Dietrich Bonhoeffer (
(February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German
Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the
German Resistance movement against
Nazism, a founding member of the
Confessing Church. His involvement in
plans by members of the
Abwehr (the German
Military Intelligence Office) to
assassinate Adolf
Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943 and his subsequent
execution by hanging in April 1945, shortly before the war's end.
His view of Christianity's role in the secular world has become
very influential.
Family and youth
Bonhoeffer
was born on February 4, 1906 with his twin sister Sabine to a prominent upper-class family
in Breslau (Wrocław
), the sixth
of eight children. His father, Karl
Bonhoeffer, was one of the most distinguished neurologists in
Germany as a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of
Berlin
and the director of the psychiatric clinic at
Charité
Hospital in
Berlin
. His mother, Paula von Hase, was a daughter
of Klara von Hase, a Countess by marriage who had been a pupil of
Clara Schumann and
Franz Liszt , and a granddaughter of
Karl von Hase, the distinguished church historian
and preacher to the court of
Kaiser
Wilhelm II. Nonetheless, the Bonhoeffer family was not notably
devout. Paula was a college graduate and
home-schooled the children. Bonhoeffer lost
his older brother
Walter to
World War I. His sister Christine
married
Hans von Dohnanyi,
conspirator against Hitler. His twin sister Sabine married Gerhard
Leibholz, a notable jurist of Jewish descent, however already
baptised as a child.
Bonhoeffer was an exceptional pianist, and his parents thought he
might pursue a music career. He was also athletic and played such
games as tennis and chess with ardor. Expected to follow his father
into
psychiatry, Bonhoeffer surprised and
dismayed his parents when he decided by age of fourteen to become a
theologian and later a pastor. When his older brother told him not
to waste his life in such a "poor, feeble, boring, petty, bourgeois
institution as the Church", 14-year-old Dietrich replied: "If what
you say is true, I shall reform it!"
Academic training
Bonhoeffer
attended TĂĽbingen
University
for a year and visited Rome, where he became conscious of the
universality of the church, before he matriculated at the University of
Berlin in 1924, then a centre of liberal theology under theologians such
as Adolf von Harnack.
Around this time, he discovered the writings of
Karl Barth, an eminent Swiss theologian whose
pioneering work in
neo-orthodoxy was a
reaction against liberal theology. Barth believed that "liberal
theology" (understood as emphasizing personal experience and
societal development) minimized Scripture, reducing it to a mere
textbook of metaphysics while sanctioning the deification of human
culture. Harnack cautioned Bonhoeffer against dangers posed by
Barth's "contempt for scientific theology", but young Bonhoeffer,
becoming increasingly critical of liberal theology as too
constraining and responsible for the lack of relevance in the
church, was won over to Barth's dialectical theology. Bonhoeffer
was nevertheless not beyond criticizing Barth, and the confluence
of Barth's
Christocentrism and
Harnack's concern to show the relevance of Christianity to the
modern world had indelible effect on Bonhoeffer's approach to
theology.
Bonhoeffer graduated
summa cum laude
from the University of Berlin in 1927 and earned his
doctorate in theology at the age of 21 with a
brilliant and ground-breaking doctoral thesis,
Sanctorum
Communio (Communion of Saints), which presented a
significantly new way of looking at the nature of the Christian
church and was praised by Barth as a "theological
miracle."
In order to become a pastor, Bonhoeffer spent
a year in 1928-1929 as a curate in a parish of German community in
Barcelona
, Spain
, where he
incidentally came to appreciate bull-fighting. At this time,
Bonhoeffer witnessed social chaos and decline of traditional values
amid international financial crisis and became critical of the
church as being insensitive to evident needs of the world around it
and instead burying Christ in the heap of religiosity.In 1929,
Bonhoeffer then returned to the University of Berlin to work on
habilitation thesis titled
Act and
Being, in which he traced the influence of
transcendental philosophy on
Protestant and Catholic theologies.
Bonhoeffer in Harlem
Still too
young to be ordained, Bonhoeffer went to the United States in 1930
for postgraduate study and a
teaching fellowship at Union Theological Seminary
in New York
City
. Bonhoeffer found the American seminary not
up to his exacting German standards ("There is no theology here."),
but he had life-changing experiences and friendships.
