Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Recovering the True Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

by Mark Nation

However, once again, in the midst of offering much help in understanding Bonhoeffer, Bethge’s account is misleading. In the midst of saying all of this, Bethge interjects that Bonhoeffer never became “a convinced pacifist.”195 This claim flies in the face of Bonhoeffer’s own words, as Bethge well knew.196 For after all, Bethge quotes the January 1936 letter from Bonhoeffer to his long-time friend Elizabeth Zinn. Bonhoeffer acknowledges in that letter that he truly became a Christian only a few years before Hitler came to power (most likely while living in New York). And what facilitated this transformation? More than likely, Bonhoeffer’s deep involvement in the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a large and dynamic African American church in Harlem, was crucial to his “conversion.” However, what Bonhoeffer himself names in this letter as crucial to his “great liberation” is “the Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount.” Among the many changes in his life and thought that flowed from this transformation was the belief that “Christian pacifism, which a brief time before . . . I had still passionately disputed, suddenly came into focus as something utterly self-evident.”197

Seems pretty clear from this statement