Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a model of how to deal with evil

Compiled by Nurit Greenger from information readily available on the Internet

“The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live.”— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years (December 1942)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, a founding member of the Confessing Church. He was a member of the German Resistance movement against Nazism during WWII. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943 and his subsequent execution, by hanging, in April 1945, shortly before the war's end. the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Church of England, the Church in Wales and the Episcopal Church (USA) commemorate Bonhoeffer as a theologian and martyr.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the few church leaders who stood in courageous opposition to the Fuehrer and his policies. To honor his memory, the Church Relations department of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has asked Victoria Barnett, author of For the Soul of the People, Protestant Protest Against Hitler, to write an essay about Bonhoeffer spanning the years from the rise of Nazism until his death in the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945.

Bonhoeffer bitterly opposed the Nazi Aryan paragraph, arguing that its ratification surrendered Christian precepts to political ideology. If “non-Aryans” were banned from the ministry, he argued, then their colleagues should resign in solidarity, even if this meant the establishment of a new church — a “confessing” church that would remain free of Nazi influence. This view was of the minority; most German bishops wanted to avoid antagonizing the Nazi regime and to keep their regional churches together.

The strongest opponents of Nazi interference in the churches, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, eventually did form the “Confessing Church.” But, while some Confessing Christians moved toward open resistance against the regime, more moderate Protestants (inside and outside the Confessing Church) made what they saw as necessary compromises. As the Nazi dictatorship tightened its hold, the Confessing Church itself became paralyzed.

This is a story that give the reader some sense of the conflict within the Protestant church, as well as the remarkable response of one pastor/theologian to that conflict and to the turmoil within the nation itself.

Bonhoeffer's life as a pastor and theologian of great intellect and spirituality who lived as he preached. His martyrdom in opposition to Nazism exerted great influence and inspiration for Christians across broad denominations and ideologies, including figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
is a heroic person who deserves mentioning from year to year.

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