I'm going to express some "religious" opinions here, but my beliefs or judgements are no more valid than yours. I don't have the gift of complete certainty, and my opinions don't rise to the level of the absolute "truth," because, like all opinions, yours and mine, they lack sufficient grounds to be called facts. That's why they're called opinions. And just because I occasionally write about religion, and profess my, so far, unshakeable faith in God, doesn't mean that I consider myself anything but your usual penitent. One makes no pretense at being someone with a praiseworthy character. Therefore, I am not the one to turn to for religious advice or example. But one does know enough about the dangers and ascendancy of rampant hypocrisy, yours and mine, in the "postmodern" Christian era, not to aspire to becoming some kind of religious performer, that is to say, a hypocrite.

Like most of you, I have a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of this brief life on earth, but those too are products of my imperfectly formed opinions. The best of those opinions have arisen from observations, personal and historical, of the immense mercy of God. I have also witnessed God bestowing mercy on someone, even when it's another person praying for mercy for a family member or friend. And, even if one had not personally witnessed the mighty mercy of God, there are the examples of the Canaanite woman who wept, and her daughter was healed; the centurion had faith, and his servant was cured; the ruler of the synagogue begged, and his daughter was brought back to life; the father prayed earnestly, and his son was set free from the evil spirits. The Apostles cry, "Lord save us, we perish," and they are all saved, all of which led me at one time to question the "necessity" of the deaths of Christian martyrs. But that question is partially answered when one considers that Christians have survived from the very beginning , and throughout our bloody history, because the hatred of the "world" (i.e., Imperial Rome, Islam, communism, fascism/Nazism, and Islam again) has unified us and forced us into fleeting periods of solidarity during the hard and crucial times; even though, when life is easy and good, we appear to lose that solidarity, that brotherhood?

When Christianity is severely threatened, the church has always had men and women who have "necessarily" died for the Word. Hitler's Third Reich was such a time, and as we are approaching the sixtieth anniversary of the defeat of Hitler, one needs to recognize those few devout Germans who died fighting for the church, while striving to rid their land of the Devil/Hitler. Folks our age and older, and their children and grandchildren, yes posterity, need to be reminded, at least during the Easter Season, that even in the wake of unimaginable horror, the church in Germany had its tiny band of defenders. I plan to write a series of articles about "decent Germans." These sixtieth anniversary articles, celebrating good over evil, are dedicated to the young American "Battle of the Bulge" soldier/hero whose body lies beneath a small headstone down at the Lulu Cemetery. He was twenty-two years old. I didn't know him, nor do I know his family. I do know that while he was fighting, suffering, and dying for us, I was a happy seven-year-old child. How can we ever adequately thank him, and his comrades?

The first decent German to be remembered is the Christian martyr, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer [pronounced, bon-her-fer, kk]. Pastor Bonhoeffer died in 1945 at the hands of the hangman in a Gestapo prison. He was born in 1906, the son of a professor of psychiatry. He grew up in intellectual surroundings and in 1930 he was appointed a lecturer in "systematic" theology at Berlin University. In 1933 he denounced Hitler and Nazism on the major medium of the day, radio. Two years later, after he spent some time in England, he was forbidden to teach and banned from Berlin by the Nazis. When war broke out, he gave up the security of the United States, where he was on a lecture tour, and returned to Germany to the Confessing Church, and joined the political opposition to Hitler. He was arrested in April 1943 and, two years later, after suffering imprisonment at Buchenwald concentration camp, he was transferred to Flossenburg prison where he was hanged. His last weeks were spent among his fellow "enemies of the Third Reich." One of those prisoners was Payne Best, an English officer who later wrote in his book, "The Venlo Incident" (London. Hutchinson, 1949), "Bonhoeffer . . . was all humility and sweetness, he always seemed to me to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive . . . He was one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God was real and close to him."

On what was, unknowingly, to be the last day of Pastor Bonhoeffer's life, the Sunday before Easter, a fellow inmate suggested (from Payne Best) that Bonhoeffer conduct a morning service. Bonhoeffer, a Protestant, was reluctant to do so because the majority of the prisoners were Roman Catholics, and he told Best that he didn't want to "inflict" a Protestant service onto them. But, the Catholics urged Bonhoeffer to conduct the service.

Those who survived report that the texts of the day were read by Bonhoeffer, and that he used the following texts in his sermon: "And with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53.5) and "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to his great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" ( I Peter 1.3). The survivors of Flossenburg said that it he was not long into the service before the door was kicked open, and two civilians (Gestapo) shouted, "Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come with us."

He had just enough time to gather his few things together, he asked the author, Payne Best, to send his special greetings to his friend the English Bishop of Chichester, if he (Best) was to survive. The message reads, "This is the end, but for me the beginning of life." The camp doctor (as related to Payne Best) saw Bonhoeffer kneeling in the preparation cell praying devoutly, and then he saw that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was made to walk naked down the hallway to the scaffold. Camp guards told Payne Best that never had a man walked up those stairs to his death with such calm assurance. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man of God, lived what he preached. He was a man who would not have thought of himself as anything special. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young man with a fiancee, and who loved life. He died from trying to free the German people from themselves.

It is a poignant reality, and the essence of the immense mercy of God, that during his imprisonment, the young Pastor Bonhoeffer was sometimes asked by his guards to pray for them, and to forgive them, all of which he did, even unto his "beginning."

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.