Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931-1932

General Editor’s Foreword to Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works

General Editor’s Foreword to Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works The German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become one of the most influential Christian thinkers of all time. Barely twenty-seven years of age when the Nazi regime came to power in Germany, Bonhoeffer emerged immediately as a radical Protestant voice against the ideological co-optation of his church. He was one of the earliest critics of the Nazi regime and an outspoken opponent of the pro-Nazi “German Christians.” From 1933 to 1935, he served as pastor of two German-speaking congregations in England, leading them to join the Confessing Church—the faction within the German Protestant Church that opposed the nazification of the Christian faith. He returned to Germany to become director of a small Confessing Church seminary and, after the Gestapo closed it, continued to work illegally to educate Confessing clergy. Throughout the 1930s, he attended ecumenical meetings, effectively becoming the voice of the Confessing Church throughout the European and American ecumenical world. In 1939, his ecumenical friends urged him to accept a position in New York. Rejecting the security of a life in exile, Bonhoeffer chose instead to join the ranks of the German conspiracy to overthrow the regime, like his brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher. He was arrested and imprisoned in April 1943 and executed in the Flossenb ürg concentration camp in April 1945. In a eulogy published shortly after Bonhoeffer’s death, his former professor and friend Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that Bonhoeffer’s story “is worth recording. It belongs to the modern acts of the apostles. . . . Not only his martyr’s death, but also his actions and precepts contain within them the hope of a revitalised Protestant faith in Germany. It will be a faith, xiii General Editors’ Foreword xiv religiously more profound than that of many of its critics; but it will have learned to overcome the one fateful error of German Protestantism, the complete dichotomy between faith and political life.”[1] In the ensuing decades, Niebuhr’s prescient insight that Bonhoeffer’s life and work offered lasting insights for modern Christian experience and witness has been more than fulfilled. Bonhoeffer wrote hundreds of letters, sermons, and biblical reflections in addition to his published theological works. After 1945, Bonhoeffer’s former student and close friend Eberhard Bethge worked with publishers to reissue and translate the books Bonhoeffer had published in his lifetime. In translation, these works—Discipleship, Ethics, and Letters and Papers from Prison—became classics, finding a wide readership among Christians throughout the world. Yet there was a growing sense that these works should not stand alone— a realization of the significance of the biographical and historical context of his thought. Bonhoeffer’s papers also included lecture notes that had been made by his students, documents from the German Church Struggle and ecumenical meetings, circular letters that were sent to his seminarians, sermons, extensive correspondence with theologians and religious leaders in Europe and the United States, and prison writings. Bethge published several early compilations of some of these documents (Gesammelte Schriften and Mündige Welt) and incorporated additional material into his magisterial biography of Bonhoeffer, which first appeared in English in 1970 and then, in a revised and unabridged edition, in 2000. Bethge and leading Bonhoeffer scholars in Germany decided to publish new annotated editions of Bonhoeffer’s complete theological works, together with most of the documents from the literary estate, including historical documents and correspondence to Bonhoeffer. The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke series was published by Chr. Kaiser Verlag, now part of Güters­ loher Verlagshaus. The first German volume, a new edition of Bonhoeffer’s dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, appeared in 1986; the final volume, Bonhoeffer ’s complete prison writings, appeared in April 1998. A seventeenth volume, an index for the entire series, appeared in 1999; this volume also included documents discovered after their respective volumes had been published. Whenever possible these documents have been included in the appropriate volumes of the English edition; documents that continue to be discovered are published in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Jahrbuch, a series published by Gütersloher Verlagshaus. [1.] Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Death of a Martyr,” Christianity and Crisis 5, no. 11 (1945): 6–7. General Editors’ Foreword xv Discussion about an English translation of the entire series began as soon as the first German volumes appeared. In 1990, the International Bonhoeffer Society, English Language Section...