Quite Clever Quotes

Who Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

Crosses of Calvery Hill

Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a modern-day Christian martyr when he was hanged on April 9, 1945, for his resistance of the Nazi regime.

Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau, Germany. As a youth he was a talented piano player and his parents expected him to pursue a life of music. However, his interests changed and at the age 12 he told his parents that he wanted to be a theologian. He desired to become a Bible scholar and an expert of Christianity.

Between earning two doctorates he spent time in Spain pastoring to German-expatriate youth. In 1930 Bonhoeffer came to the United States where he taught at the Union Theological Seminary in New York and continued with graduate studies. He came back to Germany in 1931 and became an ordained pastor and a lecturer at the University of Berlin. His purpose and life direction changed when he became dedicated to teaching and demonstrating the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler was emerging to become its leader and chancellor. Bonhoeffer opposed Hitler. In January 1933 Bonhoeffer was giving a radio broadcast that criticized Adolf Hitler and Nazism. The broadcast was suddenly cut off. Bonhoeffer was the first to urge Christian resistance to the Nazis for their treatment of the Jews. Bonhoeffer next spent two years in London and when he returned to Germany he found that he was now an enemy of the state.

In 1936 the Nazi regime forbade Bonhoeffer to teach and his books were banned. For two years he taught pastors in secret underground seminaries, always changing locations to avoid the Gestapo, the Nazi terrorist secret police. During this time he wrote The Cost of Discipleship, a book based on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In this book Bonhoeffer stressed that true discipleship costs everything.

Bonhoeffer became afraid of being arrested by the Nazis and he returned to the United States seeking safety. However, he began to feel guilty about not remaining in Germany and practicing what he preached about discipleship, that it can cost everything. Bonhoeffer did not want to be silent in the face of evil, he knew his beliefs meant that he needed to act against it. He returned to Germany knowing that his life was in danger there.

In Germany Bonhoeffer riskily became a double-agent member of the German Secret Service. He became a spy in the German Secret Service so he could help save Jews from Nazi death camps. Bonhoeffer began associating with German military officers who were part of the Nazi resistance movement. These officers had secret plans to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer knew of these assassination plans but was not involved in the heart of any of them.

Bonhoeffer was arrested for involvement in an attempt to help Jews escape to Switzerland. On an afternoon in April 1943 a black Mercedes pulled up at Bonehoeffer’s parents’ home and two men stuffed him into the back of the car. He was taken to Tegel Prison where he spent two years as a prisoner and was a pastor to other prisoners. Bonhoeffer wrote letters that sympathetic guards smuggled out for him. Many of his prison letters echoed the teachings of the Apostle Paul which emphasize the weakness and suffering of Jesus Christ.

On July 20, 1944, an assassination attempt was made on Adolf Hitler when a bomb exploded during a Nazi meeting. By chance, Hitler lived through it although he was injured. Hitler ordered all resistors to his regime be sentenced to death. Bonhoeffer was taken from the Tegel Prison to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Later, he was taken to the Flossenbürg concentration camp which is located in a remote area near Germany’s Czechoslovakia border.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at dawn on April 9, 1945. Only a month later Germany surrendered. On April 8, Bonhoeffer preached one last sermon from his cell at Flossenbürg. When the Nazis came to take him to the gallows, the 39-year-old Bonhoeffer spoke these words to an English prisoner named Payne Best, “This is the end–for me, the beginning of life.”

Bonhoeffer prison letters were edited and published as Letters and Papers from Prison. His books Cost of Discipleship and Life Together are classic Christian devotionals.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes

#1. “The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#2. “And if we answer the call to discipleship, where will it lead us? What decisions and partings will it demand? To answer this question we shall have to go to him, for only he knows the answer. Only Jesus Christ, who bids us follow him, knows the journey’s end. But we do know that it will be a road of boundless mercy. Discipleship means joy.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#3. “Seek God, not happiness – this is the fundamental rule of all meditation. If you seek God alone, you will gain happiness: that is its promise.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#4. “Be not anxious! Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of all anxiety.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#5. “Suffering means being cut off from God. Therefore those who live in communion with him cannot really suffer.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#6. “Music… will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#7. “If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#8. “Joy draws its nourishment from quietness and from the unfathomable.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#9. “Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#10. “The moment we begin to feel satisfied that we are making some progress along the road of sanctification, it is all the more necessary to repent and confess that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Yet the Christian life is not one of gloom, but of ever increasing joy in the Lord. God alone knows our good works; all we know is His good work.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#11. “If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction. ”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#12. “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#13. “Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#14. “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#15. “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#16. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#17. “Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#18. “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#19. “God’s truth judges created things out of love, and Satan’s truth judges them out of envy and hatred.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

#20. “When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Letters and Papers from Prison paperback by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

From Amazon: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German pastor who was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his part in the “officers’ plot” to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

“Acute and subtle, warm and perceptive, yet also profoundly moving, the documents collectively tell a very human story of loss, of courage, and of hope. Bonhoeffer’s story seems as vitally relevant, as politically prophetic, and as theologically significant today, as it did yesterday.”