Justified True Belief

(●) The German pastor who taught the church what grace costs, and then paid the price at a camp gallows two weeks before American soldiers arrived. + Most theologians are read because of what they wrote. Bonhoeffer is read because of what he wrote and because of where he was standing when he wrote it. He was thirty-nine when the SS hanged him at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, and almost everything he is famous for was written in the twelve years between Hitler taking power and that morning: a book on what it costs to follow Jesus, a short manual on how Christians actually live together, and a bundle of letters smuggled out of a Berlin military prison by a sympathetic guard. He matters to the question of why anyone should believe the Christian claim, for a particular reason. A great deal of apologetics is conducted in the study, where the stakes are an argument. Bonhoeffer is the twentieth century’s clearest case of a Christian thinker whose ideas were tested somewhere else, in a country where a church had to decide, quite quickly, whether it believed its own creed. The phrase he made famous for what he found there, "cheap grace," has passed into ordinary Christian speech, usually without the second half of the sentence. One fact worth remembering is that he was never tried by a court in any sense a reader would recognize. What sat in judgment on 8 April 1945 was a drumhead court-martial, the military name for a hearing thrown together on the spot, so called because a drumhead once served as the table it was written on. An SS judge convened it inside the camp, and Bonhoeffer was hanged at dawn the next day. Flossenbürg was liberated on 23 April, fourteen days later.

(●) 1906 AD: Born in Breslau into a large, brilliant, unchurchgoing family, he announced at fourteen that he would be a theologian. + Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau, then in eastern Germany and now Wrocław in Poland, the sixth of eight children and the elder twin, ten minutes ahead of his sister Sabine. His father Karl was a psychiatrist and neurologist, one of the most respected in Europe, and in 1912 he took the chair of psychiatry at Berlin and moved the household to the capital. It was not a pious home. The children were baptized and the mother, Paula, taught them Bible stories herself rather than trusting the schools, but the family’s working religion was music, argument, and evidence. His father did not discuss God at the dinner table, and his elder brothers, one of whom would eventually be shot for the same conspiracy, thought the church a poor use of a first-rate mind and told him he was choosing "a poor, feeble, boring, petty, bourgeois institution." Dietrich answered that if the church was as bad as all that, he would reform it. He was about fourteen. Two years before that exchange the war had come into the house itself. Walter, the second-eldest son, died of wounds in France in April 1918, and Paula, the one person under that roof who had taught the children any religion at all, collapsed for weeks. At Dietrich’s own confirmation in 1921 she gave him Walter’s Bible, and he used it for the rest of his life.

(●) 1927 AD: He finished a doctorate at twenty-one, and then spent a year in New York learning to hear the gospel from people the world had stepped on. + He studied at Tübingen and then at Berlin, where the faculty was the most distinguished in the world and where Adolf von Harnack lived on the same street and rode the same train. Harnack was the grand old man of liberal Protestantism, which is worth pausing on, because it is the air the young Bonhoeffer was breathing. Liberal Protestantism was the confident nineteenth-century project of reading Christianity as history and ethics: Jesus kept as the supreme teacher of the fatherhood of God and the infinite value of a human soul, with the miracles, the creeds and the doctrines treated as a later shell that had grown around that kernel and could be peeled away without loss. Bonhoeffer sat under all of it, and then at twenty-one submitted a doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, Latin for the communion of saints, arguing that the church is not a club of religious people but a form of Christ’s own presence. Karl Barth, reading it years later, called it a theological miracle. Bonhoeffer was too young to be ordained, so he spent a year as assistant pastor to a German congregation in Barcelona, and came home to write a second thesis, Act and Being, which qualified him to lecture at twenty-four. Then came the year that changed him. In 1930 he sailed for New York on a fellowship to Union Theological Seminary, and was unimpressed. The students, he wrote, could discuss any social question with confidence and had no idea what a doctrine of sin was for. "There is no theology here," he reported to Max Diestel, the superintendent at home who had arranged the fellowship. What he did find was a fellow student named Frank Fisher, an African American, who took him up to Harlem. For most of that year Bonhoeffer worshipped at Abyssinian Baptist Church, taught a Sunday school class there, and collected recordings of the spirituals to take home. He had grown up in a family that read the Bible as literature and a faculty that read it as history. In Harlem he watched people singing about deliverance who actually needed some, and he began to say that it was in the black churches that he had heard the gospel preached in America. He was still saying it years later in Berlin, playing the records for his students.

