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A Life of Witness

The circuitous route taken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s captors in the dying days of the Third Reich to his place of execution, from the Gestapo Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse prison in Berlin, to Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Regensburg, Schonberg, and finally back to Flossenburg, was in stark clear contrast to the single-minded clear certainty with which Dietrich Bonhoeffer moved toward his death. On arrival finally at that place, Flossenburg—forever associated with him, though he spent only some twelve hours there—Bonhoeffer was given a summary trial, court martialled on the evening of his arrival, before being crudely executed the following morning, April 9, 1945, only weeks from the war’s end with the guns of the Allies sounding in the distance. Three weeks later, Adolf Hitler, the one who had ordered Bonhoeffer’s execution, was dead by his own hand. A week after that suicide the “thousand-year Reich” was no more.

Why would Hitler have concerned himself with the execution of a Lutheran pastor and why would a pastor be facing a court martial? The answer to those questions is that this pastor was indeed one who was very different. Originally drawn to the idea of non-violent resistance as typified by Mahatma Gandhi, whom he so wished to visit, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had ended up part of military intelligence, the Abwehr, and was even deeply involved in their plot to kill Hitler. The best known of these failed plots, that of July 20, 1944, linked with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, was the reason why the tyrannical ruler, even in what he should have known to be the final weeks of his rule, found it necessary in an act of vengeance to personally order the execution of all those involved in plots to overthrow the regime. Thus, on that morning Bonhoeffer died in the company of General Wilhelm Canaris, under whose command he had been at the Abwehr, and other conspirators including Major General Hans Oster and Judge Advocate Karl Sack.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not the only one of his family involved in the conspiratorial plots to kill Hitler. Far from it! Indeed the whole family was involved in opposition to the Nazis with a number actively joining the conspiracy, and for that the family would pay dearly. In martyrdom Dietrich was joined by his brother Klaus and two of his brother-in-laws, Hans von Dohnanyi, who had recruited him to the Abwehr, and Rudiger Schleicher. Given the chaos of the final weeks of the war and those days following immediately after, it was to be a couple of months after his execution that both the parents and also the fiancée of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were to have their worst fears cruelly confirmed. That the parents had Bonhoeffer’s death confirmed from listening to a radio broadcast of a memorial service being held for him in London shows the great esteem in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was already being held. Of course that estimation has continued to grow over the succeeding years.

That esteem in which Bonhoeffer is held is not only due to his brave martyrdom but also for his brilliant theological mind, and it could fairly be said that much of modern theological thought finds its roots in this man’s writings. Given that he was only thirty-nine when he was executed, one is only left to ponder what brilliant subsequent thought was consigned to the grave with him. The preliminary thoughts of future works he was considering, smuggled from prison, give some indication but also teasingly leave much to conjecture. A couple of those letters in particular addressed to his great friend Eberhard Bethge, in which he spoke of ‘religionless Christianity,’ has led to all sorts of speculation as to where Bonhoeffer’s thoughts were going.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born into a prominent German family with both sides of the family being well connected. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, a leading psychiatrist, held the foremost chair in the field in Germany at the Berlin University from his appointment in 1912 until his death in 1948, and ironically in that role he would be pressed into service in examining Marius van der Lubbe, the Dutch Communist almost certainly framed by the Nazis, for starting the Reichstag (German Parliament) fire. Bonhoeffer’s mother, Paula von Hase, a teacher, was likewise from a prominent family. Her parents been connected to the emperor’s court at Potsdam, while her grandfather Karl had been a famous theologian and both her father and brother were pastors. It could be argued that the deep religious conviction of Dietrich Bonhoeffer found its genesis on the maternal side of the family while his rigorous questioning found its roots in the more religiously sceptical paternal side of the family. The Bonhoeffer family thus were very much part of the cultural and intellectual elite in Germany, and from such circles, often shocked by the common vulgar brutality of the Nazis, would come much of the opposition to Hitler.

The young Dietrich was intellectually precocious, his reflections made on a trip to Rome when just eighteen on the links between the culture of antiquity of the classical world and that of modern Europe bearing strong witness to that. During that same trip to Italy Bonhoeffer began also to reflect upon the nature of the church, with his narrow nationalist understanding of the church, a view shared by almost all Germans of the time, being challenged by the universal nature of the Roman Church with its huge range of cultures present in the Vatican. This experience largely led to Bonhoeffer’s doctorate, “Sanctorum Communio: A Dogmatic Inquiry into the Sociology of the Church,” along with his post-doctorate, Act and Being. In contrast to the narrow nationalism of the German church, Bonhoeffer’s wider universal view would make him less susceptible later to the propaganda of the Nazis, who, drawing from Luther, equated the Christian message and German nationalism and thus were able to draw the great majority of the German church to their cause.

