Never Forget: Recalling the Death of Bonhoeffer

APRIL 9, 2019 BY DEACON GREG KANDRA

German Federal Archives/Wikipedia

The great preacher, writer, theologian and witness to the faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,was executed on April 9, 1945, just days before the Nazi camp where he was held, Flossenbürg, was liberated. He was 39.

Here’s what happened: 

On 4 April 1945, the diaries of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, were discovered, and in a rage upon reading them, Hitler ordered that the Abwehr conspirators [those who had plotted for Hitler’s assassination] be destroyed. Bonhoeffer was led away just as he concluded his final Sunday service and asked an English prisoner, Payne Best, to remember him to Bishop George Bell of Chichester if he should ever reach his home: “This is the end—for me the beginning of life.”

Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on 8 April 1945 by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without witnesses, records of proceedings or a defense in Flossenbürg concentration camp.  He was executed there by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the camp,  three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.

Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard where he was hanged, along with fellow conspirators Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Canaris’s deputy General Hans Oster, military jurist General Karl Sack, General Friedrich von Rabenau, businessman Theodor Strünck, and German resistance fighter Ludwig Gehre.

Eberhard Bethge, a student and friend of Bonhoeffer’s, writes of a man who saw the execution: “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer… kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer…In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Struggle, as a Pacifist, to be Involved in the Assassination Plot to Kill Hitler

Dietrich Bonhoeffer “was thoroughly disillusioned  by the cowardice of his fellow clergy. Now he had a decision to make. To do nothing against Hitler was a sin, he had reasoned. But to kill was also a sin. How could a pacifist, a man of God, justify what he was about to do? The answer was one that had first been articulated by Martin Luther, the founder of the church Bonhoeffer had loved. Sometimes, Luther said a true believer must ‘sin and sin boldly.’ Bonhoeffer would break the Commandments he vowed to uphold and renounce his cherished philosophy of nonviolence. He would lie, cheat, and plot murder. And he would do it by using the church as his camouflage.”

~ Patricia McCormick, The Plot to Kill Hitler, 97.

Bonhoeffer’s Works Are Translated into Turkish

Calvin student opens classic Christian work to Turkey

Matt Kucinski

As a young girl growing up in Turkey, Debora Haede had heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She’d seen a documentary about the theologian and German pastor’s life, and had become fascinated by how people, like him, remained faithful, even to the point of death.

But her admiration was personalized, when, in 2007, her uncle and two other men were martyred for their Christian faith inside the publishing house where they worked.

“Having an uncle who did that made Bonhoeffer’s life a reality in a way,” said Haede, a junior studying international relations at Calvin College.

Writing justly

A decade later, Haede is honoring her uncle by doing something for her home country of Turkey that has never been done before: translating Bonhoeffer’s works into their language.

The publishing house where Haede’s uncle worked had approached her dad, who is German, asking if he knew of anyone who could translate Bonhoeffer’s work “Life Together.” Knowing his daughter knew both Turkish and German, he suggested she give it a try, and so with no prior translation experience, Haede took on the challenge.

Discerning meaning in every word

“First time I read the book before I knew I was going to translate it—it was hard to understand. I know I skipped parts that were too complicated.”

She knew the next time through, she couldn’t skip a word. She re-read the book, cover-to-cover, sentence-by-sentence.

“Bonhoeffer has such a strong language, the words he uses. The German he uses isn’t everyday German from today, so as I’m translating I want the Turkish words to be as detailed as the German, which is hard to do,” said Haede. “There were times where I compared it with the English translation as well, because I didn’t know what he meant in the German one. But even there it was interesting to see the changes they made while translating into English … I personally got to understand way more because I had to focus on one sentence for so long.”

For the rest of the post…

There May Be Times to Drive a Spoke into the Wheel…

How Can We Turn the Tide to the Biblical Void in American Pulpits and Pews?

