Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Choice

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a series in three parts. Part 1: The Choice · Part 2: The Seminary · Part 3: The Cost

The moment

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau, into a large and accomplished German family. He was a gifted theologian very young. After serving a German congregation in Barcelona, he spent 1930 and 1931 at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

In New York he attended Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. There he saw a church that lived its faith under injustice, and he became alert to racial prejudice in a way that shaped what he saw when he went home.

Hitler came to power in January 1933. Within weeks the new government began to press the Protestant churches to exclude people of Jewish descent from ministry, under what was called the Aryan paragraph.

What he did

He spoke early. In April 1933 he wrote an essay arguing that a state acting this way was illegitimate and that Christians had a duty to oppose such a state. Few church leaders were saying anything of the kind.

He drew a line his colleagues did not want drawn. He argued that accepting the Aryan paragraph surrendered Christian teaching to politics. If pastors of Jewish descent were barred, he urged others to resign in solidarity and form a church that confessed the truth.

He acted from where he was. From late 1933 to early 1935 he served German congregations in London, and led them to break with the official church and join the Confessing Church, which formed in May 1934 in opposition to the pro-Nazi “German Christians.”

What leaders can take from this part

Learn from a church that is not your own. What he saw in Harlem gave him eyes for what was happening in Berlin. Leaders who stay inside their own circle miss what outsiders see at once.

The cost of clarity is lowest at the start. He named the problem in the first months. Those who waited found each later step harder to take.

Being early is lonely. His position isolated him within his own church. Most of the Confessing Church avoided criticizing the regime directly and stayed largely silent about the persecution of the Jews.

He had a blind spot of his own. The same 1933 essay repeated traditional teaching that treated the conversion of the Jews as the final answer, and he never explicitly withdrew that view. A leader can see one injustice clearly and still carry an inherited error.

Next, Part 2: The Seminary →