DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

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February 1, 1997 (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a German theologian who was executed in the closing days of World War II, is praised continually by the modernistic ecumenical movement represented by the World Council of Churches and its member denominations. The man is often mentioned, in fact, in a positive manner by Evangelical scholars today. In his writings, though, he plainly rejected such doctrines as the virgin birth, physical resurrection, and substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. According to Bonhoeffer, it is a "cardinal error" to regard Christianity as a religion of salvation.

The following are quotations which reveal Bonhoeffer's heretical and apostate thinking. These are from the 1967 edition of his Letters and Papers from Prison, Macmillan, edited by his close friend, Eberhard Bethge. He was imprisoned and executed by the Nazis for his involvement in two conspiracies to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

"God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science, has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion. For the sake of the intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible eliminated" (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 360).

"Man has learned to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the 'working hypothesis' called 'God.' In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without 'God' -- and, in fact, just as well as before" (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 325).

"If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore (constantly) in retreat" (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 311).

"I expect you remember Bultmann's paper on the demythologizing of the New Testament. My view of it today would be not that he went too far, as most people seem to think, but that he did not go far enough. IT IS NOT ONLY THE MYTHOLOGICAL CONCEPTIONS, SUCH AS MIRACLES, THE ASCENSION AND THE LIKE (WHICH ARE NOT IN PRINCIPLE DIFFERENT FROM THE CONCEPTIONS OF GOD, FAITH AND SO ON) THAT ARE PROBLEMATIC, BUT THE 'RELIGIOUS' CONCEPTIONS THEMSELVES" (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 285).

"It's true that Christianity has always been regarded as a religion of redemption. But isn't that a cardinal error, which separates Christ from the Old Testament and interprets him on the lines of the myths about redemption?" (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 336).

"Belief in the resurrection is not the 'solution' of the problem of death" (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 282).

"The God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with what God, as we imagine him, could do or aught to do" (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 391).