Dr. Jim Garlow: The ‘Jolting’ Reality of America’s Biblical Void and a ‘Bold’ Plan to Turn the Tide

03-08-2019

Jason Yates, My Faith Votes

Dr. Jim Garlow has traveled the world imparting to global leaders the powerful truth that God’s Word provides instructions for every area of life, including government.

In a recent interview with My Faith Votes, Dr. Jim Garlow, Founder and CEO of Well Versed, provided some great takeaways for us to bring biblical change to our spheres of influence.

1. Is America headed in the right direction?

“According to a Barna study from 2013, 90% of pastors acknowledge that the Bible speaks to the cultural, political, and social issues of the day. But ask those same pastors if they have or would speak on those issues, 90% said no. Therein lies the problem.

“It’s really up to the church if the nation heads in the right direction. The problem is not the progressives and the liberals, it’s not the baby killers and it’s not the LGBTQ, the real problem is the pastors of America and the churches of America — will they rise to the occasion? So, I’m answering your question with an ‘if.’ That’s what will determine whether or not this nation can be saved or not.”

2. When you look at the culture and assess where things are headed, what concerns you the most?

“The absence of the understanding of the word of God and the lack of capacity to apply it. 92% of the people in the pew do not have a biblical worldview. What worldview do they have then? They have a secular worldview. If you go to millennials, you are down to only 4% having a biblical worldview.

“Those are really jolting numbers. Everyone is responsible to study the word and become a careful steward of the word, but where is the primary source of the word? It should be from the pulpit, from the church.”

3. We’ve come out of a hyper election season with a record number of dollars spent and record turnout. How can Christians continue to take bold steps to change culture?

“Number one, care. Care about the nation. Care about what’s happening in the community. We operate under this myth that the way things are are the way things are going to stay. That is not true.

“Cultures come and cultures go. Nations come and nations go. All the great nations that once existed never thought they would be done, but they ended, every one of them. America is not going to last forever. And we can bring it to a painstaking close by simply defaulting and not showing up for the game.

“For example, the reason we know the stories of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? They were bold!

“The reason we know the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? He was bold! Everybody likes to preach about him, it’s time to start acting like him. April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothes in the German cold air and hung by a piano wire — killed. Why do we remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Was it because he had the largest church? Was the most popular guy? No. Wrote a bestseller? No. Had a big radio and TV ministry? No. We remember him because he stood for truth.

“Who can name all the other pastors in Berlin at that time who wimped out? We can’t name one.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Issues of Abortion and Gun Control

Pro-life and pro-gun? Evangelical minister talks faith and firearms in Charleston

• By Rickey Ciapha Dennis Jr.
• rdennis@postandcourier.com
• Feb 9, 2019

Standing in the spot where a German pastor was hanged decades ago for resisting the Nazi regime, the Rev. Robert Schenck experienced a conversion.

Schenck, an Evangelical minister and former anti-abortion activist who now considers the conservative Christian right as a “Ronald Reagan Republican religion,” drew inspiration years ago from European theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Nazi resister, who preached ethics and the responsible life and was ultimately executed by Adolf Hilter’s regime.

“As I stood there, it was as if the scales were shed from my eyes,” Schenck said, referring to his change of heart regarding some of the positions held by conservative evangelicals. “I saw something I had not seen in more than three decades of work. I had been part of a spiritual corruption of the Gospel.

It occurred around the same time the 2015 documentary “The Armor of Light” was released. Schenck is prominently featured in the short film about Evangelicals and gun culture. Today, he serves as president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute in Washington, D.C., and travels the nation advocating for gun control, using Scripture and Bonhoeffer’s teachings to bolster his more moderate arguments.

On Tuesday, standing before several dozen pastors and parishioners from various denominations in Charleston, Schenck raised the question at a Lunch-and-Learn event held by local nonprofit Arm-in-Arm. The topic: Can a community be pro-life (anti-abortion) and pro-gun?

“For me, the gun question in our own culture is a gateway question on Christian ethics,” Schenk said at the event, held at All Saints Lutheran Church in Mount Pleasant.

