Confessing Church

But I wasn't a socialist, so I did nothing.

Well, he was part of what was called Die Bekennende Kirche.

That's the confessing church.

One of those main figures was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who's one of my heroes.

These actions did not escape the notice of the Nazis.

As tensions rose in the nation and in the Church, Bonhoeffer became deeply involved in the Confessing Church, an alternative to the Reich Church, whose efforts to unite German Protestants around the Führer and his ideologies deeply disturbed the young pastor.

Ultimately, Bonhoeffer was asked to direct an underground seminary in Finkenwald to practice theological preparation and life together with seminarians under the authority of the Scriptures.

Bonhoeffer became increasingly convinced that God's grace could not be met with indifference, enjoying only its benefit of mercy, what he termed cheap grace, but that God's grace must be received with gratitude and a willingness to obey the directives of Scripture and the Spirit.

Hmm.

And so Sasse says, "I'm not signing this." And he leaves, and he goes back to Erlangen, and rather than participating fully in what became called the Confessing Church, um, he, he goes back to Bavaria, and he kind of goes what, uh, what, um, [lips smack] Matthew Harrison has, I think, rightly called the lonely way in the church struggle.

He's still gonna struggle against Nazism.

He still writes against it.

... leaving, leaving, um, [lip smacks] uh, Barmen, where the declaration, it's not a confession, declaration is written.

Uh, Bonhoeffer's still in, in London at the time.

Bonhoeffer ends up reluctantly supporting the Barmen Declaration for the sake of unity in the anti-Nazi group, which becomes the Confessing Church.

And the Confessing Church is a weird mishmash of real Lutherans, real reformed, unionists, liberals, um, even a few kinda, like, almost pseudo-Methodists, and the only thing that really unites them is the Barmen Declaration.

Had a great teacher called Jane Williams who got me into church history.

And the moment I started learning about the confessing church, I was introduced to the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

And so then that sort of got interested in the Barman Declaration and what it meant for a group of Christian pastors to organize themselves and then to resist.

And I think the thing that would have made a bit of a connection sort of personal for me at the time was at the time I was 39 years old and Bonhoeffer was executed when he was 39.

John, there were a lot of moments in Bonhoeffer's life, a lot of decisive moments, like when he decided to return from America.

When he... decided to make contact with some of the bishops in the uk what do you think were the real pivotal moments in bonhoeffer's life his his career and his work i mean do you have like the three you know kind of like sliding doors moments where things could have gone one way or another what were the real moments that set him onto the path to where he ended up

Well, if I just take three, should I stay or should I go? It was like he'd helped found the Confessing Church, but then he was starting originally, you know, very, very early, 1934, to tear his hair out about the way things weren't going as well as the way things were going.

So he gets a kind of a job opening offer in the UK.