When Christ Calls
Monologues
Let Me Tell You ...
People Of Faith Speak To Their Times And Ours
"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." I wrote those words back in the relative safety of 1937. Little did I realize then that those words were to be a prophecy of my own calling. Of course, at this moment, I am not dead yet, in this year of our Lord 1945, but I have been in prison for two years now, and in recent weeks, the Gestapo has been moving me around from prison to prison as though they have some definite plan for my ending. Just today, April 8, they brought me here to Flossenberg prison. They indicate that I will be tried tomorrow, though on what charge I am not sure. I don't know why they bother with a trial; they must have their minds made up already, to have kept me in prison so long.
I don't suppose you even know who I am. My name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have been a Lutheran pastor and professor of Theology. I have written several books. Perhaps you have heard of the most popular one. It is called The Cost of Discipleship. It was published in 1937.
You might wonder, "What is a German pastor and theologian doing in a Nazi concentration camp?" My parents have wondered the same thing. When I was fourteen I informed my parents that I had decided that my life's work was to be in the field of religion. My father, a prominent psychiatrist in Berlin, was at first quite disappointed. But later, when the church was being persecuted by Hitler, my father wrote me a letter in which he said, "When you were a boy and I heard that you intended to enter the pastorate, I thought that this was not the way you should go, confining yourself to a corner of life ... Now, seeing the church in a crisis that I never thought would be possible, I see that what you have chosen was very right." Right, perhaps. But none of us knew then, that it would also be dangerous.
Permit me to share with you some of the things I have learned during these past years. I have been involved in a pilgrimage that has taken me from classroom to concentration camp, and I'm sure that you can understand that has had a profound effect on what I believe. At the very least, I have discovered that theology is not a list of propositions hammered out in a classroom or set down once and for all by church leaders of the past. It is something that develops in very concrete, this-worldly situations where one has to make hard decisions about his own destiny and that of others.
As I have spent a lot of time in prison, I have had considerable time to reflect on my own life and experiences, and I can see three rather definite periods in my own development which I would like to share with you.
I suppose that the first period of my life could be called theoretical: those halcyon days before the rise of Hitler. I was born in Bresslau, in 1906. While I was still a child, my family moved to Berlin, and it was by the University of Berlin that I was presented my theological degree in 1927. After pastoring a German colony in Barcelona, Spain, for a year and a half, I returned to Berlin and successfully presented a dissertation which won me a post as professor of Systematic Theology.
Before I took up my duties, however, I was invited to become a guest lecturer in theology, touring the United States. I made many friends in America and elsewhere in my travels, which led me to an awareness that Christ's Church is world-wide and not the special preserve of any nation. That awareness was to get me in trouble later. While I found much of the preaching in the American churches to be intellectually and spiritually empty, there was a sense of warmth and fellowship which our German churches were missing. Little did I realize then how much we in Germany were going to have to rely on our sister churches in America for support in a few short years.
I returned to Germany and took up my teaching duties at the University of Berlin. That was in 1931. I was also fully ordained as a pastor in the Lutheran Church in that year. In that year I also had a profound spiritual experience. Certainly, I had been intellectually prepared to teach theology, but it wasn't until 1931 that I discovered the Bible and prayer as personally rewarding elements in my spiritual development. I think it might be safe to say that in that year I became a Christian in the most personal sense of the word. I began to understand what it meant for the church really to be the body of Jesus Christ, the church as the person of Jesus Christ in the world. It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must also belong to the church, and step by step, it became plain to me how far that must go.
In those days the Nazi menace was growing in Germany. In 1932, I commented that we should not be surprised if once again days should come for our church when the blood of martyrs would be demanded. In January, 1933, Adolf Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany. Two days after Hitler came to power, I was presenting a radio message and I took the opportunity to warn the German people that the authority they were placing in the fuhrer would lead to idolatry. I was cut off the air before my message was completed.
I didn't realize it then, but I had embarked on the second phase of my Christian development, one that was to be marked by conflict with both government and the church. Hitler moved quickly to bend the church to his will. He developed the idea of "German Christians" as somehow unique and superior to others. He installed as head of the Protestant church a man who supported Nazi views. He passed laws barring anyone of Jewish origin, or married to a Jew, from holding any government office. He also excluded persons of Christian religion who held any office in the church.
Some of us who were opposed to these racist views organized a new structure which we called the Confessing Church. We issued a statement pointing out the errors we felt had been introduced into the church by the Nazi regime. In protest against these so-called "Aryan laws," I resigned my teaching post and accepted the pastorate of a German congregation in London, so that I could be free to tell the world that there was a church in Germany which did not go along with the Nazis.
