I had determined it was high time I finally read Dietrich Bonhoeffer: that legendary Lutheran minister who was one of the far-too-few German Christians to openly and actively speak out against the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, rather than accommodate it; who turned down multiple opportunities to escape to safety in England so that he could continue to care for his flock in Germany; and who was finally arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and executed by the collapsing regime in 1945. Truly, the Reverend Bonhoeffer took up his cross and followed the literal example of our Lord and Savior to his death. In our own day and age of authoritarian repression surging throughout the U.S. and the world–when ICE agents openly beat and murder U.S. citizens in the streets and violate the constitution with impunity, when even legal residents are deported to literal prison camps in Florida and El Salvador, when a rapist president launches unprovoked wars on OPEC countries, all while the plain majority of self-identifying Christians continue to support him without reservation–the life and example of Bonhoeffer felt more relevant than ever.

Partly my fascination with him came from the fact that, not being Lutheran myself, I had precious few LDS examples to look towards in these trying times; I’d read Daniel Conley’s otherwise excellent 2015 study Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany, you see, so I knew full well that, aside from the very singular example of Helmuth Hübener–the Mormon teen executed by the Nazis and excommunicated by his branch president in 1942 for daring spread leaflets from the BBC about how horribly the war was actually going–the vast majority of German Mormons, like the vast majority of German Christians generally, acquiesced quite readily to the Nazi regime. (And as a side-bar: also learning from that same book how J. Reuben Clark of the First Presidency had refused to sponsor visas for the minuscule number of German-Jewish converts desperately trying to flee the Third Reich in the 1930s, did not endear that old racist to me further.) Tellingly, the Jehova’s Witnesses were the ones sent to the death camps, never the Mormons.

Yet though I sincerely respect the anti-war JWs for their courage and resistance under Nazi repression, I still didn’t feel like aligning myself with those sanctimonious Bible-bashers I met on my mission who ban blood transfusions, don’t celebrate Christmas or birthdays, have no concept of Holy Spirit, shun ex-members even more severely than the Amish, and whose dry Biblical literalism makes the Evangelicals look like Unitarians; so I turned instead towards Dietrich Bonhoeffer for my example of how to resist like a faithful Christian in the face of violent state repression. Everything I read concerning him said that his masterpiece was 1937’s The Cost of Discipleship–his extended exegesis on the Sermon on the Mount–so I elected to start there.

I suppose I should have instead started with, say, his Letters from Prison, or an official biography about him, because I confess to have been a little underwhelmed by the book; not because it isn’t well written (it very much is), but because it seemed at first glance to have precious little to say about resisting Naziism or any sort of state authoritarianism. It kind of reminded me of how the first time I read John Milton’s Paradise Lost in college, I was surprised to learn that this stuffy old epic poem about the Fall of Adam and Eve—which famously opens with Lucifer, the quintessential rebel, being rightfully and righteously cast down from heaven by God the One True King—was actually written by an avid anti-Monarchist who fully supported the beheading of King Charles I in 1649, mourned the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and whose political enemies after Paradise Lost‘s success regretted they hadn’t executed that blind old Republican while they still had the chance.

Seriously, if you went into Paradise Lost blind yourself (especially as an American where we have taken for granted the Freedom of Speech for so long that we have lost all concept of how to speak or read in code), you could be forgiven for assuming—as many students still do—that this epic poem is a standard-issue celebration of the Monarchy, rather than an extended assault upon the same. The trick, I learned, is to recognize that Milton is not using the Heavenly King as a metaphor for an Earthly one (as many Medieval writers had done), but that he literally means only God is King, and that therefore all Earthly kings are mere satanic imitations of the real thing, and so deserve to be cast down like Satan was and abolished.

I suspect that this sort of literalism is a peculiarly Protestant affect: these are the same folks, after all, who insist that the communion bread and wine does not mysteriously transubstantiate into the physical flesh and blood of Christ as in Catholicism, but is literally just bread and wine (LDS sacramental practice affirms the same, recall)—a nice symbol and reminder of the Savior perhaps, but no more literally God than any earthly king or a president.

Which brings me back round to Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. A first time reader who knows nothing about the author might easily assume that this extended commentary on Matthew 5-7, which argues incessantly that we must above all else obey the call of Christ if we are to qualify for his Grace, must also therefore be a call to obey authority generally. Because (unless there is, again, some deeply coded messages that I as a 21st century American am simply not picking up), there is not one stray reference anywhere in this text to, say, the evils of the Nazi regime, or the importance of speaking out against the Holocaust, or the necessities of resisting fascism and tyranny, no: the overwhelming focus of the book is on how Protestants generally and his fellow Lutherans especially are in his estimation far too in the thrall of “cheap grace”–that is, of divine forgiveness and redemption that comes without sacrifice or effort–advocating instead for a theology of “costly grace” (one might sum up his thesis as “it is by grace we are saved after all we can do”), wherein grace is granted to us freely but still costs us everything to obtain, and which comes about only by obedience.

