“To be formed and shaped by the Incarnate: That is what it means to be truly human. All efforts to be more than human, to be superhuman, all efforts to grow beyond one's humanity, all heroism, all attempts at being demigods are discarded here, for all of it is untrue. The real human being is neither an object of contempt nor of apotheosis, but rather God's love. The multiplicity of God's creative wealth is not violated here by false uniformity, by coercion of human beings under an ideal, under a type, a particular image. Real human beings are allowed in freedom to be the creatures of their creator. Being formed in the image of the Incarnate means being permitted to be the human being one really is. There is no more pretense, hypocrisy, cramped coercion to be something other than what one is, something better, something more ideal. God loves real human beings. God became a real human being.”
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943 and his subsequent execution by hanging in April 1945, shortly before the war's end.
Overshadowed by his life and death, his theology and his view of Christianity's role in the secular world has nevertheless remained very influential.
He seems to have undergone something of a personal conversion from a theologian primarily attracted to the intellectual side of Christianity to a dedicated man of faith, resolved to carry out the teaching of Christ as he found it revealed in the Gospels.