At a glance
- Age
- 39
- Born
- February 4, 1906
- From
- Wrocław
- Nationality
- Germany
Biography
The line most readers meet first usually comes from The Cost of Discipleship, published in 1937 and since treated as a modern classic. It is a book about what following a faith actually costs the person who follows it — written by a Lutheran pastor who would go on to pay a considerable price himself. Alongside it sits a wider body of writing on the place of Christianity in a secular world, which has carried well beyond theological circles.
Born in Wrocław in 1906, Bonhoeffer worked as a pastor and as a theologian in the neo-orthodox tradition, and was among the founding figures of the Confessing Church. He did not confine his objections to the seminary. He spoke openly against the Nazi dictatorship, including its euthanasia programme and its genocidal persecution of Jews, at a time when saying so out loud carried obvious consequences.
The Gestapo arrested him in April 1943. He spent a year and a half in Tegel Prison before being moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he died on 9 April 1945. The fact that his writing on discipleship and cost was followed by that ending is much of why people still quote him.
Born in Wrocław in 1906, Bonhoeffer worked as a pastor and as a theologian in the neo-orthodox tradition, and was among the founding figures of the Confessing Church. He did not confine his objections to the seminary. He spoke openly against the Nazi dictatorship, including its euthanasia programme and its genocidal persecution of Jews, at a time when saying so out loud carried obvious consequences.
The Gestapo arrested him in April 1943. He spent a year and a half in Tegel Prison before being moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he died on 9 April 1945. The fact that his writing on discipleship and cost was followed by that ending is much of why people still quote him.
Quotes 6
“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.”
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”
“When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”
