The Tempest of the Living
Breakpoint
Colson Center
4.8 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Like many faith giants, God calls us to embrace this time and place while yet imperfect.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. |
| 0:05.5 | For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. |
| 0:09.3 | On this date 80 years ago, in the waiting days of the Third Reich, German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhofer was executed for treason. |
| 0:17.5 | At a time when many of his fellow Germans, including pastors and priests embraced embraced Hitler and the nationalist ideas of the Third Reich, Bonhofer did not. Eventually, |
| 0:26.5 | his resistance would lead to his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. The plot failed, |
| 0:31.7 | and Bonhofer was among those who were exposed. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, |
| 0:37.1 | the bulk of German Protestant groups |
| 0:39.2 | submitted to the oversight of pro-Nazi leaders. These so-called German Christians compromised |
| 0:44.6 | the eternal truths of God to a racist, statist, and eugenicist totalitarian regime. Because of this |
| 0:50.9 | compromise, they were left free to practice their faith, as long as they did not transgress Nazi doctrine. |
| 0:56.8 | But Bonhofer, along with others like Martin Niemolar and Karl Bart, did transgress. |
| 1:01.8 | They also stood against compromising churchmen. |
| 1:04.6 | Bonhofer helped found the dissident confessing church and underground seminaries, |
| 1:08.4 | and was among those who published the defiant barman declaration. |
| 1:12.2 | Rejecting his earlier pacivism, he took on an active role in resistance to Hitler's tyranny, |
| 1:17.5 | eventually joining the plot to assassinate him. Bonhofer has been praised for his faithfulness |
| 1:22.6 | and courage in each of these activities, but perhaps his most courageous act was simply going back home. |
| 1:29.3 | In the early years of Nazi terror, Bonhofer first went to the U.K. and then to the U.S., |
| 1:34.2 | taking up teaching positions in a freer, safer part of the world. His conscience, however, |
| 1:38.9 | did not let him remain in safety while his nation was facing such evil. In 1939, just weeks before the war began, Bonhofer |
| 1:47.0 | returned to Germany. Writing to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, he explained, quote, |
| 1:52.3 | I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war |
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