It's been 60 years since Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged, along with six others, by the SS, for a conspiracy against Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler. His death at 39 was extraordinary on several counts. His Lutheran tradition had inculcated a sense of duty to obey the state as an authority ordained by God, not to plot treason against it. In the 1930s, he had been advocating pacifism as the Christian response to violence, yet the plot against Hitler was to involve complicity in an attempted assassination. Changing circumstances repeatedly forced Bonhoeffer to re-examine what obedience to God required in a context where politicized evil became apocalyptic in scale.
Bonhoeffer was assured a comfortable university career or he could have lived safely in the United States. Instead he chose to wade into complicated moral ambiguity in an effort to help his neighbours live before God.
He asked the simple but searching question, Who is Christ for us today? Christianity has too often run away from the world as it is, trying to find for God a last refuge in a "religious" corner secure from science and critical thought.
Rev. Keith Clements, general secretary of the Conference of European Churches, ENI
