A Story of Courage and Faith: Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, is a Christian hero for many. Executed by the Nazis just days before the end of WWII for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer is hailed as a 20th-century martyr. But Bonhoeffer struggled with a moral dilemma – his religious views were in stark contrast to the evil he saw all around him. He chose to face possible imprisonment and execution and to remain faithful to the principles of his belief in God. Across the political and theological spectrum, Bonhoeffer is celebrated as an icon of true Christianity and his theological writings are classics throughout the Christian world.

Bonhoeffer argued that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless — reason falls on deaf ears.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4th February 1906 in Wroclaw (formerly Breslau). A twin, he grew up in a comfortable professional home. His father was an eminent psychiatrist and neurologist. It was nominally a Lutheran, though not a profoundly religious, environment and the young Bonhoeffer caused something of a stir when he announced, at thirteen, that he would go into the church. After school he enrolled as a student at the University of Berlin, the city in which the family now lived and in whose university there gathered a host of brilliant thinkers. Intellectually, Bonhoeffer was striking. But he was determined to expand his horizons, too. At the age of eighteen he went to Rome and was powerfully moved by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1930-1 he studied in New York, at Union Theological Seminary, and regularly attended Services at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Here too he became increasingly drawn to ecumenism. Three times he made plans to travel to India and visit Gandhi, whose life and teachings he found compelling.

In 1933 the leader of the radical, racialist Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler, became chancellor and then dictator of Germany. In power, the Nazi movement sought to create a new totalitarian state: the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer saw Nazism to be a counter-religion and a danger to Christianity. He became an active participant in the dispute which broke out in the Protestant churches between those who sympathized with Nazism and those who sensed that the new politics threatened the integrity of the church. In October 1933 Bonhoeffer moved to England to be pastor to two German-speaking parishes in the London area. Here he searched for allies and met his greatest British advocate, Bishop Bell of Chichester.

https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/dietrich-bonhoeffer/

Pastor. Spy. Assassin.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship is described as a modern classic.

When a pacifist is called to a political act that could change the course of history, how will a man of honor respond? This is the true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who preached love while plotting the assassination of an evil tyrant. With world-shattering stakes, Bonhoeffer begs the question, how far will you go to stand up for what’s right?

Stupidity, to Bonhoeffer, originates when people give up their independent thinking and parrot the words and phrases of the rising power movement. They “jumped on the bandwagon” and ceased to think on their own. He observed that stupidity was found less among isolated people and more in social groups.