Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany in 1906. His rather large family lived on the outskirts of Berlin, where his father practiced psychiatry. When WWI began, the Christian churches in Germany gave it their wholesale support. Afterward, many people were disillusioned and the church lost credibility. Bonhoeffer’s brother had died in the war.
Bonhoeffer became a minister and decided to study theology at Tubingen. Here he came under the influence of Karl Barth. He graduated summa cum laude and finished his dissertation at 21. About this time political chaos in Germany made way for the rise of Hitler and the National Socialists. Bonhoeffer took a year after graduate school to study in New York under Reinhold Niebuhr. Initially he didn’t like Niebuhr because the American theologian wasn’t Christocentric enough, but he later appreciated the man more. While in New York Bonhoeffer often attended the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he witnessed racism still very much alive in America and where he came under the influence of the African-American Spiritual. He took many recordings of this music back to Germany.
In Germany Bonhoeffer witnessed the beginnings of persecution against the Jews, and thanks to his experiences in Harlem immediately recognized it for what it was. He became an outspoken opponent of Hitler and helped to establish the Confessing Church in Germany. Unlike the German Christian church, which repeated the mistake of the WWI churches by backing Hitler and eventually his war, the Confessing Church held to its convictions. Bonhoeffer was a pacifist, which added extra fuel to the fire of his opposition to Hitler’s methods, and he taught this dogma often and passionately at a secret seminary for Confessing Church pastors.
One of the more interesting theological pieces produced by Bonhoeffer during this period is an article written in response to the friendly overtures of the ecumenical movement toward the Confessing Church. In this article Bonhoeffer asks a number of very penetrating questions of the movement. These questions very clearly reflect the notion, central to his thought, that a church cannot exist without a confession. In investigating whether the ecumenical movement is a church, he compares it to the Confessing Church. The Confessing Church has a confession, and it is this confession that enables it to judge what is right and what (or who) is wrong (in this case, the German Christians). A confession is not a list of abstractions, but a concrete statement having to do with matters of life and death. Bonhoeffer argues that the ecumenical church must make a similar sort of statement, choosing to be obedient and to oppose the destroyer of Christianity. The centrality of confession in Bonhoeffer’s thought would ultimately lead him to the gallows. He made the ultimate confession when he hung for his opposition to the destroyer. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Another very crucial aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought was his Christocentrism. He claims in Life Together that we are a brotherhood because of, through, and in Jesus Christ. Pastors who think they have a great vision and who think that their vision is what will make the church a success are woefully mistaken. Christ, not any pastoral vision, is the source of the church’s unity.
Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought is a vague set of statements in his letters from prison about a “religionless Christianity.” These enigmatic statements sparked a movement called “secular theology,” popularized by Harvey Cox, which claims that God wants us to act maturely, which means independently of himself. God wants to gradually withdraw from history. It has been suggested that Cox and others have misunderstood Bonhoeffer, and that he was merely arguing for the elimination of the “God of the gaps.” According to this view, Bonhoeffer was saying we should stop using God to explain phenomena in the world around us, and stop focusing on the ritual and form of religion. When we do so, the God of the Bible will come into focus for us. Some of this may have been his individualistic sentiment speaking; as a young man he rarely attended church, not because he was irreligious, but because it seemed unnecessary.
Though he started as a pacifist, by the end of Bonhoeffer’s life something had changed. He felt that a Christian had to do something to stop evil, even if he wasn’t sure it was right. He participated in an assassination plot against Hitler, a plot that failed. When his involvement was discovered, he was executed along with the other conspirators.
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