One of my book groups chose to read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor murdered by the Nazi’s toward the end of World War II. Bonhoeffer, a pacifist by inclination, chose to oppose Hitler’s reign of terror and was imprisoned, then executed.
His work with the “confessing church” in Germany before his imprisonment echos in today’s confused times. He ministered during the 1930’s, before World War II, when many Germans, including Christians, were mesmerized by Hitler’s oratory, a balm to humiliation suffered after World War I.
Bonhoeffer wrote when belief in Christendom still existed in Europe and America, a belief that the Christian religion was paramount in Western countries. However, the lack of genuine Christian living, he believed, encouraged the rise of Nazism. It allowed a charlatan, one who could blind multitudes with spell-binding, hate-filled speeches, to lead them toward the creation of the Holocaust.
Christians in Germany, he wrote, “drank of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.” And in another place: “The prices we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost.”
If Bonhoeffer wrote today, would he claim that Christians’ lack of discipleship, not political changes or the new atheism or the Internet, has encouraged the moral atmosphere in which we live? Perhaps he would say it is the way we have NOT lived that has led to the abandonment of our faith by so many.