He studied under
Reinhold Niebuhr and met Frank
Fisher, a black fellow seminarian who introduced him to Abyssinian
Baptist Church
in Harlem
, where he
taught a Sunday school and formed a life-long love for African-American spiritual, a collection of which he took
back to Germany. He heard
Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. preach the
Gospel of Social Justice and became sensitive to social injustices
experienced by minorities and the ineptness of the church to bring
about integration. He began to see things "from below", from the
perspective of those who suffer oppression. He observed, "Here one
can truly speak and hear about sin and grace and the love of
God...the Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and
vision." Later Bonhoeffer was to refer to his impressions abroad as
the point at which "I turned from phraseology to reality." He also
learned to drive an automobile although he failed the driving test
three times. He traveled by car through the United States to
Mexico, where he was invited to speak on the subject of peace. His
early visits to Italy, Libya, Spain, United States, Mexico, and
Cuba opened Bonhoeffer to the
ecumenism.
After his return from America in 1931, Bonhoeffer became a lecturer
of
systematic theology at the
University of Berlin.
Deeply interested in ecumenism, he was
appointed by the World Alliance for Promoting International
Friendship through the Churches (a forerunner of the World Council
of Churches
) as one of their three European youth
secretaries. At this time he seems to have undergone
something of a personal conversion from a theologian primarily
attracted to the intellectual side of Christianity to a dedicated
man of faith, resolved to carry out the teaching of Christ as he
found it revealed in the Gospels. In November 15, 1931, he was
ordained at the
old-Prussian
united St. Matthew's Church ( ) in Berlin at the age of
25.
Confessing Church
Bonhoeffer's promising academic and ecclesiastical career was
dramatically altered with Nazi accession to power on January 30,
1933. He was a determined opponent of the regime from its first
days. Two days after Hitler was installed as Chancellor, Bonhoeffer
delivered a radio address attacking Hitler, in which he warned
Germany against slipping into an idolatrous cult of the
FĂĽhrer (leader), who could very well turn out to be
VerfĂĽhrer (mis-leader, or seducer). He was cut off the air
in the middle of a sentence. In April, he raised the first and
virtually lone voice for church resistance to Hitler's persecution
of Jews when he declared that church must not simply "bandage the
victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself."
Bonhoeffer then put all his efforts in campaigning for the election
of
presbyters and
synodals in July, which Hitler had unconstitutionally
imposed onto all German
Protestant church
bodies.
Even before Nazi seizure of power, there had been struggle within
the Evangelical Church of the old Prussian Church between
nationalistic
German Christian
movement and Young Reformers in the constitutional church election
in November 1932, which now threatened to explode into
schism. Despite Bonhoeffer's efforts, an
overwhelming majority of Nazi-supported
German Christians
won key church positions in the rigged July election.
German
Christians won a majority within the general synod of the
Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and within
its provincial synods - except of the one of Westphalia
- , as well as in many synods of other Protestant
church bodies, except of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in Bavaria right of the river Rhine, the Evangelical
Lutheran State Church of Hanover, and the Lutheran Evangelical State
Church in WĂĽrttemberg, which the opposition thus regarded as
uncorrupted intact churches, as opposed to the other then
so-called destroyed churches.
Bonhoeffer urged an interdict upon all pastoral services (baptisms,
weddings, funerals, etc) in opposition to Nazification, but Barth
and others advised against such radical proposal.
In August 1933, Bonhoeffer and
Hermann
Sasse were deputed by opposition church leaders to draft the
Bethel Confession, a new statement of faith in
opposition to German Christians. Notable for affirming God's
faithfulness to Jews as His chosen people, Bethel Confession was
however so watered down to make it more palatable that later
Bonhoeffer himself refused to sign. In September 1933, Bonhoeffer
helped form the
Pfarrernotbund with his colleague
Martin Niemöller, a forerunner
to the
Confessing Church that was
to be organized in May 1934 at Barmen in opposition to
Nazi-supported
German Christian
movement.
