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faith without works is not faith at all, but a simple lack of obedience to God.
The Luther Bible was to the modern German language what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language. Before Luther’s Bible, there was no unified German language. It existed only in a hodgepodge of dialects.
January 1919 an election was held, but no one gained a majority and there was no consensus. These forces would keep fighting for years, and Germany would remain divided and confused until 1933, when a wild-eyed vagabond from Austria would end the confusion by outlawing all dissent, and then the real troubles would begin.
Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.
light district] would be an extremely fruitful field for church work. It’s much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
he wrote, “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property.”
Bonhoeffer’s voracious appetite17 for culture almost met its match in New York. To Max Diestel, he wrote, “If you really try to experience New York completely, it almost does you in.”
told us of his colored friend with whom he had travelled through the States… he told of the piety of the negroes . . . At the end of the evening he said: “When I took leave of my black friend, he said to me: ‘Make our sufferings known in Germany. Tell them what is happening to us, and show them what we are like.’” —WOLF-DIETER ZIMMERMANN
Years later21, one of the boys recalled that, during class, a student pulled out a sandwich and began eating it: “This was nothing unusual in the north of Berlin. Pastor Bonhoeffer said nothing at first. Then he looked at him, calmly and kindly—but long and intensely, without saying a word. In embarrassment, the boy put his sandwich away. The attempt to annoy our pastor had come to nothing through his composure and kindness—and perhaps through his understanding for boyish tomfoolery.”
The good leader serves others and leads others to maturity. He puts them above himself, as a good parent does a child, wishing to lead that child to someday be a good parent.
was a scheme at once foolproof and foolhardy: they would start a fire at the Reichstag, the seat of German democracy. Then they would blame it on the Communists! If the German people believed the Communists had tried to burn down the parliament building, they would see the need for extraordinary actions on behalf of the government. They would welcome giving up a few liberties to preserve the German nation against the Communist devils.
What is at stake is by no means whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the task of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God; here is the proof whether a church is still the church or not. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. —HEINRICH HEINE
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.”
Bonhoeffer had moved past this sort of pragmatic thinking. The “weaker brethren” argument that he had seemed willing to accept back in June no longer seemed relevant to him. He had become convinced that a church that was not willing to stand up for the Jews in its midst was not the real church of Jesus Christ. On that, he was quite decided.
when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn’t join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn’t. “If you board the wrong train,” he said, “it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”
Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: 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.
Thereafter Bonhoeffer took it upon himself to teach Hildebrandt English and always sent him shopping, believing that “shopping will always teach the essentials.”
Matt. 10:35.* The differences may lie deep as an abyss, but they have absolutely no effect on blood relationships and bonds of friendship; they are poles apart in matters of the mind, but not of faith!
Niemöller teased them from the pulpit, sometimes asking a congregant to “pass a Bible to our policeman friend.”
That year, former Reichsbank head Hjalmar Schacht exclaimed to a dinner companion: “My dear lady, we have fallen into the hands of criminals. How could I ever have imagined it!”
The plan was for the SS2, dressed in Polish uniforms, to attack a German radio station on the Polish border. To make the whole thing authentic, they would need German “casualties.” They decided to use concentration camp inmates, whom they vilely referred to as Konserven (canned goods). These victims of Germany would be dressed as German soldiers. In the end only one man was murdered for this purpose, via lethal injection, and afterward shot several times to give the appearance that he had been killed by Polish soldiers.
Dohnanyi’s boss11, General Oster, had said that National Socialism was “an ideology of such sinister immorality that traditional values and loyalties no longer applied.”
“It depends on a God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith,” he wrote, “and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture.” Here was the rub: one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin.
In his Ethics, he wrote that in our efforts to do good we, like that “knight of the doleful countenance,” are tilting at windmills. We think we are doing good and fighting evil, but in fact, we are living in an illusion. There was no moral condemnation in what Bonhoeffer said, however. “Only the mean-spirited can read the fate of Don Quixote,” he wrote, “without sharing in and being moved by it.” This is our universal predicament as human beings.
“Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.”
Disagree , wouldnt this just show people are fallible? Isnt the strongest of beliefs just a principle? How much do you adhere to the principle what matters most, how ardent is your belief because actions would then follow.
It’s time now for something to be done. He who has the courage to act must know that he will probably go down in German history as a traitor. But if he fails to act, he will be a traitor before his own conscience. —CLAUS SCHENK VON STAUFFENBERG
Maria’s uncle3 Henning von Tresckow said something similar: “The assassination must be attempted, coute que coute [whatever the cost]. Even if it fails, we must take action in Berlin. For the practical purpose no longer matters; what matters now is that the German resistance movement must take the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, nothing else matters.”
Stations on the Road to Freedom20
“Absolute seriousness is never without a dash of humor.”
being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will: “The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one’s life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration.”
A human being’s moral integrity begins when he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions.
Müller, who had suffered a thousand times worse, offered a word of encouragement to his friend and fellow believer. “Let us go calmly to the gallows as Christians,” he said.
Buchenwald and its equivalents throughout the Third Reich were living embodiments of the satanic worldview of the SS, where weakness was preyed upon and crushed. Human beings were sometimes murdered for their skin, which was used to make souvenir items such as wallets and knife cases for members of the SS.
contrast between Rascher and Bonhoeffer could not be starker. Best described Bonhoeffer as “all humility and sweetness; he always seemed to me to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. . . . He was one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God was real and ever close to him.”
Thyssen had been one of those who had supported Hitler and helped his rise to power, only to be later horrified at what he had done. The events of Kristallnacht in 1938 caused him to resign his government post.
