Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio is a dense book, which handles its material, Scriptural, theological and philosophical, with dazzling skill. It was quite unlike anything else that was coming out of the German Church in the between war years, and so it is not surprising that it was so overlooked then. It could also have been dismissed as the demonstration work of a very young man, one without experience in university or parish life. And yet, in the work Bonhoeffer showed his ability to find the memorable phrase, and in his subsequent ministry he showed how serious he was in following this path.

Bonhoeffer continued his work as a theologian, but he also began to work as a pastor: in the German church in Barcelona, as a catechist in the proletarian parishes of Berlin, as a student chaplain, as pastor to the German churches of East and south east London. In each place he attempted to gather around him and to minster to a community of believers. Eventually, in 1935, he was called back from London to a Germany and a Church in crisis. The Nazi seizure of power in early 1933 (the Machtergreifung) led to deep divisions within German society. There were some who welcomed the simple, strong leadership, based upon national pride and identity, which the Nazis promised. Others feared, even at this early stage, the loss of important parts of German self-understanding in an onslaught of national self-worship. The divisions convulsed the churches in Germany as much as wider society. The Lutheran Church was also subject to the Nazi Gleichschaltung (the euphemistically entitled ‘co-ordination’ actions of the new government), in which any possible opposition or dissent, within trade unionism, political parties, school and university educational institutions, was forcefully (and sometimes forcibly) removed. The Lutheran Church was split between the so-called “German Christians”, who recognised the authority of the (Nazi-imposed) National Bishop, Ludwig Müller, and the ministers of the Pastors’ Emergency League (the Pfarrernotbund), who went on to form the Confessing Church. The new church movement needed pastors, and so illegal ad hoc seminaries were formed: Bonhoeffer, as the ablest young theologian of the church, was invited back from London to become director of the seminary for Brandenburg and Pomerania.

In an old school house in the out-of-the-way town of Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer and twenty three students took up residence in the summer of 1935. The seminary was able to last just over two years, until it was raided and closed down by the Gestapo. Bonhoeffer had very firm ideas on how the seminary was to be organised: he visited English theological colleges in his last weeks in London, and had even made a tour of Anglican monastic communities. He brought with him some very unlutheran ideas:

The programme for the day began and ended with two long services. In the morning the service was followed by half an hour’s meditation, an exercise that was not interrupted by the circumstances of the removal, though packing cases and youth hostel bunks were the only furniture. The services did not take place in church but round the ordinary dinner-table. They invariably began with a Psalm and a hymn specially chosen for the day. There followed a lesson from the Old Testament, a set verse from a hymn (sung daily for several weeks), a New Testament lesson, a period of extempore prayer and the recital of the Lord’s Prayer. Each service concluded with another set verse from a hymn. Readings from the Psalms and the Scripture took the form of a lectio continua, for preference without any omissions. In structure this very much resembled Anglican evensong. Bonhoeffer believed that this sequence of readings and prayers was the most natural and suitable form of service for theologians.¹

Life in the seminary was basic. The library was mostly Bonhoeffer’s own (lost when the institution was shut down); letters were sent out to the Lutheran parishes of the surrounding countryside, and the “ordinands’ humble request” produced a startling amount of practical support (from church congregations which had never previously been required to support the training of their ministers). Eberhard Bethge, one of the ordinands, and later Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer, recalls that the humble request produced a live pig, which required collecting from the nearest railway station!²

The seminary lasted until September 1937: before the year’s end, twenty-seven of the students had been arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned³. Even so, in existence for such a short time, it had two great lasting legacies. First, it was the place in which Bonhoeffer first delivered the lecture series which became his great work Discipleship⁴. Second, when the seminary was suppressed, Bonhoeffer was encouraged to write down an account of the experiment and experience that was Finkenwalde. He did so, and Life Together was published in 1938. Surprisingly, despite the times in which it was published, it was a popular and critical success, the best received and best selling of Bonhoeffer’s books published in his lifetime. Overshadowed now somewhat by the three posthumous ‘greats’, Life Together⁵ deserves to be better known and wider read, as it is one of the most important of Bonhoeffer’s legacies for the church⁶:

When he [Bonhoeffer] wrote his account of his community-sustained spiritual life in the Frinkenwalde seminary, he was not reminiscing about an agreeable, idyllic experience of a like-minded group of dedicated seminarians. He intended to share with others this experience, with its joys and trials, its mutual support and enduring friendships, that it might serve as a model for forming moral leaders and for the creation of new forms of church community throughout Germany.⁷

1. Quite! Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: theologian, Christian, contemporary, ed. Edwin Robertson, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1970), p. 349. [↩]
2. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 348. [↩]
3. Kelly & Nelson, Cost of moral leadership, p. 25. [↩]
4. Discipleship (DBWE Vol. 4.). Edited by Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey. Translated by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), originally published in English as The Cost of Discipleship, trans. by R. H. Fuller (London: SCM, 1948). [↩]
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life together and Prayerbook of the Bible, eds. Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Albrecht Schönherr, and Geffrey B Kelly, (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 5), (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). Another very common edition of Life Together is that translated by J. W. Doberstein and published by SCM. It is superceded in every way by the DBWE edition. [↩]
6. Bonhoeffer himself thought that Life Together would be his definitive work: he referred to the book, somewhat jokingly, as his “swan-song” (Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 582). [↩]
7. Kelly and Nelson, Cost of Moral Leadership, p. 145. [↩]