New Every Morning

“The will of God may lie very deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities. The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason a man must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation and experience must all collaborate in this task. It is not longer a matter of man’s own knowledge of good and evil, but solely of the living will of God; our knowledge of God’s will is not something over which we ourselves dispose, but it depends solely upon the grace of God, and this grace is and requires to be new every morning.”

Bonhoeffer’s theological views were deepening, even as he searched for what his practical role as a Christian in Nazi Germany should be. At a Confessing Church meeting in October 1938, he described Judaism using the same terminology as he did for Christianity: he spoke of the equivalence, in God’s eyes, of “church and synagogue,” of the Jews as “brothers of Christians” and “children of the covenant.”  These were radical statements at a time when the leaders of the German Evangelical Church were denying all links between Christianity and Judaism (culminating in the establishment, in 1939, of the “Institute for the Research and Removal of Jewish Influence on the Religious Life of the German People.”)

On November 9, 1938, when the synagogues burned throughout Germany, his students began debating the theological significance of the Kristallnacht. As one later recalled, several of the students “spoke of the curse which had haunted the Jews since Jesus’ death on the cross.” Bonhoeffer rejected this vehemently, stating that the pogrom was a case of “sheer violence” that only revealed Nazism’s “godless face.”

Bonhoeffer’s response to the November 9 pogrom reflected his growing conviction of the significance, for Christians, of the persecution of the Jews. In the margin of his Bible, he wrote the date November 10, 1938 (it is the only date marked in his Bible) next to the words of Psalm 74, verse 8: “They said in their hearts, let us plunder their goods! They burn all the houses of God in the land . . . O God, how long is the foe to scoff? How long will the enemy revile your name?”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 –1945) was a German pastor, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Hitler's genocidal persecution of the Jews. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel prison for one and a half years. Later Bonhoeffer was transferred to a Nazi concentration camp.

He was quickly tried, and then executed by hanging on 9 April 1945 as the Nazi regime was collapsing. The SS doctor who witnessed Bonhoeffer’s death later recalled a man “devout . . . brave and composed… I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.” Bonhoeffer sent one final message, to George Bell in England: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.”