Dietrich Bonhoeffer Influence On Religion

“Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when faith and sole allegiance to God, he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God’s question and call.” This quote reflected Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s view of Christianity. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and religious scholar who opposed Adolph Hitler and the German Nazis. Bonhoeffer was one of the few Christian leaders actively to resist the discriminatory actions of the German leaders.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the earliest critics of Nazi Germany and became a leading spokesman of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer and his twin sister Sabine were born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau,
Germany. Bonhoeffer and Sabine were two of eight children of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer. Karl was a professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Berlin University and Germany’s leading empirical psychologist and his mother, Paula, were one of the few women to receive a college degree. Education has always been an important part of their life. Bonhoeffer graduated from the University of Berlin in 1927 at the age of twenty-one. He then became an assistance pastor to the German speaking people in Barcelona, Spain. In 1930, he went back to Germany to write his dissertation. In late 1930, Bonhoeffer spent a year in New York’s Union Theological Seminary, before returning to a lecturer position at the University of Berlin. While living in New York, Bonhoeffer attended the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and became interested in social justice and racial injustice. When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Germans Evangelical Church of Bonhoeffer, entered a testing time in its history.
Due to be strongly influenced by nationalism, many church leaders and members applauded the growth of Nazism. German Christians in 1933 started the Reich Church, which encouraged the Nazification of German Protestants. These Christians wanted the Protestants to conform to the Nazi philosophy and wanted the Church to embrace Aryan laws. They also believed Jews could not become members of the German Church through baptism. The extreme ideas of the German Church caused moderate Protestants to form the Confessing Church. When the Nazis started issuing strict laws against the Jews in 1933, Bonhoeffer spoke out against them in his essay, “The Church and the Jewish Questions.” He said, “The church must defend those abused by the state, even to the point of taking direct action against the government if necessary.” In creating this argument, he used scripture to support his belief. Bonhoeffer’s argument of the Jews was based on the Christian belief that Christianity replaced Judaism as God’s chosen
people. In 1936, Bonhoeffer started an underground seminary for anti-Nazi members. After leaving the seminary, the ministers were denied positions by the conservative church leaders. In 1937, the education of pastors for the Confessing Church was proclaimed to be illegal and seventeen of Bonhoeffer’s former students were arrested. Bonhoeffer then secretly traveled from village to village, preaching against the Nazi government. In 1938, he was prohibited to preach or to enter Berlin. In 1940, Bonhoeffer was forbidden to speech in public. Bonhoeffer came to America and became a guest lecturer around the country, but had an unsettling feeling of responsibility to Germany. He wrote Reinhold Niebuhr and said, “I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
After returning to Germany, Bonhoeffer started to observe the persecution of the Jews, his attitude started to change. He no longer saw them as inferior to Christians. At a 1938 Confessing Church service, he said, “that the church and synagogue were equal in the eyes of God.” The November pogrom hardened his opposition to the Nazi’s racial policies. Bonhoeffer started to turn from the Confessing Church policy concerning Hitler and the Jews, to the international community condemning Hitler’s attack on the Jews. After the closing of the seminary and Bonhoeffer being banned from preaching and entering Berlin, the Confessing Church became hesitant to speak out against Hitler and the government. Bonhoeffer changed from being a pacifist and tried to resist the Nazis through religious actions and was pressed to hinder the Nazis by working within the government. In 1940, Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi joined the German’s Military Intelligence and served as a double agent. While going to church conferences around Europe, he tried to help Jews escape Germany, instead of collecting information about the places he traveled to. After the first deportation of Berlin Jews on October 15, 1941, Bonhoeffer and Friedrich Perels, a Confessing Church lawyer, wrote a memo concerning the deportation. The memo was sent to contact in other countries and trusted German military officials, hoping it would lead them to act. Bonhoeffer was also involved in Operation Seven; this was a plan to get Jews out of Germany. They were given papers identify themselves as foreign agents and money to get them out of Germany. After the Gestapo discovered Operation Seven in April 1943, Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi were arrested and carried to Tegel prison. After the failed July 20, 1944, assassination attempt of Hitler, Bonhoeffer was connected to wider resistance plans. When the resistance plans were discovered he was transferred from Tegal to a Gestapo prison. In February 1945, he was taken to Buchenwald and in April he was moved to Flossengurg. On April 9, 1945, one month before Germany surrendered, he was hanged with other accomplices. Of the accomplices who were executed, were his brother Klaus Bonhoeffer, his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rudiger Schleicher. While in prison, Bonhoeffer impressed fellow prisoners and prison personal with his Christ-like behavior. A British POW who was with Bonhoeffer before his execution wrote, “He was, without exception, the finest and most loveable man I have ever met.” Bonhoeffer went to the gallows with unbelievable composure and even impressed the camp doctor. Eric Metaxas wrote, “This man who thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom, ended up turning the direst of situations into a memorable theological lesson. Such was the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christian.”