The Pastor Who Refused Cheap Grace

In 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer opened an illegal seminary in Finkenwalde, a small town on the Baltic coast of Germany. The Reich church had already capitulated, draping swastikas over altars and preaching a gospel scrubbed of anything that might offend the state. Most clergy kept quiet. They had not abandoned the faith exactly — they had simply made it invisible.

Bonhoeffer called this "cheap grace" — the kind of religion that costs nothing and changes nothing. At Finkenwalde, he trained twenty-five young pastors to practice something different: a faith with flavor, a gospel that could not be hidden under a bushel. They prayed together before dawn. They confessed sin to one another. They preached in underground churches where discovery meant arrest.

The Gestapo shut down the seminary in 1937. Bonhoeffer could have fled to safety in America — and briefly did, in 1939 — but he returned to Germany within weeks. "I have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life after the war," he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr, "if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."

He was executed at Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before liberation.