Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi, and founding member of the Confessing Church. He died on April 9, 1945. I did a talk some months ago summarizing Bonhoeffer’s excellent book Life Together. Here is my conclusion:
Bonhoeffer was hanged less than a month before he would have been liberated by allied forces. He never for a moment believed that the world needed to be given over to evil. He believed in the redemption of this world, and he also believed that the Gospel called us to speak into all issues of life. When Christians retreat from the public square we are leaving room for another Hitler to rise. “The Christian faith,” he said, “could never be really intellectual theory…but a responsible, obedient action, the discipleship of Christ in every situation of concrete everyday life in private or in public.” Bonhoeffer believed that life together was a necessary testament to the Gospel. It was a taste of our life together in the resurrected world. This is why for him, death was not the end. One of the English officers described his last encounter with Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
Bonhoeffer was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near….he had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said: “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.” That had only one meaning for all prisoners—the gallows. We said good-by to him. He took me aside: “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.”
Life Together now does not end at death. At that moment, it will be only the beginning of a much richer and purer life with one another.
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