Headed toward a brilliant career as a theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German Lutheran pastor, became instead a modern martyr for his opposition to Nazism and his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He excelled in his theological studies and had earned a doctorate by the age of twenty-four. He served as a pastor in Berlin, and in 1931 became a lecturer in the theological faculty. He was in London for a while pastoring two German congregations, and returned in 1935 to head an illegal seminary for training pastors for the Confessing Church that opposed Hitler. During the war Bohhoeffer was a key leader in the Confessing Church, and spoke out bravely against the anti-semitic policies of the regime. He was imprisoned in April 1943 for conspiracy and hanged two years later, just before the end of the war.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's most widely ready book, The Cost of Discipleship, begins with these words: 'Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.' His writings were and are a clarion call to church of what it means to follow Christ in the modern world, where faith is tested on every side and even government can become criminal and godless.
"Who am I?"-- a poem written in prison in June of 1944:
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell's confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a Squire from his country house
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really that which
other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself
know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick,
like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though
hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers,
for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness,
for neighbourliness,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends
at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying,
at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once?
A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still
like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder
from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me,
these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest,
0 God,I am Thine!
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Tegel Prison
Summer 1944
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