It was 1933 and the German national church was almost entirely on board with Nazi propaganda. Over 90 percent of the student body in the theology department at the university in Berlin had joined the National Socialist Party.

Bonhoeffer observed that even “the most intelligent people have totally lost their heads and their Bible.” (p. 165, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Bonhoeffer was trying to forge a response. Early on he suggested these three things:

1. The church should question the legitimacy of the state’s actions (this was in regard to the Aryan Paragraph at the time).
2. The church should assist the victims of the state’s actions even if they were not Christians.
3. The church should take direct political actions. When victims are crushed under a wheel, it wasn’t enough to bandage the victims under the wheel. It was necessary to break the spokes of the wheel at times. (This was to be taken, in Bonhoeffer’s view, when the state failed to create law and order.)

Even the first two steps violated Nazi law and put Bonhoeffer at risk.

What the third step looked like was not something he formulated at the time. Yet, in all of it, and still in his 20s, Bonhoeffer is trying to forge a way forward. He could see the crumbling will of the Church and knew deep down the Kingdom of God was something more.