(●) 1933 AD: Two days after Hitler took power he went on the radio to explain what a leader is, and within weeks he was writing about the church’s duty to the state’s victims. + Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933. On 1 February, Bonhoeffer, then twenty-six and a young lecturer at Berlin, gave a radio talk on how the idea of a Führer, a leader, had changed among the young. His point was blunt: a leader who lets himself become an idol, who answers to nobody above him, has stopped being a leader and become a misleader, and the office is then a danger to the very people who wanted it. The broadcast stopped before he reached the end. He wrote the next day that the transmission had been cut because the talk slightly exceeded its time, and the story that the Nazis pulled the plug is a later embellishment; an expanded version of the address was printed in a Berlin newspaper three weeks afterward. April brought the first national boycott of Jewish shops, and then the Aryan Paragraph, a civil service law expelling those of Jewish descent from public office. Because German pastors were paid by the state, that law reached straight into the church, and there was a faction inside the church waiting to welcome it. The German Christians, Deutsche Christen, were the Nazi movement within German Protestantism: a party of churchmen who wanted a church remade to fit the new Germany and cleared of everything they called Jewish, and they pressed to apply the Aryan Paragraph in the pulpit and expel every pastor who had so much as a Jewish grandparent. His own family felt it directly: his twin sister Sabine was married to Gerhard Leibholz, a professor of law of Jewish descent, and Bonhoeffer would eventually drive the family to the Swiss border, from where they made their way to England. His grandmother Julie, aged ninety-one, walked straight through the stormtroopers posted outside a boycotted shop and did her shopping. That April he wrote an essay called "The Church and the Jewish Question," which asked what a church owes to people the state is persecuting, and answered with three duties, the third of which nobody in a German pulpit had said out loud (T4). By autumn he had had enough of the argument and took an eighteen-month post pastoring two small German congregations in London, where he became a close friend of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, and made sure the English church heard what was happening at home. Friendships like that one were what the period called ecumenical, from the Greek word for the whole inhabited world: the working contact between churches divided by denomination and by border, conferences and correspondence and visits, the sort of thing that looks like polite machinery until a church needs a witness outside its own country. Seven years later that address book of his would be the reason German military intelligence found him worth employing.

(●) 1935 AD: He came home to run an illegal seminary in a country house, and the two years there produced Discipleship and Life Together. + In May 1934 a synod of German Protestants met at Barmen, a synod being simply an assembly of delegates sent by the churches to decide something together, and it declared that the church listens to Jesus Christ and to no other event, power, figure, or truth. Out of that declaration came the Confessing Church, the wing of German Protestantism that refused to be absorbed into a state church. Bonhoeffer was in London when it happened, and he came home in 1935 to train its ministers, because the universities were closed to them. The seminary opened on the Baltic coast at Zingst and moved that summer to a rambling house at Finkenwalde, near Stettin. It was illegal from the start, funded by donations, and permanently short of everything. About two dozen ordinands at a time, men who had finished their studies and were waiting to be ordained as pastors, lived under a shared rule that the students found startling: half an hour of silent meditation on a single verse each morning, the Psalms prayed daily, no talking about a brother behind his back, and a period of confession one to another. Some of them thought their director had come back from a monastery. He had in fact spent time with an Anglican community in England, and he thought a church about to be persecuted needed a practiced common life rather than opinions. He wrote Discipleship out of the lectures he gave there, the book English readers know as The Cost of Discipleship, and published it in 1937 (T1, T2). Himmler declared the Confessing Church’s seminaries illegal that August, and the Gestapo shut the house in September. The following autumn Bonhoeffer sat down at Gerhard Leibholz’s desk, in the emptied Göttingen house his twin sister had just fled, and wrote Life Together in about four weeks: an account of the shared life at Finkenwalde set down while it was still fresh, on the theory that a thing worth doing should be recorded before the people who did it were scattered (T3). They were scattered. Many of his students were conscripted, and a great many of them were killed.

