Sveshnikova Irene on: Bonhoeffer

Sveshnikova Irene said:
March 12th, 2007 at 12:11 pm eNow we know very much about tose antifascist and communistic groups which have operated in the deepest underground,arising or breaking up,were put to the brutal punitive measures,struggled agaist dictatorship in Russia,in Germany,in Austria-Hungary.Dietrich Bonhoeffer was from those Christian people who was against that people live under the political and ideological principles,dictatorship,under the oppression of national socialim,Nazy regime.Propagation has penetrated mostly into all spheres of human activity;cinema,theatre,newspapers,radio and so on.Bonhoeffer is the man who commands respect,despite he could be sent to prieson he helped Jews went to Switzerland.He has created the Christian resistant movement,he called for that people open their eyes ans saw what’s going on in reality and realize that it is national catastrophe,it is awfully ans terribly to live so.People should respect each other irrespective of nationality and believes.He said:’Only one who loves human being,life and earth-can love God’.And maybe now people will learn and understand something,will learn lessons from own sufferings, blood and tears,will learn to understand that today all should go otherwise.’There in no savation for human without salvation of the earth’.
In the 21st century the humanity ought understand that God has brought on the Earth not new religion but new belief.

Surprised by Joy — Summary by Zina

The book ” Surprised by Joy”, written by C.S. Lewis seven years before his death, is one of the premier Christian apologist of the 20-th century. In this book he explained why he became a Christian and narrated “directly and unabashedly” about specific details of his personal life.
Life of S.C. Lewis interested a great number of people, that is why, despite his own detail narration about it, many authors wrote critiques of it. And a lot of “secondary sources” about his personal life appeared. It is very sad, because Lewis himself did not approve it. And all his life, as a critic, he fought against it.
He began with the description of peace and grace of his childhood. He described himself, his brother, the home library and his imaginary world of miracles and adventures. In his childhood he got an experience of feeling real joy, but after the death of his mother he lost it. During his life, C.S. Lewis experimented with various Eastern beliefs, Aristotelian ethics, he balanced between pantheism and theism and even was an atheist. Hard and complicated was not only his internal life, but also an external. He went through many life tests and difficulties. But despite them all he became an outstanding person. He succeed as literary critic, teacher in Oxford, author of children books and writer of Christian apologetics. But before returning to Christianity he went through a long way of fight with himself. And on this way there were people and factors which made him change his opinion. ” Surprised by Joy” is about them. In this book C.S. Lewis described his long searching for “joy” and the recovery of a child-like wonderment at the world and its mysteries after his conversion. He supposed that joy was an experience of the transcendent, which was available in earthly loves, aesthetics and later he understood that it also could be found in the Creator.
In this book C.S. Lewis depicted only those people, events and ideas which had direct influence on his conversion. He distinguished two persons who influenced his change a lot. First of them was William Kirkpatrick. He was atheist and that is why he could not help C.S. Lewis to believe directly, but he convinced him, that the base for the belief was in the fact that the reason alone could not bring person to the central truth. Another important person was his oxford friend Owen Barfield. He proved C.S. Lewis, that not all “out of date” things had to be discredited and that Christianity could be a way for people even in 20-th century. And there were also two popular writers who influenced Lewis’ conversion. First was George MacDonald, whose works convinced C.S. Lewis that there was another world, despite of the material. And the second was G. K. Chesterton. After reading his book “The Everlasting Man”, C.S. Lewis got a full picture of Christianity and understood its role in world’s history. With the help of these people C.S. Lewis found the joy, he sought for a so long period of time.

Bonhoeffer Against “Despisers of the Body”

Against the Despisers of the Body: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Today by Jurgen Moltmann

By demandside

Created Nov 12 2006 – 8:39am

We need Bonhoeffer’s earth piety today. A new ecological theology must oppose religious and practical world denial. We humans came from the earth and belong to this earth as the angels belong to heaven. There is no salvation for humans without the salvation of the earth.

AGAINST THE DESPISERS OF THE BODY

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Speaks to Today’s Christians

By Jurgen Moltmann

[This article is translated from the German in: zeitzeichen 1/2006.]

[Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the best-known German theologian of the 20th century. What is the fascinating secret behind Bonhoeffer’s name? The Tubingen theologian Jurgen Moltmann who also enjoys a worldwide reputation probes this question.]

For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ordination as a pastor in 1931 was as important as teaching authority in the theological faculty of Berlin University. His friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge describes this as “the turn of the theologian into a Christian.” From being a subject of academic theology called “ecclesiology,” the church for Bonhoeffer in those years was a place of engaged Christian life. Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, the struggle of the Confessing Church against the “German Christians,” the Nazis, and the Jewish persecution made theology into a personal and political necessity for Bonhoeffer and not merely an academic and church matter. From then on, theology and biography were connected in his lived theology. In 1933, he broke off his academic career after the theological faculties in Germany6 were “brought into line” by the Nazi party.

Bonhoeffer began to live what he knew theologically and reconsidered theologically the decisions in his life. His personal existence was a theological existence. His theology was increasingly a political theology because his personal life was challenged politically. We stand at the gateway to the fascinating mystery of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s effect, his authentically lived theology to his martyrdom on April 9, 1945 in the Flossenburg concentration camp. His authentically lived theology convinces people across time and space in Korea and Nicaragua, to name only two distant countries.

Bonhoeffer was 39 years old when he was put to death. From 1933 to his arrest in 1943, he had ten years to develop his theology in those difficult and dangerous times. Whoever reads his “Letters and Papers from Prison” from April 1943 to October 1944 shares in a theology of becoming and is stimulated through his incomplete ideas to his own thinking. That is unique in theology and constitutes Bonhoeffer’s tremendous attraction and lasting effect. He left behind lived theology and theology in becoming, not any doctrinal system or dogmatics.

LIFE – NOT RELIGION

In the cramped conditions of the prison cell, Bonhoeffer’s ideas were more expansive than ever. His focus changed from the church to the world. He discovered the freedom of the secular world, the dignity of earthly life, the real message of the Old Testament, the beauty of the earth and the delight in life on earth. For Bonhoeffer, faith is “something whole, a life act.” “Jesus calls to life, not to a new religion.” “Natural piety” and “unconscious Christianity” now suddenly interested Bonhoeffer, that lived Christianity of his own family, not a special churchly Christianity. Bonhoeffer wanted to “learn to believe” in the “full worldliness of life.” He did not think of the “trite and banal worldliness” of the enlightened and comfortable but worldliness “in which knowledge of death and the resurrection is always present.” In his prison cell, Bonhoeffer fought against the religious at the expense of the worldly and against spirituality at the expense of vitality. Faith meant for him affirming and loving life up to death and sharing in God’s love for the world that also embraces God’s suffering in this world. He saw in Christ God’s reality in the reality of the world.

Bonhoeffer overcame the traditional theological thinking in two realms or in the opposition of God and world. He wanted to believe in the full “polyphony of life,” in the beauty, delight and pain of life. He loved the Song of Songs of love in the Old Testament and hated the Christian tempering of all passions. He became engrossed in the wild opposition of pleasure and curse that constitutes real life and added the musical counterpoint in his new theological drama. If faith is the “cantus firmus,” the counterpoints are heard in the polyphony of life. Life first becomes whole in this polyphony. At the same time faith proclaims nothing sinister can happen as long as the “cantus firmus” is preserved. Since God is “beyond life in the midst of life,” faith must be grasped in the midst of life. The church must remain in the village and not be pushed aside to the edge of life and the cemetery.

Bonhoeffer began reading the New Testament from the Old Testament. “Only one who knows the inexpressibility of God’s name can say the name Jesus Christ. Only one who loves life and the earth so that everything is lost with them can believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world. Only one who accepts God’s law over one’s life can also speak of grace.”

Boinhoeffer urged his fellow Christians to remain faithful to the earth and not believe those who “speak of supernatural hopes.” They are “despisers of the body.” Once blasphemy of God was the greatest outrage. “Now blaspheming the earth is the most dreadful blasphemy,” Bonhoeffer quotes the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The religious socialists of the twenties also understood this as a call to re-orient Christian hope and pass from the hope in heaven of the world to come to the forward hope in the coming reign and the new earth where God’s justice will dwell.

