Dietrich bonhoeffer biography martyrdom

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His friends abroad were worried for his safety in the increasingly hostile Nazi environment and, so, in June of 1939 he returned to the United States with all in order to stay through the pending catastrophe. The editor’s introduction to the critical English edition is helpful in laying out these ideas: he “articulates the concept of ‘person’ in ethical relation to the ‘other,’ Christian freedom as ‘being-free-for’ the other, the reciprocal relationship of person and community, vicarious representative action as both a Christological and an anthropological-ethical concept, the exercise by individual persons of responsibility for human communities, social relations as analogies of divine-human relations, and the encounter of transcendence in human sociality” (DBWE 1:1).

Germany was now a dictatorship. As a double agent for the Abwehr, Hitler's intelligence service, he facilitated communications with anti-Nazi organizations abroad.

Imprisonment and Execution

On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned in Tegel Prison on charges of "undermining the armed forces." After the failed July Plot of 1944, he was transferred to the Gestapo headquarters and later to the Buchelwald and Flohhenburg concentration camps.

But avoiding racism was not a choice for African American Christians; it was a matter of life and death in a society organized by race and enforced by violence.  Consequently, Bonhoeffer’s friendship with Albert Fisher introduced him to Christian worship with an inherently different view of society. In September of 1933, Bonhoeffer joined Martin Niemöller and others to form the Pastors’ Emergency League (PEL) to help clergy who had already been dismissed.

[There is a footnote in the text that says by “objection” he probably meant “resistance.”]

Reggie Williams explores the impact of this year in New York on Dietrich’s thinking in his 2014 book titled Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Imprisoned during the last two years of his life, Bonhoeffer was executed just weeks before the end of the war.

The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

[Edited] Excerpt from “Exploring the Life and Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” a Westar Institute Webinar (2/10/2021), by Lori Brandt Hale.

The ensuing conflict, known as the Church Struggle (Kirchenkampf), was nothing less than the struggle – as Ludwig Mueller himself put it – “for the soul of the people” (Barnett 4).  

Bonhoeffer’s Early Response to the Nazis

In the early days of 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the first to recognize “Hitler’s policies against the Jews as a problem for the church… and eminently a political one” (Schlingensiepen 125).

National Socialism and its leaders are of course unambiguously anti-Christian. Metaxas has also looked at the outtakes of the Doblmeier documentary interviews with Bonhoeffer’s students, so there are a few new anecdotes here. His mother, whose father and grandfather were both clergymen, was supportive. It is also a consciously evangelical (in the U.

S. context) interpretation of Bonhoeffer, his life, and times.

Neither of these factors are obstacles per se to a good new look at Bonhoeffer. He would not make a decision based on his own safety when the well-being of his nation was at stake.

Bonhoeffer was arrested on vague charges in 1943 and imprisoned in Berlin.

By age fourteen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided and announced that he would become a theologian and minister (Bethge 36). (Two of my students “borrowed” my book, a dozen years ago, and had it bound for me.) I am drawn to the questions and conclusions Bonhoeffer reaches in his prison reflections, even though they are incomplete – questions about the possibility of a religionless interpretation of Christianity that means one only “learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life… living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities – then one takes seriously no longer one’s own sufferings but rather the suffering of God in the world… this is faith; this is metanoia.

He also read the novels and poetry of many Harlem Renaissance writers – WEB DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Alaine Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes – and he concluded that the mood in this literature indicated that “the race question is arriving at a turning point. His experiences there exposed him to the Social Gospel movement and the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., which influenced his later thinking on Christian ethics.

Resistance to Nazism

Upon returning to Germany, Bonhoeffer became a lecturer at the Theological Faculty of the University of Berlin.

The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated and edited by Isabel Best.