Dying to Come Alive: Lessons from the Life of a Modern MartyrSample

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had come not to hope but to know that the only life worth living is that eternal life, the one God breathed into us in Paradise, before which we were merely inert mud and dust. That life was true life—for no life that is not eternal life is really life at all—and when our sad First Parents disbelieved God’s goodness and shrank from His love, they fell with us and all their progeny into that antechamber of hell that now passes for our dreary mortal existence, where every flower is a cut flower, disconnected from the source of life and dying even as we admire it. And then Jesus came to restore us to our original state. Dare we believe that? Dietrich Bonhoeffer dares us to dare.

Of course the idea of “dying to self”—and living for others and for God—is often thought an onerous if not unbearable burden, something only a handful of sulking, otherworldly saints can do. But Jesus disagrees. “My yoke is easy,” He says, “and my burden is light.” In the Gospel of John He says, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Paul declared the wonderful converse of this when writing, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” It is this paradox—dying in order to live—that lies at the heart of all reality and yields the life of meaning we were always meant to live—and now, through the cross, can begin living again, forever.

In a tired and decadent world where such beliefs had become fatally attenuated, or where they had devolved to pro forma exercises in religious tradition, Bonhoeffer believed them utterly. And he saw that the failure on the part of the German church to believe these things made the way for the river of blood that was National Socialism. So as a result of what Bonhoeffer saw and others didn’t, he was a prophet in his time and is a prophet in ours too. 

In what ways do you live for others and for God? Where do you get the strength to do so?