The young Dietrich Bonhoeffer belonged to this group. In a 1932 address on the petition “Thy kingdom come,” he said “only the one who loves the earth and God in one can believe in God’s reign.” “Christ strengthens the person.” Christ does not lead him “to the hinterlands of religious escapism” but “returns the earth to him as is faithful son.” Whoever “loves God loves him as the Lord of the earth as it is. Whoever loves the earth loves it as God’s earth.” This forces the church to pray for the reign “come what may in the cooperative society of the children of the earth and the world.” “God’s reign is the reign of the resurrection on earth.”

I believe Bonhoeffer returned to this early insight in faithfulness to the earth in prison in 1943. On the strength of this faithfulness, he resisted evil on earth. This was the theological basis for his new view of the “genuine worldliness of faith in Christ.” Christ’s cross stood on this earth. His resurrection happened on this earth. This earth will become again the dwelling-place of God’s righteousness.

Bonhoeffer’s faithfulness to the earth is revolutionary. The traditional Christian hope is a longing for redemption. It is directed to heaven, not the earth. Little children learn to pray “Dear God, make me pious so I can come to heaven.” The pious enter heaven after death, it is said. An unconscious world denial is planted there. If heaven is true home, then this earth becomes indifferent. Since we cannot remain here, we exploit the earth and leave behind devastations. Different forms of religious world denial are responsible today for destruction of the environment and the ecological catastrophes inflicted on the earth. Conversion from betrayal of the earth to faithfulness to the earth is implicit in the simple petition: “Thy kingdom come – on earth as in heaven.”

We need Bonhoeffer’s earth piety today. A new ecological theology must oppose religious and practical world denial. We humans came from the earth and belong to this earth in the present and future as the angels belong to heaven. There is no salvation for humans without the salvation of the earth, that new earth on which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3,13). We make international politics but need earth politics. We bring world religions into dialogue but need a religion of the earth that respects a Sabbath of the earth. We globalize and mean Internet and the cyber-world while the globe is marvelous and fragile. Bonhoeffer had not known about the ecological crisis. Still his theology of faithfulness to the earth is a magnificent ecological theology.

For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, enlightenment was “the end of the self-indebted minority human status,” the “inability to use one’s intelligence without the direction of another.” Kant encouraged persons to use their own intelligence. Bonhoeffer took up this idea of enlightenment when he spoke of the “come-of-age world” and of the “autonomy of the world” in one of his last letters. He saw a great cultural development in the modern age leading to a come-of-age world where a person can live, think and feel as though there were no God. God as a moral, political and natural science work hypothesis had its day for Bonhoeffer. Dropping this work hypothesis and “being finished with life without God” was part of intellectual honesty, the theologian said.

How can Christ counter the come-of-age world? “Christ takes hold of the person in the center of his life.” Starting from this point, the come-of-age world and the modern person can be confronted in their strongest position with God. A “non-religious interpretation of biblical terms” in a religionless world is necessary. Bonhoeffer could not tell us what this interpretation would look like. But he left behind a very dialectical formula: “We see before God that we have to live in the world – etsi deus non daretur! God forces us to this discovery… God shows us we must live as persons finished with life without God. The God who is with us is the God who abandons us (Mark 15,34). Before and with God, we live without God.”

Bonhoeffer sees God in Christ and Christ in the modern come-of-age world. Like the young Hegel, he interprets the process of God’s displacement from the modern world christologically as a new Golgotha. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on the cross.” Matthew 8,17 declares: Christ helps “by virtue of his weakness and suffering, not by his omnipotence.” “Worldly interpretation should be used here.”

This is a very bold, unusual and one of the last total theological interpretations of the modern world as the Christian world. Let us see whether his analysis is true.

In the modern world, people are only rarely come-of-age. In the Nazi dictatorship and under communist rule, there was no chance of using their own intelligence without direction of the party. Rather people were held as extremely underage and could only use prescribed political-ideological language. This is called political correctness today.

