On an April afternoon in , two men arrived in a black Mercedes, put Bonhoeffer in the car, and drove him to Tegel prison. Bonhoeffer spent two years in prison, corresponding with family and friends, pastoring fellow prisoners, and reflecting on the meaning of "Jesus Christ for today. In another passage, he said, "To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself a sinner, a penitent, or a saint on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man—not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us.
It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. On April 9, , one month before Germany surrendered, he was hanged with six other resisters. A decade later, a camp doctor who witnessed Bonhoeffer's hanging described the scene: "The prisoners … were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of court martial read out to them.
Through the half-open door in one room of the huts, I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his 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 prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued in a few seconds. In the almost 50 years that I have worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God. Bonhoeffer's prison correspondence was eventually edited and published as Letters and Papers from Prison , which inspired much controversy and the "death of God" movement of the s though Bonhoeffer's close friend and chief biographer, Eberhard Bethge, said Bonhoeffer implied no such thing.
His Cost of Discipleship , as well as Life Together about Christian community, based on his teaching at the underground seminary , have remained devotional classics. Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer.
Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives. Christian History Archives Eras Home. He outlined three stages of this opposition. First, the church was called to question state injustice. Secondly, it had an obligation to help all victims of injustice, whether they were Christian or not. The essay reveals the complexity of Bonhoeffer's thought and action.
It was one of the earliest and clearest repudiations of National Socialism, revealing his early opposition to the regime. He never explicitly abandoned this view. Bonhoeffer's outspoken political opinions isolated him within his church, and throughout the s many of his activities were focused abroad. In September he attended the ecumenical World Alliance meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he spoke about the Jewish question and the delegates passed a resolution condemning Nazi actions against Jews.
Bonhoeffer took a copy of the resolution to the German consul in Sofia to prove that Nazi policies were damaging Germany's image abroad. The leaders of the German Evangelical Church in Berlin demanded that he withdraw from ecumenical activities; Bonhoeffer refused. From September to April , Bonhoeffer served as pastor to several German-speaking congregations in London, leading them to break with the official German church and join the Confessing Church.
In April , Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, where the Confessing Church was under increasing pressure from the Gestapo. Most church leaders refused to openly oppose the Nazi regime and criticized their colleagues who did. As a result, more radical Confessing Christians found themselves embattled on all sides. Bonhoeffer began to train young clergy at an illegal Confessing Church seminary, Finkenwalde, which was closed by the Gestapo in September Bonhoeffer spent the next two years secretly travelling throughout eastern Germany to supervise his students, most of whom were working illegally in small parishes.
The Gestapo banned him from Berlin in January and issued an order forbidding him from public speaking in September Bonhoeffer became informed about different German resistance plans in through his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, who worked in the Justice Ministry and was one of the earliest opponents of the regime.
In October , Dohnanyi used his connections to help Bonhoeffer avoid military service, obtaining an assignment for him in the office of Military Intelligence. Led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Military Intelligence office became the center of the German military resistance groups that eventually culminated in the July 20, , attempt to overthrow the regime.
On behalf of the Military Intelligence office Bonhoeffer made several trips outside the Reich between and , informing ecumenical contacts in Geneva and the Vatican of the resistance plans. By then he and members of his own family had for some time been on the fringe of circles that were opposed to the Nazi regime.
To Bonhoeffer, true discipleship now demanded political resistance against this criminal state. He wrote that the Christian must live maturely and responsibly in the world, and live by God's grace, not by ideology. He was increasingly implicated in the work of groups committed to the overthrow of the government.
In March he was arrested and incarcerated. On 20th July a final attempt was made by German citizens to destroy the Hitler regime for themselves. It failed disastrously, and hundreds of political prisoners were executed afterwards. Bonhoeffer himself survived as a prisoner until 9th April He was executed only a few days before the end of the war, as the Soviet armies moved across the diminishing face of the Third Reich to victory.
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