Bonhoeffer’s doctorate was completed within the highly prestigious theological faculty of the University of Berlin by the time he was just twenty-one. That faculty had as its iconic figure the father of modern liberal Christian thought, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), and still heavily bore his influence. During the time of Bonhoeffer’s studies the faculty head was another paradigmatic figure within liberal Christian thought, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930). While the liberal views of the faculty may have been met with familial understanding, though much of the family thought Dietrich’s brilliance was wasted in theology, they left Bonhoeffer unsatisfied. While not opposed to Christianity the Bonhoeffer family, as typified by his father Karl, had imbibed deeply from a more empirical scientific source. As Professor of Psychiatry Karl Bonhoeffer was an empiricist with little time for the emerging psychoanalytical movement led by such figures as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler. Family discussions were set by a need to be concise and to have clarity in thinking, with overdone appeals to emotion frowned upon. This environment set the course for the Bonhoeffer siblings, with Dietrich’s brother Klaus choosing a career in law, rising in that profession to be the top lawyer for the German airline Lufthansa, and Karl Friedrich distinguishing himself as a brilliant physicist working with such figures as Albert Einstein and Max Planck in the quest to split the atom. The Bonhoeffer family were not churchgoers, although Paula as mother along with her familial church background had been imbued with the piety of the “Herrnhut movement” and so ensured that regular Bible reading and hymn singing were a part of the family life.

Though Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theological training took place in an institution synonymous with the German historical-critical method, that was not to be the system of thought which most influenced him. Instead his major influence came from a man who stood irrevocably opposed to that liberal tradition, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), who had shaken the theological world when in 1922, while working as a rural pastor, he wrote a commentary on Romans that represented the beginning of his sustained attack on theological liberalism. Theological liberalism had equated European progress, thought, and culture with Christian theology, stating that the gospel must be couched in such a manner to make sense in that context. Of course when Barth wrote Europe had just passed through the catastrophic war of 1914–18, making such an easy accommodation of the gospel to European culture much more problematic. In response Barth developed a system of theological thought resolutely opposed to all for which the liberal tradition stood. The liberal system, its father being Schleiermacher, had been the norm in the European theological tradition for over a century and of course much of it was centred on Bonhoeffer’s alma mater, the theological faculty within the University of Berlin. So entrenched was theological liberalism that the contribution of Barth represented ‘a bolt out of the blue.’ While the liberal project had seen culture and faith as analogous, believing the task of theology to be to speak coherently and sensibly to the culture, Barth charged that faith instead stood dialectically rather than analogously to culture and far from acting as the affirmation of culture stood instead dialectically as its great “no.” Human beings from within their framework of culture and tradition were totally unable to work their way to God, who always stood above and outside the human project looking down from a height on the human towers of Babel. Barth’s God was utterly transcendent and there were no means by which humans could win divine approval through their own methods, but rather salvation could only come from the divine side mediated as grace through Jesus Christ. As such it cast a great judgement upon all human effort.

Barth understood his theology as a restatement of the Protestant orthodoxy of “sola fides,” that one could only be saved through faith. That in particular had been the experience of the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, a man whose figure towered over Germany. However, though Protestantism in essence rejected any idea that one could achieve salvation through their own means or through participation in a particular culture, the historical reality that Protestantism had been founded in Germany by a German, Luther, and represented a break with the universal church meant that the Protestant faith had ironically become deeply linked with what it meant to be German, so that the two had almost become synonymous. Martin Luther, who had stood against the universal church, was viewed as a German hero and in his opposition to the universal nature of the Catholic Church was understood to be the one in which German particular identity was created and centred. By his translation of the Latin Vulgate into German Luther had also largely codified a language unifying the disparate Germanic traditions into a greater sense of oneness, though that process of unity would not culminate until Bismarck established the German nation in 1871. Given this context, the Protestant church and in particular the Lutheran church had strongly developed as a German nationalist church.

