Costly Grace: The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

April 16, 2000

The Subject of my thoughts this morning was a German Lutheran pastor, teacher, and theologian. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 of a wealthy academic family. He attended Tubingen University, where he studied theology, and by the late 1920s and early 1930s he had become a lecturer in theology at Berlin University.

His theological writings had gained recognition, and a life as a university professor seemed to be assured. But the rise of Nazism intervened in this pleasant scenario, and Bonhoeffer was swept up in the resistance movement within the German Lutheran Church. This resisting segment of the church became known as the Confessing Church, and Bonhoeffer took a leading role in it.

His role in the Confessing Church eventually would lead to his dismissal as a lecturer. However, spared military service through the influence of friends, Bonhoeffer became active in the political underground movement which was spawned by the outbreak of war. He had a strong spiritual influence on the growing opposition within Germany.

In the next few years, despite pacifist sentiments, Bonhoeffer came to believe that Hitler's assassination was essential to the salvation of Germany. He shared his participation in the resistance with his brother and two brothers-in-law, one of whom was Jewish. Their involvement in what came to be known as "the failed plot of July 1944" against Hitler's life brought Bonhoeffer's arrest and imprisonment in April 1943.

Bonhoeffer was to remain imprisoned until the spring of 1945, when he was executed by hanging in the closing hours of the war. During his imprisonment, he continued to do what he could for the resistance, mainly by his brilliance in maintaining his innocence during repeated trials and in covering the work of the July plotters.

Fortunately for us, many of Bonhoeffer's letters and papers from before and during the war and his imprisonment have survived, often thanks to sympathetic jailers who smuggled his work out of his prison in Berlin. His brother-in-law, and later his biographer, Eberhard Bethge, has written,

In prison and concentration camp, Bonhoeffer greatly inspired, by his indomitable courage, his unselfishness, and his goodness, all those who came in contact with him. He even inspired his guards with respect, some of whom became so much attached to him that they smuggled out of prison his papers and poems written there, and apologized to him for having to lock his door after the round in the courtyard. His own concern in prison was to get permission to minister to the sick and his fellow prisoners, and his ability to comfort the anxious and depressed was amazing. We know what Bonhoeffer's word and religious assistance meant to his fellow prisoners. . . ; we know what [his] practical aid meant in prison during political trials to those men of whom ten or twenty were sentenced to death by a military court every week in 1943 and 1944. Some of these (among them a British soldier), charged with sabotage, were saved by him (and his father and solicitor) from certain death. We have heard that his fellow prisoners were deeply impressed by the calmness and self-control which Bonhoeffer displayed even in the most terrible situations. For instance, during the very heavy bombings of Berlin, when the explosions were accompanied by the howling of his fellow prisoners, who beat with their fists against the locked doors of their cells clamoring to be transferred to the safe bunkers, Bonhoeffer stood, we have been told, like a giant before men.

While I am interested in Bonhoeffer's life in the context of remarkable historical events, and in his involvement in the German resistance to Hitler, it is to his theological ideas, which grew out of the experience of resistance and imprisonment, that I want to turn in the remainder of my remarks this morning. In particular, his idea of "costly" versus "cheap" grace, and his idea of "being for others," seem appropriate topics for this Palm Sunday service. These ideas speak to our contemporary situation in several important ways, and stand in the prophetic tradition of Jesus in speaking truth to power.

Possibly what marked Bonhoeffer most was his unselfishness and preparedness to help others to the point of self-sacrifice. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer made clear that "the deadly enemy of the church" was what he called "cheap grace," by which he meant comfortable religion that does not confront the depths of sin in human experience. He recognized the connection between the church and "privilege." In July/August 1944, he was to write that "the church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start," he said, "it should give away all its property to those in need."

He also recognized that in the time leading up to the war, religion had become the strongest guarantor of the safety and continuation of the existing order, power structure, and ways of thought. "Religion," wrote his biographer, "has become essentially a way of distinguishing people. A victim of its divisive privileged character, it has presided over a vast number of acts of violence throughout history."

In place of the cheap grace offered by such a church, Bonhoeffer offered the notion of "costly grace." "Costly grace," he wrote,

is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. . . . [It] is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which [we] must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow. . . . It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.

With a remarkable prescience, Bonhoeffer described the course that his own life was to take. "Faith is something whole," he wrote, "involving the whole of one's life."

A theological conservative, his views were to be radicalized by his experience of imprisonment. By the end of his life, he had become critical of the church, and he felt, in his own words, that "Nothing will be a difficult as overcoming the monarchical and patriarchal structure of hierarchies, theologies, and . . . dogmas." The church, he came to believe, must take risks for others. Ideally, he hoped that it might correct "the unquenchable urge of humankind to deify or demonize its progress."

