Today I must inform you that our brothers Konrad Bojack, F.A. Preuß, UlrichNitack, and Gerhard Schulze have been killed on the eastern front. . . . Theyhave gone before us on the path that we shall all have to take at some point.In a particularly gracious way, God reminds those of you who are out on thefront to remain prepared. . . . To be sure, God shall call you, and us, only atthe hour that God has chosen. Until that hour, which lies in God’s hand alone,we shall all be protected even in greatest danger, and from our gratitude forsuch protection ever new readiness surely arises for the final call.
Who can comprehend how those whom God takes so early are chosen? Does notthe early death of young Christians always appear to us as if God wereplundering his own best instruments in a time in which they are most needed?Yet the Lord makes no mistakes. Might God need our brothers for some hiddenservice on our behalf in the heavenly world? We should put an end to our humanthoughts, which always wish to know more than they can, and cling to that whichis certain. Whomever God calls home is someone God has loved. “For their soulswere pleasing to the Lord, therefore he took them quickly from the midst ofwickedness” (Wisdom 4).
We know of course, that God and the devil are enraged in battle in the worldand that the devil also has a say in death. In the face of death we cannotsimply speak in some fatalistic way, “God wills it”; but we must juxtapose itwith the other reality, “God does not will it.” Death reveals that the world isnot as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone isthe conquering of death. Here the sharp antithesis between “God wills it” and“God does not will it” comes to a head and also finds its resolution. Godaccedes to that which God does not will, and from now on death itself musttherefore serve God. Fron now on, the “God wills it” encompasses even the “Goddoes not will it.” God wills the conquering of death through the death of JesusChrist. Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawninto God’s power, and it must now serve God’s own aims. It is not somefatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died androse for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death.
In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us fromwithout is confronted by death from within, one’s own death, the free death ofdaily dying with Jesus Christ. Those who live with Christ die daily to theirown will. Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live within us.Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without. Christians receivetheir own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very trulybecomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ.Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say,“It is finished.”
(Deitrich Bonhoeffer, “Circular Letter to the ConfessingChurches August 1941,” cited by Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr,Prophet, Spy, 383-84)