Dietrich Bonhoeffer – the liberated theologian of liberation

Abstract

The case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is particular for the reason that there’s no way to omit or at least not to remember his life for this simple cause that it constitutes an important commentary to his views, that’s why the first chapter of the article has been devoted in its wholeness to his biography. Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to the world in an old, bourgeois-aristocratic family on the day of 4th February 1906 in Breslau (Wroclaw). He was executed in the concentration camp in Bavarian Flossenburg on the 9th of April in 1945. He has written himself into history as a Lutheran pastor, theologian, ecumenical and anti-Hitlerite activist. He was the creator of the concept of ’secular Christianity‘, which would have been supposed to have guested in the religionless world, that is, such that God had left it out of His own will and, while abandoning it, He didn’t desire for man anything so much as his maturity and growing-up to the self-directed and responsible living in the here and now. People must learn to live in the world etsi Deus non daretur (as if there weren’t any God), although still under His sight.