The Lutheran church also importantly had a very particular way of understanding faith in relation to the political order. The theological centre point of the Lutheran faith, as we have just seen, was that a person is entirely dependent on the grace of God for salvation, with no one being able to save themselves. This thought of course had a radical outworking within the political and social order by stripping away all distinctions of self-righteousness and in so doing had a revolutionary impact in that it undermined a class system at that time firmly set within the framework of feudalism. If no one was more justified than anyone else before the great Lord then why should one seek justification before the lesser lords? Rather, each person was equal before the magisterial divine. Understanding the political implications of this theological thought, the German peasants began a rebellion against that old order they no longer viewed as having divine sanction. Initially Luther was supportive of the peasants, but then turned against them in the style of vile language that perhaps only Luther could muster, urging the princes to “smite slay and stab” the peasants, before adding, “such wonderful times are these that a prince can merit heaven better with bloodshed than another with prayer.”1 The sudden turn of Luther’s sympathies is best explained of course by his realisation that he needed the support of the German princes if his Reformation was to succeed in face of the power of the Holy Roman Empire. What seemed to be a logical nexus between the theological idea that all people, in total need of grace, were equal before God with the sociopolitical outworking that therefore no one should be privileged and that all were equal, had to be broken. Luther did this by separating the religious and the secular realm. In the former, yes, all were equal in that all were equally dependent on God’s grace, but this was to be held entirely separate from the political realm in which the old order would prevail. Lutheran thought would operate by a stark dualism whereby the religious and secular realms were held separate. The church was to only be concerned with the realm of faith but must remain mute in the secular realm which properly belonged to the state for state authorities like those in the church had been placed in those positions by the Divine will. They drew especially from the Scripture passage “for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1) for this view, along with the passage calling one to “render Caesar that which belongs to Caesar and unto God that which belongs to God” (Mark 12:17).

This dualist understanding was to strongly shape the German church response to the Nazis, largely precluding the church from mounting an effective opposition to that regime. That response to the regime, however, did vary.

I response of a large part of the church was that represented by the German Christians, those who completely fell in behind the Nazi Reich not only understanding it as being like other political leadership as being established by God, but going further by seeing the Nazis as having a special providential role. Led by such figures as Ludwig Muller, later made Reichsbishop of the Reichskirche (the unified German Protestant Church) by the Nazis, the German Christians offered total support to the regime, gladly superimposing the swastika with the cross. Selling themselves completely to the Nazis, they viewed Hitler and the Nazis as saviours divinely sent in order to save Germany from both the ignominy of the strictures placed on the nation by the Treaty of Versailles and also from the Communist threat both from within and outside Germany. They identified the Weimar Republic with German weakness, both of which had been a result of Versailles, and its weakness they understood as fuelling the atheistic Communist threat. Further, they joined the Nazis in seeing the Jews as the integral part of an international “Zionist conspiracy” being behind the Weimar Republic, and viewed both the Jews and that Republic as being part of a planned “Zionist-Communist” takeover. The Jews were understood in this to be a fifth column, a traitorous festering sore within Germany. In order to create this narrative, Jesus of course had to be rebirthed as a classic Aryan hero who had been betrayed and executed by this perfidious race. In one sense, however, the German Christians were not classically Lutheran, for they were all too eager to hand over control of the church, the properly religious realm, to the Nazis. The German Christians came later to dominate the Reichskirche and the same could be said also of that body.

The main alternative response to that of both the German Christians and the Reichskirche was that initially represented by the Pastors’ Emergency League and then later the Confessing Church. The response of both these fell classically within the duality of the Lutheran framework, in that they largely ceded the political sphere to the Nazis but strongly opposed Nazi interference in the religious realm. Opposing the Reichskirche for their selling out of the properly religious sphere to the Nazis, the Confessing Church, because of their dualist understandings, were never able to offer the needed strength of opposition to the regime. While unable to offer the needed resistance to the Nazis, from within their dualist framework they were able to arrive however at a point where they separated themselves from the Reichskirche and viewed it as having lost the right to call itself church by its surrender of the realm that was properly religious by allowing its doctrine to be infected with the regime’s ideology. The Barmen Declaration of 1934, largely written by Karl Barth, is the best known document representing the Confessing Church framework and as the foundation document of the Confessing Church it centres not on a critique of Nazi policy in general but rather on the defence only of the properly religious realm from attack by the Nazis. For not opposing this, the Confessing Church through this declaration charged that the Reichskirche no longer had the right to be called church, for by taking on “alien principles” it “ceases to be the church.” The declaration rejected the idea that the church should shape its message to “the prevailing ideological and political convictions,” for no part of the church’s life can belong “to other Lords.” It further stated, “We reject as the false doctrine, as though the state over and beyond its special commission should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the church’s vocation as well.”