These ideas, which sound so contemporary, were written more than fifty years ago. They anticipate such contemporary critiques of the church as liberation theology and feminism.

Most interesting to me, Bonhoeffer's theology became "this-worldly," a term he himself used to describe it. He wrote:

I don't mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness, characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.

In his biographer's words, his theology became "a theology of God's solidarity with the world. . . ."

In May 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote, "We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems, but in those that are solved."

In practical terms--in the reality of a life of imprisonment--this theology became embodied in human relationships. In words that I have quoted before, Bonhoeffer wrote that "Whoever happens to be one's neighbor and reachable is the transcendent."

Jesus became for him the exemplar of what he came to call "being for others." Jesus, he said, was "the man for others," who turns from privilege to outcasts, who liberates humanity to find its own responsible answer to life through his own powerlessness: "[God] is weak and powerless in the world," he wrote, "and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us."

This "weak" God, paradoxically, "wins power and space in the world by his weakness." This is the powerless but sympathetic God that Rabbi Harold Kushner speaks about in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a God who suffers with us in our tragedy and despair, but who is powerless to change it. Indeed, Bonhoeffer himself often felt strongly that God shared his suffering.

I believe there are several important ways that Bonhoeffer's life and theology speak to contemporary events. First, his resistance, even unto death, to totalitarianism in the form of Nazism, and his belief in what he came to call "costly" grace, remind us of the costs of political and religious freedom, and of the dangers of the totalitarian or fundamentalist mindset. We can never take our freedom for granted.

Bonhoeffer reminds us of this by his own recognition, early on, that it was impossible to tolerate a Hitler, that it was impossible to tolerate the incarceration of fellow human beings on the basis of an imagined racial inferiority, and that it was impossible to tolerate the doublespeak of Nazi propaganda.

Second, in his idea of "being for others," Bonhoeffer speaks to other critical issues of our day: the AIDS epidemic and homophobia, the plight of the homeless and immigrants, and the ongoing realization of the racism which still afflicts us and our public institutions.

One of the consequences of the AIDS virus, in particular, has been to challenge many in our society to overcome their own repugnance and fear of death in order to deal with a terrible health crisis. Those who work with the sick and dying know the meaning of "costly grace." Hard as it is to imagine, the AIDS crisis forced the American Medical Association to reaffirm by vote the Hippocratic Oath, because so many physicians had refused to treat AIDS patients.

Bonhoeffer's reminder that God is in our neighbor is a much needed corrective to the violence and mean-spiritedness of contemporary American life. To be for others is, at some level, to share their suffering,--perhaps even to share their death. It is not to be exempt from personal risk.

Bonhoeffer also reminds us that a God who is in the world must be met in its outcasts: in the poor, in the faces of those who look different than we do, in the vilified. We may even be called upon to meet them in our own community.

In the twentieth century, few embodied the characteristics of the heroic better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Strength, courage, fortitude, and greatness of soul, being "favored by the gods,"--these are the characteristics that Bonhoeffer displayed under the most horrible of circumstances. He lived toward an ideal. He refused to let the evil in those around him cause him to give up hope or to deny the goodness of his fellow human beings. In fact, he never doubted that Hitler would ultimately fail.

His greater concern was for the kind of world that would follow the war. He wanted desperately to have a hand in shaping that world, particularly in shaping the "new" church which he believed would be born out of the ashes of the war. I suspect that he would have been disappointed in how similar that new church was to the old one which he had found so wanting during the period of Nazism. But he might have found hope in events such as the recent apology of the Pope for the church's past sins. And I think he would have welcomed the various "liberation" movements which have found their way into the contemporary church and contemporary theology.

Ultimately, it was not the circumstances of Bonhoeffer's life which were extraordinary, but his response to them. He had that rare strength of character and integrity which allows one to be true to what one believes. He was true to the demands of costly grace, and he became the embodiment of the one who, like Jesus, is for others. As his friend Bishop George Bell of the Church of England was to say of him in a memorial service for Bonhoeffer in July 1945, "As one of a noble company of martyrs of differing traditions, he represents both the resistance of the believing soul, in the name of God, to the assault of evil, and also the moral and political revolt of the human conscience against injustice and cruelty."

Bonhoeffer's life and death also serve to remind us, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said in speaking of his own life, that longevity is not essential in order for us to accomplish something of worth with our lives. Recognizing that he probably would not survive the war, Bonhoeffer wrote in 1944:

It all depends on whether or not the fragment of our life reveals the plan and material of the whole. There are fragments which are only good to be thrown away, and others which are important for centuries to come because their fulfillment can only be a divine work. They are fragments of necessity. If our life, however remotely, reflects such a fragment, we shall not have to bewail our fragmentary life, but, on the contrary, rejoice in it.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock