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The Christian Faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Twenty-one years ago, The Kreiders, the Hildebrands, the Hintzes, the Ratzlaffs and we
spent a year studying this booklet, Life Together written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The
book was instrumental in helping our group focus on the undertaking which we had
envisioned and came about in the Menno Simons Centre and the beginning of this
congregation in September of 1986. This booklet was written by Bonhoeffer to provide
pastors who were training at his illegal Seminary with an understanding of life together in
a church community. A subtitle on the cover further explains that this booklet is a
discussion of Christian fellowship.
We have now completed almost twenty years of fellowship in this place and so this year
is a good time to reflect our experience and compare in a small way with that of the ideals
set out in this booklet. Our Anabaptist forefathers focused on the life of the Christian in
this world. Menno Simons came to understand the centrality of faith based on the life and
death of Christ as contained in the gospels of the New Testament. He also emphasized
that this had to be actualized in the life of the Christian as a life of faith in this world.
Bonhoeffer found the same centrality of the message in his short lifetime. A phrase that
is helpful for us is one he wrote in a letter to his father who had taught him what he
termed, an insistent realism, a “turning away from the phraseological to the real.” For
him, Christianity could never be merely intellectual theory, doctrine divorced from life,
or mystical emotion, but always it must be responsible, obedient action, the discipleship
of Christ in every situation of concrete everyday life.
Bonhoeffer was born in 1905 and grew up in a Germany that can be characterized as a
European centre of culture and learning. The heritage of music and art, literature,
philosophy, psychiatry, theology, and science in the early 20th Century was at the
forefront of that of any country. His family was of German aristocracy and had been
strongly connected to government and learning. Dietrich’s father was a leading
psychiatrist and head of the psychiatric clinic in Berlin. As a side comment, his father
did not agree with the theories of Freud. The religion in the family home was that of the
national state religion, namely Lutheran. Church attendance was not regular, but prayer
and celebration of the major religious events was a part of the family “culture”.
Bonhoeffer was an excellent pianist and in his teens considered a career as a pianist. He
kept an instrument in his room and took one with him to his various places of residence.
He enjoyed the luxuries of regular forest and seaside vacations, read widely and
extensively. At the age of sixteen, he was sure he wanted to study theology. His informal
education continued when he spent three months in Rome to study the Catholic Church
which according to his diary helped him to understand the “concept of the church.”
Bethge, his biographer says “Bonhoeffer’s attention was soon completely absorbed by the
phenomenon of the church… He based his core theological principles upon this
ambiguous but concrete structure. His journey to Rome essentially helped him to
articulate the theme of ‘the church.’ The motive of concreteness – of not getting lost in
metaphysical speculation – was a genuine root of this approach.”
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He finished his doctoral dissertation, The Communion of Saints at age twenty-one. This
was his first publication and was a strong theological beginning of Bonhoeffer’s lifelong
interest in exploring the nature and vocation of the church within society. He began to
read Karl Barth and found resonance with his thinking. Bonhoeffer’s description of the
church as “Christ existing as the church community” would prove to be a standard of
whether churches truly reflected the spirit of Jesus Christ. He began to serve in concrete
church settings, spending a year in Barcelona, serving the German churches there, a year
in New York studying at New York’s Union Theological Seminary where he came in
contact with Niebuhr and also a classmate Jean Lassere, a pacifist with whom he
maintained a lifetime friendship. He came into contact with the black Abyssinian Baptist
Church in New York. He spent a year in London, again serving the German churches
there. Here he made very significant connections with the Anglican Bishop Bell. When
in Berlin he either taught at the University or pastored a church, notably a church in the
poorest part of Berlin where he worked specifically with youth. He served as a
representative for the ecumenical councils such as the World Alliance for Promoting
International Fellowship as well as the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work.
Here he made a huge impact with his almost prophetic messages and challenges.
In Barcelona, New York and in Berlin, he had his first experiences with poverty. He
began to sensitize his congregants to those less fortunate and throughout his ministry he
began to counsel the community to look on the diversity not as a problem of the common
life, but as a cause for rejoicing and an opportunity to tighten community bonds.
Bonhoeffer implied that the community’s strength lies in the care it takes of its weakest
members. The elimination of the weak is the death of the community he said. These are
words written in the face of Nazi determination to euthanize the mentally and
emotionally weak and physically handicapped. He was referring not only to society but
also to the church. The practical directives he gives in his book, Life Together, are all
related to the manner in which a community’s diversity provides and opportunity for
individuals and the community itself to grow in the love of Jesus Christ and in their love
and esteem for one another, especially the most vulnerable of their brothers and sisters.