In 1935, the Confessing Church called me back to Germany to organize a seminary for the training of pastors. We had some 35 pastors in training there. I wrote a book about our experiences which I called Life Together. Sometimes a student, realizing the limitations of our small Confessing Church, would say that he would like to enter the larger State Church in order to have access to the larger pulpits, so that he might speak to more people about our concerns. On those occasions I would have to remind the student that "one act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons." Almost immediately after its formation, the seminary was outlawed as being seditious, but the Gestapo, involved with other things, didn't get around to closing us by force until 1937.
Though I was harassed by the Nazis, I continued to preach and lecture, and in 1937, I published what came to be my best-known book, The Cost of Discipleship. At this time I was particularly concerned about the Protestant emphasis on God's gracious forgiveness, which seemed to excuse a person from costly discipleship. I called this emphasis "cheap grace," and in the course of my book, I sought to show that being Christian and relying on God's grace doesn't excuse one from costly acts of loyalty. In fact, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."
In 1938, my brother-in-law introduced me to the resistance movement against the Nazis, what you might call "the underground." I had always been an absolute pacifist. In fact, I had confided to a friend a few years earlier that "when war comes I shall pray to Christ to give me the power not to take up arms." But I was beginning to see that it is not enough to follow Christ by preaching, teaching, and writing. Being a Christian must be translated into action and self-sacrifice. The Christian must not be shut away in sacramental piety, for we follow one who passed through this world as a living, dying, and risen Lord. I was beginning to see pacifism as an illegitimate escape.
In the midst of these thoughts I was invited on a lecture tour of the United States. Some of my brethren, concerned for my safety, and also wanting a representative of the Confessing Church to speak for them in America, urged me to go. I arrived in America in June of 1939, knowing that war was imminent. But my conscience was unsettled. Almost at once I wrote a letter to my American sponsors telling them that I had made a mistake in coming to America, that I would have to live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I pointed out that I would have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I did not share the trials of this time with my people. My brethren in the Confessing Synod may have been right in urging me to go to America, but I was wrong in going. I felt that Christians in Germany would soon have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization might survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I knew which of these alternatives I had to choose, but I could not make that choice in the security of another country, so I left America.
I returned to Germany and soon thereafter became active in the resistance. I saw Hitler as an anti-Christ who must be stopped. I became convinced that it is not only a Christian right, but also a Christian duty to oppose tyranny. In time, I was to work for the defeat, not only of Naziism, but even for the defeat of my own country, for I felt that only so could Germany be saved as a Christian country. Of all this, of course, the government knew nothing, but because of my previous statements, in 1940, the Gestapo stopped me from teaching, preaching, or publishing. No longer was I permitted the luxury of theoretical Christian opinion; I was being forced by circumstances to apply Christian principles in the sphere of life and death decisions about my own conduct.
The third phase of my Christian development began now as I became a political activist. My brother-in-law got me a job in the counter-intelligence office in Berlin, which, unknown to the government, had become the center of the revolt against Hitler. The Gestapo was apparently too preoccupied with other things to question my involvement in a government position. In that position I was permitted to travel on official business to certain neutral countries where I made contacts with the Allies, to determine if they would come to favorable terms with the resistance, if we could take over the government. The Allies offered us nothing. Nevertheless, we plotted to get rid of Hitler. What a change had occurred in my life and thought: from a Christian pacifist to a planner of assassination, and all out of loyalty to the same Lord. How circumstances control our Christian conduct! I appeal to you, therefore, not to judge others until you understand what they are up against!
In April, 1943, the Gestapo became aware that the counter-intelligence office was being used by the resistance. Though they did not know our plan, many of us were arrested. At first I was charged with treason, but lacking evidence, that charge was dropped, and I was simply held on a technicality of having spoken against the State. I lived daily with the thought that I would be charged and quickly released, but the Gestapo had other things in mind.
Prison life at best is a living death, cut off from those who make life meaningful. To be imprisoned without sentence is worse, because you are always telling yourself and others, "maybe tomorrow," "maybe next week," "maybe by Christmas," but nothing changes. By this time, nightly air raids had begun on Berlin, and the prisoners were in constant fear that we would be bombed and killed since we had no shelters. Frequently, I was able to minister to prisoners, some of them in their final hours. Therefore, prisoners and guards alike called me "Padre." I spent most of my time reading and writing, as I worked on several projects which were slipped out of prison, a few pages at a time, by friendly guards.