(●) 1939 AD: Friends got him safely to New York, and after twenty-six days in the country he took a ship back. + By 1939 his position had closed in from every side. His licence to teach at Berlin had been withdrawn in 1936, and in January 1938 he was banned from the capital altogether, so the ordinary working life of a theologian was already gone. Then there was the call-up, which was coming and could not be talked away. Refusing military service in Nazi Germany carried the death penalty, and he could not in conscience swear the oath, which by then was sworn to Hitler in person rather than to Germany. Reinhold Niebuhr and other American friends arranged a lecture post and an escape. He arrived in New York on 12 June. He was miserable from the first week. He walked the city, sat in on services, wrote in his diary that he could not think why he was there, and after less than a month he wrote to Niebuhr to say he had made a mistake in coming, that he had to live through this period of his nation’s history with the Christian people of Germany, and that he would have no right to share in rebuilding Christian life there after the war if he did not share the trials of it now. He sailed on 7 July, twenty-six days in the country all told, and the German army crossed into Poland eight weeks after that. Nothing in his own account makes this a heroic gesture. It reads like a man who could not settle, in a strange city, working something out. What he had worked out was that the sermons he had been preaching to other people about the cost of following Christ applied to him, in the ordinary way, on a specific day, with a ticket in his hand.

(●) 1940 AD: He joined military intelligence as a double agent, helped smuggle Jews to Switzerland, and got engaged the winter before his arrest. + His brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi worked in the Abwehr, German military intelligence, which under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Colonel Hans Oster had quietly become the headquarters of the resistance to Hitler. In 1940 Bonhoeffer was taken on as a civilian agent. On paper his ecumenical contacts abroad made him useful to German intelligence; in fact he was carrying the conspirators’ messages to the Allies, and the job exempted him from the army. A pastor who had preached the Sermon on the Mount for a decade now lied for a living, and knew exactly what he was doing. In September 1942 the group ran what they called Operation 7, using Abwehr cover to get fourteen Jews out of Germany into Switzerland on the story that they were being sent abroad as German agents. It worked, and that is the part to say first: fourteen people crossed a border and lived. It was also the thread that unravelled everything, because the currency needed to support them abroad left a paper trail, and a financial investigation followed it back. In the middle of this, in the summer of 1942, he fell in love with Maria von Wedemeyer, the granddaughter of Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, the Pomeranian matriarch who had taken up the Finkenwalde seminary years before. He was thirty-six and she was eighteen, and her mother asked for a year’s delay. They became engaged in January 1943. They were never married, and after his arrest three months later they were never alone together again; her visits to him at the military prison at Tegel were watched by guards. He was arrested on 5 April 1943, along with Dohnanyi and his sister Christine, on charges of undermining the armed forces and irregularities in the exemption of Jews. The murder plot itself was not yet suspected.

(●) 1945 AD: Two years in prison produced his most disputed writing, and then the SS hanged him at Flossenbürg. + For eighteen months he was held in cell 92 of the military prison at Tegel in Berlin, a room about seven feet by ten. He read enormously, wrote a novel and a play he never finished, worked at a theological project he could not consult a library for, and was allowed a censored letter to his family every ten days. A guard named Knobloch, who came to like him, carried other letters out unread, and those are the ones the world knows: letters to Eberhard Bethge, his former student and closest friend, arguing about what Christianity would look like in a world that had stopped needing God as an explanation (T5). Then the ground gave way under him. The 20 July 1944 plot to kill Hitler failed, and in September the Gestapo found the conspirators’ files at Zossen, where Bonhoeffer’s part in the plot was set out on paper that no interrogation had been needed to produce. After that he was moved the way freight is moved: in October to the Gestapo cellar on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, in February 1945 to Buchenwald, and in early April driven south with a handful of prominent prisoners. On Sunday 8 April, at a schoolhouse in Schönberg, the other prisoners asked him to hold a service. He had just finished when two men came for him. He drew an English fellow prisoner, Captain Payne Best, aside, told him that this was the end and for him the beginning of life, and then gave him a message to carry to Bishop Bell of Chichester. That night the drumhead court-martial sat at Flossenbürg, without witnesses, without evidence and without a record of the proceedings, and at dawn on 9 April the condemned were stripped of their clothes and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged along with Canaris, Oster, and three others. The camp doctor’s account, set down years afterward and now handled with some caution by scholars, says he had hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God. The killing of the family did not stop there. Dohnanyi was murdered at Sachsenhausen on 9 April, or possibly the day before. His brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher were shot near the Lehrter Straße prison in Berlin on the night of 22 to 23 April, with Soviet troops already at the eastern edge of the city. On 27 July, Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer sat by the wireless and heard the BBC broadcast a memorial service for Dietrich from a church in London. It was how they learned that he was dead.

