The statue to Bonhoeffer was unveiled in July 1998 and stands
above the west entrance to the Abbey.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau. A
twin, he grew up in a comfortable professional home. His father
was an eminent psychiatrist and neurologist. It was nominally a
Lutheran, though not a profoundly religious, environment and the
young Bonhoeffer caused something of a stir when he announced, at
thirteen, that he would go into the church. After school he
enrolled as a student at the University of Berlin, the city in
which the family now lived and in whose university there gathered
a host of brilliant thinkers. Intellectually, Bonhoeffer was
striking. But he was determined to expand his horizons, too. At
the age of eighteen he went to Rome and was powerfully moved by
the Roman Catholic Church. In 1930-1 he studied in New York, at
Union Theological Seminary, and regularly attended Services at
the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Here too he became increasingly
drawn to ecumenism. Three times he made plans to travel to India
and visit Gandhi, whose life and teachings he found
compelling.
In 1933 the leader of the radical, racialist Nazi Party, Adolf
Hitler, became chancellor and then dictator of Germany. In power,
the Nazi movement sought to create a new totalitarian state: the
Third Reich. Bonhoeffer saw Nazism to be a counter- religion and
a danger to Christianity. He became an active participant in the
dispute which broke out in the Protestant churches between those
who sympathized with Nazism and those who sensed that the new
politics threatened the integrity of the church. In October 1933
Bonhoeffer moved to England to be pastor to two German-speaking
parishes in the London area. Here he searched for allies and met
his greatest British advocate, Bishop Bell of Chichester.
On his return to Germany, Bonhoeffer ran an illegal seminary
for the so-called Confessing Church at Finkenwalde. It was shut
down by the state security police in October 1937. He continued
to write. In 1939 he sailed to the United States, and once again
to New York. But war was imminent. He chose to return to his own
country, knowing what costs may lie before him, and remarking
that the victory of Nazism in Europe would destroy Christian
civilization.
By then he and members of his own family had for some time
been on the fringe of circles that were opposed to the Nazi
regime. To Bonhoeffer, true discipleship now demanded political
resistance against this criminal state. He wrote that the
Christian must live maturely and responsibly in the world, and
live by God's grace, not by ideology.
He was increasingly implicated in the work of groups committed
to the overthrow of the government. In March 1943 he was arrested
and incarcerated. On 20 July 1944 a final attempt was made by
German citizens to destroy the Hitler regime for themselves. It
failed disastrously, and hundreds of political prisoners were
executed afterwards. Bonhoeffer himself survived as a prisoner
until 9 April 1945. He was executed only a few days before the
end of the war, as the Soviet armies moved across the diminishing
face of the Third Reich to victory.
Sermon
on DIETRICH BONHOEFFER given at Westminster Abbey on July 21,
2002