The Confessing Church was not large, but it represented a major
source of
Christian opposition to the Nazi
government. The
Barmen
Declaration, drafted by
Karl Barth
and adopted by the Confessing Church, insisted that Christ, not the
FĂĽhrer, was the head of the church. However, most streamlined
Protestant church bodies and the newly established Nazi-submissive
German Evangelical Church,
shaped by long traditions of nationalism and obedience to state
authority in their functions as
state
churches (until 1918), for most part acquiesced to Nazification
of the church. In September 1933, the church
Aryan paragraph prohibiting non-Aryans from
taking parish posts was approved by the national church synod at
Wittenberg. When Bonhoeffer was offered such a post in eastern
Berlin, he refused it in protest of the racist policy.
London ministry
Disheartened by the German Churches'
complacency with the Nazi regime, 27-year-old Bonhoeffer accepted
in the autumn of 1933 a two-year appointment as a pastor of two
German-speaking Protestant churches in London
, St. Paul's
and Sydenham. He explained to Barth that he found little
support for his views, even among friends, and that "it was about
time to go for a while into the desert", but Barth regarded this as
running away from real battle. He sharply rebuked Bonhoeffer that
"I can only reply to all the reasons and excuses which you put
forward: 'And what of the German Church?'" Barth accused him of
abandoning his post and wasting his "splendid theological armory"
while "the house of your church is on fire" and chided him to
return to Berlin "by the next ship." Bonhoeffer however did not go
to England simply to avoid trouble at home, but he hoped to use
ecumenical movement in the interest of the Confessing Church. He
continued his involvement with Confessing Church, running up a
staggeringly high telephone bill to maintain his contact with
Niemöller. In the international gatherings, he rallied people to an
opposition to
German Christian
movement and its attempt to amalgamate Nazi racism with the
Christian gospel. Bishop Theodor Heckel, the official in charge of
German Evangelical Church foreign affairs, traveled to London
to warn Bonhoeffer to abstain from any ecumenical activity not
directly authorized by Berlin. Bonhoeffer refused.
Finkenwalde Seminary
In 1935,
Bonhoeffer was presented with a much-sought after opportunity to
study non-violent resistance under Gandhi in
his ashram, but perhaps remembering Barth's
rebuke, he decided to return to Germany in order to head an
underground seminary for training Confessing Church pastors in Finkenwalde
(and then at the von
Blumenthal estate of Gross
Schlönwitz
. The pastors of Groß Schlönwitz and
neighbouring villages supported the education by employing and
housing the students as vicars in their congregations.
In summer 1939 the
seminary could move to Sigurdshof, an outlying estate (Vorwerk) of
von Kleist family in Wendisch
Tychow
. There the Gestapo
shut down the seminary after the outbreak of
World War II in March 1940. As
the Nazi suppression of the Confessing Church intensified, Barth
was driven back to Switzerland that year,
Martin Niemöller was arrested in July
1937 and Bonhoeffer's authorization to teach at the University of
Berlin was revoked in August 1936 after he was denounced as
"
pacifist and enemy of the state" by
Theodor Heckel.
Bonhoeffer's efforts for the underground seminaries included
securing necessary funds, and he found a great benefactor in Ruth
von Kleist-Retzow. In times of trouble, his former students and
their wives would take refuge in her Pomeranian estate and
Bonhoeffer himself was a frequent guest. Later he would fall in
love with Kleist-Retzow's granddaughter Maria von Wedemeyer, to
whom he was engaged three months before his arrest. By August 1937,
Himmler decreed the education and examination of Confessing
ministry candidates illegal.
In September 1937, the Gestapo closed the seminary at Finkenwalde and by November
arrested 27 pastors and former students. It was around this
time that Bonhoeffer published his best-known book,
The Cost of Discipleship, a
study on the
Sermon on the Mount
in which he attacked "cheap grace" as a cover for ethical laxity
and preached "costly grace".
Bonhoeffer spent the next two years secretly travelling from one
eastern German village to another to conduct "seminary on the run"
supervising of his students, most of whom were working illegally in
small parishes. His monastic communal life and teaching at
Finkenwalde seminary formed the basis of his books
The Cost of
Discipleship and
Life Together. In 1938, the Gestapo
banned him from Berlin.
His sister Sabine, her Jewish-classified husband Gerhard Leibholz,
and two daughters escaped to England by way of Switzerland in
September.