On July 20, 1944, some of the members of the resistance who were still free, managed to plant a bomb in Hitler's conference room. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived, and personally directed the counter-revolutionary measures. Most of the conspirators were apprehended and executed. In October, the Gestapo found some records which firmly connected me with the resistance, and they subsequently moved me to a maximum security prison in Berlin, still without trial. I have not been able to contact my family since then. As Berlin has been threatened by the arrival of the Allies, I have been moved from one concentration camp to another, while the Gestapo tries to decide what to do with me. In spite of what I have been through, I have never regretted my decision to return to Germany in 1939. I am sure of God's hand and guidance, and I am thankful and glad to go the way in which I have been led.
As I said previously, these past two years have had considerable impact on my thinking. I have discovered what I call a "Christian worldliness." By that I mean that we must not think that God and the Christian faith are concerned only with the ultimate outcome of things in some future eternity. We have responsibility for things in the present moment, and we must take action. To labor for civil rights, to engage in political struggle on behalf of the disadvantaged, to do battle with ignorance, poverty, and disease: these are things that cannot be dismissed as secular and unspiritual. In fact, every attempt to make people more truly human is a Christian act, whether the name of Christ is mentioned specifically or not. In Christ, God and the world have been inseparably joined. Therefore, we cannot think of Christianity as being concerned only with the next world; Christ is Lord of all creation.
Not only have I discovered a "Christian worldliness," but a "religionless Christianity." In some ways religion is the enemy of Christianity. Religion is individualistic: it can make one so concerned for his own soul that he abandons his neighbors in need. Religion is metaphysical and often looks to another world when it should be dealing with this one. Religion tends to be provincial and to concentrate on smaller and smaller segments of life which it calls "religious," when its view should encompass all of life. Moreover, religion tends to appeal to God to intervene in the course of things so that consequences won't follow actions, which is irresponsible. What matters in the church, then, is not the growth of religion, but the development of the body of Christ. Jesus is supremely "the man for others," and the church is only the church when it exists for humanity. Only a servant church can earn the right to speak with authority and power in our secular age.
And now my pilgrimage has brought me here to Flossenburg concentration camp. Perhaps you feel I am here for political activity; I believe I am here as a servant of Jesus Christ in a difficult time. They have just called my name. I know what that means. Take to heart what I have said. A Christian has no other choice as a free moral agent, than to act, to suffer, and if need be, to die. Suffering is the badge of true discipleship. When Christ calls you, may you find the strength to do what is required.
Epilogue: Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis at Flossenburg Prison on April 9, 1945, one month before World War II ended in Germany.
I don't suppose you even know who I am. My name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have been a Lutheran pastor and professor of Theology. I have written several books. Perhaps you have heard of the most popular one. It is called The Cost of Discipleship. It was published in 1937.
You might wonder, "What is a German pastor and theologian doing in a Nazi concentration camp?" My parents have wondered the same thing. When I was fourteen I informed my parents that I had decided that my life's work was to be in the field of religion. My father, a prominent psychiatrist in Berlin, was at first quite disappointed. But later, when the church was being persecuted by Hitler, my father wrote me a letter in which he said, "When you were a boy and I heard that you intended to enter the pastorate, I thought that this was not the way you should go, confining yourself to a corner of life ... Now, seeing the church in a crisis that I never thought would be possible, I see that what you have chosen was very right." Right, perhaps. But none of us knew then, that it would also be dangerous.
Permit me to share with you some of the things I have learned during these past years. I have been involved in a pilgrimage that has taken me from classroom to concentration camp, and I'm sure that you can understand that has had a profound effect on what I believe. At the very least, I have discovered that theology is not a list of propositions hammered out in a classroom or set down once and for all by church leaders of the past. It is something that develops in very concrete, this-worldly situations where one has to make hard decisions about his own destiny and that of others.
As I have spent a lot of time in prison, I have had considerable time to reflect on my own life and experiences, and I can see three rather definite periods in my own development which I would like to share with you.
I suppose that the first period of my life could be called theoretical: those halcyon days before the rise of Hitler. I was born in Bresslau, in 1906. While I was still a child, my family moved to Berlin, and it was by the University of Berlin that I was presented my theological degree in 1927. After pastoring a German colony in Barcelona, Spain, for a year and a half, I returned to Berlin and successfully presented a dissertation which won me a post as professor of Systematic Theology.
