As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin in God, but the man who has become like God has forgotten how he was at his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge. What God had given man to be, man now desired to be through himself. But God’s gift is essentially God’s gift….
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
As the Image of God
Topic: Overcoming Adversity
Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin in God, but the man who has become like God has forgotten how he was at his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge. What God had given man to be, man now desired to be through himself. But God’s gift is essentially God’s gift… In becoming like God man has become a god against God… Man’s life is now disunion with God, with men, with things, and with himself.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), into an intellectually active and musically gifted family. He studied theology at the University of Tübingen and earned his doctorate from the University of Berlin at age 21. Bonhoeffer was ordained as a Lutheran pastor and recognized early for his theological insight and moral clarity. He also spent time teaching and preaching in Germany, Spain, and the United States.
As Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became one of the first to speak out against the regime’s control of the church and its racial ideology. He helped found the Confessing Church, which rejected the Nazification of Christian teaching. In 1935, he opened an underground seminary in Finkenwalde to train pastors committed to spiritual integrity and communal life. His writings from this period, especially The Cost of Discipleship, called the church to live with faithfulness under pressure.
Bonhoeffer’s resistance grew beyond teaching. He aided Jews fleeing persecution and was later linked to efforts to overthrow Hitler. Arrested in 1943, he was imprisoned in Berlin’s Tegel Prison and later moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was executed there on April 9, 1945, just weeks before the war ended. His life remains a clear expression of the cost of conscience and the demands of faithful resistance.
Ethics
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, and Eberhard Bethge. Ethics. Touchstone Book, 1995.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, participant in the German resistance movement against Nazism and founding member of the Confessing Church.
Thomas Merton
So Bonhoeffer says very rightly: “In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all…. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God.” Only against God can man know good and evil.
–Thomas Merton [Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander].
Additional Dietrich Bonhoeffer Quotes
“Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God — the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?”
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer [Letters and Papers from Prison, Who Stands Fast?, p. 5.].
“The truthfulness which Jesus demands from his followers is the self-abnegation which does not hide sin. Nothing is then hidden, everything is brought forth to the light of day. In this question of truthfulness, what matters first and last is that a man’s whole being should be exposed, his whole evil laid bare in the sight of God. But sinful men do not like this sort of truthfulness.
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer [Discipleship and the Cross, Truthfulness, p. 138.].