Dietrich Bonhoeffer Had a Secret Weapon for Resisting Evil

How Bonhoeffer became the type of man who resisted the Nazis and Hitler to the death, when so many of his countrymen did not

German Christian leader and resistance participant Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) in early to mid 1930s. An outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, the Lutheran pastor and theologian was ultimately hanged at Flossenburg Concentration Camp. (Authenticated News/Getty)

This article is adapted from my book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics of Formation, about how Bonhoeffer became the man who resisted the Nazis and Adolf Hitler to the death.

Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s best friend and biographer, noted that as a result of Bonhoeffer’s transition from academic theologian to practicing Christian, Bonhoeffer began to personally engage in Christian practices that he previously ignored or spoke of only academically.

As Søren Kierkegaard once put it:

To what shall we compare the relation between the thinker’s system and his actual existence?

A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world history, etc. — and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge.