The Road to Freedom, April 9th, 1945

On the monday morning, with the war only weeks from ending, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Gestapo.  It marked the end of a decade of resistance by Bonhoeffer, first to the offical German Church's embrace of Hitler's Nazi racial theology, eventually to the Hitler regime itself culminating in his joining with the plotters in the failed Valkyrie plot.  In the end, Hitler personally ordered the death of Bonhoeffer and many other of the conspirators while he cowered in the rubble of Berlin awaiting his own suicide.  Evil, when it cannot have victory, is content with spite.  Similiar scenes were taking place all over Nazi occupied Europe as concentration camps hurried to kill as many innocents as possible before Allied troops arrived.

To Bonhoeffer, this end was a choice he would embrace if it was what God asked of him.  He could have stayed safely in America with rewarding teaching opportunities at seminaries that certainly would have benefited from his wisdom, but he chose to return to Germany to be with the Confessing Church (the opposition church formed to counter the Nazi takeover of the offical German Lutheran Church) pastors in their ongoing struggle against Hitler.  To give oneself wholly to God was the passion of his life.

If we allow ourselves to be sub-divided into a spiritual side that we give to God and a secular side that we reserve to ourselves, we will never be the Christians that God wants us to be.  Nor will we ever be as useful for the Kingdom of God as we could be.  It is only when we have decided firmly in our hearts that our lives are not our own that we can truly find lives of purpose and meaning.  This radical wisdom comes from Christ himself who said, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 10:39)  Bishop Bell, a friend of Dietrich from his ecumenical efforts in London, ended his memorial sermon with the words, "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church".