Thoughts on Christmas from Diedrich Bonhoeffer

Diedrich Boenhoffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian in Germany before and during World War II. Along with Karl Barth, he split off from the main Lutheran Evangelical church because of their support for Hitler. Their new "Confessing" church was actively involved in resisting the Nazis and part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer originally left Germany to lecture in America about the dangers of Nazi Germany, but returned to Germany in 1939 because he felt like he needed to support and encourage the Christian church there. He was arrested a few years later and wrote many letters from prison. He wrote the following quote towards the end of 1943. He was sent to a concentration camp in 1945 and was hung a month before the war ended.

“From the Christian point of view there is no special problem about Christmas in a prison cell. For many people in this building it will probably be a more sincere and genuine occasion than in places where nothing but the name is kept. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God from what they mean in the judgment of man, that God will approach where men will turn away, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn — these are things that a prisoner can understand better than other people; for him they really are glad tidings, and that faith gives him a part in the communion of saints, a Christian fellowship breaking the bounds of time and space and reducing the months of confinement here to insignificance.”