A clear example of the Confessing Church’s dualist and therefore limited opposition to the Nazis was the view they held concerning Nazi policies toward the Jews. Numerous Jews and Jewish families in Germany over the centuries had converted to Christianity and were part of the church, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s close friend Franz Hildebrandt being one such person, having even become a pastor in the Lutheran Church. Bonhoeffer’s twin sister, Sabine, had even married such a person, Gerhard Liebholz. Bonhoeffer assisted all of them in their later escape from Germany, but one episode he deeply regretted in which he felt he had failed the Liebholz family was when under pressure from his district superintendent Bonhoeffer refused to preach at the funeral of Gerhard’s father due to his being Jewish and not being baptised as a Christian. This memory particularly haunted Bonhoeffer.

The Nazis of course viewed being Jewish not as a religious belief held concerning Judaism but rather as a gene contained within, i.e., racially, whatever one’s belief. Thus for them all those of Jewish background in the church were still Jews and Jews were being increasingly persecuted in Germany. Caught in its dualist understanding, the Confessing Church mounted a defence for those Jews within the church but was never able to rise in defence of those outside it. Bonhoeffer, although he had been among the founders of both the Pastors’ Emergency League and the Confessing Church, finally felt that the limits of its response to the increasing terror felt by the Jews at the hands of the Nazis was too narrowly premised, and his famous cry became, “only those who cry out for the Jews may also sing Gregorian chants.”2 Bonhoeffer had now moved from his early response to the regime, seen in his initial radio address two days after the Nazis had come to power in January 1933, where he critiqued the ideology of the leader (German literally “fuhrer”) when it claimed too much for itself thereby becoming idolatrous and taking the place of the one to whom praise ought be offered thereby, to a point where he was among very few in the church prepared to oppose the Nazis ethically and politically as well as for their religious policies. Bonhoeffer’s opposition was best expressed by his well known words, we “are not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.”3 For Bonhoeffer it was clearly necessary to stop the state carrying out evil not just in the religious realm but wherever and against whomever it was being perpetrated. Such thinking led to Bonhoeffer’s later involvement in the conspiracy and even to be part of the plot to assassinate the Fuhrer. The journey to such a position must not of course have been easy for one who had at one stage been so drawn to the non-violent resistance of Gandhi.

Not only did the church have difficulty opposing the Nazi regime, but the military did also. Deeply imbued by a culture of obedience to the state as legitimate authority, opposition to the regime represented a massive step for those within the military who chose to make it. That disobedience to the regime had been made even more difficult by the Nazis, who had made the military pledge an oath of obedience to Adolf Hitler as their Fuhrer. Such oaths were seriously regarded in military circles. Despite this the plots against Hitler were centred within the military, particularly in its high circles, and it is among this circle Bonhoeffer found himself as a member of military intelligence, the Abwehr. Many within those ranks of the military gave their lives for that involvement.

To return to the German church and the heritage it inherited from Martin Luther, one cannot of course pass without considering the church’s attitude to the Jews. Luther originally had been very understanding of the Jews and why they had not converted to Christianity, speaking of their non-conversion as a result of Christians acting as “beasts” toward them. He even wrote as essay on how Jesus Christ had been born a Jew. Towards the end of his life, however, he became more and more the “grumpy old man,” lambasting pretty much everything and everyone in ever more vulgar language, and that included becoming an extreme anti-Semite. Thus he advocated in his essay “On the Jews and Their Lies” setting fire to Jewish synagogues and schools, destroying homes, confiscating of Jewish prayer books, expropriating their money, and putting them to work in forced labour. The Nazis of course were to gleefully make great use of such material from the German hero, but not only the Nazis but the Protestant church attitude in general to the Jews also had been long tainted by such words from its founder. The anti-Semitism of the Nazis did not arise out of barren ground but had a long history of being planted in fertile soil.

