Bonhoeffer and the Church That Split in Two

In May 1934, a young German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer helped draft the Barmen Declaration, a document that drew a sharp line through the heart of the German church. On one side stood the "German Christians," who draped swastikas over their altars and bent scripture to serve the Reich. On the other stood the Confessing Church, which insisted that Jesus Christ alone was Lord.

The cost was immediate and brutal. Families who had worshiped side by side for generations now sat in separate pews — or separate buildings. Pastors lost their pulpits. Friendships dissolved overnight. Bonhoeffer's own family was divided over how far resistance should go. His brother-in-law would later be executed alongside him at Flossenburg, just weeks before liberation.

Bonhoeffer once wrote, "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless." He understood something the comfortable church in Germany did not want to hear: the truth of the Gospel, faithfully proclaimed, does not leave things as they are. It burns through pretense. It forces a decision.

When Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth," He was not speaking of destruction for its own sake. He was describing the unavoidable reality that divine truth, when it arrives, divides — not because God desires conflict, but because light and darkness cannot quietly coexist. The question for every generation is the one Jesus posed to the crowds: Can you not read the signs of this present time?