The Pastor Who Preached From a Prison Cell

On April 5, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Dietrich Bonhoeffer at his parents' home in Berlin. For two years, the Lutheran pastor lived in Tegel military prison, then Buchenwald, and finally Flossenbürg concentration camp. He had every opportunity to stay safe in America — Union Theological Seminary had offered him refuge in 1939. He boarded the ship, crossed the Atlantic, and then turned around and went back.

"I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany," he wrote. "I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."

Bonhoeffer walked willingly into suffering. And from behind bars, he kept proclaiming. He wrote letters that would reshape twentieth-century theology. He led worship services for fellow prisoners. He spoke of Christ to guards and inmates alike — men trapped in their own spiritual captivity. The prison doctor at Flossenbürg later recalled that on the morning of his execution, Bonhoeffer knelt and prayed, then walked to the gallows with complete peace.

This is the pattern Peter describes. Christ, the Righteous One, suffered for the unrighteous to bring us to God. He descended into the realm of the dead and proclaimed His victory even to imprisoned spirits. And through water — that ancient symbol of both death and deliverance — we are united with His passage from death to life. Our baptism is not mere ritual. It is, as Peter writes, the pledge of a clear conscience before the Almighty, secured by the resurrection of the One who now reigns with all authority in heaven.