Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness by Eric Metaxas

Author:Eric Metaxas [Metaxas, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781595554697
Amazon: 1595554696
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

The events of the nine months Bonhoeffer spent in America had a profound effect on him, and when he returned to Germany in the summer of 1931, it was clear to his friends that something had changed. He seemed to take his faith much more seriously. Before he had left, his intellect had been in the right place, but somehow now his heart was engaged in a way that it hadn’t been before.

Bonhoeffer took a position on the theological faculty of Berlin University and began to teach there. From behind the lectern, he would say things that one did not usually hear in Berlin theological circles. For example, he referred to the Bible as the Word of God, as though God existed and was alive and wanted to speak to us through it. The whole point of studying the text was to get to the God behind the text. The experience could not be merely intellectual but must also be personal and real, as it had been for the African American Christians at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. Bonhoeffer also took his students on retreats and taught them how to pray. One of his students said that Bonhoeffer once asked him: “Do you love Jesus?”

Bonhoeffer had changed, but Germany had changed too. Before Bonhoeffer left for New York in 1930, the Nazis had very little political power. They were then the ninth most important political party in the Reichstag, the German parliament. But when he returned in 1931, they had vaulted to being the second most important party and were consolidating more power with each day that passed. Bonhoeffer could see the trouble on the horizon, and he would speak in his classes about it. He was not afraid of saying things like, “For German Christians, there can be only one savior, and that savior is Jesus Christ.”3 That was a brave statement because many Germans were beginning to look toward Hitler as their savior, as the man who would lead them out of the wilderness and suffering of the previous several years.

And who could have guessed what lay ahead under his leadership? Hitler presented himself as a man of moderation and peace, as someone devoted to the German people, and as someone who publicly claimed to be following “God’s will.” He promised to lead Germany out of the economic hell into which it had fallen, and to lift the deep shame that Germans felt at having lost the First World War.

Hitler fed the idea that they had lost the war because they had been betrayed from within, by Communists and Jews—he often conflated these terms—and he said that the way forward was to purge Germany of these supposed traitors. This idea of treachery from within Germany was known as the Dolchstoss (stab-in-the-back) legend, and many accepted it as the main reason that Germany had lost the war.

Hitler also portrayed himself as the one who might lead Germans beyond the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, through which the victorious Allied powers had imposed unbearable terms on the Germans.

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