Return to the United States
In February 1938, Bonhoeffer made an initial contact with members
of
German Resistance when his
brother-in-law
Hans von Dohnanyi
introduced him to a group seeking Hitler's overthrow at
Abwehr, German military intelligence.Bonhoeffer also
learned from Dohnanyi that war was imminent. He was particularly
troubled by the prospect of his call-up. As a committed
pacifist opposed to Nazi regime, he could never
swear an oath to Hitler and fight in his army, which was
potentially a capital offence. Yet he was also worried about
consequence of refusing military service for Confessing Church, a
move that would be frowned upon by most Christians and their
churches at the time.
It was at this juncture that Bonhoeffer left for the United States
in June 1939 at the invitation of Union Theological Seminary in New
York. Amid much inner turmoil, he soon regretted his decision
despite strong pressures from his friends to stay in the U.S. He
wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr: "I have come to the conclusion that I
made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this
difficult period in our national history with the people of
Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconÂstruction
of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the
trials of this time with my people... Christians in Germany will
have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat
of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or
willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying
civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but
I cannot make that choice from security." He returned to Germany on
the last scheduled steamer to cross the Atlantic.Dietrich
Bonhoeffer,
A Testament to Freedom, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly,
p35
Double agent of Abwehr
Back in Germany, Bonhoeffer was further harassed by the Nazi
authorities as he was forbidden to speak in public and was required
to regularly report his activities to the police in 1940. In 1941,
he was forbidden to print or to publish. In the meantime,
Bonhoeffer, an avowed pacifist and pastor, joined the Abwehr (a German military intelligence organization)
which was also the center of the anti-Hitler resistance. Bonhoeffer
advocated Hitler's assassination and knew about various 1943 plots against Hitler
through Dohnanyi, who was actively involved in the planning. In the
face of Nazi atrocities, the full scale of which he learned through
the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer concluded that "the ultimate question for a
responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself
heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall
continue to live." He did not justify his action but accepted that
he was taking guilt upon himself as he wrote "when a man takes
guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to
himself and no one else. He answers for it...Before other men he is
justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his
conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace." (In this
connection, it is worthwhile to recall his 1932 sermon, in which he
said: “the blood of martyrs might once again be demanded, but this
blood, if we really have the courage and loyalty to shed it, will
not be innocent, shining like that of the first witnesses for the
faith. On our blood lies heavy guilt, the guilt of the unprofitable
servant who is cast into outer darkness.” )
Under cover of Abwehr, he served as a courier for the German
resistance movement to reveal its existence and intentions and
secure possible peace terms for post-Hitler government with the
Allies through his ecumenical contacts abroad. His visits to
Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland were camouflaged as legitimate
intelligence activities for Abwehr. In May 1942, he met Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, member
of the House of
Lords
and ally of Confessing Church, consulted by
Bonhoeffer's exiled brother-in-law Leibholz, through whom feelers
were sent to Anthony Eden, British foreign minister.
However, British government ignored these like all other approaches
from German resistance. Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were also involved
in Abwehr operation to help German Jews escape to Switzerland
. It was during this time that Bonhoeffer
worked on Ethics and wrote letters to keep up the spirits
of his former students. He intended Ethics as his magnum
opus, but it remained unfinished due to his arrest.
Arrest
On
April 6, 1943, Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi were arrested not because of
their conspiracy but because of long-standing rivalry between
SS
and Abwehr
for intelligence fiefdom. One of the informers of Abwehr, Wilhelm
Schmidhuber, was arrested by the Gestapo for involvement in a private currency
affair. In the subsequent investigations the Gestapo
uncovered Dohnanyi's operation in which 14 Jews were sent to
Switzerland ostensibly as Abwehr agents and large sums in foreign
currency were paid to them as compensation for confiscated
properties. The Gestapo, which had been looking for any dirt to
discredit Abwehr, sensed that they had a corruption case against
Dohnanyi and searched his office at Abwehr, where they discovered
notes revealing Bonhoeffer's foreign contacts and other documents
related to the anti-Hitler conspiracy. One of them was a note that
discussed plans for a journey by Bonhoeffer to Rome, where he would
explain to church leaders why the assassination attempts on Hitler in March
1943 had failed. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer's involvement in
assassination plots was not known by the Gestapo as Abwehr
succeeded in explaining away the most damning documents as official
coded Military Intelligence materials. Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer
were, however, suspected of subverting Nazi policy toward Jews and
misusing Abwehr for inappropriate purposes. Bonhoeffer was, for
instance, suspected of evading military call-up, using Abwehr to
circumvent Gestapo injunction against public speaking and staying
in Berlin, using Abwehr to further Confessing Church works,
etc.
