Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Westminster Abbey, London, UK
N 51° 29.968 W 000° 07.716
30U E 699295 N 5709279
A statue to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a modern martyr, was unveiled in July 1998 and stands above the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. This is one of ten statues of 20th century martyrs.
Waymark Code: WME2D2
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 03/25/2012
Views: 11
The statue, by Tim Crawley, was placed here in 1998. It
weighs about a ton and is carved from French Richemont limestone. The statue,
that is about twice life size, shows Bonhoeffer in clerical robes. He is holding
a book in his right hand and his left had is raised, close to his neck, and is
almost clenched. He is looking forward, through spectacles, towards, one
imagines, a congregation.
The Westminster Abbey website (visit
link) tells us about Bonhoeffer:
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau. A twin, he grew
up in a comfortable professional home. His father was an eminent psychiatrist
and neurologist. It was nominally a Lutheran, though not a profoundly religious,
environment and the young Bonhoeffer caused something of a stir when he
announced, at thirteen, that he would go into the church. After school he
enrolled as a student at the University of Berlin, the city in which the family
now lived and in whose university there gathered a host of brilliant thinkers.
Intellectually, Bonhoeffer was striking. But he was determined to expand his
horizons, too. At the age of eighteen he went to Rome and was powerfully moved
by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1930-1 he studied in New York, at Union
Theological Seminary, and regularly attended Services at the Abyssinian Baptist
Church. Here too he became increasingly drawn to ecumenism. Three times he made
plans to travel to India and visit Gandhi, whose life and teachings he found
compelling.
In 1933 the leader of the radical, racialist Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler, became
chancellor and then dictator of Germany. In power, the Nazi movement sought to
create a new totalitarian state: the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer saw Nazism to be a
counter- religion and a danger to Christianity. He became an active participant
in the dispute which broke out in the Protestant churches between those who
sympathized with Nazism and those who sensed that the new politics threatened
the integrity of the church. In October 1933 Bonhoeffer moved to England to be
pastor to two German-speaking parishes in the London area. Here he searched for
allies and met his greatest British advocate, Bishop Bell of Chichester.
On his return to Germany, Bonhoeffer ran an illegal seminary for the so-called
Confessing Church at Finkenwalde. It was shut down by the state security police
in October 1937. He continued to write. In 1939 he sailed to the United States,
and once again to New York. But war was imminent. He chose to return to his own
country, knowing what costs may lie before him, and remarking that the victory
of Nazism in Europe would destroy Christian civilization.
By then he and members of his own family had for some time been on the fringe of
circles that were opposed to the Nazi regime. To Bonhoeffer, true discipleship
now demanded political resistance against this criminal state. He wrote that the
Christian must live maturely and responsibly in the world, and live by God's
grace, not by ideology.
He was increasingly implicated in the work of groups committed to the overthrow
of the government. In March 1943 he was arrested and incarcerated. On 20 July
1944 a final attempt was made by German citizens to destroy the Hitler regime
for themselves. It failed disastrously, and hundreds of political prisoners were
executed afterwards. Bonhoeffer himself survived as a prisoner until 9 April
1945. He was executed only a few days before the end of the war, as the Soviet
armies moved across the diminishing face of the Third Reich to victory."