David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at something I’m calling allow me to post this epistle that is writings from prison that escape out into the world one way or another and have effects on the larger society. And today, I want to talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Nineteen sixty in nineteen forty five, one of the more famous prisoners in our own time and very much affects what we talk about in seminaries and about religion and theology very much today. Here we have a little Greek Orthodox icon of Bonhoeffer running away the demon of Nazism.There are quite a few of those kinds of things out there.Most people, I think, know a little bit about Bonhoeffer. I do want to make a very quick pass through his life here. Bonhoeffer traveled to the United States in 1930 on a teaching fellowship at Union Theological Seminary where he said there is no theology here. He was accustomed to German universities and German theology very much in the liberal theological Protestant tradition. He was into systematic theology, that is theology that all fits together very logically in huge volumes of and collections of books. So the American theological landscape just was not up to his standards. But he began to go to Harlem and the black church very much appealed to him. He fell in love with spirituals and he was transformed by the social gospel of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell senior. Now, Bonhoeffer then goes back and he was a key figure in the early nineteen thirties, forming what was known as the confessing church, the church that was opposed to the Nazi takeover of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism right in the lead up to the Second World War. We can see some images here. The do you see this is the the Protestant churches that cooperate with Nazism and in the confessing church that was very much against Nazism. And we know how that’s going to go as the day is passed. This is from about nineteen thirty three and four and the crackdown is going to begin. What confuses Bonhoeffer is why the church isn’t better able to resist the ideas of the Nazis. As the war approaches, Bonhoeffer will have to go into service. He will be drafted. He’s a pacifist. But avoiding service was a capital offense, so he would have been shot.So he pulled strings. And Bonhoeffer was very connected to the ruling class within Germany of the day from his family background. And so he pulled strings and is able to join the military intelligence service. This leads to a lot of opportunities to do travel outside of Nazi Germany. He’s able to contact church leaders in other parts of the world. And but unfortunately, it also leads eventually to his death. Yes, he was indeed a spy. And so there are some interesting books out there talking about this, the faithful spy and the plot to kill Hitler Bonhoeffer. And this is really the scholarly standard if you’re interested in reading about his life. Bonhoeffer Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, spy, and is an open question very much debated today, whether or not Bonhoeffer should be considered to be a martyr, because here he was executed. Yes. By the Nazis. Yes, we’re trying to kill Hitler, but he was trying to commit murder and he was tried and convicted of doing that and therefore hanged, executed several books that are out there, the plot to kill Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, passersby, unlikely hero and Bonhoeffer, the assassin, questionmark, challenging the myth, recovering his call to peacemaking, trying to reevaluate how these things work. How much did he know about the plot to kill Hitler and when did he kn...