Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the most original theologians of the twentieth century and one of its most consequential witnesses. A leader of the Confessing Church — the body of German Protestants who refused to let the Nazi state co-opt the gospel — he wrote, in The Cost of Discipleship, the century's sharpest attack on what he called 'cheap grace': forgiveness preached without repentance, and a Christianity that costs the believer nothing. 'When Christ calls a man,' he wrote, 'he bids him come and die.'
Bonhoeffer lived what he wrote. He could have remained safely abroad — he was lecturing in New York in 1939 — but returned to Germany to share his nation's ordeal, saying he would have no right to help rebuild Christian life there after the war if he did not endure its trials. He became involved, through the Abwehr, in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, judging that a Christian in such a time might be called not only to bandage the victims under the wheel but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. He was arrested in 1943.
After the July 1944 plot failed, his connection to the resistance was exposed. On April 9, 1945 — two weeks before American troops reached the camp — Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg. The camp doctor who witnessed it wrote that he had never seen a man die so submissive to the will of God. His prison letters, smuggled out and later published, remain among the most searching Christian writings of the modern age. Theologos remembers him as a martyr whose theology and whose death were a single act: a man who taught that grace is costly and then paid the price himself.