Bonheoffer’s life and death belong to the annals of Christian martyrdom”¦his life and death have given us great hope for the future. He has set a model for a new type of true leadership inspired by the gospel, daily ready for martyrdom and imbued by a new spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty. The victory which he has won for us all, a conquest never to be undone, of love, light and liberty.
–Gerhard Leibholz (1901-1982), Bonhoeffer’s brother in law
I agree. But his actual death in that concentration camp (ironically, just two weeks before it was liberated by Allied Forces) only sealed his living martyrdom, so to speak, as he risked death repeatedly as a leader in the underground Confessing Church movement.
It’s not just in his fierce denunciaton of “cheap grace” that Bonhoeffer is such a timely inspiration for orthodox Anglicans today, it is also in his courageous opposition to the dominant trends in his society that had turned on the Christian Church and co-opted most of its leaders. Alas, the majority of the regional state churches in Germany went along with the Nazi regime, as state churches are ever wont to go along with the powers that be. That is why we simply MUST make the radical, harrowing transition to a “High Commitment, Post-Christendom style Anglicanism of a radically sectarian, Christ-against-culture sort.”
David Handy+