The sort of issues with which Bonhoeffer was involved increasingly sharpened of course his theological analysis. That contextual sharpness is initially seen in his Cost of Discipleship, published November 1937. In that work Bonhoeffer contrasted “cheap grace” with “costly grace.” God’s grace, he noted, had been too easily given by the church to the whole German community with the result that it had lost any real meaning. We have baptised a nation, Bonhoeffer charged, with a cheap grace that made no demands to live in discipleship as Christians. Rather, grace was free but never cheap, as God’s giving of grace was centred in the cross of Jesus and was therefore a most costly grace. Cheap grace had only served to provide justification for whatever was carried out in the name of Christ, and made no demand for lives to be Christlike. Instead of being a recipient of cheap grace, the Christian is called to costly discipleship. “When Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die,” cried Bonhoeffer, and “only the one who believes is obedient, and only the one who is obedient believes,”4 thereby challenging the shallow and complacent religiosity passing itself as faith.

Bonhoeffer’s next major work, never actually completed, was Ethics. Clearly, in his increasing involvement in the conspiracy Bonhoeffer was moving in places where Christian ethics had little if anything to say. In this work Bonhoeffer called the Christian to go past absolute ethical ideas, which all too often serve as a means of opting out of decision making and action. Rather than maintaining moral purity by adhering to an abstract ideal, a Kantian ethical imperative, a Christian is called to action in obedience to the call and will of God. Too often, he wrote, Christians were reduced to inaction due to their often ego-centred concern for their moral purity rather than getting actively involved in a world where ethical decisions were not usually black or white and involved acting in a manner contrary to absolutes. Truth of itself, he noted, had no absolute value as a moral imperative. In order to show such, Bonhoeffer posed the example of a child asked at school in front of the class as to whether his father was a drunkard. In such circumstances Bonhoeffer charged there was no obligation to tell the truth. Equally, Bonhoeffer in his conspiratorial role in the Abwehr felt no obligation to tell the truth but rather to the Nazis would live a life of deception. What was of prime importance to him was devotion to God and the living out God’s will, and this trumped all moral and ethical imperatives. Thus Bonhoeffer felt himself increasingly called to such action even if that sullied his own moral conscience. He even spoke of how if his actions condemned him to eternal torment he must accept this, for such actions, even at the expense of one’s soul, were the disciple’s call and duty. With their own ethical questions, many in the conspiracy looked to Bonhoeffer for guidance as to their duty, and that adherence to duty was to eventually cost many in the conspiracy, including of course Bonhoeffer, their own lives.

It was while he was imprisoned in Tegel that Bonhoeffer wrote a series of theological reflections, which for the most part were smuggled out of the prison. These became the basis for the third major writing associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his Letters and Papers from Prison. As earlier said, the thoughts expressed in these are especially tantalising, as clearly most of them are only worked out in a nascent preliminary form, Bonhoeffer’s intention being to further expand on them after his release from prison. That release of course never came.

The teasing kernel of the work comes in letter dated April 30, 1944. It is good to quote it extensively because even as it is in full it is clearly but a précis of where Bonhoeffer’s thought was taking him. He begins by expressing his hope for the success of one of the upcoming plans to assassinate Hitler. “I think,” he writes, “God is about to accomplish something that, even if we take part in it either outwardly or inwardly, we can only receive with the greatest awe.” He follows then with some theological reflections in which he clearly understands himself as broaching new ground. “What is bothering me incessantly,” he writes,

is the question what Christianity really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time. . . . Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of humankind. “Christianity” has always been a form—perhaps the true form—of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore humans become radically religionless—and I think that that is already more or less the case . . . what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what to now been our “Christianity.”5

It could be argued that this style of thought stands within the Barthian neo-orthodox tradition which had so shaped Bonhoeffer, but Bonhoeffer as I understand is clearly carrying Barth’s conclusions further:

Barth, who is the only one to have started along this line of thought, did not carry it to completion, but arrived at a positivism of revelation, which in the last analysis is essentially a restoration. For the religionless working person (or any other person) nothing decisive is gained here. The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God—without religion? . . . How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now speak as we used to) in a “secular” way about “God”? In what way are we “religionless-secular” Christians, in what way are we the “ek-klesia” [NB: Greek literally ‘called out,’ from which we get our word ecclesial], those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world?6

Again just four days before the von Stauffenberg plot, July 16, 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote,

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto 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.7

The day following the unsuccessful von Stauffenberg plot, Bonhoeffer wrote,

During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo-religiosis, but simply a person, as Jesus was a man—in contrast, shall we say to John the Baptist. . . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.8

Clearly Bonhoeffer writing in such manner is an expression of his interests and actions having moved far beyond the sphere of religion to the down-to-earth questions of living in the midst of the ambiguity of the world. Of course his thinking in such secular manner had been strongly shaped by his ongoing involvement in the conspiracy that he was hoping as he wrote was about to culminate successfully in the most extensive and best known of the plots on Hitler’s life.