Before I took up my duties, however, I was invited to become a guest lecturer in theology, touring the United States. I made many friends in America and elsewhere in my travels, which led me to an awareness that Christ's Church is world-wide and not the special preserve of any nation. That awareness was to get me in trouble later. While I found much of the preaching in the American churches to be intellectually and spiritually empty, there was a sense of warmth and fellowship which our German churches were missing. Little did I realize then how much we in Germany were going to have to rely on our sister churches in America for support in a few short years.
I returned to Germany and took up my teaching duties at the University of Berlin. That was in 1931. I was also fully ordained as a pastor in the Lutheran Church in that year. In that year I also had a profound spiritual experience. Certainly, I had been intellectually prepared to teach theology, but it wasn't until 1931 that I discovered the Bible and prayer as personally rewarding elements in my spiritual development. I think it might be safe to say that in that year I became a Christian in the most personal sense of the word. I began to understand what it meant for the church really to be the body of Jesus Christ, the church as the person of Jesus Christ in the world. It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must also belong to the church, and step by step, it became plain to me how far that must go.
In those days the Nazi menace was growing in Germany. In 1932, I commented that we should not be surprised if once again days should come for our church when the blood of martyrs would be demanded. In January, 1933, Adolf Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany. Two days after Hitler came to power, I was presenting a radio message and I took the opportunity to warn the German people that the authority they were placing in the fuhrer would lead to idolatry. I was cut off the air before my message was completed.
I didn't realize it then, but I had embarked on the second phase of my Christian development, one that was to be marked by conflict with both government and the church. Hitler moved quickly to bend the church to his will. He developed the idea of "German Christians" as somehow unique and superior to others. He installed as head of the Protestant church a man who supported Nazi views. He passed laws barring anyone of Jewish origin, or married to a Jew, from holding any government office. He also excluded persons of Christian religion who held any office in the church.
Some of us who were opposed to these racist views organized a new structure which we called the Confessing Church. We issued a statement pointing out the errors we felt had been introduced into the church by the Nazi regime. In protest against these so-called "Aryan laws," I resigned my teaching post and accepted the pastorate of a German congregation in London, so that I could be free to tell the world that there was a church in Germany which did not go along with the Nazis.
In 1935, the Confessing Church called me back to Germany to organize a seminary for the training of pastors. We had some 35 pastors in training there. I wrote a book about our experiences which I called Life Together. Sometimes a student, realizing the limitations of our small Confessing Church, would say that he would like to enter the larger State Church in order to have access to the larger pulpits, so that he might speak to more people about our concerns. On those occasions I would have to remind the student that "one act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons." Almost immediately after its formation, the seminary was outlawed as being seditious, but the Gestapo, involved with other things, didn't get around to closing us by force until 1937.
Though I was harassed by the Nazis, I continued to preach and lecture, and in 1937, I published what came to be my best-known book, The Cost of Discipleship. At this time I was particularly concerned about the Protestant emphasis on God's gracious forgiveness, which seemed to excuse a person from costly discipleship. I called this emphasis "cheap grace," and in the course of my book, I sought to show that being Christian and relying on God's grace doesn't excuse one from costly acts of loyalty. In fact, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."
In 1938, my brother-in-law introduced me to the resistance movement against the Nazis, what you might call "the underground." I had always been an absolute pacifist. In fact, I had confided to a friend a few years earlier that "when war comes I shall pray to Christ to give me the power not to take up arms." But I was beginning to see that it is not enough to follow Christ by preaching, teaching, and writing. Being a Christian must be translated into action and self-sacrifice. The Christian must not be shut away in sacramental piety, for we follow one who passed through this world as a living, dying, and risen Lord. I was beginning to see pacifism as an illegitimate escape.
In the midst of these thoughts I was invited on a lecture tour of the United States. Some of my brethren, concerned for my safety, and also wanting a representative of the Confessing Church to speak for them in America, urged me to go. I arrived in America in June of 1939, knowing that war was imminent. But my conscience was unsettled. Almost at once I wrote a letter to my American sponsors telling them that I had made a mistake in coming to America, that I would have to live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I pointed out that I would have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I did not share the trials of this time with my people. My brethren in the Confessing Synod may have been right in urging me to go to America, but I was wrong in going. I felt that Christians in Germany would soon have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization might survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I knew which of these alternatives I had to choose, but I could not make that choice in the security of another country, so I left America.
