This week in Christian history: Bill Hybels resigns, Dietrich Bonhoeffer executed

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Sunday, April 07, 2024

Dietrich Bonhoeffer executed – April 9, 1945

A blown-up photo of 20th-century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer is shown in an image gallery at the Becket Fund's Canterbury Medal Dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., on May 12, 2011. Author Eric Metaxas received the medal this year. | The Christian Post

This week marks the anniversary of when German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, author of the influential book The Cost of Discipleship, was executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of World War II.

Bonhoeffer, who had coined the phrase "cheap grace" to describe Christian belief that did not involve personal transformation, had been a longtime critic of the Third Reich and National Socialism.

The theologian was eventually arrested for being loosely tied to a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, which had been spearheaded by a military officer named Claus von Stauffenberg.

Hung less than a month before Germany surrendered at the prison camp at Flossenburg, the 39-year-old Bonhoeffer's last recorded words were, "This is the end–for me, the beginning of life."