An Outline of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life

The outline of Bonhoeffer’s story is well known. In 1927 he was a student earning a doctorate in theology from Berlin University at the age of twenty-one. In 1930 he was a debater crossing theological swords with the liberal establishment at Union Theological Seminary, New York. In 1931 he was a teacher exegeting issues of Christian ethics and the nature of the Church at Berlin University. Bonhoeffer, it seemed, was destined for the life of an academic. But the ominous storm clouds of the Third Reich changed everything.

By 1933 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an activist attacking the…