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United Methodists give Bonhoeffer martyr status Linda Bloom, Jul 1, 2008
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
By Linda Bloom United Methodist News Service
Although Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been dead for more than 60 years, the well-known German theologian has been a role model of faith for many Christians, including the Rev. Charles Sigman.
That’s why Mr. Sigman, the 42-year-old pastor of First United Methodist Church of Newport, Ark., north of Little Rock, has helped make Bonhoeffer the first martyr officially recognized by the United Methodist Church.
A Lutheran pastor, Bonhoeffer was a member of the resistance against dictator Adolf Hitler and was executed by the Nazis in 1945, during the final months of World War II.
“I always find myself quoting him because of the way he lived his faith and because he really teaches us all that there are things in this world worth dying for,” Mr. Sigman said.
As a seminary student, Mr. Sigman was shelving books one day in the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University when he happened to glance at a 1956 book, in which a Lutheran pastor was lamenting how children held up athletes as their role models and that the church had failed to lift up role models of faith. “Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said.
Compared to the musicians, actors and athletes that today’s youth idolize, Mr. Sigman said Bonhoeffer “rose above our basic human instinct to proclaim a love that is worth dying for.”
The resolution he submitted was simple: “In keeping in line with the Church of England and the Church of Wales, we, as United Methodists, should also recognize Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a modern day martyr for the cause of Christ.”
It was approved during the 2008 General Conference, as was a resolution on full communion agreement with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Alan Combs, a 25-year-old provisional elder with the Virginia Conference, said he was excited by the resolution on Bonhoeffer. He has been focusing in his Duke University master’s thesis on how the United Methodist Church views recognizing saints.
“I think the writer of the resolution was smart to use ‘martyr,’ because we don’t have any formal recognition of saints,” he said.
A martyr can be a saint, but the reverse might not necessarily apply, Mr. Combs pointed out. Christianity’s early heroes were martyrs because the church was under persecution. Saints lived lives of holiness but weren’t always subject to persecution.
John Wesley “liked the community of saints,” he said, but the idea may not have universal appeal among church members. “We’re fairly willing to call biblical heroes ‘saints,’ but beyond that, we start getting uncomfortable about it,” he said.
Born in Breslau, Germany, in 1906, Bonhoeffer received his doctorate in 1927 from Berlin University, where he lectured in the 1930s as part of the theology faculty, and was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1931.
In rebellion against the Nazi-controlled state church, some 2,000 Lutheran pastors organized in 1934 a group that became known as the Confessing Church. A member of the resistance, he also worked on his book, Ethics, until his arrest in 1943.
Bonhoeffer’s fellow resisters tried to kill Hitler but were unsuccessful. He was executed on April 9, 1945, just a few weeks before Hitler committed suicide.
In his rationale for the resolution, Mr. Sigman wrote: “During a time of grave darkness in Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer shined the light of Christ all the way to a hangman’s noose. Nearly every clergy has studied him and used him in sermons and theological discourse. It is time we recognize his accomplishments and martyrdom of the highest calling.”
Mr. Sigman believes it is important for the church to show how people sometimes die for their faith. “I hope it will start a precedent,” he said. “I personally think we, as a denomination, need to start recognizing these people.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
