Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed more than eight decades ago, on April 9, 1945, in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Yet today, he remains one of the most popular Christian theologians, whose life has even served as the basis for a Hollywood production. Much is written and said about him; people – rightly or wrongly – lay claim to his legacy, and it does not seem that his unique character is fading from ecclesiastical or public discourse. I have often wondered why this is. One reason may be that his life and his thoughts formed an organic unity: his life inspired his words, and his life followed from his words. This is why both his character and his ideas feel fresh and full of life even today.
I was recently in New York, where Bonhoeffer came to mind. Walking among the skyscrapers, I wondered what he might have seen of the city when he arrived in 1930. That was the year of a unique race within the Big Apple to build the world’s tallest building. In May 1930, 40 Wall Street (now known as The Trump Building) was opened, followed a few weeks later by the Chrysler Building, while the frame of the Empire State Building was already visible. He surely saw in these structures evidence of human power and creativity.
At the same time, Bonhoeffer was moved less by skyscrapers than by human encounters and culture. At Union Theological Seminary, it wasn’t just the architecture that differed from the surrounding skyscrapers, but the human relationships as well. It was here that Albert Fisher was studying, the first Black student to enroll at the institution. It was he who took Bonhoeffer to Harlem, to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the young theologian-pastor encountered something entirely new: he saw worship services where deep and powerful emotions could manifest in song and movement; where the sermon resembled an emotion-fuelled dialogue rather than a lecture; and where a socially disadvantaged group could form a loving community in Christ. When he returned to Germany, he brought this spirit back with him – along with a bunch of spiritual music records, which he often listened to with his students later at the Finkenwalde seminary.
Another key New York experience for Bonhoeffer was a visit to the cinema. Together with a fellow young theologian, Jean Lasserre, they bought tickets for Lewis Milestone’s 1930 double-Oscar-winning film, All Quiet on the Western Front. The film touched them both so deeply that when the protagonist, Paul Bäumer, falls, the German Bonhoeffer and the French Lasserre wept together. The two of them experienced the story quite differently from the audience around them, some of whom even cheered during the battle scenes. For them—sons of two formerly hostile nations—this was a special experience of friendship and a longing for peace. Many other moments from Bonhoeffer’s life could be highlighted: for instance, his visit to Rome, which interestingly inspired his shaping of the community’s spiritual life; or when he sat in a Berlin café with his friend Eberhard Bethge and, upon the radio announcement of France’s surrender, watched as peaceful citizens turned into frenzied “fools” singing Nazi songs.
Reading Bonhoeffer is truly extraordinary when we align his writings with the turning points of his life: Sanctorum Communio alongside his academic years; Ethics alongside his New York “conversion”; Life Together (Gemeinsames Leben) during the Finkenwalde seminary period; and his Letters and Papers from Prison (Widerstand und Ergebung) during his years in captivity. Reading them this way, a picture emerges of a man whose thinking, faith, and theology were in constant flux, and—it can be said in hindsight—developed and matured.
As I walked the streets of New York and thought of Bonhoeffer, I wondered: do similar turning points exist in our own lives? Moments when our thinking, our faith, and our theology take a different path. For us, especially as theological ethicists, it is a vital question: does something follow for our theology from what we experience? And vice versa: does the maturity gained through our own story react in some way upon our lives and our Christian responsibility? I believe these are key questions for today’s moral theologians. We should certainly read Bonhoeffer – if only to learn from him how to recognize the theology-shaping moments of our own lives.
Further Reading
Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer : Theologe – Christ – Zeitgenosse ; eine Biographie. 8., Korrigierte Aufl. [Darmstadt]: Wiss. Buchges., 2004.
DeJonge, Michael P, and Dallas Gingles. “In the Face of Barbarism”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Ethics of Everyday Life. 1st ed. London: T&T Clark, 2025.
Huber, Wolfgang. „Dietrich Bonhoeffer“. Zeitschrift für evangelische Ethik 62, Nr. 2 (2018): 148–50. https://doi.org/10.14315/zee-2018-0210.
Dei, Daniel, and Dennis E Akawobsa. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Perspective on Racism.” Hervormde Teologiese Studies 78, no. 1 (2022): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v78i1.7450.
This article has been linguistically revised with the assistance of an AI language model, Gemini, for clarity and correctness.