and especially in the next. When we pay a price to refuse temptation, the calculus is the same: the reward of our obedience outweighs any benefit the sin offers.

This means that dying to ourselves so that we can live fully for Jesus is not only the best way to glorify our Lord—it is also the best way for us to live our best lives.

What Bonhoeffer said before he died

To illustrate in a most mundane way, one of my favorite memories of time with my father is of the hours we spent working on cars together. We did so in part out of necessity to keep our vehicles running but also as a hobby since we truly enjoyed restoring older cars.

My dad knew infinitely more about vehicular mechanics than I did, however. As a result, I spent most of my time doing what he told me to do. And on the occasions when I tried a repair my way rather than his, it took much longer to fix what I broke than to do the repair correctly the first time. When I chose to “die” to myself and choose his way over mine, I benefitted every time.

If you’ve ever been through physical therapy after a surgery or medical procedure, you know the same principle to be true. What hurts (sometimes terribly) at first leads eventually to a level of health we could not otherwise experience. The therapist turns out to be wiser than we are; so long as they have our best interest at heart, we discover that their way is better than ours.

This, on a much more superlative level, was what Dietrich Bonhoeffer tried to tell us by his words and his life. It is why the “cost of discipleship” is God’s gracious gift to us since he always gives his best to those who leave the choice with him.

• When we suffer by refusing temptation, we avoid the damage of sin while gaining God’s reward for obedience.
• When we continue to love and serve Christ in the face of personal pain and tragedy, we demonstrate the relevance of our faith to others and position ourselves to experience God’s omnipotent grace.
• When we suffer by standing for Christ in the face of cultural opposition, we prove the reality of our faith to skeptics and glorify our Lord.
• When we give up our lives to serve our Lord, Jesus promises: “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew the joy of such faithfulness. That is why, when the soldiers came for his execution, he said to another prisoner, “This is the end—but for me, the beginning—of life.”

“Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving”

In December 1944, as Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in a basement cell, he wrote a letter to his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, “as a Christmas greeting for you and the parents and siblings.” In it, he authored a poem in which he prayed,

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving

even to the dregs of pain, at thy command,

we will not falter, thankfully receiving

all that is given by thy loving hand.

How fully will you trust your Father’s “loving hand” today?