The German theologian’s unfinished magnum opus on Christian moral responsibility
What the Work Is
Ethics is the book Dietrich Bonhoeffer worked on during the final years of his life, intended as his magnum opus. He began writing it during the period when he was involved in resistance activities against the Nazi regime, and it remained unfinished when he was arrested on 5 April 1943. The work was written in German by Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church and an anti-Nazi dissident.
What the Book Is About
Ethics represents Bonhoeffer’s sustained attempt to work out the foundations of Christian moral life in a context of extreme political and moral crisis. He wrote it while the Nazi regime was carrying out atrocities against Jews and other minorities—atrocities whose full scale Bonhoeffer learned through his work with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. The book was composed during a period when Bonhoeffer was wrestling with questions of responsible action, guilt, and what it means to live faithfully as a Christian under a regime of radical evil.
The work engages with the question of how a responsible person should act when facing a situation of overwhelming moral complexity. Bonhoeffer did not justify his own actions but wrote that when a person takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes that guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it before other men, is justified by dire necessity before them, is acquitted by his conscience before himself, but before God hopes only for grace. This conception of responsible action—accepting guilt rather than seeking moral purity—stands at the center of the ethical vision the book develops.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central theme of Ethics concerns the nature of responsible action in a fallen world. Bonhoeffer rejected the idea that moral life consists in preserving one’s own innocence or avoiding complicity. Instead, he argued that genuine responsibility may require accepting guilt for the sake of others. The responsible person does not ask how to extricate himself from a difficult situation but rather asks how the coming generation shall continue to survive and live for truth.
This emphasis on responsibility connects to Bonhoeffer’s broader theological conviction that Christians should not retreat from the world but act within it. He believed that two elements were constitutive of faith: the implementation of justice and the acceptance of divine suffering. These convictions shaped his ethical thinking throughout the work.
The book also reflects Bonhoeffer’s engagement with the concept of conscience. He wrote that before other men the responsible person is justified by dire necessity, before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace. This threefold structure—social justification, personal conscience, and divine grace—suggests a complex understanding of moral accountability that does not rest on simple rule-following or the preservation of personal virtue.
Bonhoeffer’s ethical thought in this work must be understood against the backdrop of his earlier theological development. In The Cost of Discipleship, his best-known book, he had attacked “cheap grace” as a cover for ethical laxity and contrasted it with “costly grace”—the grace that calls believers to follow Christ and costs them their lives. He argued that Christians have relied so much on Christ’s forgiveness that they do not challenge themselves enough in actually following his word, instead relying on God’s grace to save them when they fall. This insistence on the concrete demands of discipleship carries over into the ethical thinking of Ethics, where the question is not merely what one believes but what one does in the face of radical evil.
The work also engages with the concept of simple obedience. Bonhoeffer admonished Christians who come too quickly to the conclusion that God could not possibly have meant his commands literally. He cited the example of the rich man who asks Jesus how he can enter the kingdom of heaven, noting that people often assume Jesus did not mean literally to leave everything and follow him, treating it instead as a matter of faith or inward detachment. This concern with taking divine commands seriously—with the literal demands of obedience—informs the ethical vision of Ethics as well.
Structure and Approach
Ethics was never completed. Bonhoeffer intended it as his magnum opus but was arrested before he could finish it. The work was composed during the period when he was also writing letters to keep up the spirits of his former students and when he was involved in resistance activities. The unfinished nature of the book means that it does not present a fully systematized ethical theory but rather a series of reflections and arguments developed under conditions of extreme pressure and danger.
Significance and Influence
Ethics holds a significant place in Bonhoeffer’s body of work as the book he intended to be his major statement on Christian moral life. Its composition during his involvement in the German resistance and its abrupt termination by his arrest give it a particular historical weight. The work reflects the theological and ethical concerns that animated Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazi regime and his broader conviction that Christians must act responsibly within the world rather than retreat from it.
Bonhoeffer’s theological legacy is subject to diverse interpretations. His Christocentric approach appeals to conservative, confession-minded Protestants, while other commentators note his commitment to justice and his ideas about “religionless Christianity.” Ethics, in its unfinished state, contributes to this complex legacy by presenting a vision of Christian moral responsibility that emphasizes action, guilt, and grace rather than purity or withdrawal. The book stands as a testament to Bonhoeffer’s conviction that faith must be lived out in concrete historical circumstances, even when those circumstances demand the acceptance of guilt rather than the preservation of innocence.
Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for a year and a half. He was later transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp. Though many believe he was accused of being associated with a plot to assassinate Hitler, the actual arrest and court documents show that he was arrested for his involvement in “Operation 7,” which succeeded in saving the lives of first seven then fourteen Jews. The judge in the trial was especially angry that Bonhoeffer had successfully avoided serving in the military by working for the Abwehr, something cited in the court documents.
