There’s a line that’s been attributed to Martin Luther that goes something like this: “Even if I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today.” The origins of this quotation do not go back to the 16th century Augustinian-monk-turned-Reformer. The attribution actually originated in Germany during World War II. But the popularity of the linkage to Luther is in part due to its resonance with his thought. Luther didn’t say it, but he might as well have.
In fact, as one historian observes regarding the apocryphal saying, “Scholars believe it originated in the German Confessing Church, which used it to inspire hope and perseverance during its opposition to the Nazi dictatorship.” Indeed, the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis 80 years ago today, on April 9, 1945, echoed a similar sentiment in his theological reckoning with the meaning of discipleship in the world, death, and new life.
Bonhoeffer himself was a leader in the Confessing Church, which separated from the established state church, which had been increasingly controlled by the pro-Nazi German Christian party. At the same time that Bonhoeffer came to maturity and embarked on a promising theological career at the University of Berlin, Adolf Hitler rose to power. Rather than simply retreating to the vagaries of academic theology, or escaping to a safe haven outside Germany, the young Bonhoeffer, who was just in his mid-20s, publicly opposed the Nazi regime and its anti-Semitism, in the church but more broadly as well.
Bonhoeffer’s theology drove him to engage the concrete responsibilities of discipleship in the world. This meant exposing himself to danger. It meant risking, and ultimately losing, his life. But Bonhoeffer’s deeply Lutheran formation led him to focus on Christ and his sacrifice, responding in faith to the call to follow his Lord. And as Bonhoeffer famously put it, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”
Bonhoeffer wrote these words as he was engaged in leading an illegal seminary for the marginalized and oppressed Confessing Church in the late 1930s. He knew that the call to follow Christ meant dying to sin and living for God. But he also was keenly aware that in the struggle with Nazism it might also mean directly sacrificing his life. Writing at Christmas in 1942, when Bonhoeffer had already become deeply involved in secret opposition to Hitler, he reflected on a decade of Nazi rule. “In recent years we have become increasingly familiar with the thought of death,” he wrote. “After what we have experienced in the war, we hardly dare acknowledge our wish that Death will find us completely engaged in the fullness of life, rather than by accident, suddenly, away from what really matters.”
But what really matters? Bonhoeffer lived his life in the conviction that what really mattered most was faithfully following Christ in this world with the time that God has given us to do so. This means following Christ in all areas of one’s life: in family, in work, in education, in business, in worship, and in citizenship.
At his death, Bonhoeffer was not yet 40 years old. He was arrested when he was suspected of involvement in a plan to smuggle Jews out of Germany and was imprisoned for the rest of his life when he was connected to the discovery of files that were being collected to document Nazi atrocities. But even while he spent his final years in prison, Bonhoeffer sought to meet his fate, whatever that might be, while “engaged in the fullness of life.”
This meant, for example, becoming engaged to marry the young Maria von Wedemeyer, only three months before his arrest. He wrote to Maria during his imprisonment and testified to his conviction that a Christian must live faithfully no matter the circumstances and no matter the consequences. He called their betrothal “a token of God’s grace and goodness, which summon us to believe in him.” God’s work is a call to faith, not “the faith that flees the world, but the faith that endures in the world and loves and remains true to that world in spite of all the hardships it brings us.”
“Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth,” Dietrich wrote to Maria. “It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too.” Even with the prospect of impending death, Bonhoeffer’s faith led him to affirm the goodness of God’s world, pursuing his duty to be found faithful at the end, at Christ’s return or his own demise.
“It may be that the day of judgment will dawn tomorrow,” wrote Bonhoeffer. “Only then and no earlier will we readily lay down our work for a better future.” That call is ours today as much as it was Bonhoeffer’s in 1945, and we must pursue it in that same hope in Christ’s death, resurrection, and return.