The interpretation of the modern age as the “come-of-age world” transfers the personal stages of development of a person to the development of humanity. At age 18, one is come-of-age. Previously one was underage and needed a guardian. This transfer is part of the modern belief in progress that declares the past as a preliminary childhood stage of its own development. However this is not true. Our ancestors in antiquity and the Middle Ages were not more underage or more come-of-age than us.

After the diverse criticism of religion in the 19th century, we at the beginning of the 21st century did not enter a “religionless age” but are threatened by religious terror and the longing for religious redemption.

We conclude: We need not all become religious again before we can become Christians. There is also a non-religious Christianity, not only a religious Christianity. Bonhoeffer’s sentence “Christ brings new life in the world, not a new religion” is true for both. What is involved is this whole, loved, healed and justified life that Christ opens up with the abundance of life and eternal life. The word “suffering God” comes in the context of Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the “come-of-age world.” To my knowledge, this is unique in all German theology of the 19th and 20th centuries in Germany. This idea only appeared with the philosopher Georg F W Hegel while an extensive discussion about God’s capacity for suffering occurred in England.

Bonhoeffer speaks of “God’s suffering in the godless world” and of “God’s messianic suffering in Jesus Christ.” He says in a poem: “People go to God in God’s distress, find him poor and scorned, without shelter and bread, see him engulfed by sin, weakness and death. Christians stand by God in his suffering.” However God’s suffering embraces the present godless world situation and is not limited exclusively to Christ. This is God’s suffering in the godless world. As the poem says, God suffers in the godlessness of violent criminals and in the abandonment of their victims, “poor, and reviled, without shelter and bread.”

In the New Testament, Christ’s sufferings are not exclusively Jesus’ sufferings. The Apostle also shares in them. They reach up to the sufferings of this age (Romans 8,18). A new theology of the cross arose out of the experiences of war, destruction and mass murder after the Second World War. Unconsciously and consciously, this was tied to Bonhoeffer’s message from the Gestapo cell: “Only the suffering God can help.” The metaphysic of an apathetic deity incapable of suffering that has long marked Christianity was criticized.

The God helping through his suffering is not the untouchable sovereign in heaven who so gloriously rules all things but rather the “one like the mother bearing her child” and “as a father holds his child in his arms.” So God in Christ bears our suffering and our sin as the Greek sage Atlas bears the world on his shoulders so the world does not sink in the abyss and become lost. The God who bears and supports this world is the “God of hope” (Romans 15,13).

Zina Kirko on: The Everlasting Man (Chesterton)

In the preface of his book “The Everlasting man”, C.K. Chesterton explains that it is not easy for all people to understand Christian Religion. Because of their tiredness, habits and everyday routine the majority of people nowadays can’t be surprised any more. Getting used to something, people become tired and it is practically impossible to revive truth which is familiar to them for a very long time. The fuss and press of our modern life hinder people to perceive real beauty of things. Maybe that is why to understand something people should throw away their scepticism and become like children, who are ready to believe, perceive and understand.
In the chapter ” The strangest story in the world” C.K. Chesterton mentions that Jesus Christ was the first who advised to be like children. In this chapter C.K. Chesterton also describes personality of Christ, his life story, his mission and the role of his life and death in the fate of all the World.
First of all C.K. Chesterton explains why Jesus Christ was not just a smart person or wise philosopher, but the son of God. By his point of view only in three cases person can talk in a manner as if he was God: mad person, somebody with great megalomania or a real son of God. Jesus Christ was wise, equitable, equable and calm, that is why he could not be mad. He was kind, merciful, all his life was devoted to help to other people, for whom he finally died , that is why he had no megalomania.No one great philosopher or wiseman before Christ had never called himself God. Moreover the greater and the wiser the person, the better he knows how far he is from God. Only God is great enough to call himself God. It means that only the third variant seems to be true.
Jesus Christ was thinking not just as an ordinary person. As Chesterton told, he was thinking “on three planes at once”. His wisdom was amazingly deep and complicated. It was hidden in parables, which are still difficult to understand even today. In the Gospel must be found something much more complicated than “simple morality”. Because of his ability to think in such way Jesus Christ differed from other people and was higher than any human creature of those times and even today.
And the main proof for divinity of Jesus Christ is the fact that he knew about his mission. He had an aim and all his words, deeds and conducts served this goal. He knew about his death, about betrayal, but he also knew that it would serve the achievement of his goal. On the same reason he did not vanish before the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate. His goal and his philosophy were much higher than just a human aim or human philosophy.
It means that Jesus Christ was not just an ordinary person, who had very deep and wise philosophy and who successfully preached it, but he was somebody much higher than human creature, somebody who came with a mission to this world, and whose goal was to change it. In this chapter C.K. Chesterton compare Jesus Christ with new Adam, who gave the beginning of new Era. All the mythes, old religions, teachings, gods and heroes died with Christ. All the ancient world died with him. And a new history began.