What He Taught

(T1) Grace is free, and a church that makes it cheap has sold something that was not for sale. + Think of a season ticket to a gym. It cost nothing, somebody else paid, and it entitles you to walk in whenever you like. That is roughly what a great many people in 1930s Germany understood their baptism to be: a membership, acquired in infancy, requiring nothing, guaranteeing everything. Bonhoeffer called it cheap grace, and the phrase has outlived almost everything else he wrote. His definition is worth having in full, because the popular version usually softens it. Cheap grace, he wrote, is forgiveness preached without repentance being required, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. It is grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system, held in a way that makes actually following Jesus unnecessary. It is, he said, grace without the cross. Costly grace is the same grace, described honestly. It is costly because it calls a man to follow, and it is grace because it calls him to follow Jesus Christ. It cost God the life of his Son, which is why nothing about it is cheap, and it is given away free, which is why nothing about it is earned. Bonhoeffer is not smuggling works back into salvation, and he says so directly: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8) is not a sentence he wants softened. His complaint is with a church that has learned to stop reading two verses early, before Paul gets to "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10).

(Q) "Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace." + Source: The Cost of Discipleship, ch. 1, "Costly Grace" (R. H. Fuller translation, SCM Press). The opening lines of the book, written in 1937 for a church that was at that moment deciding whether to be absorbed into the state. "We are fighting to-day" was not a figure of speech. The hyphenated to-day is the spelling Fuller’s SCM text prints.

(T2) Christ does not call people to a doctrine but to himself, and the call costs a life. + Levi is sitting in a customs booth counting other people’s money. A man walks past and says two words, and Levi gets up and leaves the money on the table. Bonhoeffer keeps returning to that scene because of what is missing from it. There is no argument, no doctrine explained, no period of consideration. There is a person who calls and a person who obeys, and the obedience is a single concrete step, out of the booth and into the road. From this he draws a claim that reads oddly at first and is the hinge of the whole book: only the one who believes is obedient, and only the one who is obedient believes. Turn either half loose and something goes wrong. Faith without any step taken is what he means by cheap grace, a conviction held at a safe distance. Obedience without faith is mere religious effort, the man who cleans up his life and never meets anyone. Both halves are needed and they arrive together, which is why the first step is always something ordinary and specific: leave the booth, go to your brother, tell the truth on Tuesday. The cross, in his usage, is not a hard circumstance that happens to you. Everybody has those. The cross is what happens as a direct result of following, the suffering you would not have had if you had stayed in the booth. Jesus put it as plainly: "let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). When Bonhoeffer wrote that the call is a call to die he meant, first, the death of the self that runs its own life. In his own case it also meant the other thing, and he never suggested the two were unrelated.

(Q) "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." + Source: The Cost of Discipleship, ch. 4, "Discipleship and the Cross" (R. H. Fuller translation, SCM Press). He goes on to say that this death takes different forms: the first disciples left home and work, Luther left the monastery and went out into the world. The sentence was written eight years before Flossenbürg, and its author had no way of knowing how it would be read afterward.

(T3) Christian community is a gift already given in Christ, not an ideal a group builds for itself. + Anyone who has been part of a small church or a house group knows the pattern. Someone arrives with a clear picture of what real Christian fellowship should feel like, and spends a year being disappointed by the actual people, who talk too much, or too little, and hold the wrong opinions about the music. Bonhoeffer had watched this happen to young ministers under pressure, and his diagnosis is the sharpest sentence in Life Together: the man who loves his dream of community will destroy community, however sincere his intentions, while the man who loves the people around him will build one. The reason is theological rather than psychological. Christians are not joined to each other by affection, agreement, or temperament, all of which run out. They are joined because each is joined to Christ, which means the fellowship is a fact before it is an achievement, something received on the first day rather than manufactured over years. A group that grasps this can be disappointed in each other on a Tuesday and still be a church on Wednesday. Out of that came the practices Finkenwalde ran on: the Psalms prayed daily as the church’s own prayer book, a long stretch of silence with one verse of Scripture, the ministry of holding your tongue about an absent brother, the ministry of listening, and confession made to another person rather than only in the privacy of one’s own head. Bonhoeffer knew perfectly well that these looked Catholic to Lutheran students. He argued they were simply what people do who intend to stay together when it becomes expensive, and within a few years many of those men were in the army and the rest were under surveillance.

