Letters from a Nazi prison
Bonhoeffer's prison correspondence
Bonhoeffer is arrested on April 5, 1943, connected to the Abwehr network that has been involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. He will spend the remaining two years of his life in prison.
He writes letters. To his parents, to his friend Eberhard Bethge, to his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer — extraordinary letters that are, simultaneously, pastoral theology, personal testimony, and some of the most provocative theological thinking of the twentieth century.
From Tegel prison he begins asking questions that have occupied theologians ever since: what does it mean to be a Christian in a world come of age — a world that no longer needs God as a working hypothesis, that has learned to manage its own existence without religious assistance? What is a religionless Christianity? Who is Christ for us today?
He is not abandoning faith. He is stripping it of the scaffolding — the religious forms, the institutional props, the cultural Christianity that passes for the real thing — to find what is at the center when everything else is removed.
From prison, facing death, he finds the center: a God who suffers alongside humanity, who is found not in power and privilege but in weakness and suffering, who is present precisely where the religious forms say he should be absent.
Only a suffering God can help.
He writes this from a cell. He means every word.
“Only a suffering God can help.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1944 AD
“that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death;”
Only a suffering God can help.
Bonhoeffer writes this from a prison cell with executions happening in the yard. He has had two years to think about what kind of God is present in this situation — what kind of God is useful in a Nazi prison when the religious forms have been stripped away.
Not the God who keeps people safe. Not the God who rewards the faithful with prosperity. Not the God who is powerful in the way that empires are powerful.
The God who suffers alongside. The God who is found in weakness, in the cross, in exactly the place where power has abandoned.
In your suffering — not someone else's, yours — what kind of God do you find? And is it the one Bonhoeffer found, or a different one?