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The ambiguous witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2014)

The complicated legacy of the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Lacking precise direction, he cobbled together positions as an unpaid adjunct at his graduate alma mater, a chaplaincy at Berlin Technical University, youth ministry at a working-class Lutheran parish, and ecumenical work for a forerunner of the World Council of Churches. For the leaders of the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer’s duties as courier to the British government covered his assigned operations as a Nazi spy, while he in fact, as part of the anti-Hitler conspiracy within the agency, was passing on to the western Allies classified material and urging them (utterly without success) to work with the conspirators toward a coup d’état and forge a lenient separate peace. He prayed for the members of his new “congregation,” wrote them notes of assurance and consolation, and maintained as far as he could a liturgical discipline of “meditation, thanksgiving, intercessory prayer, praise, and lament.” He minimized his own suffering and kept up an appearance of confident good spirits.

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