Reflections on the 80th Anniversary of the Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945

On April 9, 1945, the Protestant pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at a Nazi concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany. The prisoner’s last recorded words were: “This is the end – but for me, the beginning of life!”

Posted Date : 2025-06-10 23:25:00

Photo: Buchenwald Memorial

By Joseph Mangina

On April 9, 1945, the Protestant pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at a Nazi concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany. The prisoner’s last recorded words were: “This is the end – but for me, the beginning of life!”

The recent 80th anniversary of that “beginning” invites us to consider who Bonhoeffer was and why he still matters.

He was born in 1906 into a highly cultured family in Berlin, where his father was a professor of psychiatry and neurology. Like many German intellectuals, the Bonhoeffers were politely respectful of Christianity but hardly devout. Young Dietrich’s decision to become a theologian therefore came as something of a surprise. A brilliant student, he rose swiftly through the ranks of the German university system.

His 1927 doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio (“The Communion of Saints”), was a groundbreaking study of the church in light of modern personalist philosophy. The church, he argued, is nothing less than “Christ existing as community.” A second thesis, Act and Being (1930), explored Luther’s view of sin as “the heart turned in on itself,” and described grace as being set free for authentic relationship to God and others. These are themes that would mark Bonhoeffer’s thinking from beginning to end.

Bonhoeffer seemed set for a conventional academic career, but events – and perhaps his own inner restlessness – conspired to pull him in other directions. A fellowship year spent at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1930-31 proved decisive. Union exposed him to the American Social Gospel, which eschewed dogma in favor of economic analysis and practical efforts to improve the lives of workers and the poor. He studied under Reinhold Niebuhr, at this point still very much a theological liberal.

While Bonhoeffer appreciated mainline Protestantism’s focus on ethics, its superficial and unbiblical preaching left him cold. He found a far deeper understanding of God’s living Word in the Black Church, especially as he encountered it in a particular congregation, Abyssinian Baptist in Harlem. If Union shaped Bonhoeffer’s intellectual outlook, Abyssinian touched his soul. Here was “Christ existing as community.” Here were a people who knew oppression first hand, and yet who worshiped and sang with exuberance. Years later, Bonhoeffer would delight in playing recordings of African-American spirituals for his seminary students.

A second life-altering event was the National Socialist party’s coming to power in January 1933. That same month, Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address in which he criticized the Nazi cult of the “leader” (Führer) as anti-Christian. He had reason to be concerned: there was considerable pro-Nazi sentiment within the Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) church itself. The so-called German Christian party viewed Hitler as a messiah-figure, poised to lead the nation (das Volk) back to greatness. They regarded the Old Testament with suspicion for its “Jewish” mentality, and welcomed Nazi legislation on race – for example, the policy that banned non-Aryans (persons of Jewish descent) from serving as Protestant clergy. Swastika flags were set up in churches, alongside the cross.

Bonhoeffer rejected all of this as the rankest idolatry and heresy. He and his allies, including Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller, first tried to stop the Nazi subversion of the established church; and when that didn’t work, they founded a breakaway body, the Confessing Church. If we summarized its creed as “Jesus is Lord, and Hitler is not,” we would not be far wrong.

It is important not to romanticize the Confessing Church, many of whose members seemed more interested in protecting Christian privilege than in bold acts of resistance. Bonhoeffer himself lamented the Church’s reluctance to speak up for the Jews. Feeling increasingly isolated, he decided to “go for a while into the desert,” as he said to Barth, accepting a position as pastor to German-speaking congregations in London. But even in the “desert” he was forging ecumenical alliances – most notably with Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who became an important friend, mentor and father figure.

Bonhoeffer’s most important works from the time of the Church Struggle are Discipleship (1937) and Life Together (1938). It was in Discipleship that he coined the phrase “cheap grace,” contrasting it with the “costly grace” of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Life Together grew out of Bonhoeffer’s experiences as leader of the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde from 1935-37. In place of the standard theological curriculum, he instituted a strict regimen of prayer, Bible-reading and personal confession of sin. It was a discipline many of the students found alienating.

In stressing the costs of discipleship and the imperative of life in community, Bonhoeffer was by no means repudiating his Lutheran heritage. He affirmed the great Protestant (including Anglican) teaching about salvation by grace through faith. He merely insisted that grace is not an idea, principle, or “get out of jail free” card. Grace means Jesus Christ. It is life in him – which also includes participation in his cross – that defines being a Christian. In emphasizing these themes, Bonhoeffer wasn’t being less Lutheran but more so.

