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Luther’s influence cannot be overestimated. His translation of the Bible into German was cataclysmic. Like a medieval John Bunyan, Luther in a single blow shattered the edifice of European Catholicism and in the bargain created the modern German language, which in turn effectively created the German people.
Before Luther, no one outside the choir sang in church.
Bonhoeffer had been raised in an elite community where many of his family’s friends were Jewish.
Prussia had led the way in uniting the twenty-five states of Germany. They became a federation called the German Empire, and for the nearly fifty years of its existence this Reich was led by Prussia and the Hohenzollern dynasty.
The designation Catholic or Protestant is unimportant. The important thing is God’s word.
Bonhoeffer agreed with Barth3, seeing the texts as “not just historical sources, but [as] agents of revelation,” not merely “specimens of writing, but sacred canon.”
It was the God beyond the texts, the God who was their author and who spoke to mankind through them, that fired his interest.
For his doctoral dissertation Bonhoeffer was drawn to dogmatics, the study of the beliefs of the church.
Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.
For Bonhoeffer it must have seemed a bit like leaving the intellectual and social ferment of Greenwich Village for a community of prosperous, self-satisfied, and intellectually incurious Connecticut suburbanites.
here I meet people as they are, far from the masquerade of “the Christian world”; people with passions, criminal types, small people with small aims, small wages and small sins—all
can only say that I have gained the impression that it is just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world which is more under wrath than grace.
“the whole of world history there is always only one really significant hour—the present. . . . [I]f you want to find eternity, you must serve the times.”
“we build him a temple, but we live in our own houses.”
Religion had been exiled to Sunday morning, to a place “into which one gladly withdraws for a couple of hours, but only to get back to one’s place of work immediately afterward.”
It is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.
“Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued.”
But Goebbels and the other Nazis rejoiced that Luther’s ugliest ravings existed in writing, and they published them and used them with glee, and to great success, giving the imprimatur of this great German Christian to the most un-Christian and—one can only assume—demented ravings.
Luther’s ugliest statements served the Nazis’ purposes and convinced most Germans that being a German and being a Christian were a racial inheritance, and that neither was compatible with being Jewish.
The Nazis were anti-Christian, but they would pretend to be Christians as long as it served their purposes of getting theologically ignorant Germans on their side against the Jews.
Sounds fmiliar...
truth is born only of freedom.
One can’t be a Christian and a nationalist at the same time.”
In 1933, when they came to power, the Nazis burned copies of Remarque’s book and spread the canard that Remarque was a Jew whose real surname was Kramer—Remark spelled backward. But now, in 1930, they attacked the film.
Bonhoeffer’s interest was not only in teaching them as a university lecturer. He wished to “disciple” them in the true life of the Christian.
“He taught us that the Bible goes directly into your life, [to] where your problems are.”
Their home conditions are generally indescribable: poverty, disorder, immorality. And yet the children are still open; I am often amazed how a young person does not completely come to grief under such conditions; and of course one is always asking oneself how one would react to such surroundings.”
One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us.
the younger generation, especially, had lost all confidence in the traditional authority of the kaiser and the church.
He must radically refuse to become the appeal, the idol, i.e. the ultimate authority of those whom he leads. . . . He serves the order of the state, of the community, and his service can be of incomparable value. But only so long as he keeps strictly in his place.
Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish.
Hitler knew his opponents were divided and couldn’t unite against him. He would play them off each other brilliantly and would consolidate his power with breathtaking speed and a calculating ruthlessness for which no one was prepared.
fire was set and the Communists blamed and the Nazis triumphed.
The third way the church can act toward the state, he said, “is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.” The translation is awkward, but he meant that a stick must be jammed into the spokes of the wheel to stop the vehicle. It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions
Bonhoeffer’s three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state’s victims, and work against the state, if necessary—were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.
“the hope, so eagerly nourished, that Hitler would soon ruin himself by mismanagement was shattered,”
Most Germans believed Hitler was basically “one of them,” however, and they welcomed the Nazis’ plans to reorder society, including the church.
Verry familiar
Bonhoeffer recalled with shame that even though he found the man’s attitude insulting, neither he nor his colleagues felt sufficient courage to walk out in protest:
“Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.”
Sigmund Freud, whose books were also burned that night, made a similar remark: “Only our books? In earlier times they would have burned us with them.”
he praised the churches as bastions of morality and traditional values.
Hitler worshiped power, while truth was a phantasm to be ignored; and his sworn enemy was not falsehood but weakness.
“the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.”
Müller also publicly stated that the idea of grace was “un-German.”
They, who were on the right side of the issue, must guard against spiritual pride.
On June 28, Müller ordered SA troops to occupy the church offices in Berlin. On July 2, an SA commando arrested a pastor.
A church synod had officially voted to exclude a group of persons from Christian ministry simply because of their ethnic background. The German Christians had clearly broken away from the true and historical faith.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
And it must no longer present an “exaggerated emphasis on the crucified Christ.” This tenet was defeatist and depressing, which was to say Jewish.
the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must simply be to suffer faithfully.