Imprisonment
For a
year and a half, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned at Tegel
military
prison while awaiting trial. There he continued his work in
religious outreach among his fellow prisoners and guards.
Sympathetic guards helped smuggle his letters out of prison to
Eberhard Bethge and others, and
these uncensored letters were posthumously published in Letters
and Papers from Prison. A guard named Corporal Knobloch even
offered to help him escape from the prison and "disappear" with
him, and plans were made for that end. But Bonhoeffer declined it
fearing Nazi retribution on his family, especially his brother and
brother-in-law, who were then also imprisoned.
FlossenbĂĽrg concentration camp,
Arrestblock-Hof: Memorial to members of German resistance executed
on April 9, 1945
After the failure of the
July 20 Plot
on Hitler's life in 1944 and the discovery of secret Abwehr
documents relating to the conspiracy by the Gestapo in September
1944, Bonhoeffer's connections with the conspirators were
discovered.
He was transferred from the military prison
in Berlin Tegel, where he had been held for 18 months, to the
detention cellar of the house prison of the Reich
Security Head Office
, the Gestapo's high security prison.
In
February 1945, he was secretly moved to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to
FlossenbĂĽrg
.
On April 4, 1945, the diaries of
Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr,
were discovered and in a rage upon reading them Hitler ordered that
the Abwehr conspirators be destroyed. Bonhoeffer was led away just
as he concluded his final Sunday service and asked an English
prisoner Payne Best to remember him to Bishop George Bell of
Chichester if he should ever reach his home: "This is the end — for
me the beginning of life."
Execution
Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on April
8, 1945, by SS judge
Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without
witnesses, records of proceedings or a defence in FlossenbĂĽrg
concentration camp. He was executed there by
hanging at dawn on April 9, 1945, just three weeks
before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the
capitulation of
Nazi Germany. Like other executions associated
with the
July 20 Plot, the execution
was particularly brutal. Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing
and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged with
thin wire for strangulation. Hanged with Bonhoeffer were fellow
conspirators
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Canaris' deputy
General Hans Oster,
military jurist General
Karl Sack, General
Friedrich von Rabenau,
businessman
Theodor StrĂĽnck,
and
German resistance (anti-Nazi)
fighter
Ludwig Gehre. Bonhoeffer's
brother,
Klaus Bonhoeffer, and his
brothers-in-law
Hans von Dohnanyi
and
RĂĽdiger Schleicher were
executed elsewhere later in the month.
The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote: “I saw Pastor
Bonhoeffer ... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I
was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout
and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of
execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few
steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a
few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I
have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will
of God.”
Legacy
Bonhoeffer is commemorated as a theologian and martyr by the
Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America, the
Church of England and the
Church in Wales.
Bonhoeffer's life as a pastor and theologian of great intellect and
spirituality who lived as he preached and his martyrdom in
opposition to Nazism exerted great influence and inspiration for
Christians across broad denominations and ideologies including
figures such as
Martin Luther King
Jr. and Archbishop
Desmond
Tutu.
Overshadowed by his life and death, his theology has nevertheless
remained very influential although interpretations are necessarily
often based on speculations and projections. Because of its
unsystematic and fragmentary nature due to his early death, his
theology was subject to diverse and often contradictory
interpretations. His
Christocentric
approach appealed to conservative, confession-minded Protestants
while his commitment to social justice as a cardinal responsibility
of Christianity appealed to liberal Protestants.
Central to his theology is Christ, in whom God and the world are
reconciled. Bonhoeffer's God is a suffering God, whose
manifestation is found in this-worldliness. He believed that the
Incarnation of God in flesh made it
unacceptable to speak of God and the world "in terms of two
spheres," an implicit attack upon Luther's
doctrine of the two kingdoms.
