Bonhoeffer's Straight Line

In 1933, as Adolf Hitler consolidated power, most German churches bent to accommodate the new regime. They draped swastikas beside crosses and rewrote liturgies to honor the Fatherland. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young Lutheran pastor, held up a different standard. He saw with terrible clarity that the German Church had drifted so far from the Gospel that it could no longer recognize its own crookedness.…