Bonhoeffer had an extraordinary gift for friendship. Among his many friends, the most important was Eberhard Bethge, a Finkenwalde student who became his close companion, confidant, and theological ally. The story of their friendship is well told in Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an insightful and beautifully written work that manages to avoid hagiography – a perennial risk in Bonhoeffer studies.

It was, in part, the prospect of separation from friends and family that guided Bonhoeffer’s decision not to sit out the war in the safety of America, as Niebuhr and others had urged. The reluctant traveler sailed for New York in June, 1939 – and immediately realized he’d made a mistake. Besides being homesick, he came to realize that he would have  no right to a voice in the postwar reconstruction of Germany unless he shared in her present suffering. He returned home in July, and shortly thereafter was hired as a civilian agent of the Abwehr, the Military Intelligence service. An unexpected job for a radical pastor! Except that the Abwehr was a hotbed of the German resistance.

This is not the place to tell the story of Bonhoeffer’s involvement in resistance work. Suffice to say that he was tasked with using his ecumenical contacts in the West, including Bishop Bell, to inquire about possible terms for a negotiated end to the war. This could only happen, of course, if Hitler were to be deposed from power. Bonhoeffer gradually became involved in the circle of highly-placed military officers who were plotting a coup, culminating in the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. But long before this, the Gestapo had come to suspect him of treason. He was arrested in April, 1943, on a trumped-up charge, and spent most of the remainder of his life in Berlin’s Tegel prison.

Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison stands among the great works of Christian theology of the twentieth century. It consists of fragments – letters, meditations, poems, sketches for a novel. The letters – especially the early ones to his parents – are touching in their everydayness. Bonhoeffer asks them for food and clothing, slippers and shaving soap, ink and stationery, and above all, books. He inquires (sometimes in coded language) about the status of the legal case the Gestapo was building against him. There are also letters to his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, although the bulk of their correspondence wasn’t published until the 1990s. She visited him regularly during his time in prison.

As an aside, Bonhoeffer was surrounded by strong women – among them his mother Paula Bonhoeffer, who homeschooled her eight children; his grandmother Julie Tafel Bonhoeffer, who at age 91 dared to defy the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses; and Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, an aristocratic lady who supported his work for the Confessing Church and backed the resistance. She was the grandmother of Maria von Wedemeyer. Still, it seems fair to say that Bonhoeffer’s world was marked more by male companionship and camaraderie than by friendship with women.

During his first year in prison, all of Bonhoeffer’s correspondence had to pass under the eye of the censor; but from April 1944 onward, a secret channel opened up that permitted him and Bethge to write with greater freedom. These are the famous theological letters, the ones where Bonhoeffer explores heady themes about “religionless Christianity” and “a world come of age.” In the 1960s, these letters were celebrated by the Death of God theologians, who found in them a charter for a radically secular form of Christian faith, shorn of all supernatural elements. The movement even ended up on the cover of Time magazine.

There are two ways of viewing the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters. One is to see him as the proponent of a vulgar form of Christian atheism. People used to believe in transcendence, but they don’t anymore, and so the church needs to adjust her message accordingly. God is dead, but the church goes on – surely a dismal prospect. Even the secularist theologians didn’t quite mean this, although their sometimes breathless rhetoric could often sound like this is what they were saying.

But another reading – and to my mind, one that’s both more faithful to Bonhoeffer and more theologically promising – is to see the prison fragments as being less about the “what” of Christian faith, the content of confession, than about the “how.” Bonhoeffer was doing contextual theology. God might not be not dead, but establishment Protestantism was dying fast. It was dying in part because it had nothing much to say, beyond a vague commendation of “being good” or “being spiritual,” as an accessory of bourgeois existence. But people discovered they could be good without the church, and as for spirituality, sleeping in on Sunday morning often seemed the more attractive option. This is more or less what Bonhoeffer meant by “a world come of age.”

And so the answer is not to do without God, but rather (if I may put it so) to stop being more damned religious than God is. God, wrote Bonhoeffer to Bethge, is to be found not on the margins of life but at its centre. He is encountered in the face of a friend, in the very real needs of our neighbour, and in the ordinary joys and sorrows of human living. To be a Christian, one does not first need to be religious – that would be salvation by “works”! One need only be open to the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and to the daily gift of life in the extraordinary world God has made.  In this sense, the ideas Bonhoeffer tested out on Bethge in the prison letters were consistent with his overall theology, both radically evangelical and rooted deep in the soil of the Old Testament.   TAP

Dr. Joseph Mangina is Professor of Systematic Theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto.

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