The Prison Prophet

If asked to name the most influential work of modern Christian thought, older Protestant divines might point to Karl Barth's powerful commentary on The Epistle to the Romans or Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology. Younger ministers, on the other hand, would be far more likely to cite a book that is scarcely more than an elliptical fragment of theology, since it was never intended for publication at all. It is the Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the now-famed German Lutheran pastor who was arrested and later executed by the Nazis.

Some of Bonhoeffer's appeal for the young stems from the remarkable drama of his life. The son of a prosperous neurologist, he studied theology at the University of Berlin in the 1920s and quickly gained a reputation as one of Germany's most promising young Protestant thinkers. After Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer joined the anti-Nazi "Confessing Church," for which he later ran a secret, illegal seminary at Finkenwalde. In 1939, Bonhoeffer, who had once been a pacifist, refused the safety of exile in the U.S. Even though employed as a German intelligence agent, he secretly joined the underground.

The Man for Others. Bonhoeffer believed that it was morally right to assassinate Hitler, and had a share in planning an abortive 1943 plot against the Fuehrer's life. That year, however, he was arrested; in 1945 he was tried for treason and hanged by the SS at the Flossenbuerg concentration camp in Bavaria, a few days before the area was liberated by Allied troops. At his death, he was 39.

Had he died before the war began, Bonhoeffer would have been remembered only as a dedicated young minister cut down before his time. But during his years of commitment to the underground, he matured from pastor to prophet. In his incomplete Ethics, he proposed a practical, person-centered morality based on love rather than law, which in some ways foreshadows today's "situation ethics" (TIME, Jan. 21). His most radical and prophetic ideas Bonhoeffer explored in the letters he wrote from Berlin's Tegel prison to his friend and fellow pastor, Eberhard Bethge. These reveal the vision of a new kind of secular Christianity, preaching the Gospel of Jesus, "the man for others," using a "nonreligious interpretation of Biblical concepts."

Pervasive Influence. Bonhoeffer the radical prophet was in many ways devoutly orthodox. The kind of "worldly holiness" that he proposed for modern Christians took for granted the necessity of the church, the sacraments, an inner spiritual discipline. Some Bonhoeffer interpreters believe that he would have worked out his radical theology in light of his firm commitment to church doctrine, which is reflected in his early writings. One such statement of the "orthodox" Bonhoeffer has just been published under the title Christ the Center (Harper & Row; $3). It is the text of his 1933 lectures on Christology at the University of Berlin, which Bethge reconstructed from student notes. The lectures show Bonhoeffer grappling with a theological question that he returned to in the prison letters: Who is Christ? In one lecture he speaks of Christ as being "for me," and standing "on the boundary of my existence, beyond my existence, but still for me"--a foreshadowing of his later concept of Jesus as the man for others.

Bonhoeffer left no school of disciples, but he has nonetheless become the most frequently quoted theologian of his generation. For better or worse, his idea of a "religionless Christianity" has been taken up by today's death-of-God thinkers. His belief that the church must exist to serve the world is axiomatic to activist ministers. So pervasive is his influence that Lutheran Church Historian Martin Marty once suggested dividing the theological world into two groups: those who admit their debt to Bonhoeffer, and those who borrow his ideas without acknowledgement.

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