The core he develops to integrate diversity into the formation of community faithful to
Jesus Christ is in the promotion of mutual service that, like common worship, Scripture
reading, table fellowship and private and communal prayer is necessary for the
community to grow in love for one another and into the image of Christ.
Within a strong family setting, Dietrich, came to study theology. That sentence implies
more than it seems. Germany was renowned for its theologians and philosophers and you
may well be familiar with such names as Harnack, Bultman, Barth, Nietzsche, Tillich,
etc. The teaching of theology was a significant component of University training of
Lutheran pastors. He was greatly influenced by the writings and teachings of Karl Barth.
Although he was a serious student of theology, it was as a student of theology that he
recognized that a faith in Christ demanded more than head knowledge, that faith in Christ
is a powerful experience of conversion and commitment. Moreover, such conversion and
commitment is an all encompassing act. It engages the Christian in a belief so profound
as to reorder the Christian’s priorities and his perspective of living. This was profoundly
the case in Bonhoeffer’s life.
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The common term for the focus on the life and teachings of Christ is the word,
Christology. Let me elaborate on this central focus:

The Christian’s view of who Christ is, is central. Christ is God’s Son, one of the
Trinity, comprising of God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation: “for
him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether
thrones or dominions, or principalities or authorities – all things were created
through him and for him.” ( Col. 1:15-17)
As a result we accept that the whole of creation had Christ as its prime force and
purpose. It was intended from the very beginning by the triune God for the purpose of
creating a world into which man could be placed and eventually God would enter
through Jesus Christ in order to communicate with man. Not until our recent study of
Bonhoeffer’s theology has this concept, this direct link of creation with the purpose of
Christ’s entry into the world, become clear and powerful for me.
We see the whole of creation including mankind who has been given reason and
understanding as divinely ordered and created by God, through Christ. The Christian
accepts God’s revelation of this knowledge to us.
We, therefore, as Christians think outside the box of human understandings which
seeks to provide formulas and schemes as to how the world came about. We accept
as an a priori fact that the universe was created by God, through Christ. We accept
this as a revelation.
The writer to the Hebrews is able to say “in these last days (the Father) has spoken
To us in his Son…. through whom also he made the world. (Heb.1:2) The purpose
for which the world was created and why the world was created is central to the
understanding of Christology.
Again,
“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
He came unto his own, and his own received him not,” found in John 1:10
Because the triune God created all things, He is not a created being – he is the
external uncreated Creator. For me this understanding satisfies any questions in
respect to the creation vs. evolution debate. It is one thing to think of the world
as being separate from Christ as creator and then to argue as to the legitimacy of
the gospel of his coming into the world. It is a whole different concept to accept
that for Him and through Christ the world was created. That it is sustained by and
through Christ so that he could come into the world in order to provide and entry
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or access for man to God.

We further accept that God in Christ is the beginning and end of all true
wisdom and knowledge and that he is the true source of truth.
That the Christian life as taught by Christ provides us with the best possible “way”
and the best possible “Life”.
That the Christian destiny goes above and beyond life here on earth. That in our living we
govern our priorities on that basis, that we are part of God’s purpose that goes beyond the
grave.
That the cross and resurrection are central to our redemption. All other human attempts
of attaining spiritual goodness or wholeness are only partially successful in the ultimate
sense, particularly if they are judged by human standards.

Christ is also characterized as the sustainer of all things. As the world’s
creator the Son is not only “before all things but in him all things hold
together”. The one who created the world is also the one who sustains it. It is
the Son who “upholds all things through the word of his power”. The entire
created universe is contingent upon him at every point and in every way.

The cosmos created by God is not simple. It is multifaceted. It has physical,
spiritual, and moral dimensions to it. The creation, not the human creatures,
gives form to matter, animation to dust, order to chaos.
One writer puts it this way
“The root of enacted law is the moral law.
The root of the moral law is the design of the created order
The root of the created order is the Creator.
Conversely, enacted law severed from moral laws is chaos
Ethics, severed from moral law, is perversion
Creation severed from the Creator, is an idol.”
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When Bonhoeffer had the experience of faith, he saw life in a new way. For the next
twenty or so years of his life, Bonhoeffer lived the life of a follower of Christ. This led to
his death as a martyr in Germany under the regime of Hitler.
We have many of his writings which set out his strong Christology and reflect the
concepts of living the Christian faith as in his Ethics book and the depth of commitment
to a life of following Christ as set out in The Cost of Discipleship.
Bonhoeffer had many injunctions for the church. One of his most important
contributions during the Nazi period was to break away from the Lutheran church
controlled by the National Socialists under Hitler and form the Confessing Church. He
then established a Seminary to train the pastors of these confessing churches, first in
Zingst on the Baltic coast and then in Finkenwalde. We visited both of these places on
our recent trip. What he hoped to achieve was a church of faith and practice. Here is an
excerpt form his Ethics book reflecting on the failures of the church:



The church confesses that she has not proclaimed often and clearly enough her
message of the one God who has revealed Himself for all times in Jesus Christ
and who suffers no other gods beside himself. She confesses her timidity, her
evasiveness, and her dangerous concessions. She has often been untrue to her
office of guardianship and to her office of comfort. And through this she has
often denied to the outcast and to the despised the compassion which she owes to
them. She was silent when she should have cried out because the blood of the
innocent was crying out loud to heaven. She has not resisted to the uttermost the
apostasy of faith, and has brought upon herself the guilt of the godlessness of the
masses.
Some who seek to escape from taking a stand publicly find a place of refuge in a
private virtuousness. Such a man does not commit any sins pursuant to the ten
commandments, and we would not pour scorn on such a man, but it is not
enough.
He was of course referring to the Lutheran churches failure to protest the
treatment of Jews, gypsies, the physically and mentally challenged and
homosexuals and others not acceptable under the Aryan race purity principle.
In order to better understand Bonhoeffer’s struggle under the National Socialist Party of
Hitler, we have to understand the place of the Lutheran church in Germany. It is a state
church supported by a tax system and governed by a church administrative hierarchy. It
was relatively easy for Hitler firstly to make deceptive statements that he intended the
church to have a significant “Christian” role in the new Germany which held the churches
in thrall. Secondly, the Nazis could control the appointments of the Bishop and
administrative seats and with threats and coercion forced the church to accept his projects
and purposes. Bonhoeffer challenged the Lutheran church in its failure to respond to the
direction of the church and its fear and lack of moral leadership. Few if any sermons
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from Lutheran pastors spoke with critical perception of the lack of moral leadership on
the part of the church. Bonhoeffer refers to the approach of the church and that of
society in general as:
The astonishing experience of the deification of the irrational,
That surely it could be countered as follows,
Of blood and instinct, of the beast of prey in man
could be countered with the appeal to reason;
Arbitrary action could be countered with the written law,
Barbarity with the appeal to culture and humanity
The violent maltreatment of persons with the appeal to freedom
Tolerance and the rights of man;
The subordination of science;
Art and the rest to political purposes
with the appeal to the autonomy of the various fields of human activity.
Reason, culture, humanity, tolerance, autonomy and self determination, all concepts that
had until now served as battle slogans against the church, against Christianity, against
Jesus Christ himself, had now suddenly and surprisingly become the domain of the
church in speaking to the atrocities of the Nazi regime. These concepts no longer had a
home in society at large and sought refuge in the church. Bonhoeffer goes on to
elaborate that there is only power and strength in Christ, not only in the church but in the
concepts of humanity, reason, justice, and culture.
That Bonhoeffer became a radical disciple of Christ is the key to his life. He says of his
conversion “something happened” that transformed his life from what it was before.
What it had been was not Christian. He says of this turning point in his life:
I discovered the Bible. I had often preached about it - but I had not yet become a
Christian. The life of a servant of Jesus Chris must belong to the church, and step by step
it became clearer to me how far that must go
The Cost of Discipleship is a booking which Bonhoeffer, using Jesus’ own words and the
exhortations of the Apostle Paul, confronts readers with the uncushioned challenges to all
their distortions of what it means to be follower of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer probes the
seemingly “impossible demands” of Jesus’ sermon on the Mount against the economic
materialism, patriotic militarism, and ruthless racism to which Christians and their
churches had succumbed in Nazi Germany. He went so far as to state that cheap grace is
the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.
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He preached on the basis of John 8: 31-32 “If you continue in my word, you are truly my
disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” For him
freedom was not a revolutionary slogan. Truth was not to be found in the mastering of
church-sanctioned truths in catechisms, creedal formulae and dogmatic treatises. Truth
and freedom were always connected in Bonhoeffer’s preaching and always based on the
truth in Christ. He challenged the carefully worded responses of the state church so as not
give offence to the Nazi government. People became totally submissive because of the
ruthless and swift punishment and as a result there was a complete loss of freedom of
speech. We have echoes of such denial of freedom of speech even in our time on moral
and political issues in that it is not politically correct to hold a position which may be
different then what popular opinion sanctions.
