https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/dietrich_bonhoeffer_pastor_martyr_prophet_spy.html
For a very long time, I have heard of the man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I recognized him as someone who wanted to save the Jews from Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Recently, I saw a movie about him, and was inspired to learn more about him. Coincidentally a friend told me that Eric Metaxas had written a book about Bonhoeffer, and I felt compelled to read it.
I was impressed and deeply moved.
Like so many brilliant men, Bonhoeffer was complicated. And yet he demonstrated so much clarity in his ideas and beliefs that he left no doubt about his relationship to the Church and his abhorrence of the Nazis. He grew up in a family that was not deeply religious, although Christian, but eventually he saw his own destiny emerge:
It wasn’t until 1920, when Dietrich turned fourteen, that he was ready to tell anyone he had decided to become a theologian. It took a bold and courageous person to announce such a thing in the Bonhoeffer family.
Although his family was taken aback at his decision so early in his life, over time they grew to fully support him in his academic and religious pursuits.
In this review, I don’t plan to review the details of his maturation. Suffice it to say that he saw the dangers well in advance of the Nazi rule, and acted accordingly:
When the Nazis were taking over the German Lutheran Church, he would lead the charge to break away and start the Confessing Church. [The church] must completely separate herself from the state. . . It wouldn’t be long before the people return because they must have something. They would have rediscovered their need for piety.
Bonhoeffer was well aware of the violations against both the Church and the people who the Nazis would target. He realized early in his career that the Jews were going to be in Hitler’s sights, and he rejected the dictator’s decisions:
The Bonhoeffers learned that something especially disturbing called the Aryan Paragraph would take effect April 7 [1933]. It would result in a series of far-reaching laws that were cynically announced as the ‘Restoration of the Civil Service.’ Government employees must be of ‘Aryan’ stock; anyone of Jewish descent would lose his job. If the German church, essentially a state church, went along, all pastors with Jewish blood would be excluded from ministry. But perhaps the most grievous aspect of the church turmoil was the willingness of mainstream Protestant Christian leaders to consider adopting the Aryan Paragraph.
The German Christians, which Bonhoeffer refused to support, had allied themselves with the State and supported its perverse views:
In her book, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, Doris Bergen wrote that ‘the ‘German Christians’ preached Christianity as the polar opposite of Judaism, Jesus as the arch anti-semite, and the cross as the symbol of war against Jews.’ To make Christianity one with Germanness meant purging it of everything Jewish. One of the leaders, Georg Schneider, called the whole Old Testament ‘a cunning Jewish conspiracy.’
