The fourth of seven keys to Bonhoeffer’s house is surrender to God’s will, allowing Him transform us and walk through us where He wants to go (1 John 4:9). This is the call to discipleship; losing our life (attempting to lead our own life by human wisdom) in finding His. Living in Christ is lasting gain (Philippians 1:23).
I find it fabulous and instructive that Bonhoeffer’s writings and letters are the outworking of His fellowship with God in his journey of surrender, even unto death. This surrender was possible because of his revelation that suffering and physical death are not the end of the journey. In actuality, the daily dying in embracing abiding in Jesus prepares us for physical death. We see this in a circular letter written to his former ordinands in 1941.
“In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without is confronted by death from within, one’s own death, the free death of daily dying with Jesus Christ. Those who live with Christ die daily to their own will. Christ in us gives us over to death so that He can live within us. Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without. Christians receive their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ. Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say, ‘It is finished’…. Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God’s power and it must now serve God’s own aims. It is not some fatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died and rose for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death.”
Ten years earlier, arriving back in Germany from America, those around him saw firsthand that faith in Jesus was changing him. A description of this change is shown in a letter to a friend. He grew in prayer and the pursuit of the wholeheartedness Jesus describes in His Sermon on the Mount. “It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must belong to the Church, and step by step it became plainer to me how far that must go. Then came the crisis of 1933…. The revival of the Church and of the ministry became my supreme concern…. My calling is quite clear to me. What God will make of it I do not know…. I must follow the path. Perhaps it will not be such a long one…. Some times we wish that it were so (Philippians 1:23). But it is a fine thing to have realized my calling…. I believe its nobility will become plain to us only in the times and events to come. If only we can hold out.”
This change prepared Bonhoeffer to discern and stand for truth as Germany quickly changed in the early 1930’s with Hitler in power as Chancellor by early 1933. Two years prior Bonhoeffer could sense they were “‘standing at a tremendous turning point in world history,’ that something was about to happen.” He sensed the coming change strongly and that the church was not ready to stand against it but rather to jump right into its opposite current of deception.
In 1932, the church in Germany was divided on Adolf Hitler. Many wanted to restore Germany from the humiliation of World War 1 and Hitler looked to be the man of the hour. In Lutheran Germany, he used Christian language in his cunning to get the church on his side while in actuality, he hated God and His church. He also hated the Jewish people. This became glaringly evident when he was in top control of the country. Bonhoeffer saw where this might lead. In a letter he wrote, “Although I am working with all my might for the church opposition, it is perfectly clear to me that this opposition is only a very temporary transition to an opposition of a very different kind, and that very few of those engaged in this preliminary skirmish will be part of the next struggle. And I believe that the whole of Christendom should pray with us that it will be a ‘resistance unto death,’ and that the people will be found to suffer for it.” “He was thinking about the deep call of Christ, which was not about winning, but about submission to God, wherever that might lead…. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bonhoeffer was somehow thinking prophetically, that somehow he could see what was ahead of him, that at some point he would be able to do nothing more than ‘suffer faithfully’ in his cell, praising God as he did so, thinking him for the high privilege of being counted worthy to do so.”
After ten or so years of standing firm in the faith of Jesus, speaking up for and helping Jews, and calling the church to wholehearted devotion to Jesus, Bonhoeffer was arrested in early 1943 for being identified as one helping seven Jews escape from Germany. Around 15 months into prison, he wrote, “During this last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is…. but simply a man, as Jesus was a man…. I don’t mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy, the comfortable, the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness, characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection…. I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith…. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman, a righteous or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith…. And this is how one becomes a man and a Christian. How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind? I think you see what I mean, even though I put it so briefly, I’m glad to have been able to learn this, and I know I’ve been able to do so only on the road I’ve travelled. So I’m grateful for the past and present, and content with them…. May God in his mercy lead us through these times, but above all, may he lead us to himself.”
As the Allied Powers closed in on Nazi Germany to bring the war to a close in Europe, Bonhoeffer was moved from Tegel Prison to a Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Flossenburg camp. Here is a part of his last day. “So less than twenty-four hours before he left this world, Bonhoeffer performed the offices of a pastor. In the bight Schonberg schoolroom that was their cell, he held a small service. He prayed and read the verses for that day: Isaiah 53:5 ‘With his stripes we are healed’ and 1 Peter 1:3 ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’ He had hardly finished his last prayer when the door opened and two evil-looking men in civilian clothes came in and said: ‘Prisoner Bonhoeffer. Get ready to come with us…. We bade him good-bye—he [fellow prisoner] drew me aside— ‘This is the end,’ he said. ‘For me the beginning of life.’” This is a picture of a person accessing God’s grace and its exceedingly great power, even over death.
We do not know for sure how Bonhoeffer processed the last minutes of his life in this age, but we can guess based on a sermon he preached years earlier in London:
“No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick for that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence.
Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up—that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death?…Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.
How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world?
Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.”
We do have a record of his death and how he approached it calmly and courageously.“The camp doctor at Flossenburg was H. Fischer-Hullstrung. He had no idea whom he was watching at the time, but years later, he gave the following account of Bonhoeffer’s last minutes alive: ‘On the morning of that day between five and six o’clock the prisoners… were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of the court martial read out to them. Through the half-open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”