Bonhoeffer stressed personal and collective piety and revived the
idea of imitation of Christ. He argued that Christians should not
retreat from the world, but have a duty to act within it. He
believed that two elements were constitutive of faith: the
implementation of justice and the acceptance of divine suffering.
He insisted that the church, like the Christians, "had to share in
the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world" if it were
to be a true church of Christ.
In his prison letters, Bonhoeffer also raised tantalizing questions
about the role of Christianity and the church in a "world come of
age", where human beings no longer need a metaphysical God as a
stop-gap to human limitations, and mused about the emergence of a
"religionless Christianity", where God would be unclouded from
metaphysical constructions of the last 1900 years. Influenced by
Barth's distinction between faith and religion, he had a critical
view of the phenomenon of religion and asserted that revelation
abolished religion (which he called the "garment" of faith).
Bonhoeffer, who witnessed the complete failure of the German
Protestant church as an institution in the face of Nazism, saw this
challenge as an opportunity of renewal for Christianity.
Years after Bonhoeffer's death, some Protestant thinkers developed
his critique into a thoroughgoing attack against traditional
Christianity in the "
Death of God"
movement, which briefly attracted the attention of the mainstream
culture in the mid-1960s. However, some critics, such as
Jacques Ellul and others, have charged that
those radical interpretations of Bonhoeffer's insights amount to a
grave distortion, that Bonhoeffer did not mean to say that God no
longer had anything to do with humanity and had become a mere
cultural artifact. More recent Bonhoeffer interpretation is more
cautious in this regard, respecting the parameters of the
neo-orthodox school to which he belonged.
Works by Bonhoeffer
English translations of Bonhoeffer's works, most of which were
originally written in German, are available:
- The Young Bonhoeffer 1918–1927. Fortress Press, 2002.
ISBN 0-8006-8309-9.
- This
first volume in the Fortress Press critical edition of Bonhoeffer's
work gathers his earliest letters and journals through his
graduation from Berlin University
. It also contains his early theological
writings up to his dissertation. The seventeen essays include works
on the patristic period for Adolf von
Harnack, on Luther's moods for Karl Holl, on biblical
interpretation for Professor Reinhold Seeberg, as well as essays on
the church and eschatology, reason and revelation, Job, John, and
even joy. Rounding out this picture of Bonhoeffer's nascent
theology are his sermons from the period, along with his lectures
on homiletics, catechesis, and practical theology.
- Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931, a translation
of Barcelona, Berlin, Amerika: 1928–1931. Fortress Press:
not yet released.
- Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of
the Church. Clifford Green (editor); Reinhard Krauss
(translator); Nancy Lukens (translator). Fortress Press, 1998. ISBN
0-8006-8301-3.
- Bonhoeffer's dissertation, completed in 1927 and first
published in 1930 as Sanctorum Communio: eine Dogmatische
Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche. In it he attempts to
work out a theology of the person in society, and particularly in
the church. Along with explaining his early positions on sin, evil,
solidarity, collective spirit, and collective guilt, it unfolds a systematic
theology of the Spirit at work in the church and what it implies
for questions on authority, freedom, ritual, and eschatology.
- Act and Being. Clifford Green (editor); Reinhard
Krauss (translator); Nancy Lukens (translator). Fortress Press,
1996. ISBN 0-8006-8302-1
- Bonhoeffer’s second dissertation, written in 1929–30 and
published in 1931 as Akt und Sein, deals with the
consciousness and conscience in theology from the perspective of
the Reformation's insight
into the origin sinfulness in the “heart turned in upon itself and
thus open neither to the revelation of God nor to the encounter
with the neighbor.” Bonhoeffer’s thoughts about power, revelation,
Otherness, theological method, and theological anthropology are
explained.
- Ecumenical, Academic and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932,
translation of Ökumene, Universität, Pfarramt: 1931–1932.
Fortress Press: not yet released.
- Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis
1–3. John W. de Gruchy (Editor); Douglas Stephen Bax
(Translator). Fortress Press, November 20, 1997. ISBN
0-8006-8303-X.