(Q) "Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate." + Source: Life Together, ch. 1, "Community" (John W. Doberstein translation, Harper & Brothers). Written in about four weeks in the autumn of 1938, a year after the Gestapo closed the seminary the sentence describes. The point is the difference between a demand and a gift: an ideal is something a group owes, a reality is something a group has been handed.

(T4) A church that only bandages the state’s victims has not finished its work. + Picture an ambulance crew stationed at the foot of a hill where cars keep coming off the same bend. There are three things they might do about it. They can go to the highway office and ask, out loud and on the record, what exactly is wrong with that bend. They can patch up the drivers, which is their work and which nobody would dream of stopping them doing. And one of them can decide that the traffic itself has to be stopped, and walk up the hill, and stand in the road. Those are three different acts, they get harder in that order, and Bonhoeffer asked a church for all three. In April 1933, with the boycott of Jewish businesses days old and the Aryan Paragraph about to strip Germans of Jewish descent of their public offices, he wrote an essay setting out what a church may do when the state turns on a group of people. He named the three duties, and they climb. - Ask the state whether it can justify what it is doing. Not a protest, a question, put to the government about the legitimacy of its own action. A state that will not answer that question has already told you something. - Serve the victims, whoever they are. The church owes help to anyone the social order has crushed, Christian or not, and he grounds this in Paul’s plain instruction, "as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone" (Galatians 6:10). Scripture had said the same to Israel long before: "Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute" (Proverbs 31:8). - Stop the wheel. The third duty is not to keep bandaging the people the wheel runs over but to act against the wheel itself. His German image is of throwing yourself into the spokes to jam them, and it is a direct political act, not a metaphor for prayer. Two things are worth saying plainly about this. The first is that in 1933 almost nobody said the third thing at all; the essay was startling then and its author was twenty-seven. The second is that Bonhoeffer at that point was still describing something the church does as a church, publicly. What he personally ended up doing, eight years later, was covert, violent, and undertaken as a private citizen inside a conspiracy, and he never wrote the essay that would have squared the two.

(Q) "The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself." + Source: "The Church and the Jewish Question," April 1933, in Berlin: 1932–1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works vol. 12 (Fortress Press, 2009), p. 365. English versions differ because the German idiom has no neat equivalent. Dem Rad selbst in die Speichen zu fallen is literally to fall into the spokes of the wheel, throwing your own body in to stop the machine; older English versions render it as putting a spoke in the wheel, where the critical edition has him seizing the wheel itself.

(T5) God’s power in the world is the powerlessness of the cross, and he lets us live before him without leaning on him. + This is the hardest thing he wrote. It went to one friend, in letters, out of a prison cell, and he was killed before he could finish the thought or explain a single sentence of it. There is no completed version to consult, because he never wrote one. Start with a farmer, because Bonhoeffer’s observation is easier to see in a field than in an argument. In 1600 a farmer prayed about the weather, and he meant it, because the weather was in God’s hands and in nobody else’s. By 1940 the same farmer read a forecast, insured the crop, called a vet for the sick cow, and prayed about whatever the forecast and the insurance and the vet had left over. Bonhoeffer noticed that Europeans had spent several centuries finding they could run medicine, law, politics, and physics without invoking God at any point, and that Christian apologists kept responding by hunting for a gap where God was still needed: some remaining mystery, some private anxiety, some deathbed. The trouble with a God who lives in the leftovers is that the leftovers keep shrinking. He thought this was a losing strategy and, worse, a dishonest one. It makes God a stopgap for the parts of life we have not managed yet, and it means preaching first has to make people feel weak, guilty, or frightened before it can offer them anything. He called the whole apparatus "religion," meaning by it not faith but the assumption that God belongs to a special department of life, and he asked what Christianity would be if that apparatus dropped away. His answer runs through the middle of the New Testament. God does not meet us at the edge of our competence but at the center of our life, and the place he chose to be found was a cross, where he had no power at all. The God who saves is the God who was pushed out of the world and killed, and that is not an embarrassment to be explained but the actual shape of how he helps. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13) is a description of God’s method, not a nice sentiment about ours. What that would mean in practice he sketched rather than argued. The church, he wrote, is the church only when it exists for others, and it should start by giving away its property to those in need and letting its clergy live on free-will offerings or take ordinary jobs. He described a Christian faith carried on in the middle of village life, work, and marriage rather than in a religious compartment. It is a set of notes, not a system, and he was hanged before he could test any of it. The one control on how far the notes can be stretched is the man who wrote them, who was praying the Psalms and reading his Bible daily in that same cell, and who kept asking his parents for more theology to work through.

