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He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. —Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dietrich—the little boy who was afraid of Father Christmas—would become best known for standing up to Hitler.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer would go on to become one of the most famous theologians in the world and he would write many books that would move people, even today, to fight for social justice.
Bonhoeffer insisted that the church wasn’t a historical institution; it was a living community that could transcend national, ethnic, class, and even religious boundaries. The “church” was not a building or an organization; it was a force for good, alive all around the world. The church should not be a remote, authoritative institution, he argued. It should be deeply and directly involved in the problems facing ordinary people.
In his dissertation entitled “Act and Being,” Bonhoeffer was critical of religious thinkers who believed that constant thought and reflection was a way to be closer to God; that sort of cerebral approach was what killed faith, he said. To be faithful, he wrote, a person had to be concerned less about himself and more about caring for his neighbor.
The separation of whites from blacks in the southern states really does make a rather shameful impression. In railways that separation extends to even the tiniest details. I found that the cars of the negroes generally look cleaner than the others. It also pleased me when the whites had to crowd into their railway cars while often only a single person was sitting in the entire railway car for negroes. The way the southerners talk about the negroes is simply repugnant, and in this regard the pastors are no better than the others. I still believe that the spiritual songs of the southern negroes
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Worshiping shoulder to shoulder with the congregation in Harlem, he would later say, was the only time “he had experienced true religion in the United States.”
his experiences with the poor taught him to see life “from below from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”7 “I turned from phraseology to reality,”
The church, he said, has an obligation to “assist the victims” of government wrongdoing—“even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”
While Bonhoeffer made a moral plea to the clergy, Hitler appealed to their desire for power.
At the stroke of midnight, they threw thousands of books into piles and lit an enormous bonfire. It was a grand “cleansing”5 of “un-German” books—including works by Helen Keller and Albert Einstein. Also destroyed were the works of Heinrich Heine, a Jewish writer who had penned these fateful words nearly a hundred years earlier: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.”
“Perhaps I seem to you rather fanatical,” he wrote to his brother Karl-Friedrich. “I myself am sometimes afraid of that. . . . Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things.”
The Cost of Discipleship. It is a book that has gone down in history as one of the most important religious texts ever written. It is not enough to simply believe in God, Bonhoeffer says. That is “cheap grace.”3 One must take actions based on that belief.
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” he would later write. “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
“I pray that God will give me the strength not to take up arms.”
“There is no way to peace along the way of safety,” he said in a speech. “Peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe.”2
concepts into confusion,”1 Bonhoeffer told his brother-in-law and the other conspirators. “To think and to act with an eye on the coming generation and to be ready to move on without fear and worry—that is the course that has, in practice, been forced upon us.”2 With these words Bonhoeffer gave the conspirators the moral justification—and “the greatness of heart”3—to commit murder. He also offered them reassurance: “God promises forgiveness and consolation to a man who becomes a sinner in [such a] bold venture.”4
“If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try and wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”
Before he was hanged, Bonhoeffer knelt and prayed. A doctor who observed the execution said, “I have never seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”3 As the noose was put around his neck, he whispered a prayer, completely calm and ready, at last, to meet eternity.
His writings were translated into English and passed around jail cells in the South during the civil rights movement and read to discouraged protestors. Martin Luther King, Jr., seemed to echo Bonhoeffer’s words when he said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetuate it.”2 Bonhoeffer’s famous speech calling on people of good will to “jam a stick in the wheels of government”3 was quoted by student demonstrators in the United States in the 1960s. And they were invoked by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. All
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