Though mass shootings have impacted houses of worship, Evangelicals are among the most avid supporters of gun rights and most also are against abortion, the Pew Research Center reported.

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. encouraged students of the conservative Christian college some years ago to arm themselves, citing the need to protect against violent perpetrators.

But for others, the Evangelical view on abortion and gun rights represents a contradiction where the community calls for life preservation at one stage while life at later stages remains at risk.

“I see an inherent conflict,” Schenck said. “I’m not anti-gun. But I do believe whenever someone takes a weapon to himself or herself, they (raise) supreme ethical questions.”

Referencing abortion, Schenck said fictional narratives were drawn around ending pregnancies. For example, the claim that every woman seeking an abortion was either being bullied or was selfishly intending to save herself is false, he said.

“It took me some very painful encounters to realize that was not reality at all,” the minister said.

Spike Coleman, who pastors St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in West Ashley, said at the event that the anti-abortion and pro-gun views are “hard to fit together.”

He pointed to moral injury, the damage that can be done to a shooter’s conscience after they’ve taken a life.

For the rest of the post…

I replied to his post. Is Schenck pro-choice now? Can a follower of Jesus use a gun to protect his/her family. self and others? Dietrich Bonhoeffer said:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Donald Trump, and Stupidity

From Bryan–Most recent articles that link Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Donald Trump will use Bonhoeffer to criticize the President. The truth does need to be expressed by both the left and the right.

JANUARY 12, 2019

BY VANCEMORGAN

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of the figures we will be studying in “’Love Never Fails’: Grace, Truth, and Freedom in the Nazi Era,” an interdisciplinary colloquium that I will be teaching with a colleague from the history department this coming semester. The first thing I read when on retreat last week was a new translation of Bonhoeffer’s “Ten Years After,” an essay Bonhoeffer wrote for colleagues and friends in 1942, reflecting on various aspects of the past decade in Germany as he and others had, in various ways, resisted the rise and entrenchment of the Nazis. Less than year after writing this essay, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazis for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, for which he was executed in 1945, just weeks before the end of World War Two. “Ten Years After” is comparable to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a document addressing the specific challenges of their times by speaking to greater issues, including the human capacity for decency, courage, and engagement in political culture that honors integrity and these values. How is one to think beyond self-interest and toward the common good in challenging times?

In “Ten Years After,” Bonhoeffer observes how easily human beings are swayed and seduced by peer pressure and crowd behaviors. Although his context was Nazi Germany, his observations about what happens to human decency and courage when a political culture begins to disintegrate and a social atmosphere becomes toxic read as if they were written this morning. Bonhoeffer wrestles with what happens to good people, what to the soul, and to the human sense of morality and responsibility, when evil becomes so embedded in a political culture that it is part of the very fabric of daily life, and it becomes impossible for good people to remain untouched by it.

One of the most written about and often quoted portions of Bonhoeffer’s essay is “On Stupidity,” a stupidity that Bonhoeffer claims “is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.” By “stupidity,” Bonhoeffer does not mean low IQ or lack of intelligence; indeed, “there are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull, yet anything but stupid.” By “stupid,” Bonhoeffer means something that contemporary Americans encounter every day, from the White House to the local coffee shop.

Against stupidity, we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential.

When President Donald Trump denies saying something that was recorded less than a month ago on television (at his own insistence), when Vice President Mike Pence and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders spout numbers that a brief session on Google shows to be blatantly false, stupidity is in the ascendant. When millions of citizens are uninterested in fact-checking lies or changing their minds in the face of new evidence, stupidity reigns. And as Bonhoeffer notes, we misjudge the situation when we dismiss such believing persons with condescending pejoratives—persons with PhD’s and people with no formal education are equally susceptible to stupidity as Bonhoeffer defines it. How can this be?