- Creation and Fall, lectures given
at the University of Berlin in 1932–33 during the demise of the
Weimar
Republic
and the
birth of the Third Reich. In a
book published in 1933 as Schöpfung und Fall, Bonhoeffer
called his students to focus their attention on the word of God the
word of truth in a time of turmoil.
- Christology (1966) London: William Collins and New
York: Harper and Row. Translation of lectures given in Berlin in
1933, from vol. 3 of Gesammelte Schriften, Christian
Kaiser Verlag, 1960. retitled as Christ the Center, Harper
San Francisco 1978 paperback: ISBN 0-06-060811-0
- London: 1933–1935, translation of London:
1933–1935. Fortress Press: not yet released.
- The Cost of
Discipleship (1948 in English). Touchstone edition with
introduction by Bishop George
Bell and memoir by G. Leibholz, 1995 paperback: ISBN
0-684-81500-1. Critical edition published under its original title
Discipleship: John D. Godsey (editor); Geffrey B. Kelly
(editor). Fortress Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8006-8324-2
- Bonhoeffer's most widely read book begins, "Cheap grace is the
mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly
grace." That was a sharp warning to his own church, which was
engaged in bitter conflict with the official nazified state church,
The book was first published in 1937 as Nachfolge
(Discipleship). It soon became a classic exposition of what it
means to follow Christ in a modern world beset by a dangerous and
criminal government. At its center stands an interpretation of the
Sermon on the Mount: what Jesus
demanded of his followers—and how the life of discipleship is to be
continued in all ages of the post- resurrection church.
- Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937,
translation of Illegale Theologenausbildung: 1935–1937.
Fortress Press: not yet released.
- Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940,
translation of Illegale Theologenausbildung: 1937–1940.
Fortress Press: not yet released.
- Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible James H.
Burtness (coauthor); Geffrey B. Kelly (editor); Daniel W. Bloesch
(translator). Fortress Press: 1995. ISBN 0-8006-8305-6.
- The stimulus for the writing of Life Together was the closing of the
preacher’s seminary at Finkenwalde. The treatise contains
Bonhoeffer’s thoughts about the nature of Christian community based
on the common life that he and his seminarians experienced at the
seminary and in the “Brother’s House” there. Life Together
was completed in 1938, published in 1939 as Gemeinsames
Leben, and first translated into English in 1954. Harper San
Francisco 1978 paperback: ISBN 0-06-060852-8
- Prayerbook of the Bible is a classic of Christian
spirituality. In this theological interpretation of the Psalms,
Bonhoeffer describes the moods of an individual’s relationship with
God and also the turns of love and heartbreak, of joy and sorrow,
that are themselves the Christian community’s path to God.
- Ethics (1955 in English by SCM Press). Touchstone
edition, 1995 paperback: ISBN 0-684-81501-X. Fortress Press 2004
critical edition: Clifford Green (editor); Reinhard Krauss
(translator); Douglas W. Stott (translator); Charles C. West
(translator). ISBN 0-8006-8306-4.
- This is the culmination of Bonhoeffer's theological and
personal odyssey. Based on careful reconstruction of the
manuscripts, freshly and expertly translated and annotated, the
critical edition features an insightful introduction by Clifford
Green and an afterword from the German edition's editors. Though
caught up in the vortex of momentous forces in the Nazi period,
Bonhoeffer systematically envisioned a radically Christocentric,
incarnational ethic for a post-war world, purposefully recasting
Christians' relation to history, politics, and public life.
- Fiction from Tegel Prison Clifford Green (editor);
Nancy Lukens (translator). Fortress Press: 1999. ISBN
0-8006-8307-2.