This tantalising reflection of Bonhoeffer’s thought has led to much speculation as to where Bonhoeffer may have taken the theological world if he had survived the war. As earlier stated, I believe that Bonhoeffer was past a mere restatement of Barthian neo-orthodoxy, though holding to its essential anti-religiosity. It is clear from his words above that he has left behind a view that merely replaced a “via-positiva,” working from the world to God, with a “via-negativa” and therefore a need for revelation from God, for such revelation leaves us still in the religious realm and is therefore irrelevant in the radically secular world of which Bonhoeffer speaks. Bonhoeffer’s view of the secularity of the world and therefore the absence of God as a premise needed to make sense of existence, led in the 1960s to the “death of God” school of theologians including Harvey Cox, Bishop John Robinson, and Thomas Altizer, while his call for action in the pained reality of the world found voice in the liberation theologians primarily associated with South America, figures such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Lenonardo Boff, and Juan Segundo.

Bonhoeffer also presented an ecclesiastical challenge to the church, writing in his April 30, 1944 letter of the church in a secular age being made up of

a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as “religious.” Are these to be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervour, pique or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion upon them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgement must be that the western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us in the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians?9

Clearly again in his ecclesial understanding Bonhoeffer was visualising a future—perhaps already then becoming present—in which seemingly the religious domain, along with its vehicle, the church, was redundant.

While in the Tegel prison Bonhoeffer clearly hoped to be released, and that real hope remained present for him right up the failure of the von Stauffenberg plot and the subsequent discovery of the Zossen files. Bonhoeffer was treated well at Tegel, almost certainly due to his uncle on his mother’s side being General Paul von Hase, the military commandant of Berlin and therefore in charge ultimately of the military prison. Bonhoeffer, however, never took advantage of this fortuitous relationship, sharing with other prisoners the goods sent to him by his family and refusing on one occasion the offer of moving to a better cell, though at one point Bonhoeffer was visited by his uncle armed with plenty of sekt (German champagne), which they shared together with a few others. Paul von Hase was also involved in the conspiratorial movement, an involvement that would cost him his life just six weeks after that visit to Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer had a particular reason for wanting to be released from the Tegel prison: his engagement with Maria von Wedemeyer, only concluded a matter of months before his arrest. This action alone represented a change in Bonhoeffer’s theological understanding. Previous to this he had a relationship with a fellow theological student, Elizabeth Zinn, and this lasted eight years before Bonhoeffer increasingly distanced himself from the relationship, believing that, given the context in which he found himself, there were seemingly more important things to do. Now, however, with Maria his attitude had changed to one in which deeply human, life-affirming things such as love must be celebrated. It was almost as though he was saying, “What greater protest against a surrounding nihilist culture of death, seemingly closing off from any future, could there be than the concluding of a marriage celebrating love and a commitment to the future?”

Maria was the granddaughter of a dear friend, Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, who had long been a supporter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from the time he had been directing the Confessing Church seminaries and collective pastorates in Pomerania, eastern Germany, where she lived on a country estate. Bonhoeffer had seen Maria grow, from a child he considered too young to join the confirmation classes he conducted for her older siblings, into a young woman. It seems that he became increasingly attracted to her until he became smitten with her in May 1942—feelings about which she had no idea at that stage and which she did not share for him. She was only eighteen, after all, while he was an eminent figure aged thirty-six.

It was not until three months later, August 1942, that Bonhoeffer was able to return to the estate, having had no contact with her over that period. While he was there tragic news came that Ruth’s son Hans, Maria’s father, had been killed at Stalingrad, aged fifty-four. Not long after Maria’s older brother, Max, who had been part of the family confirmation class conducted by Bonhoeffer, was also killed. Possibly through Bonhoeffer’s pastoral care and sensitivity at the time, he and Maria grew closer, prompted by Ruth the grandmother, but resisted by Maria’s mother Ruth, who forbade Bonhoeffer to come to her son’s funeral. Eventually Maria’s mother relented and agreed to the relationship on the stringent grounds that there be a year separation and restricted correspondence. In ordinary times those conditions would have been onerous enough, but in the place in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer found himself it was like an eternity. He eventually proposed to her by letter January 10, 1943.