“The South African resistance against apartheid, for example, was decisively influenced by him. Latin American liberation theology has also repeatedly appealed to him,” said WCC moderator Bishop Prof. Dr Heinrich Bedford-Strohm. He was speaking on 7 April at an event at the former concentration camp of Flossenbürg in Bavaria where Bonhoeffer and other opponents of Hitler were hanged in the early hours of 9 April 1945. “Central elements of Bonhoeffer's theology are of significant importance for ecumenical public theology today,” said Bedford-Strohm, mentioning the environmental crisis, bringing an end to violence in Ukraine, and overcoming nationalism and xenophobia. Born in Breslau in 1906, Bonhoeffer was an early critic of Nazism in Germany after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 and was a committed supporter of the Confessing Church, which opposed Nazi incursions in theology and church life. He became deeply involved in the ecumenical movement, and later developed a close friendship with Willem Visser ’t Hooft who would become the WCC’s first general secretary when it was founded in 1948. “The brutal death of this witness to Christ is a great loss not only for the Confessing Church in Germany, but also for the entire ecumenical movement, both of which have lost a gifted companion, strong in faith, and all those who were close to him have lost an irreplaceable friend,” Visser ’t Hooft wrote soon after Bonhoeffer’s death Bonhoeffer’s writings smuggled out of his cell after his arrest in 1943, published in English as Letters and Papers from Prison, became a source of inspiration for Christians worldwide. Bonhoeffer was appointed a youth secretary of the World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches, one of the forerunners of the WCC, in 1931. Three years later he made a much-noted address to an ecumenical meeting in the Danish town of Fanø in which he said that in the face of the “fury of the world powers” only the “one great Ecumenical Council of the Holy Church of Christ” could send out a radical call to peace. Bonhoeffer’s vision would become, said Bedford-Strohm, an important source of inspiration for the WCC’s “conciliar process” for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation, that followed its assembly in Vancouver, Canada, in 1983. “Alongside peace,” said Bedford-Strohm, “his commitment to social justice is also evident in very specific words that have become much less well known, but are at least as important.” In 1935, Bonhoeffer wrote that whether the hopes laid on the ecumenical movement would be fulfilled, whether it would “speak a word of judgment about war, race hatred and social exploitation … All this depends on our obedience.” Bonhoeffer had a deep Christian confidence that was expressed in his belief that this faith needed to find expression in the world, said Bedford-Strohm. “One will only be able to understand Bonhoeffer's later personal decisions if one understands how inseparable the connection is for Bonhoeffer between a radical commitment to faith and the life described in the Sermon on the Mount and commitment to the world.” See also: Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2015) free download Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Ecumenical Quest for Peace (WCC webinar recording) | 
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