(Q) "Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us." + Source: Letters and Papers from Prison, letter to Eberhard Bethge of 16 July 1944 (Reginald Fuller translation, SCM Press). Written in cell 92 four days before the assassination attempt he knew was coming. The first sentence is deliberately shocking and the third explains it: living "without God" means without God as a working hypothesis for the parts of life we cannot manage, and precisely not without God.

(Q) "This is the end. For me the beginning of life." + Source: reported by Captain S. Payne Best, The Venlo Incident (Hutchinson, 1950). Best was a British intelligence officer held with the prominent prisoners. He records that on Sunday 8 April 1945, at Schönberg, Bonhoeffer had just finished a short service when two men arrived for him; he drew Best aside, said these words, and then gave him a message for Bishop Bell of Chichester about a Christian brotherhood that rises above national hatreds. It is a witness’s memory written down five years later rather than a text of Bonhoeffer’s own, and it is the last thing anyone recorded him saying.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) A friend kept the prison letters through the war, and they made him one of the most widely read Christians of the century. + Almost nothing that made Bonhoeffer famous outside Germany was in print when he died. Six books had appeared in his lifetime; Ethics existed as loose manuscripts, and the prison correspondence existed as smuggled paper that Eberhard Bethge had hidden and carried through the last year of the war at obvious risk to himself. Bethge published Ethics in 1949 and the letters in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung, "Resistance and Submission," which English readers know as Letters and Papers from Prison. Then he spent twenty years on a biography of over a thousand pages, published in 1967, which remains the primary source for the life because Bethge was in most of it. The effect was to give the church a theologian who could be read in two directions at once, as a thinker and as a life, with each explaining the other. The reading crossed every boundary the twentieth-century church had. Evangelicals took up Discipleship and made "cheap grace" a standard term in English preaching. Catholics found in Life Together a Protestant arguing for practices they recognized, and on 15 September 2024 Pope Francis quoted the prison letters on the question of what Christianity really is and who Christ really is for us today, speaking at the Angelus, the Sunday hour when a pope says a few words from his window to the crowd in St Peter’s Square and then leads the old midday prayer that gives the hour its name. The ecumenical movement, the long effort to get divided churches talking and working together across their denominations and their borders, claimed him too, because he had spent the 1930s telling foreign churches what the German church would not say. In 1998 he was one of ten twentieth-century martyrs whose statues were placed above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Oscar Romero.

