Bonhoeffer's Tragic Choice

Today's Scripture

Matthew 5:44 — "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

James 4:17 — "So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin."

Romans 7:24-25 — "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Hold these three verses together today. The whole story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer lives in the space between them.

The Big Idea

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote one of the most radical books on the Sermon on the Mount ever published — and then joined a conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler. He never claimed he had found a loophole. He said he was a sinner who could only throw himself on grace. Today is about what discipleship looks like when every available choice seems to break something Christ commanded.

Reflection

The man who wrote "come and die"

In 1937, a young German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer published a book about following Jesus. It was not a gentle book. Most Christians, he argued, treat Jesus's hardest commands like a thermostat set too high — they admire the setting, then quietly turn it down. Bonhoeffer refused to turn it down.

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

He took Matthew 5:38-39 at full strength: "Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." No fine print. He took Matthew 5:44 the same way: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." For Bonhoeffer these were not lovely ideals for some better world. They were marching orders for this one. The disciple absorbs evil rather than passing it back. The disciple does not kill.

He had a name for the watered-down faith that admires Jesus without obeying him. He called it cheap grace.

"Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Grace is free, he meant, but it is not cheap. It cost God his Son, and it calls the disciple to follow that Son all the way. Matthew 16:24-25 — "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Bonhoeffer believed every word of that.

So hold the picture: the most uncompromising voice for Christian nonviolence in his generation. Now watch what history did with him.

The road back into the fire

By 1939 the Nazis controlled everything in Germany — the courts, the newspapers, the schools, and increasingly the churches. Bonhoeffer's friends saw what was coming and arranged a safe teaching job for him in New York. He sailed in June. Within weeks he knew he had made a mistake, and he wrote to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to explain why he was going home.

"I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, June 1939

He took one of the last ships back into the catastrophe. Over the next two years he was drawn into the secret resistance against Hitler — a network hidden, of all places, inside German military intelligence. He carried messages to church contacts abroad on behalf of the conspirators, the same circle that would eventually try to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb in July 1944. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943. He was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just weeks before the war in Europe ended.

Why would the man who wrote "love your enemies" join a plot against anyone's life? Part of the answer sits in Proverbs 24:11-12 — "Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, 'Behold, we did not know this,' does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?" Bonhoeffer knew. He knew about the arrests, the camps, the trains full of Jewish neighbors. "We did not know" was the excuse millions of Germans would offer afterward. He could not offer it.

And he had read James 4:17 — "So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin." We usually picture sin as a bad thing we do. James says sin can also be a good thing we refuse to do. Standing still has moral weight too. Bonhoeffer reportedly put it in a picture his students never forgot: if a madman is driving a car into a crowd, a pastor's job is not only to bury the dead afterward — it is to try to wrestle the wheel away.

No clean hands — only grace

Here is what makes Bonhoeffer different from almost everyone who quotes him. He never claimed the plot was righteous. He never said, "In this case, killing is not really killing." He said the opposite: it is killing, and killing is sin, and he would take that sin on himself rather than let a greater evil roll on — and then he would trust God's mercy with the rest.

"Before other men the man of free responsibility is justified by necessity, before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Read that slowly. Other people might excuse him: you had no choice. His own conscience might excuse him: you meant well. But before God, Bonhoeffer expected to arrive with no defense at all. Only grace. He wrote the same thing to his fellow conspirators in a Christmas essay smuggled between friends:

"It depends on a God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith, and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

This is the apostle Paul's territory. Romans 7:19 — "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing." Paul is describing a divided human will, a person who cannot get his own life to line up with what he loves. And where does Paul land? Not on a tidy solution. On a cry: Romans 7:24-25 — "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Martin Luther reached for the same truth in a letter that has startled readers for five hundred years:

"Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly." — Martin Luther, letter to Philip Melanchthon

Luther was not handing out permission slips for wrongdoing. He was writing to a timid friend who was paralyzed by the fear of choosing wrong. His point: you will never act with perfectly clean hands, because you are not perfectly clean. So act in faith — and trust Christ's mercy more than your own record. Bonhoeffer's choice was Luther's sentence lived out at the most extreme edge imaginable.

You are probably not Bonhoeffer — and grace holds you anyway

Now the warning, because this day needs one. Bonhoeffer has become a costume that people put on. Christians angry about an election, a law, a school board decision reach for his story: this is our Bonhoeffer moment. Almost always, it is not. Hitler comparisons are cheap, and Bonhoeffer comparisons are cheaper.

His case was narrow in ways that matter. He lived inside a regime that was murdering millions of people. There were no free elections to vote in, no free press to write to, no courts that would listen. He acted with trembling, expected no vindication, and paid with his life. If you live in a country where you can still vote, speak, publish, protest, and organize, you have a hundred faithful tools Bonhoeffer did not have. Skipping past them to play the hero is not courage. It is theater.

And notice what came before his dramatic choice: two decades of unglamorous faithfulness. Preaching. Teaching seminary students. Praying the Psalms every morning. Telling the truth in small rooms when lying was easier. The famous decision grew at the end of ten thousand small obediences. To want his ending without his ordinary obedience is to want the photograph, not the life.

But the deepest lesson of his story is not about heroism at all. It is about the gospel. Romans 3:23-24 — "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Justified means declared right with God — not because our choices were clean, but because Christ was. Bonhoeffer staked everything on that. Galatians 6:14 — "But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." That was the only ground he ever claimed.

Tim Keller compressed this gospel into one sentence:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

That is good news for a conspirator in 1944, and it is good news for you in your far smaller dilemmas — the friendship where honesty will cost you, the workplace where silence is safer, the family fight with no clean exit. 1 John 1:8-9 — "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

On the morning he was hanged, Bonhoeffer asked a fellow prisoner to carry a message to his friend, an English bishop. The words were these:

"This is the end — for me the beginning of life." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flossenbürg, April 1945

He did not die certain that he had chosen perfectly. He died certain of Christ. In the end, that is the only certainty any disciple gets — and it is enough.

Going Deeper

Think of one hard situation in your own life right now — at school, at work, in your family. Notice the temptation to treat it as an emergency that excuses you from ordinary discipleship. Then make a short list: have I done the small, faithful things first? Prayed? Told the truth? Asked for counsel? Apologized where I owe it? Do one item on the list today. Bonhoeffer's dramatic choice came after a lifetime of small obediences. Start there — and when you fail, remember that you live, as he did, by grace alone.