Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Lutheran Minister for Catholics?

In Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas indicated that Lutheran pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer early on recognized the demonic thought of Adolph Hitler;  he was eventually executed for his role in efforts to overthrow Hitler. Metaxas shares a passage from Bonhoeffer's "Ethics," which showed  his consistency about the sanctity of human life:

• "Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder" (p. 472).

By contrast, Metaxas reminds us of the Nazis' absolute disrespect for the consciences of medical professionals. Maligning those medical professionals resisting participation in barbaric human experimentation, Heinrich Himmler said:

• "It will take at least another ten years until we can get such narrow-mindedness out of our people" (p. 512)

Jordan Ballor tells us

• "Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Bonhoeffer observed, 'one thing has emerged that seems certain: in the common life of human beings, there are laws that are stronger than everything that believes it can supersede them, and that it is therefore not only wrong but unwise to disregard these laws'....One of these laws of the created order that Bonhoeffer recognized and affirmed was the institution of marriage. The changes in the social order and the upheaval of war and industrialization had placed marriage and family in a precarious position. Bonhoeffer cited the prevalence of voluntary childlessness and dissolution of familial bonds, in part due to the influence of radical individualist and socialist ideologies, as evidence that 'marriage and family are experiencing a violent crisis,' as he put it in a 1932 lecture. Even amid such travails, however, Bonhoeffer steadfastly defended marriage as foundational to God’s purposes in the world."

Metaxas shares the eulogy from Franz Hildebrant:

• " He came from an academic home and seemed destined for the academic life....His complexity was not such as to allow for any doubt between right and wrong. To probe the problem of ethics was not to indulge in the game of `dialectical' theology. The search had to lead to the goal, the quest demanded an answer....The unrest of the quest ends in the discipleship of Christ" (pp. 538 - 542).

Had he lived till an old age, it is easy to imagine that Bonhoeffer would have embraced the Catechism of the Catholic Church.