(†) He gave the church a working answer to the question of when obedience to a government stops. + None of the raw material was new, which is the first thing to say. Christian political thought had carried these resources for centuries. Augustine held that an unjust law is no law at all. The Reformers worked out the doctrine of the lesser magistrate, the lower official who holds real authority of his own, a duke or a city council or a sheriff, and who may use that authority to resist a tyrant above him instead of waiting for permission. And every catechism, the little question-and-answer book a child learned before confirmation, taught that when the command of a ruler contradicts the command of God, a Christian obeys God. So what the German church of 1933 lacked was not doctrine but the will to reach for it. Part of the reason was that Lutheran teaching on the two kingdoms, the idea that God rules the world in two distinct ways, through the church by his word and through the state by the sword, had hardened in many hands into a rule of thumb that the church minds its own business and lets the state get on with governing. Bonhoeffer’s contribution was to make the question concrete and early. The three duties of the 1933 essay (T4) gave a church a sequence it could actually follow: ask, serve, and then act. Barmen in 1934 supplied the confession that the church has one Lord and no second one. Together these are the reason the Confessing Church exists as a memory at all, and they are what later Christians reached for under other regimes, in South Africa, in the Soviet bloc, and in the American civil rights movement, where Bonhoeffer’s name appears in the reading of pastors who had never heard of Finkenwalde. The honest footnote is that the Confessing Church itself did not go where its own logic pointed. It fought hard for its own pastors and its own independence, and it said very little about the Jews as such. Bonhoeffer knew this and said so at the time. When the synagogues burned on 9 November 1938 he was with his students; he took out his Bible, underlined the words "they burned all the meeting places of God in the land" (Psalm 74:8), and wrote the date in the margin.

(†) His unfinished prison theology has been read in incompatible ways, and the argument about it is not settled. + The prison letters are the most contested Christian writing of the last century, for a straightforward reason: they are private letters to one friend, written under interrogation and censorship, exploring an idea their author expected to work out later. He never did. Everyone reading them is finishing a sentence somebody else started. Two readings have persisted. On one, Bonhoeffer was moving toward a Christianity stripped of doctrine and worship, and the 1960s theologians who announced the death of God, along with popular books like John Robinson’s Honest to God, took him as their forerunner. On the other, he was doing what the Reformers did when they attacked "religion," namely clearing away a human apparatus so that Christ himself could be seen, and the phrase "religionless Christianity" describes a method of speaking to modern people rather than a reduced creed. The evidence for the second reading is the man himself, and it is substantial. In the same weeks he was writing those letters he was praying the Psalms daily, asking his parents for theological books, writing a sermon for the baptism of Bethge’s son, his godson, and composing a poem about being surrounded by good powers that is now sung as a hymn in German churches every New Year. A theologian dismantling Christian practice does not do those things. What can be said with confidence is that he was trying to speak about God to a civilization that had stopped needing God as an explanation, and that the problem he named has not gone away.

(†) He repeated an inherited slander against the Jews in the same essay that defended them, and he joined a plot to kill without ever writing the defense of it. + Two entries belong in the ledger, and both come from his own hand rather than from what admirers later did with him. - The 1933 essay says more than its third duty. Alongside the demand that the church act for the Jews, "The Church and the Jewish Question" carries a paragraph in the older Christian idiom of the day, treating the suffering of the Jewish people through history as a curse borne for the crucifixion and looking to their conversion. He was defending them and repeating an inherited slander in the same breath. It is the kind of thing that is easy to condemn from eighty years away and worth reading carefully instead: the argument he built on top of it saved lives, and the paragraph underneath it belonged to a tradition of reading that Christians have since had to unlearn from Scripture itself, where Paul says the gifts and the calling of God to Israel are irrevocable (Romans 11:28–29). His own thinking moved. The explicit language of a curse does not reappear in his later writing, and in Ethics he was arguing that Western history is bound by God’s will to the people of Israel, and that driving the Jews out of the West must drive Christ out with them, because Jesus Christ was a Jew. How far the change went is still argued among his readers, since that same passage keeps the Jewish people inside a Christian scheme of election and wrath rather than letting them stand in their own right. - He joined a plot to commit murder and never wrote the defense of it. In 1934, preaching to an ecumenical conference on the Danish island of Fanø, he had said that peace is a commandment and not a problem to be solved, and he came close to the position that a Christian may never take up arms. By 1940 he was inside a conspiracy to assassinate a head of state. Ethics reaches toward an answer, in what he calls free responsible action: a man who acts in an extremity where no clean option exists, does what is necessary, and refuses to pretend he is innocent, accepting the guilt rather than claiming a principle exempted him. It is honest and it is not a completed argument, and Christians of good faith have disagreed ever since about whether he was right. Some pacifists hold that he abandoned the Sermon on the Mount he had taught. Others hold that he did exactly what his own third duty required. He would not have wanted the question closed on his behalf. Neither entry is the whole man, and neither should be filed away. He was a person who got some things wrong in public and changed his mind where the evidence changed it, which is a better recommendation than the alternative.