On 13 January 1943, Bonhoeffer had become engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, the granddaughter of his close friend and Finkenwalde seminary supporter Ruth von Kleist-Retzow. Ruth had campaigned for this marriage for several years, although up until late October 1942 Bonhoeffer remained a reluctant suitor despite Ruth being part of his innermost circle. He considered that his responsibilities during wartime made it the wrong time to marry. A large age gap loomed between Bonhoeffer and Maria: he was 36 to her 18. Bonhoeffer had first met her when she was his confirmation student at age 11. As was considered proper at the time, the two had spent almost no time together alone prior to the engagement and did not see each other between becoming engaged and Bonhoeffer’s arrest on 5 April, three months later. Once he was in prison, however, Maria’s status as his fiancée became invaluable, as it meant she could visit Bonhoeffer and correspond with him. While their relationship was troubled, she was a source of food and smuggled messages. Bonhoeffer made Eberhard Bethge his heir, but Maria, in allowing her correspondence with Bonhoeffer to be published after her death, provided an invaluable addition to this scholarship.
For a year and a half, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned at Tegel Prison awaiting trial. There he continued his work in religious outreach among his fellow prisoners and guards. Sympathetic guards helped smuggle his letters out of prison to Bethge and others, and these uncensored letters were posthumously published in Letters and Papers from Prison. One of those guards, a corporal named Knobloch, even offered to help him escape from the prison and “disappear” with him, and plans were made for that end; eventually Bonhoeffer declined it, fearing Nazi retribution against his family, especially his brother Klaus and brother-in-law Dohnányi, who was also imprisoned.
Notes on Bonhoeffer’s intelligence activities and ecumenical contacts featured among the contents of the Zossen documents uncovered by the Gestapo on 22 September 1944; this fact, combined with his familial connection to Dohnányi, sealed Bonhoeffer’s fate and led directly to his transfer to Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. On 4 April 1945, the bulk of the diary belonging to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was also discovered, and in a rage upon reading them, Hitler ordered that the other Abwehr members be executed. Bonhoeffer was led away just as he concluded his final Sunday service and asked an English prisoner, Payne Best, to convey a message to Bishop Bell if Best should ever reach his home: “This is the end—but for me it is the beginning of Life!”
Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death on 8 April 1945 by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without witnesses, without any evidence against him, with no records of the proceedings or a defense. He was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945. Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard where he was hanged with five others: Canaris; General Hans Oster, Canaris’s deputy; General Karl Sack, a military jurist; lawyer Theodor Strünck; and German resistance fighter Ludwig Gehre.
Eberhard Bethge, a student and close friend of Bonhoeffer, writes of a man who saw the execution: “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer… kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
This historical account of Bonhoeffer’s death went unchallenged over the following decades. However, several recent biographers see problems with the story because Bethge’s witness, Hermann Fischer-Hüllstrung, was a doctor at Flossenbürg concentration camp. J.L.F. Mogensen, a former prisoner at Flossenbürg, cited the length of time it took for the execution to be completed (almost six hours), plus departures from camp procedure that may not have been granted to prisoners so late in the war, as jarring inconsistencies. Considering that the sentences had been confirmed at the highest levels of Nazi government, by individuals with a pattern of torturing prisoners who dared to challenge the regime, Craig J. Slane posits that “the physical details of Bonhoeffer’s death may have been much more difficult than we earlier had imagined.” Other recent critics of the traditional account are more caustic. It also appears in some instances that “Fischer-Hüllstrung had been given the job of reviving political prisoners after they had been hanged until they were almost dead, in order to prolong the agony of their dying.” Another critic charges that Fischer-Hüllstrung’s “subsequent statement about Bonhoeffer as kneeling in wordy prayer … belongs to the realm of legend,” although without evidence to the contrary. The disposition of Bonhoeffer’s remains is not known. His body may have been cremated outside the camp along with hundreds of other recently executed or dead prisoners, or American troops may have placed his body in one of several mass graves in which they interred the unburied dead of the camp.
Commemoration
Bonhoeffer is commemorated in the liturgical calendars of several Christian denominations on the anniversary of his death, 9 April. This includes many parts of the Anglican Communion, where he is sometimes identified as a martyr and other times not. His commemoration in the liturgical calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America uses the liturgical color of white, which is typically used for non-martyred saints. In 2008, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church, which does not enumerate saints, officially recognized Bonhoeffer as a “modern-day martyr.” He was the first martyr to be so recognized who lived after the Reformation and is one of only two as of 2017. Bonhoeffer is remembered in the Church of England with a commemoration on 9 April.
The Deutsche Evangelische Kirche in Sydenham, London, at which he preached between 1933 and 1935, was destroyed by bombing in 1944. A replacement church was built in 1958 and named Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche in his honor.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s text “Von guten Mächten” (translated as ‘By Gentle’ or ‘By Gracious Powers’) is known to a large audience as a worship song. The song is often sung at funerals. In 2021 it was voted the most popular hymn in Germany. The best-known melody was written by Siegfried Fietz in 1970.
