Dietrich Bonhoeffer Suffering Summary

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent most of his adult life trying to combat the oppressive regime in Nazi Germany. He worked so hard to bring awareness to the corruption in the country and tried to encourage people of the church, as much as he could, to oppose it. The persecution of the Jewish people caused him to question Christianity and the presence of God within the whole situation. His frustration emanated from the fact that so many people within the church community allowed for political corruption and the mistreatment of certain individuals without much of a fight. The churches were not speaking out for the oppressed but instead were succumbing to Hitler’s threats. Bonhoeffer saw the ways the religious institutions were not responding and made

He saw their unresponsiveness to the tyrannical system during that time as a new form of Christianity: Religionless Christianity. His writings from prison were dominated with this idea that religion as he knew it had completely changed with the times. His letters illustrate his loss of hope in the church and the Christian community. Although he “doesn’t reject the idea of the church,” and still values the idea of it, Bonhoeffer sees the challenge of religionless Christianity as something that calls for “radical reform”. Restoration was essential for the saving of the Christian church, which has been torn out its religious roots along with being overcast arguable dismantled by the political and cultural climate of the time. It had stopped being what it once was; through Bonhoeffer’s words “the church is the church only when it exists for others.” He saw the only solution for reformation to be for the church to rid of its selfish tendencies and “share in the secular problems of ordinary human life.” Therefore, there should be more focus on the Christian devotion of loving thy neighbors than yielding to the political pressures that threaten the faith