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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us September 24, 2005 Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A man of faith and conscience Scott Dalgarno In the summer of 2004 my church honored me with a brief sabbatical leave. I secured a grant from the Louisville Institute to study and write about the poet William Carlos Williams. I was particularly fortunate to be granted the opportunity to receive the counsel of a special friend of Dr. Williams, Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University. Coles had been a student at Harvard in the 1950s and had written his senior thesis on Williams’ long poem, “Patterson.” At the suggestion of his principal professor, Perry Miller, Coles sent the essay to Williams and received a warm response from the doctor/poet, plus an invitation to visit him in Rutherford, N.J. Of the essay, Williams wrote, “Not bad for a Harvard man.” Coles soon found that the old doctor wasn’t kidding with the crack about Harvard. Williams had a jaundiced view of high learning. It wasn’t that he didn’t respect the academy or a Harvard education. It was just that he knew that reading “great books” didn’t guarantee that a person might develop what we called character. Integrity depends on more than a good education. “Never forget, Bob,” Williams said, “Josef Goebbels (Hitler’s minister of propaganda) had a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Heidelberg University.” In other words, a person can have the best education money can buy and still be a skunk. We are quickly coming up on the centenary of the birth of a German of great moral character, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer had a degree in theology from Tubingen University. Not entirely comfortable with the intellectual ease of a European academic life, he became a minister, believing that there is an essential “this-worldliness” to Christianity. “By this-worldliness,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes, and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into God’s arms,” His service to the church was anything but conventional. He served as pastor to a congregation made up of disaffected French Foreign Legionaires in Barcelona, Spain, and came to the United States in the early 1930s because he was interested in seeing firsthand the kind of social services American churches offered. He worked for a time with Abyssinia Baptist Church in Harlem, falling in love with black culture and church music. The year 1939 found him once again in New York teaching and studying at Union Theological Seminary, but when war loomed he decided to head back home, fearful that the door to Germany might close abruptly when hostilities began and that he would lack the credibility necessary to be called upon to help rebuild Germany afterward. He was certainly a visionary, but more than that, he was a man of supreme moral courage. Many American friends urged him to stay in the relative safety of New York. Returning home, he immediately thrust himself into the underground anti-Nazi movement, working to get Jews out of Germany and into neutral Switzerland. His this-worldly version of Christianity also led him to get involved in the plot to kill Hitler for which he was arrested and imprisoned. Interestingly, he had great respect for Gandhian passive resistance but felt that it just wouldn’t work in Hitler’s Germany. Bonhoeffer was tried at the hands of the S.S. judge Otto Thorbeck, a man who had the same high classical education as Bonhoeffer, but who worshipped at the altar of Nazi hate. Both men read Sophocles’ “Antigone” and Goethe’s “Faust,” and yet their moral compasses were completely opposite. In fact, Thorbeck was so committed to German National Socialism that when he received his orders to try Bonhoeffer in prison near the end of the war he got on a train which ran out of fuel on the way, then borrowed a bicycle and rode it the last 20 kilometers to carry out his “duty.” Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death. His family concocted a plan to free him but Bonhoeffer dissuaded them, fearing that his escape would lead to repercussions for other family members jailed by the Nazis. He was executed at the orders of Heinrich Himmler on April 9, 1945. He preached a sermon to fellow prisoners on the morning of his execution. His last act was to write his name in large letters inside a copy of Plutarch’s “Lives of the Greeks and the Romans” — another “great book” that he had asked his family to send to give him the inspiration necessary to go to his death with dignity. His last recorded words: “For me this is the end, but also the beginning.” Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Ashland’s First Presbyterian Church. He is currently teaching a GREAT BOOKS class at his church. 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