Originally Published in The San Antonio Express News, December 12, 2024
My wife and I recently attended a late morning showing of the film, Bonhoeffer, two days after it opened at our local theater. Besides us there were two others in the audience. We knew little about him or his writings. The film opened our eyes to his brilliance as a writer and as a fierce critic of Hitler’s Third Reich and of his own Church that lacked the courage to speak out against the growing authoritarian regime.
Born into a wealthy family in Wroclaw, Poland, he was one of nine children. His father was a famous psychiatrist. For most of his life he was an accomplished pianist. When later as a divinity student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a fellow black student from Georgia, took him to Harlem to a Baptist church where parishioners sang and worshipped Jesus with great enthusiasm.
Their singing celebrated their faith in joyful awareness, as did all dimensions of their lives. Bonhoeffer was introduced to jazz, which he adapted his musical talents to accommodate and became a superb jazz pianist. He had never seen in his Lutheran Church in Germany a congregation with such gusto in loving Christ. He was transformed by their love of the Savior.
In the 1930s, with Hitler gaining more power in Berlin and across Germany, Bonhoeffer realized how unworthy this political figure was of being Chancellor and believed he would never be elected.
A priest friend of his who eventually began speaking out publicly against the Reich, told Bonhoeffer that Hitler did not need the German people to elect him, only enough of those who did vote to believe the lies until they cast their ballot. Hitler was elected, to the surprise and chagrin of many.
As Hitler’s power became absolute over time, it rested in part how he had successfully targeted the Jews in Germany as the source of all of the country’s woes. Bonhoeffer, resisting the advice of others in New York on his second visit to teach for two years at Union Theological Seminary after the Gestapo had shut down his alternative seminary in Germany, returned to Berlin after only twenty-six days in New York.
His credo had was unshaking: when those who remain silent in the face of evil, their silence becomes evil.
He was arrested in 1943 and spent two years in various prisons for being a member of a plot to assassinate Hitler. There he was allowed to write and to continue to minister to other prisoners and several guards sympathetic to his cause: his passionate love of Jesus—his only lodestar and guiding light that sustained him.
Bonhoffer knew, as one writer observes in a prefatory essay in The Cost of Discipleship, one of the most famous of his thirty-four volumes, that “the fanatical devilish forces within National Socialism…were aiming at the destruction of Germany as a European and Christian country.”
Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “if individuals choose ‘cheap grace,’ “which is the deadly enemy of the Church because it demands nothing from its adherents, over ‘costly grace,’ which he asserted is what we must fight for, it will lead to separation from Jesus; the former “is sold in the market, while ‘costly grace’ is the incarnation of God.”
The film ends with a fact we know too well: that antisemitism is on the rise globally. We need voices of heroic stature like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s to counter the dreaded infection of such prejudices.