Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Costly Discipleship

In 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer held a one-way ticket to safety. Friends in America had arranged a teaching position at Union Theological Seminary in New York, far from the gathering storm of Nazi Germany. He could have stayed. No one would have blamed him. The position was prestigious, the work meaningful, and his body would have been safe from the Gestapo's reach.

He lasted twenty-six days before booking passage home.

"I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America," he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr. He understood something Paul pressed upon the Corinthians — that our bodies are not our own. Bonhoeffer refused to treat his physical life as a private possession to be preserved at all costs. He belonged to Christ, and Christ's work was in Germany, among the suffering, inside the conspiracy against Hitler, even unto death.

Bonhoeffer could have argued that survival was permissible. And it was — "all things are lawful for me." But he would not be mastered by the instinct for self-preservation. His body was a temple of the Holy Spirit, and that temple needed to stand where God planted it, not where comfort beckoned.

He was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, just days before liberation. His final words: "This is the end — for me, the beginning of life."

Paul's question still echoes: Do you not know that your body is a temple? Bonhoeffer knew. He honored the Almighty with his body — every last breath of it.