On New Year’s Day 1943, the German pastor and resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer sent a letter to his circle of close friends and compatriots. For years, Bonhoeffer and a group of dissenting clergymen known as the Confessing Church had struggled against the Nazi takeover of religious life in Germany. More recently, Bonhoeffer had joined German military intelligence as a double agent, attempting to contact the western Allies on behalf of the German resistance movement. Only three months after Bonhoeffer wrote his letter, he was arrested by the Gestapo and, in April of 1945, murdered in Flossenbürg concentration camp. “We have been silent witnesses to evil deeds,” he wrote. “We have been drenched by many storms. We have learned the arts of equivocation and pretense. Experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open… Are we still of any use?” Eighty years after Bonhoeffer was killed, the answer to his question seems to be “yes”—though not any use that the pastor himself could have imagined.
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