Eighty years ago, on 9 April 1945, the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in Flossenburg. Ethics was the final book that he wrote before his arrest by the Nazis. Pages of it were on his desk the day he was taken away and it remained unfinished. Based on careful reconstruction of the manuscripts, freshly and expertly translated and annotated, this crown jewel of Bonhoeffer’s body of work is the culmination of his theological and personal odyssey.
A repackaged edition of Ethics, published by SCM Press, includes a foreword by the Revd Dr Sam Wells. On the podcast this week, to mark the anniversary, Dr Wells reads the foreword.
“Perhaps the greatest fascination of the book lies in the insight it gives to the soul of the author in the midst of the German crisis and the war,” he says.
Dr Wells is the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in London.
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