Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed on this day in 1945.

A while back, Hunter Baker enthused over his exploration of the free-church idea in Germany. Baker observes, “A regenerate church is not a private church,” and so must engage the state while remaining independent from it.

Here’s a short piece on Bonhoeffer’s last twelve hours.

Michael Hollerich reviews a biography of Bonhoeffer, getting into many of the ideas presented in Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, including this one:

Protestantism in particular could not surrender the claim to be a Volkskirche, a true national church and the spiritual custodian of the German people. This was the preoccupation, even among Confessing Christians, that ultimately disenchanted Bonhoeffer and led to his visionary anticipation of an outcast church on the margins of ­society. We can appreciate the measure of that disenchantment if we remember that he had taken membership in the Confessing Church so seriously that he once said that whoever knowingly separated himself from the Church separated himself from salvation—for which he was roundly denounced for “Catholic” thinking.

As with most things, the man had something there.