Knowing what sticklers for the rules Germans are reputed to be, it would, again, be easy for a naive reader to assume the focus of Bonhoeffer’s book is upon obedience for its own sake; one could even imagine an alternative history wherein The Cost of Discipleship is happily accepted, printed and distributed by the Nazi regime directly, since it could help to instill into the populace the cardinal virtue of obedience above all other considerations. Since the Nazi regime also had pretensions to being a Christian-centered government, one could easily see the Nazis hijacking and co-opting Bonhoeffer’s magnum opus for themselves.

But the Nazis did not co-opt Bonhoeffer, who was instead arrested on sedition charges during WWII, sent to a prison camp, and finally executed as an enemy of the state, one of the Nazi regime’s last acts of revenge upon their enemies before the Allies sent them to the scaffolds themselves. And the reason why Bonhoeffer was so treated by the Nazis is similar to why the English Monarchists resented Milton’s Paradise Lost so much: just as Milton does not use our Heavenly Father as a metaphor for our Earthly kings, but literally just means the only valid King is God, Bonhoeffer nowhere extols the virtues of obedience for its own sake, but literally just means that only obedience to Christ is valid. Just as all earthly kings are merely satanic imitations of the true King for Milton, so are all other forms of earthly obedience just a satanic imitation of the only real Obedience for Bonhoeffer. Such an attitude towards Christian obedience would, naturally, preclude any and all other forms of obedience, including to the Third Reich. The Nazis quite accurately read his thesis as a threat to their rule.

Although much of Bonhoeffer’s discussion on “costly grace” left me, as a non-Lutheran, a little cold (again, Nephi’s “It is by grace we are saved, after all we can do” in my opinion sums up much more succinctly what Bonhoeffer spends an entire book trying to prove), I do find that we in the LDS faith could stand to better internalize his message that there is only one obedience that matters, as well. How many times, for example, was I shamed into getting a shave and a haircut at the BYUs because “obedience in the small things leads to obedience in the big things”–under the apparent assumption that if we strain at gnats, then we will definitely strain at camels? How often have I been lectured, “Let no man break the laws of the land, for he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land” (D&C 58:21), which has been abused to browbeat people into obeying vicious and unjust laws–as though the American Revolution, which we also claim as divinely inspired, wasn’t the greatest act of law-breaking of all—as though Helmuth Hübener wasn’t breaking the law, and was also the one German Latter-day Saint to acquit himself honorably during World War II?

“Obedience is the first law of heaven” is another one of our old chestnuts we use to browbeat people into submission, forgetting that the phrase appears nowhere in the scriptures. No, we instead have the old scripture mastery D&C 130:21, which actually reads: “And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.” Yet as Bonhoeffer might astutely point out, this scripture does not say obedience in and of itself is the first law of heaven, but only obedience to that law. And which is “that” law? The same as it was from the beginning: to love God and love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 13:28-33); to love your enemy and bless them that curse you (Matthew 5:43-48); to sell all that you have and give it to the poor (Matthew 19:16-24); to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, and welcome in the stranger (Mathew 25:34-46). If we do not do these things, then we have not actually obeyed the law of heaven–which is, again, the only obedience that matters. Obey all you want, say, the Word of Wisdom, or the Law of Tithing, or the For Strength of Youth manual, or BYU Dress and Grooming standards, or a thousand other things besides: if we do not obey the law of love, then per both 1 Corinthians 13 and Moroni 7, all our other obedience has been for naught. In fact, per 1 Peter 4:8, the inverse is also true: if we keep the law of love, then all other forms of obedience are irrelevant, “for charity covereth a multitude of sins.” Obedience for its own sake only leads to idolatry, “looking beyond the mark,” and self-destruction.

We spend so much of our limited time on this earth, I suspect, hoping that in the Last Day, we will be judged by literally anything other than by how much we loved one another. Hence why we strive so fanatically to be obedient in the small things; understandably, it’s simply easier to focus on the small things than on the big things. Yet as the Savior might remind us, straining at gnats does not in turn make us strain at camels, but only gives us psychological permission to swallow camels whole; such is also why Bonhoeffer pointedly insists that any obedience that is not to Christ directly is not any obedience worth having at all.

This commitment, to love only as Christ loves us, above all other considerations, is ultimately why the Nazis executed the Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer; such is also the only way we can effectively resist in our own day and age.