- Writing fiction—an incomplete drama, a novel fragment, and a
short story—occupied much of Bonhoeffer’s first year in Tegel
prison, as well as writing to his family and his fiancée and
dealing with his interrogation. “There is a good deal of
autobiography mixed in with it,” he explained to his friend and
biographer Eberhard Bethge. Richly annotated by German editors
Renate Bethge and Ilse Todt and by Clifford Green, the writings in
this book disclose a great deal of Bonhoeffer’s family context,
social world, and cultural milieu. Events from his life are
recounted in a way that illuminates his theology. Characters and
situations that represent Nazi types and attitudes became a form of
social criticism and help to explain Bonhoeffer’s participation in
the resistance movement and the plot to kill Hitler.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, (first English
translation 1953 by SCM Press). This edition translated by Reginald H. Fuller and Frank Clark from
Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der
Haft. Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag (1970). Touchstone 1997
paperback: ISBN 0-684-83827-3
- Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940–1945 Mark Brocker
(editor). Fortress Press: 2006. ISBN 0-8006-8316-1
- In hundreds of letters, including letters written to his
fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer (selected from the complete
correspondence, previously published as "Love Letters from Cell 92"
Ruth-Alice von Bismarck and Ulrich Kabitz (editors), Abingdon Press
(April 1995) ISBN 0-687-01098-5), as well as official documents,
short original pieces, and a few final sermons, the volume sheds
light on Bonhoeffer's active resistance to and increasing
involvement in the conspiracy against the Hitler regime, his
arrest, and his long imprisonment. Finally, Bonhoeffer's many
exchanges with his family, fiancée, and closest friends,
demonstrate the affection and solidarity that accompanied
Bonhoeffer to his prison cell, concentration camp, and eventual
death.
- A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer (1990). Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson,
editors. Harper San Francisco 1995 2nd edition, paperback: ISBN
0-06-064214-9
Works about Bonhoeffer
- Books
- Non-fiction
- Gillian Court, Heart of Flesh: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a study
in Christian prophecy (Churches Together in Britain and
Ireland, 2007). ISBN 0-85169-330-x
- Keith Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain (Churches
Together in Britain and Ireland, 2006). ISBN 0 85169 307 5
- Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for His Times: A
Biography Rev. ed. (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2000).
- Craig J. Slane, Bonhoeffer as Martyr: Social Responsibility
and Modern Christian Commitment (Brazos Press, 2004).
- Stephen R. Haynes,The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust
Perspectives (Fortress Press, 2006). ISBN 0-8006-3815-8.
- Stephen Plant, Bonhoeffer (Continuum International
Publishing, 2004). ISBN 0-8264-5089-X.
- Edwin Robertson,
Bonhoeffer's Legacy: The Christian Way in a World Without
Religion (Collier Books, 1989). ISBN 0-02-036372-9.
- Edwin Robertson, The
Shame and the Sacrifice: The life and teaching of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer (Hodder & Stoughton, 1987). ISBN
0-340-41063-9.
- Dallas M. Roark, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Makers of the
Modern Theological Mind. (Word Publishing Group, 1972) ISBN
0849929768
- Audrey Constant, No Compromise: The story of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer Faith in action series. ISBN 0 08-029272-0 (non
net) ISBN 0 08-029273-9 (net)
- Fiction
- Daniel Jándula, El Reo (Tarragona: Ediciones Noufront,
2009). ISBN 13-978-84-937017-0-3
- Denise Giardina, Saints and
Villains (Ballantine Books, 1999). ISBN 0-449-00427-9. A
Fictional Account of Bonhoeffer's life.
- Mary Glazener, The Cup of Wrath: A Novel Based on Dietrich
Bonhoeffer's Resistance to Hitler (Macon, GA: Smyth &
Helwys Publishing, 1996). ISBN 1-57312-019-7.
- George Mackay Brown,
Magnus (Hogarth Press, 1973)
A novel in which the imprisoned 10th century Orcadian saint
Magnus Erlendsson is transformed
into Bonhoeffer.
- Films
- Plays
- Bonhoeffer - a Finnish
monologue
play written and performed by Timo Kankainen and directed by
Eija-Irmeli Lahti, premiered in January 2008 at the Seinäjoki
city theatre.
- Personal Honor: Suggested by the Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -
written by Nancy Axelrad and performed by the Ricks-Weil Theatre
Company (directed by Thom Johnson), premiered May 1, 2009 at the
H.J. Ricks Centre for the Arts in Greenfield, Indiana.
- Audio Drama
- Focus on the Family
Radio Theatre created an audio drama on the
life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1997. Titled "Bonhoeffer: The
Cost of Freedom", this three-hour series was highly acclaimed and
received a Peabody award for broadcast
excellence in 1998. (Tyndale, 1997, 1999, 2007)
- Verse about Bonhoeffer
- Opera
- Art (Iconography)
References
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