Letters to London: Bonhoeffer's previously unpublished correspondence with Ernst Cromwell, 1935-36

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sep 2013 · SPCK

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160

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About this ebook

Giving you valuable insight into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's public spirituality, theology from the perspective of his private life and concerns. In this first collection of the Lutheran pastors letters, this founding member of the Confessing Church, who would be martyred for his active resistance to the Nazi movement, you will find intimate and revealing details essential to the serious Bonhoeffer student and interested reader.

His character and relationships, practice as a pastor and developing theological and political thought, revealed in these previously unknown and unpublished letters, are skilfully and sensitively edited by one of the world's most Bonhoeffer scholar.

The letters have their origin in the dispirited 27 year old's acceptance of a two year appointment to two German-speaking Protestant churches in London: the German Evangelical Church in Sydenham and the German Reformed Church of St Paul's, Whitechapel in the Autumn of 1933. As German churches acquiesced to Hitler's growing power, Bonhoeffer found little support for his views deciding that "it was about time to go for a while into the desert".

Fellow theologian, Karl Barth, regarded this as running away from real battle accusing Bonhoeffer of abandoning his post and wasting his "splendid theological armory" while "the house of your church is on fire."

The letters help explain Bonhoeffer's hopes that, in going to England, he was not simply avoiding trouble at home; but hoping for support from the ecumenical movement in the interest of his anti-Nazi Confessing Church.

Bonhoeffer rallied people to oppose the Nazi subversion of the Gospel to the extent that Bishop Theodor Heckel - the official in charge of German Evangelical Church foreign affairs, was sent to London to warn Bonhoeffer to abstain from any activity not authorized by Berlin.

Bonhoeffer refused to desist from his work. This is the momentous background to this collection of globally significant letters with relevance to formulating the Christian response to the divisive religious and secular forces in the world today.

About the author

Born in 1906 in Breslau, Germany, now part of Poland, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a radical theologian. He was raised in a home where the intellect was honored. His father was a physician and professor of psychiatry at the University of Berlin. Such scholars as the church historian Adolph von Harnack, the theologian and sociohistorian Ernst Troeltsch, and Max Weber, a founder of modern sociology, were frequent guests of the Bonhoeffers. A precocious student who evidenced a degree of independence of thought that was at odds with the reverence in which his fellow students held their professors, Bonhoeffer decided early on the church and theology as his life's work. He was a product of liberal studies that were greatly influenced by Karl Barth. Bonhoeffer's doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio: A Dogmatic Investigation of the Sociology of the Church, was published in 1930, at the time he was teaching theology at the University of Berlin. A year's study in the United States followed and leadership of the World Alliance of Churches, where his flair for languages and his genial disposition won him many friends. His American and British friends tried unsuccessfully to dissuade him from returning to Germany after the rise of Hitler in 1932. But Bonhoeffer returned, and joining the so-called Confessing Church of those who resisted Germanizing the church, he conducted an illegal seminary in Finkenwalde. Out of this experience came his Life Together; out of his struggles to encourage Christians to resist the Nazis came The Cost of Discipleship, his study of the Sermon on the Mount. Although Bonhoeffer escaped military duty by joining the intelligence service, he was eventually arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo and was linked to the attempt on Hitler's life. His Letters and Papers from Prison (translated in 1953), was his testimony of faith; the writing gave the American death of God movement the term religionless Christianity. Bonhoeffer was killed in 1945 while he was in prison in Flossenburg.

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