To speak of freedom as arising from truth is difficult. Bonhoeffer concluded that
everyone wants to be free and everyone strives to be free. But does the notion of truth
create a problem? He said yes. He argued that people realize the “truth” may seem cold
uncompromising, and disturbing. It raises our anxiety before God. God may shine the
light of truth on us and reveal our dishonesty and lack of freedom. Truth is a power that
stands over us and at any moment can undo us. No one can deny that social lies, political
lies and self –serving lies exercise a domineering power over people. Sooner or later, this
duplicity is recognized. Bonhoeffer’s climactic statement in this regard was that not
Adolf Hitler, but the people who love, because they are freed through the truth of God are
the most revolutionary people on earth. They are the ones who upset all values; they are
explosives in human society. This disturbance of peace, which comes to the world
through these people, provokes the world’s hatred. He recognized also this freedom and
truth spoken clearly would lead to suffering.
As mentioned earlier, during his year in Barcelona, he ministered to the poor and was
offended by the attitude of the church towards the poor. At church gatherings for
discussions on forms of worship and even new church music in the Hitler era he said:
“Only those who cry out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”
The liberating effect of Bonhoeffer’s Christ centered freedom was clearly evident in his
life experiences. He identified strongly with the impoverished blacks in Harlem during
his stay at Union Theological Seminary in 1930-31. This showed him how poverty could
be tied to racism. He became attached to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He
particularly admired the deep liberating spirituality of their hymns at worship. He
predicted even then that white America would have to acknowledge its guilt and was
astonished at the silence of the church on this matter. He took many of the spirituals back
with him to Germany.
He believed in a Spirit-inspired interpretation of the Scriptures
In one of his early essays he writes,
“Does one read the Scriptures in a purely scientific mode or in a spirit of prayer and faith
with the mind opened to what God, and not skilled scientific exegetes, may be saying?
The Christian religion, he says, stands or falls by belief in the divine revelation that
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became historically real, tangible and visible – that is, to those who have eyes to see and
ears to hear.” The Christian religion, in its very essence contains the question that we ask
ourselves today about the relationship between history and spirit, scripture and revelation,
man’s word and God’s. He had become disgruntled with the textual criticisms of his
mentors. He stated that textual criticisms left only “rubble and fragments”
Bonhoeffer did not repudiate the historical-critical method – in fact he insisted that it was
still necessary. He thought however, that the scientific approach had to give way to the
pneumatological, which inevitably became “prayer… and supplication to the Holy
Spirit”, which alone as it pleases gives, it the hearing and understanding “without which
the most highly intellectual exegesis is nothing”
In respect to the Church, Bonhoeffer’s insight that God’s Spirit makes possible the birth,
growth, and enhancement of individuals into a church community is foundational. Every
church community in Christianity claims its foundational bondedness to the Holy Spirit
and it is not merely a lifeless line from a creedal litany. What that means in the practical
living out of the gospel this was his major preoccupation during the crisis years. He was
particularly concerned that the common bond be based on the Spirit and love rather than
a superficial congeniality or an association of kindred spirits. The acts of love which the
Holy Spirit brings about are the very heart of the community of spirit. Those who in the
spirit organize their relationships to others, do so with a single end in mind, to fulfill
God’s will by loving others. Much more on this topic can be found in his book, Life
Together which he wrote during his work in the seminary.
Bonhoeffer makes a direct connection between his insistence on doing what Christian
faith demands and professing that faith with creedal accuracy within the church
community. The fidelity to Jesus, made possible by the Holy Spirit within the church
community, is much more than purity of orthodoxy. Bonhoeffer builds his argument on
Paul’s exclamation of 1 Cor. 12:3: no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy
Spirit and contrastingly, not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom, but
only the one who does the will of my father in heaven. For example, even the confessing
church (the alternative church that Bonhoeffer began) ultimately failed because it had
resisted by its confession, but had failed to confess by its resistance.
The year preceding the formation of the Pacific Centre for Discipleship as well as Point
Grey Fellowship (I say Point Grey Fellowship because there was a clear intention to be
more community friendly rather than ethnically focused during our initial discussions),
our small Bible Study group studied Bonhoeffer’s book, Living Together. It was
foundational in my thinking of the kind of church fellowship we wanted to experience.
Twenty years later, and especially after a thorough experience of Bonhoeffer’s thought, I
resonate strongly with Bonhoeffer’s theology, especially on his teachings focusing on
Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit in the church. The question we must answer is
whether or not we have been able to achieve at least some of the early intentions of our
fellowship.
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