The Crucible

The Man Who Went Back

THE BRIEF

Tonight, Jesus picked up a towel.

He knew where he had come from and where he was going. He knew one of the twelve would betray him. He knew what the next eighteen hours would cost. And he got up from the table, wrapped a towel around his waist, and washed the feet of the men who would abandon him.

The Formation Forge exists to show what that kind of costly, chosen obedience looks like in a human life. Not as a concept. As a person.

Today that person is Dietrich Bonhoeffer — a German pastor and theologian who, in June 1939, chose to go back into the most dangerous place on earth because he believed a man who was not present in his nation's darkest hour had no right to help rebuild it afterward.

THE FORMATION FORGE

Guardians of Virtue: Dietrich Bonhoeffer — The Cost of Chosen Presence

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stepped off a ship in New York City.

He had escaped Germany. He had secured a teaching position at Union Theological Seminary through Reinhold Niebuhr. He had friends, colleagues, and a future that did not end in a Gestapo cell. He lasted twenty-six days.

On July 7, 1939, Bonhoeffer wrote Niebuhr a letter that stands as one of the most concentrated statements of costly obedience in modern Christian history:

"I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."

He booked the last ship back before the Atlantic crossing became impossible. The Confessing Church was being systematically dismantled. His seminary at Finkenwalde had already been shut down by the Gestapo. Pastors who held his views were being arrested, conscripted, or silenced.

He went anyway. Not because he was unafraid. He went because he believed that a faith which retreated to safety when the cost became real was not the faith the New Testament described.

Bonhoeffer spent the years that followed working inside the German resistance. He was arrested in April 1943. He spent two years in prison writing letters and papers later published as Letters and Papers from Prison — among the most significant works of Christian theology produced in the twentieth century.

On April 9, 1945 — less than a month before Germany's unconditional surrender — Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at Flössbrg concentration camp. He was 39 years old.

The camp doctor who witnessed his execution wrote: "I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God."

He knew what the towel would cost. He picked it up anyway.

THE GUARDIAN'S TAKEAWAY

Read the letter again: "I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."

The formed person does not earn the right to rebuild by staying safe. They earn it by being present when presence is costly. Holy Week is the week that question becomes unavoidable. Where are you being called to be present that would cost you something to show up for? That is not a rhetorical question. It is the question.

FROM THE BLOG

Wednesday — The Cost of Conviction examines what happened when Chicago Bulls guard Jaden Ivey expressed his Christian faith publicly and lost his contract the same afternoon. Bonhoeffer's story is the long arc of what Ivey's story is the opening chapter of — what it costs to carry conviction into the rooms that do not want it, and why formed people do it anyway. [Read it here → theguardianscross.org/blog/the-cost-of-conviction]

LEARN MORE ABOUT DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy — Eric Metaxas (2010). The definitive modern biography. The detail on Bonhoeffer's 1939 decision is worth the entire book.
The Cost of Discipleship — Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1937). The distinction between cheap grace and costly grace is the formation framework beneath this entire week.
Letters and Papers from Prison — Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1953, posthumous). What a formed person thinks about when they have chosen the costly path and are living inside the consequences.