October 07, 2026

What Must Die First

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Bonhoeffer wrote this line in 1937 while running an underground seminary for the Confessing Church, the wing of the German church resisting Hitler's demand for loyalty above conscience. For him, following Christ was never a matter of adding religious habits onto an otherwise unchanged life. It demanded the death of old securities, old ambitions, old ways of protecting oneself. He had already given up a safe academic post abroad to return to a Germany sliding toward war, so he knew what that kind of dying actually cost.