Bonhoeffer's Straight Line

In 1933, as Adolf Hitler consolidated power, most German churches bent to accommodate the new regime. They draped swastikas beside crosses and rewrote liturgies to honor the Fatherland. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young Lutheran pastor, held up a different standard. He saw with terrible clarity that the German Church had drifted so far from the Gospel that it could no longer recognize its own crookedness.

Bonhoeffer helped draft the Barmen Declaration, a theological plumb line dropped against the wall of a compromised church. The document stated plainly: Jesus Christ alone is Lord — not the state, not the culture, not the crowd. Many church leaders despised him for it. Like Amaziah telling Amos to pack up and prophesy somewhere else, they told Bonhoeffer he was being disloyal, divisive, unnecessary.

He paid for that faithfulness with his life, executed at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, just weeks before liberation.

When God sets His plumb line against the wall, as He did in Amos's vision, He is not asking whether we compare favorably to our neighbors. He is measuring us against His own straight truth. The wall that leans may look stable for years, even decades. But the plumb line does not lie. And the prophet who holds it up will rarely be thanked — not by Amaziah, not by the comfortable religious establishment. Yet God keeps sending those prophets, because He loves His people too much to let them lean uncorrected into ruin.