Christian moral action: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Overview

Recall questions on Bonhoeffer's life, the Confessing Church and Finkenwalde, cheap and costly grace, duty to God and to the state, three responses to an unjust state, civil disobedience and the plot against Hitler, ethics as action, the Church for others, and his relevance today.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and what circumstances shaped his theology?

   Model answer

   He was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, born in 1906, whose adult life coincided with the rise of the Nazi state. He opposed the attempt to bring the German churches into line with the regime, became a leading voice in the church struggle, ran the Confessing Church's illegal training seminary, later joined the circle within military intelligence that conspired against Hitler, and was imprisoned in 1943 and executed in April 1945. His writing is inseparable from that setting: it asks what obedience to Christ costs when the state has gone wrong.

2. 2

   What was the Confessing Church, and what was Bonhoeffer's part in it?

   Model answer

   It was the movement of German Protestants who refused to accept the Nazification of the churches and the exclusion of Christians of Jewish descent from ministry, over against the pro-regime German Christians. Its founding statement, agreed at Barmen in 1934, insisted that the Church owes allegiance to Christ alone and rejected any claim that the nation, its history or its leader was a second source of revelation. Bonhoeffer was among its leaders and trained its ordinands, and he pressed it to go further than most of its members were willing to go.

3. 3

   What was Finkenwalde, and why did Bonhoeffer think a community like it was necessary?

   Model answer

   Finkenwalde was the seminary Bonhoeffer directed from 1935 until the Gestapo closed it in 1937, where Confessing Church ordinands trained illegally. Its life was deliberately disciplined: shared prayer and silence, daily meditation on scripture, common meals, confession to one another and shared work. Bonhoeffer's argument was that resistance is not sustained by opinions but by formation, and that pastors facing a hostile state would need a community and a rule of life to hold them.

4. 4

   Explain what Bonhoeffer means by cheap grace.

   Model answer

   He means forgiveness offered as a general principle with nothing asked in return: absolution without confession, communion without repentance, and Christianity as a comfortable inheritance that leaves a person's life exactly as it was. On his analysis it is not grace at all but a doctrine about grace, and it was cheap grace that left the German churches unable to resist, because it had already taught them that following Christ made no practical demands.

5. 5

   What does Bonhoeffer mean by costly grace, and why does he call it grace at all?

   Model answer

   Costly grace is the same forgiveness received as a summons: it calls a person to follow, and it costs them the life they had planned. He calls it costly because it cost God the death of his Son and it costs the disciple their self-direction; he still calls it grace because it is freely given and cannot be earned, and because what it gives is the only life worth having. The pairing is the centre of his account of discipleship.

6. 6

   How did Bonhoeffer understand what a Christian owes to God and what they owe to the state?

   Model answer

   He worked within the Lutheran tradition that treats civil authority as ordained by God and normally to be obeyed, so he did not think Christians were free to disregard the law when it suited them. But he held that obedience is owed to the state doing its proper work, and that a state which attacks the innocent and demands ultimate allegiance has forfeited that claim. Obedience to God then requires disobedience to the state, not as a private preference but as a duty owed to the same God who established government.

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