Bonhoeffer from Cell 92

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945

Dietrich Bonhoeffer — along with his twin sister, Sabine — was born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau, Germany. Later a student in Tubingen, Berlin, and at Union Theological Seminary in New York — as well as a participant in the European ecumenical movement — Bonhoeffer became known as one of the few figures of the 1930s with a comprehensive grasp of both German- and English-language theology.

His works resonate with a prescience, subtlety and maturity that continually belies the youth of their author.He wrote his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, at the end of three years at the University of Berlin (1924-1927) and was awarded his doctorate with honors. Act and Being, his Habilitationsschrift, or qualifying thesis, allowing him to teach at the University of Berlin, was accepted in July 1930. The following year, 1930-1931, Bonhoeffer spent a postgraduate year at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He assumed his post as a lecturer in theology at the University of Berlin in August 1931. In the winter semester 1931-1932 Bonhoeffer presented the lectures that were published as Creation and Fall.

His final lecture courses at Berlin — published as Christ the Center — along with a seminar on the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, were taught in the summer of 1933. His authorization to teach on the faculty of the University of Berlin was finally withdrawn on August 5, 1936.Bonhoeffer served as a curate for a German congregation in Barcelona during 1929-1930. Following his ordination at St. Matthias Church, Berlin, in November 1931, he was to help organize the Pastors’ Emergency League in September 1933, prior to asssuming the pastorate of the German Evangelical Church, Sydenham, and the Reformed Church of St. Paul in London.

During his sojourn in England, Bonhoeffer became a close friend and confidant of the influential Anglican Bishop, George Bell. After the Confessing Church was organized in May 1934 at Barmen, Germany, Bonhoeffer returned from England in the spring of 1935 to assume leadership of the Confessing Church’s seminary at Zingst by the Baltic Sea–a school relocated later that year to Finkenwalde in Pomerania. Out of the experiences at Finkenwalde emerged his two well-known books, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as well as his lesser known writings on pastoral ministry such as Spiritual Care. His work to prepare pastors in the Confessing Church continued all the way to 1939.

Bonhoeffer’s early travel to Rome, his curacy in Barcelona and his post-doctoral year in New York (including regular work at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, as well as travel to Cuba and Mexico), opened Bonhoeffer to the ecumenical church. In 1931 he as appointed youth secretary of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, and in 1934 he became a member of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work. At conferences throughout Europe he vigorously represented the cause of the Confessing Church and challenged the ecumenical movement about its theological foundations and its responsibility for peace.

Bonhoeffer’s theologically rooted opposition to National Socialism first made him a leader, along with Martin Niemueller and Karl Barth, in the Confessing Church (bekennende Kirche), and an advocate on behalf of the Jews. Indeed, his efforts to help a group of Jews escape to Switzerland were what first led to his arrest and imprisonment in the spring 1943. His leadership in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church and his participation in the Abwehr resistance circle (beginning in February 1938) make his works a unique source for understanding the interaction of religion, politics, and culture among those few Christians who actively opposed National Socialism, as is particularly evident in his drafts for a posthumously published Ethics.

His thought provides not only an example of intellectual preparation for the reconstruction of German society after the war but also a rare insight into the vanishing social and academic world that had preceded it. Bonhoeffer was also a spiritual writer, a musician and an author of fiction and poetry. The integrity of his Christian faith and life, and the international appeal of his writings, have led to a broad consensus that he is the one theologian of his time to lead future generations of Christians into the new millenium.

