Theologian · Contemporary
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
1906–1945 · Confessing Church; Lutheran theology of discipleship
A Lutheran pastor and martyr, drawn to the Church's catholicity on a visit to Rome in 1924, who restored private confession and a daily office among his students and is cited with honor by Benedict XVI and Francis.
A Berlin pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer wrote Sanctorum Communio (1930) on the church as ‘Christ existing as community’, led the Confessing Church's underground seminary at Finkenwalde, and in Discipleship (1937) attacked ‘cheap grace’, grace without the cross or the call to follow: ‘only he who believes obeys, and only he who obeys believes’. Life Together (1939) described the common prayer, confession and daily office he kept with his students. Drawn into the Abwehr conspiracy against Hitler, he wrote in the unfinished Ethics of the ‘penultimate’ and the ‘natural’, of God's mandates (family, work, government, church) and of responsible action that accepts guilt; from Tegel prison the Letters and Papers asked who Christ is for a ‘world come of age’ and sketched a ‘religionless Christianity’ lived in the midst of life. He was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.
Why he matters: His critique of cheap grace, his recovery of the natural and of confession for Protestant theology, and his martyrdom have made him the Protestant most quoted by Catholic preachers and popes; the Catholic theologian Ernst Feil wrote the standard account of his thought, and the Church's own witness under tyranny is read beside his.
Where to be careful
He kept Luther's justification by faith alone (Trent, Session 6), Scripture as the only rule and no place for the papacy; the Ethics' willingness to incur guilt in responsible action strains the teaching that evil may never be done for good (Veritatis Splendor 80), and ‘religionless Christianity’ has been read in ways he would not own. Common ground: costly discipleship, the Sermon on the Mount, confession, the daily office, and resistance to the idolatry of the state (Mit Brennender Sorge).
Reading
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DiscipleshipDietrich Bonhoeffer · Cheap and costly grace; the Sermon on the Mount read as command.
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Letters and Papers from PrisonDietrich Bonhoeffer · The 1944 letters on the world come of age and ‘only the suffering God can help’.
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The Theology of Dietrich BonhoefferErnst Feil · A Catholic theologian's standard account of the unity of his thought.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.