Bonhoeffer - A Conscience Captive to the Word of God

Now I know better, my early training notwithstanding. How I regret having never questioned the then prevailing notion that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the theological bad guys - not only was he supposedly suspect as to orthodoxy but actually an enemy of the Gospel. Thankfully, it is not too late to profit from the life and writings of this man of God.

Truly, if ever a man spoke with a "conscience captive to the Word of God" (M. Luther) - it was Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. This is the title of the very revealing and moving new book by Eric Metaxas (also the author of the seminal Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery).

Metaxas' work is sorely needed, not just for me but for so many others who have been misinformed. Bonhoeffer dared to criticize the politicized cultural "Christianity" of Hitler's Germany (primarily the unbiblical "religious" legalism, fomalism, and Nazi compromise). Metaxas emphasizes - and proves - that Bonhoeffer was not, as some have said, a liberal Christian opposing genuine Christianity. Unfortunately, some English-speaking interpreters of his German letters have unjustly distorted his prison-letters and taken certain phrases -- such as "religionless christianity" -- out of context. To see his genuine love for the whole, unabridged Word of God, please see Bonhoeffer's little booklet, Life Together. 

Kevin Williamson wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "Bonhoeffer’s is a story that the most imaginative novelist could not have invented." I can tell you that it actually does read like a novel while also opening up that darkest of times; after all these years his descriptions still stretch credulity: How could these things have ever happened? How could such people exist in a civilized world and how could so many have been deceived? And how is it possible that so many died the grisley and horrific deaths that they died?

But more to the point, how could such a man as Bonhoeffer come to be? And how could he - or anyone - stand as he did against the tidal wave of National Socialism? He was often alone, and very often at odds with the Nazi controlled German Christians Church, misunderstood and doubted even by his own Confessing Church?

This is a book that is "unputdownable", but one that you eventually do have to stop reading, if only because it is well-over 500 pages long! But 500-plus gripping and inspiring pages they are. And besides that, with mind and emotions in overload, the only thing that one can do sometimes is set it aside. For me that was often to turn to the Word of God, to meditate, and to pray.

Bonhoeffer's best known work is The Cost of Discipleship. In the beginning of the 1963 Macmillan paperback edition there is a "Memoir" written by G. Leibholz." In it he describes Bonhoeffer's faith and martyrdom. Here is an edited version which includes some quotations directly from Discipleship:

Memoir

"In his hearing before the Gestapo during his imprisonment, defenseless and powerless as he then was, only fortified by the word of God in his heart, he stood erect and unbroken before his tormentors. He refused to recant, and defied the Gestapo machine by openly admitting that, as a Christian, he was an implacable enemy of National Socialism and its totalitarian demands toward the citizen—defied it, although he was continually threatened with torture and with the arrest of his parents, his sisters and his fiancée… In 1944, when friends made an attempt to liberate him and to take him to safety abroad, he decided to remain in prison in order not to endanger others.

"The last service which Dietrich Bonhoeffer held on the day before his death... 'moved all deeply....' Every Nazi inflicted death was calculated to be gruesome; Bonhoeffer's was no different when stripped naked he put his head in a noose of piano wire. "Bonhoeffer, who was never tried, went steadfastly on his last way to be hanged, and died with admirable calmness and dignity. God heard his prayer and granted him the 'costly grace'—that is, the privilege of taking the cross for others and of affirming his faith by martyrdom."

"How can a man wax arrogant if in this life he shares the suffering of God?" 

"Both modern liberal theology and secular totalitarianism hold pretty much in common that the message of the Bible has to be adapted more or less, to the requirements of a secular world. No wonder, therefore, that the process of debasing Christianity as by liberal theology led, in the long run, to a complete perversion and falsification of the essence of Christianity...." 

A Christian must be prepared, if necessary, to offer his life for this. Thus all kinds of secular totalitarianism which force man to cast aside his religious and moral obligations to God and subordinate the laws of justice and morality to the State are incompatible with his conception of life.…"

"The life of the spirit is not that which shuns death and keeps clear of destruction: rather it endures death and in death it is sustained. It only achieves its truth in the midst of utter destruction."

"In a modern dictatorship, however, with its subterranean ubiquity and all-embracing instruments of oppression, a revolt means certain death to all who support it. ... The future in modern society depends much more on the quiet heroism of the very few who are inspired by God. These few will greatly enjoy the divine inspiration and will be prepared to stand for the dignity of man and true freedom and to keep the law of God, even if it means martyrdom or death--

"… because they 'look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen; for the things which are seen /are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal." [2 Cor. 4:17-18, 33-34]

"Jesus invites all those that labor and are heavy laden, and nothing could be so contrary to our best intentions, and so fatal to our proclamation  as to drive men away from him by forcing upon them man-made dogmas. If we did so, we should make the love of Jesus Christ a laughing-stock to Christians and pagans alike."

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Please read the book. I would loan you mine but I got it at the library.