The Theologian Who Sailed Back to Suffering

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood on the docks of New York City with every reason to stay. Friends at Union Theological Seminary had arranged a teaching position, a safe refuge from the Nazi regime that was already closing in on dissenting pastors. He had a desk, a salary, and a future. The Atlantic Ocean stretched between him and danger.

He lasted twenty-six days.

In his diary, Bonhoeffer wrote that he had made a terrible mistake. He realized he had no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if he did not share the trials of this time with his people. So he booked passage back to Berlin — back to surveillance, back to prison, back to the gallows at Flossenburg where he would be executed in April 1945, just weeks before liberation.

Bonhoeffer did not lack options. He possessed every credential, every connection, every justification to remain in comfort. Yet he emptied himself of safety and chose the path of solidarity with the suffering.

This is the downward movement Paul describes in Philippians 2. Christ Jesus, who existed in the very form of God, did not cling to equality with the Almighty as something to be exploited. He emptied Himself. He descended — not twenty-six days into discomfort, but from the throne of heaven to a borrowed manger, from glory to a criminal's cross. And because He humbled Himself to the point of death, the Most High exalted Him and gave Him the name above every name.