According to Bonhoeffer, people either consciously choose to become stupid or allow it to happen because their defenses are down.The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them . . . Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity . . . The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

In our current political climate, stupidity ranges across the spectrum from the most obsessed Trumpster to the most avid Berniebot. Whether in support of or in opposition to any particular agenda or political figure, stupidity always dehumanizes, replacing thought and deliberation with soundbites and memes. Bonhoeffer’s diagnosis seventy-five years ago could have been written this morning.

One virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him . . . Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

So, what is to be done? Bonhoeffer expresses his prescription for stupidity in religious terms: “The internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.” This is not a call for everyone to become a person of faith, however; from a prison cell a couple of years later, Bonhoeffer will write that God wants people of faith to live as if God does not exist. Bonhoeffer’s call is for people to take responsibility for who and what they are, rather than turning this responsibility over to others in exchange for perceived power or solidarity.

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Bonhoeffer: Advent Is Like a Prison Cell

In the midst of Nazi resistance, this Christian martyr offered three models for the season of waiting…

by Elisabeth Rain Kincaid

Image: Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source image: Lightstock

On November 21, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter from Tegel Prison. “A prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent,” he said. “One waits, hopes, does this or that—ultimately negligible things—the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”

The comparison between Advent and a prison cell may seem strange. It evokes powerlessness, perhaps even hopelessness. However, it is this particular type of waiting that Bonhoeffer believes best prepares us for Christ’s coming.

Although a Nazi prison gave him this metaphor, the sermons he wrote during his time of active ministry also present a similar vision of Advent waiting. In these sermons, Bonhoeffer sees the season before Christmas as a sharpened liturgical expression of the tension that informs our entire lives as Christians. Celebrating it prepares us to live as people who have made a radical break with the present world of sin and death and are also preparing for the redeemed future that God has already, in one sense, accomplished. Through Advent, we learn how to live in these two concurrent realities: We have already been delivered, and yet our deliverance is still to come.

Bonhoeffer’s Christmas and Advent sermons highlight three figures who exemplify life amid this tension and, by their example, might guide us through this season. Learning how to wait from these figures will not be warm and cozy but deep, dangerous, and shot through with sorrow and pain.

The first figure is Moses. This is not the triumphant Moses leading the people of Israel through a miraculously parted Red Sea or the lawgiver Moses carrying the stone tablets down the mountainside. Rather, the Advent Moses is the one found in Deuteronomy 32:48–52. Moses knows that God’s promise will be fulfilled, but he also knows that the promise will not be fulfilled in his lifetime. Instead, he will die on Mount Nebo, gazing across the river into the land. This Moses seems at first like the very antithesis of Advent, since he is the one for whom the promise is never fulfilled.

However, Bonhoeffer finds in Moses’ experience an expression of our own Advent waiting. Just like Moses, we know that the promise has been fulfilled—Jesus has come—but not yet completely. Through Moses’ punishment—his death before entering the Promised Land—we are also reminded that Advent is the season for death, judgment, and repentance. In a reversal of the world’s order, we pass from death into birth and new life. This awareness of our own death and judgment is crucial for us to understand that we only enter the Promised Land due to God’s victory, not our own. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “God is with us and we are no longer homeless. A piece of the eternal home is grafted onto to us.”

The second figure is Joseph

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If Dietrich Bonhoeffer Lived Today in America, Would He Vote for Hillary or for the Donald?

I have been a fan of Dietrich Bonhoeffer since I was a student at Bethel College in St. Paul, MN back in 1970s. Over the years, the person and works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer have been embraced by evangelicals, liberals, Jews and Catholics. He is also the champion of both the right and the left. He has been described as a “flamingly gay“.

No matter the issue, people from both sides of the issue look to Bonhoeffer for wisdom and guidance. The issue may be same-sex marriage, gun control, abortion, immigration, politics and politicians.

If Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived today, let’s say in America, what side would he take? Back in 2016, would he vote for Hillary or Trump? Voters for both candidates would build a case that Bonhoeffer would certainly see their point of view.

My thesis for my Doctor of Ministry degree focused on the impact of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on twenty-first century preachers, but I am far from being an expert on Bonhoeffer. But I did do enough research then and since then to say that Dietrich Bonhoeffer cannot be boxed in.

