Top left photo
Bonhoeffer and his seminary class at Finkenwalde, 1935

The Confessing Church had to organize its own educational institutions. Bonhoeffer was called by the Confessing Church to lead a new seminary in eastern Germany, in a small town called Finkenwalde. Here the students and faculty led a disciplined community life of prayer, meditation, mutual confession, theological study, pastoral ministry and evangelization, and large doses of play and recreation. A small cadre of graduates from the seminary formed a permanent community of pastors who put themselves at the disposal of the church authorities, to be sent where the need was greatest. Bonhoeffer later distilled their experience of Christian community into the book Life Together.

The core curriculum of the seminary was the Sermon on the Mount. During the last year of the seminary, Bonhoeffer had managed to gather together his lectures on the Sermon on the Mount and related materials into the book Discipleship. The German title is Nachfolge, which means, simply, “following after.” In it, he called on Germans to follow after Christ, to separate themselves from their world gone mad with lust for power and glory, and live the costly life of obedience to Christ alone. It was in the midst of this life under the cross, with Jesus Christ, that people could know and experience the greatness of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. As they lose all security in the world, Jesus becomes all they have and all they are as his body. Bonhoeffer wrote, “Only the one who believes is obedient and only the one who is obedient believes.” Christian faith is not an opinion about Jesus Christ, grace, and forgiveness of sins that one keeps tucked away in one’s head while living just like everyone else. Christian Faith is existence as the body of Christ in the world.

Top right photo
Bonhoeffer and students’ arrival in Stockholm, March 3, 1936

Bottom photo
Bishop Bell

Bonhoeffer was an active leader in the ecumenical movement and repeatedly tried to get the ecumenical leaders to understand the seriousness of the struggle to confess Christ in Germany and recognize the Confessiong Church as the only true Protestant church in Germany. His efforts were fruitless. Most ecumenical leaders saw their movements as a more or less neutral forum for all those who claim to confess Christ to learn about each other, clear up misunderstandings, and engage in joint efforts to alleviate suffering and promote world peace. Taking sides in the German church struggle to the point of deciding that one side was no longer a true Christian church was unthinkable to them. Bonhoeffer found a sympathetic interpreter of events in the German church to the British public and within ecumenical circles in his friend George K. A. Bell, Bishop of Chicester.

Bonhoeffer and his students managed to travel to Sweden in 1936 for an ecumenical exchange. It is indicative of the atmosphere in Germany at this time that some considered this seemingly innocuous journey a near-treasonous act.