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

by Mark Nation

Bonhoeffer named some of the specifics he had in mind when he offered reflections from prison for the baptism of Eberhard and Renate Bethge’s newborn son, Dietrich: What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one’s enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us, we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it and express it. This is our own fault. Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world.435 If we are to recover these ways of understanding and living out the Christian faith, said Bonhoeffer in 1944, speaking of the next generation, then it must begin with the realization that “all Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of . . . prayer and action.”436