In the gray dawn of April 1945, in a concentration camp in Flossenburg, shortly before the camp was liberated by the Allied forces, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by special order from Heinrich Himmler. On Easter Monday 1953, Bavarian priests unveiled a plaque, in the church in Flossenburg, with the simple inscription:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a witness to Jesus Christ among his brothers. Born February 4, 1906, in Breslau. Died April 9, 1945, in Flossenburg.

For countless Christians around the world, the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become a contemporary confirmation of the statement of the Church Father, Tertullian: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

Christians may disagree with his theology, but few can fail to admire Bonhoeffer’s steadfastness in opposing the German government under Adolf Hitler, even at the cost of his life.

A student of Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer received his doctorate in theology from the University of Berlin when he was twenty-one. In 1928 he became vicar in Barcelona and in 1929 he returned to Berlin. After being accepted as a lecturer in theology, he was sent to Union Theological Seminary in New York for a year. Returning to Berlin, he began lectures in systematic theology and soon attracted a group of students. His first book, Creation and the Fall , a product of his lectures, was a theological exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis. In addition he served as chaplain to the engineering school students in Charlottenburg, where he led services to packed houses.

Then came the fateful year of 1933. Adolf Hitler came to power. Aware of the influence of the church on the masses, Hitler seduced and deceived the Church by gaining great support from the Lutheran and Catholic clergy. The idea of ​​the German Church had touched many “German Christians”. Nazi (ultra-nationalist) ideas had begun to infiltrate the church.

However, there were also those who were worried and suspicious of Hitler's intentions and his ideas about the superiority of the Aryan (Indo-German) race. About a third of the Protestant clergy who joined and led the so-called Confessing Church opposed the German leader.

In 1935, Bonhoeffer became President of the Confessing Church Seminary. However, the seminary was closed in 1937, and Bonhoeffer was banned from publishing or speaking in public. Two years later Bonhoeffer returned to America. There he was offered the possibility of moving to teach in America, but Bonhoeffer refused. He reasoned that he wanted to serve his fellow countrymen, the Germans.

His brother-in-law drew him into the resistance movement, and Bonhoeffer had become part of the group that planned to assassinate Hitler. He and others felt that Hitler with his dictatorship was the anti-Christ and the enemy of humanity. The plan failed and Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943, not because he worked as a rebel, but because he helped smuggle fourteen Jews into Switzerland. In prison he wrote, which was published after his death, under the title Letters and Papers from Prison.

If Bonhoeffer had lived longer, perhaps he could have explained some of the challenging but confusing ideas he put forward while in prison. Theologians to this day still often discuss various terms and phrases put forward by Bonhoeffer, such as: "religionless Christianity" (Christianity without religion), "death of God" (death of God) which are understood differently by theologians and evangelists. When Bonhoeffer in his writings stated "the world has come of age" (the world has come of age), people ask what he meant? Did he want to secularize the gospel or did he see, like so many others today, that many people no longer understood traditional Christian concepts?

“How can we speak secularly about God?” Bonhoeffer asked. We know that he disagreed with other theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, who wanted to “demythologize” the gospel, but he never started a program of his own?

While many questions about him remain unanswered, the basic elements of Bonhoeffer’s beliefs are unquestionable: Faith is costly, faith in Christ is not a cheap commodity. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, called Christians to a strong faith and a willingness to deny themselves. Many people have received the “cheap grace” of Christianity, which has led them to have a weak faith, Bonhoeffer claimed. Rather than discussing the ethical parts of the New Testament as a wonderful but impossible legacy, Bonhoeffer urged every Christian to strive and practice the values ​​of the New Testament in their daily lives. True religion is more than having correct ideas about God, but true faith means faithfully following Him, even to death, if necessary.

Bonhoeffer himself obeyed the edict he had written. While in prison, he never gave up his faith in Christ. He continued to seek to serve others, his fellow prisoners. In Flossenburg prison, his last weeks were spent with men and women of many nationalities: Russian, English, French, Italian and German. A British officer who eventually survived wrote:

Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to radiate an atmosphere of happiness and joy over little things and a deep sense of gratitude for the fact that he was alive….He was one of the few people I have ever met for whom God was real and always near…On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer led a small service and worshipped us in a way that penetrated our hearts. He found the right words to express our captivity, the thoughts and decisions it brought us. He had just finished his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us. It means only one thing to all prisoners, the prisoner’s stake. We bade him farewell. He took me aside, “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.” The following day he was hanged at Flossenburg.

The text he recited on that last day was “By His stripes we are healed.”

Such was the life and death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a teacher of the Church, a writer with profound theological and biblical abilities, yet close to contemporary life and sensitive to reality, a witness who saw the path of discipleship and lived it to the end. His willingness to die for Christ is an example for every generation of the challenge of a faith that is always ready to sacrifice.