But someplace in this beautiful landscape, planted like a time bomb, was a single sentence. It would soon explode and effectively obliterate every sentence around it and cause a firestorm of controversy. Bonhoeffer did not think of it that way when he wrote it, and he had never imagined that it would become a focal point of the lecture. The controversial sentence was this: “Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church in Germany separates himself from salvation.”