He was only 39 years old when he was hung. Imagine if he lived another thirty or forty years and was able to develop his ideas and theology further.

What side would he take? My take is this: Dietrich Bonhoeffer would teach us to pray, read the Bible and meditate on God’s Word. He would also not to place our trust in people (like Presidents) but in God alone. He would tell us to love others who are vastly different than us. I think he would say that even though, we live is an age of outrage, Christians, are to be at their very best and represent Jesus.

Bryan

Is the Rise in Anti-Semitism One of the Church’s Unpaid Bills?

Opinion: Doyle Sager  |  November 2, 2018

Sadly, but predictably, finger-pointing abounds as Americans seek answers and assign blame in the wake of the slaughter of 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 27. But the rise of anti-Semitism in our culture is undeniable. According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic attacks increased by almost 60 percent from 2016 to 2017. The ADL also announced that the Pittsburgh massacre was the deadliest assault on a Jewish community in our nation’s history.

While no single factor ever explains the sociological, psychological and spiritual factors which contribute to such evil, the American church should also do some soul searching. Have we (myself included) promulgated a shallow theology, at times confusing and distorting Christianity’s relationship with Judaism?

When I was a boy, a small Baptist church nearby went through a noisy controversy when the Vacation Bible School leader hatched a plan to have an area rabbi visit with the VBS children. “What?!” screamed the deacons, “Exposing our precious children to heresy?” The plan was quickly abandoned, because, after all, they were a Christian church. Why would the branches want to learn anything about the root (Romans 11:16ff)?

The church’s neglect of sound teaching is like failing to pay our bills. We are still required to pay, but now with interest and penalties compounding. One of the tragedies of history is that demagogues and other unstable people rarely grasp the church’s strong, clear teachings. But they almost always gravitate to the doctrines we neglect or muddle.

Adolph Hitler was not the last tyrant to blame the Jews for Jesus’ death. How well have we in the evangelical wing of Protestantism clarified that all of humanity crucified our Lord? A power-crazed Gentile government in league with Judaism’s corrupt church – the execution of Jesus was truly an equal opportunity event.

“Bonhoeffer told his students, ‘Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.’”

I’m embarrassed by the need to point this out, but Jesus was probably not blue-eyed, blonde and fair-skinned; he was a Middle Eastern Jew. And he didn’t come to wipe away Judaism and start over again with some new religion; he came to complete God’s ancient promises through Israel to the world. (Many Bible verses come to mind, but for starters, read Matthew 5:17-18 and the first two chapters of Luke.)

The Apostle Paul did not abandon his Judaism when he turned to Christ. Instead, he fell in love with Jesus Christ precisely because he experienced this Jewish peasant rabbi as the fulfillment of God’s plan for the ages. Don’t forget: the name “Christ” means “Anointed One,” and Paul’s favorite description of himself was a person “in the Anointed One.”

In an interesting coincidence of timing, just days before the Tree of Life murders, I took part in an area pastors’ peer group discussion of recent trends in Pauline theology. David May of Central Baptist Theological Seminary led us in some thoughtful reflection on “Paul, the Judean.” Noted scholars, including N.T. Wright (Paul: A Biography) and Mark Nanos (The Mystery of Romans), have written persuasively of the continuity as well as discontinuity in the Judeo-Christian message.

In these dark days when anti-Semitism is on the increase, some of us have been revisiting the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the build-up to World War II and the Holocaust, Bonhoeffer was one of the first and the few to call the church to stand with the Jews.

I take some comfort, however, in the fact that not even Bonhoeffer always got it right. His twin sister, Sabine, was married to a Jew, Gerhard Leibholz. When Leibholz’s father died, the family asked Bonhoeffer to officiate the funeral. After agonizing over the invitation, he declined, a decision he almost immediately regretted (Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 209). Bonhoeffer was ashamed and wrote honestly about his failure, a reminder that we are all captives of our culture, struggling to get free.

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