Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Man

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Man

For many years the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer have touched many lives in the Christian community. The impact he has had and continues to have in today’s society is incredible and the reason for this paper is to examine the merits of his work and to look at his life and his particular place in Christian history by closely examining his background and historical setting, and some of his more significant works. This paper will look into Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, and Ethics, and his Prison Correspondence. These works are important in understanding the man and as a theologian and they give an accurate picture of what it was like to live back in those times as a Christian. Despite the numerous accounts of WWII that are out there are very few that give us an account from the perspective of a Christian and the hope that all Christians can share even in the darkest of times. But before we get into his works let us take a look at some of his background. Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer?  

With every great hero there must be a great villain, and in the case of Bonhoeffer there was no greater villain than the Nazi party or specifically Adolf Hitler himself. Not many people realize this but when Nazism first started it was considered a Christian movement coming from the Lutheran Church. The Nazi party tended to get much of their beliefs from the sayings of Martin Luther in his later life. Because in Luther’s later life he did come to write many anti-semantic statements that the Nazi party adopted and went about trying to enforce and in some cases over exaggerating Luther’s original intent. This is when Bonhoeffer's story takes place, at a time when the Nazi party had its greatest influence in the German church and many submitted to their rule out of fear. Bonhoeffer stood up and spoke out against this rising evil. He fought against this terrorist cell and preached the gospel unashamedly. Who was this Dietrich Bonhoeffer? What gave him that kind of courage? As this paper seeks to answer some of these questions it will focus in on his background and some of his more famous works.

         As we take a look at some basic background information on Dietrich Bonhoeffer we will find that Bonhoeffer and his twin sister, Sabine, were born on February 4, 1906 in Breslau, Germany, which is now part of Poland. Dietrich was one of six children. By the time Dietrich had turned 6 years old, his family had moved to Berlin. Bonhoeffer was taught at the colleges of Tubingen (1923-1924) and Berlin, where he received a doctorate in the year1927 at the early age of only 21. Then after a year as a part of the clergy of a German-speaking church in Spain (1928-1929), Bonhoeffer spent a year in the United States at Union Theological Seminary. And while studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York City (1930–1931), Bonhoeffer co-taught a Sunday school class in a black church in Harlem. This particular experience was a powerful lesson to Dietrich on how a discriminated people could go through degrading harassment by practicing a childlike, biblical faith. This experience only seemed reinforce Bonhoeffer in his fight against the Nazi power in Germany. So when many pastors submitted to Hitler’s intervention in church affairs, Bonhoeffer was able to refuse to go along and instead shared in forming the Confessing Church in Germany. In 1935 Bonhoeffer started and led an underground seminary in Finkenwalde. Bonhoeffer early on acknowledged himself alongside the resistance movement against Adolf Hitler, who in 1933 had become the dictator of Germany.

 “The November 9, 1938 Krystalnacht, which saw the destruction of six hundred German synagogues, the looting of seventy-five hundred shops, and the arrest of thirty-five thousand Jews, led Bonhoeffer and other conspirators to intensify their efforts against Hitler. Bonhoeffer was taken into custody in April 1943 and hung in 1944, shortly after a failed assassination attempt on

Hitler.”^[1]

The Cost of Discipleship

Bonhoeffer's by far most well-known book is The Cost of Discipleship, which was published in 1939. The Cost of Discipleship was written in 4 parts: Grace and Discipleship, The Sermon on the Mount, The Messengers, and The Church of Jesus Christ and the Life of Discipleship. In the first section of the book Bonhoeffer's major concern for the Christians at this time was that Christians were settling for cheap grace. Cheap grace, as Bonhoeffer put it is grace that has become so dampened that it no longer looks like the grace of the New Testament.

 The phrase cheap grace, Bonhoeffer is referring to is the grace which has brought chaos and destruction; it is the “intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission” ^[2]without a real transformation in the sinner's life. It is “the justification of the sin without the justification of the sinner”.

^[3] Bonhoeffer says “cheap grace is 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, and grace without Jesus Christ living and incarnate.”^[4]

 According to Bonhoeffer, cheap grace will end up costing the Christian church more dearly in fact he goes on to say “The price we are having to pay to-day in the shape of the collapse of the organized church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available all at too low a cost.”^[5], but true grace will cost a Christian everything. The same grace that Christ sacrificed His life for. Cheap grace came about because man wanted to be saved but had no desire to become a disciple. Then the church with its rules and of social codes somehow became a replacement for Jesus, and that in fact cheapens and weakens the meaning of discipleship. A true Christian must resist cheap grace, resist the allure of a luxurious and easy belief system and get up out of the church pew and go claim the mission that Jesus has for all of us. Having “faith does not entail sitting still and waiting; they must rise and follow Him.^[6]

Discipleship, for Bonhoeffer, “is not an offer man makes to Christ”, ^[7]but instead calls for absolute obedience to Him and His commandments. It is also a strict obedience to Christ as the object of our faith. “For faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience^[8].”  Bonhoeffer discusses this focused obedience with the call of Levi and Peter as examples of what a true believer's proper response to the call of Christ and the Gospel. The only prerequisite these men needed was that in each case they were called to rely on Christ's word, and to hold on to that with greater security than all the securities in the world. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this book he challenged all Christians to find God’s will for their lives today and to figure out what God is calling them to do. Bonhoeffer showed his readers that costly grace was the only way to truly live your life. By giving your entire life to the Lord’s calling you can truly experience grace. Bonhoeffer pleads in this book for Christians to not settle for an ordinary life. What if Levi or Peter had stayed in their boats? It is true that Levi and Peter could have “remained in obscurity, pursuing their work as the quiet in the land, observing the law and waiting for the Messiah.” ^[9]If they had and if Christians today remain in the boat or the church pew then Christians will never experience costly grace. The whole reason why Bonhoeffer wrote this book was to educate Christians on how to be true disciples of Christ.