Bonhoeffer's Question From Behind Bars

In 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in Tegel military prison outside Berlin, arrested for his role in the resistance against Hitler. This was a man who had left the safety of a teaching position in New York to return to Germany, convinced that God had called him to stand with the suffering church. Now the walls closed in. The war dragged on. The conspiracy had stalled. And in his letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer wrestled with questions that would have been unthinkable in his seminary lecture hall — questions about where God was working, whether the kingdom was really advancing, whether everything he had staked his life on was true.

He never stopped asking. But he also never stopped looking for evidence. In the kindness of a guard who smuggled letters. In the hymns sung by fellow prisoners on Christmas Eve. In the strange, persistent hope that kept surfacing even in a place designed to crush it.

John the Baptist asked his question from a prison cell too. "Are you the one, or should we expect someone else?" Jesus did not scold him. He simply said, "Look at the evidence — the blind see, the lame walk, the poor hear good news."

Sometimes the deepest faith is not the faith that never questions. It is the faith that asks honestly from the darkest cell and still watches for signs of the Kingdom breaking through.