I returned to Germany and soon thereafter became active in the resistance. I saw Hitler as an anti-Christ who must be stopped. I became convinced that it is not only a Christian right, but also a Christian duty to oppose tyranny. In time, I was to work for the defeat, not only of Naziism, but even for the defeat of my own country, for I felt that only so could Germany be saved as a Christian country. Of all this, of course, the government knew nothing, but because of my previous statements, in 1940, the Gestapo stopped me from teaching, preaching, or publishing. No longer was I permitted the luxury of theoretical Christian opinion; I was being forced by circumstances to apply Christian principles in the sphere of life and death decisions about my own conduct.
The third phase of my Christian development began now as I became a political activist. My brother-in-law got me a job in the counter-intelligence office in Berlin, which, unknown to the government, had become the center of the revolt against Hitler. The Gestapo was apparently too preoccupied with other things to question my involvement in a government position. In that position I was permitted to travel on official business to certain neutral countries where I made contacts with the Allies, to determine if they would come to favorable terms with the resistance, if we could take over the government. The Allies offered us nothing. Nevertheless, we plotted to get rid of Hitler. What a change had occurred in my life and thought: from a Christian pacifist to a planner of assassination, and all out of loyalty to the same Lord. How circumstances control our Christian conduct! I appeal to you, therefore, not to judge others until you understand what they are up against!
In April, 1943, the Gestapo became aware that the counter-intelligence office was being used by the resistance. Though they did not know our plan, many of us were arrested. At first I was charged with treason, but lacking evidence, that charge was dropped, and I was simply held on a technicality of having spoken against the State. I lived daily with the thought that I would be charged and quickly released, but the Gestapo had other things in mind.
Prison life at best is a living death, cut off from those who make life meaningful. To be imprisoned without sentence is worse, because you are always telling yourself and others, "maybe tomorrow," "maybe next week," "maybe by Christmas," but nothing changes. By this time, nightly air raids had begun on Berlin, and the prisoners were in constant fear that we would be bombed and killed since we had no shelters. Frequently, I was able to minister to prisoners, some of them in their final hours. Therefore, prisoners and guards alike called me "Padre." I spent most of my time reading and writing, as I worked on several projects which were slipped out of prison, a few pages at a time, by friendly guards.
On July 20, 1944, some of the members of the resistance who were still free, managed to plant a bomb in Hitler's conference room. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived, and personally directed the counter-revolutionary measures. Most of the conspirators were apprehended and executed. In October, the Gestapo found some records which firmly connected me with the resistance, and they subsequently moved me to a maximum security prison in Berlin, still without trial. I have not been able to contact my family since then. As Berlin has been threatened by the arrival of the Allies, I have been moved from one concentration camp to another, while the Gestapo tries to decide what to do with me. In spite of what I have been through, I have never regretted my decision to return to Germany in 1939. I am sure of God's hand and guidance, and I am thankful and glad to go the way in which I have been led.
As I said previously, these past two years have had considerable impact on my thinking. I have discovered what I call a "Christian worldliness." By that I mean that we must not think that God and the Christian faith are concerned only with the ultimate outcome of things in some future eternity. We have responsibility for things in the present moment, and we must take action. To labor for civil rights, to engage in political struggle on behalf of the disadvantaged, to do battle with ignorance, poverty, and disease: these are things that cannot be dismissed as secular and unspiritual. In fact, every attempt to make people more truly human is a Christian act, whether the name of Christ is mentioned specifically or not. In Christ, God and the world have been inseparably joined. Therefore, we cannot think of Christianity as being concerned only with the next world; Christ is Lord of all creation.
Not only have I discovered a "Christian worldliness," but a "religionless Christianity." In some ways religion is the enemy of Christianity. Religion is individualistic: it can make one so concerned for his own soul that he abandons his neighbors in need. Religion is metaphysical and often looks to another world when it should be dealing with this one. Religion tends to be provincial and to concentrate on smaller and smaller segments of life which it calls "religious," when its view should encompass all of life. Moreover, religion tends to appeal to God to intervene in the course of things so that consequences won't follow actions, which is irresponsible. What matters in the church, then, is not the growth of religion, but the development of the body of Christ. Jesus is supremely "the man for others," and the church is only the church when it exists for humanity. Only a servant church can earn the right to speak with authority and power in our secular age.
And now my pilgrimage has brought me here to Flossenburg concentration camp. Perhaps you feel I am here for political activity; I believe I am here as a servant of Jesus Christ in a difficult time. They have just called my name. I know what that means. Take to heart what I have said. A Christian has no other choice as a free moral agent, than to act, to suffer, and if need be, to die. Suffering is the badge of true discipleship. When Christ calls you, may you find the strength to do what is required.
Epilogue: Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis at Flossenburg Prison on April 9, 1945, one month before World War II ended in Germany.