He was hanged in the concentration camp at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945, one of four members of his immediate family to die at the hands of the Nazi regime for their participation in the small Protestant resistance movement. The letters he wrote during these final two years of his life were posthumously published by his student and friend, Eberhard Bethge, as Letters and Papers from Prison. His correspondence with his fiance, Maria von Wedermeyer, has been published as Love Letters from Cell 92.   (Source: http://www.dbonhoeffer.org/node/3)

 

Bonhoeffer Documentary

Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) into a middle to upper-class professional family. He and his sister Sabine were twins and the sixth and seventh of eight children. His brother Walter was killed during World War I. His sister was married to Hans von Dohnanyi and was mother of the conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi and a former mayor of Hamburg, Klaus von Dohnanyi. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a prominent German psychiatrist in Berlin; his mother, Paula, home-schooled the children. Though he was initially expected to follow his father into the field of psychology, Dietrich decided at an early age to become a religious minister. His parents supported his decision. He attended college in Tübingen, where he received his doctorate in theology from the University of Berlin. As Dietrich was just 24 at this time, he was unable to be sustained [one must be 25 by church regulations]. This however, gave Dietrich the opportunity to go abroad. He then spent a post-graduate year abroad studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. During this time, he would often visit the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he became acquainted with the musical form that ethnomusicologists call the African-American Spiritual. He amassed a substantial collection of these spirituals, which he took with him back to Germany.

Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1931, where he lectured on theology in Berlin and wrote several books. A strong opponent of Nazism, he was involved, together with Martin Niemöller, Karl Barth and others, in setting up the Confessing Church. Between late 1933 and 1935, he served as pastor of two German-speaking Protestant churches in London: St. Paul’s and Sydenham. He returned to Germany to head an illegal seminary for Confessing Church pastors, first in Finkenwalde and then at the von Blumenthal estate of Gross Schlönwitz, which was closed on the outbreak of war. The Gestapo also banned him from preaching; then teaching; and finally any kind of public speaking. During this time, Bonhoeffer worked closely with numerous opponents of Adolf Hitler.

During World War II, Bonhoeffer played a key leadership role in the Confessing Church, which opposed the anti-semitic policies of Adolf Hitler. He was among those who called for wider church resistance to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. While the Confessing Church was not large, it represented a major source of Christian opposition to the Nazi government in Germany.

In 1939, Bonhoeffer joined a hidden group of high-ranking military officers based in the Abwehr, or Military Intelligence Office, who wanted to overthrow the National Socialist regime by killing Hitler. He was arrested in April 1943 after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. He was charged with conspiracy and imprisoned in Berlin for a year and a half. After the unsuccessful July 20 Plot in 1944, Bonhoeffer’s connections to the conspirators were discovered. He was moved to a series of prisons and concentration camps ending at Flossenburg. Here, he was executed by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, just three weeks before the liberation of the city. Also hanged for their parts in the conspiracy were his brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher.  (wikipedia)
—————

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, igniting the Second World War, a group of German conspirators were already plotting a coup d’état; over the next six years, there were as many as fifteen assassination attempts against Hitler. One of the co-conspirators, a double-agent who smuggled information about the plots to the Allies, was the young German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the late 1930s he wrote about the necessity of “risking” peace and “daring” a loving presence to others – words which seem to fly in the face of his later justification of assassination. But Bonhoeffer formulated his theology and ethics in the crucible of a long and ultimately fatal struggle with the Nazi regime in Germany. His story is a fascinating window onto the dilemmas of twentieth-century ethics and spirituality.

Bonhoeffer’s work came to full fruition only after his death. His efforts and his writings on behalf of the international ecumenical movement laid the groundwork for post-war inter-faith dialogue. His insistence on the importance of an active response to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount – a call to social justice – inspired many of the world’s great civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Vaclav Havel and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And finally, his brave and revolutionary concept of a “religionless Christianity” has helped Christian theology turn toward uncertain vistas of the future. It is an idea which exposes the vitality and relevance of faith in a world, as Bonhoeffer put it, “come of age.” (Source: Bonhoeffer Documentary)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born: February 4, 1906 – killed: April 9, 1945