Bonhoeffer and Matthew 5:43-48: Love Your Enemy Cost
Short answer: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who took Jesus' command in Matthew 5:43-48 with uncommon seriousness. He taught that loving one's enemy is the distinguishing mark of those who belong to Christ, not an optional ideal for saints. That conviction led him to return to Germany, to speak against the Nazi regime, and finally to join the resistance - and to be executed for it. He was not sinless, and Christians disagree about whether his involvement in a plot to kill Hitler was faithful or wrong. But his life raises the very question Jesus' words press on every reader: do we merely admire the Sermon on the Mount, or obey the one who preached it?
The Sermon's Hardest Command
Matthew 5:43-48 sits near the climax of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has already said, in Matthew 5:43, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'" The first half comes from Leviticus 19:18; the second half appears nowhere in the Law of Moses. It was a popular addition, a piece of pious reasoning that narrowed love to those who deserved it. Jesus exposes the narrowing and replaces it with something that sounds impossible.
What follows is not a suggestion but a series of imperatives: love, bless, do good, pray. Each verb is aimed at the person who has done us harm. The command reaches the heart as much as the hands - blessing and prayer are inward responses, while doing good is outward. Jesus does not say to feel warmly about enemies. He says to act in their favor and to speak to God on their behalf. That is a far harder assignment, and it cannot be faked by mere temperament.
The reason Jesus gives is not that enemies will always soften or that love always produces peace. The reason is paternity: those who love this way show whose children they are. The Father sends sun and rain on the evil and the good alike, so his children are to reflect that indiscriminate generosity. Love that only returns kindness to friends is no different from what tax collectors and pagans manage. Jesus calls his disciples to exceed that standard, not to match it.
Verses 47 and 48 land the point with a word often translated perfect or complete. The standard is the Father himself. This is not a demand for sinless performance but for a family resemblance - a whole, undivided love that mirrors God's own. Bonhoeffer read this passage as describing the concrete shape of discipleship. For him, the Sermon was not a distant ethic for a future age. It was addressed to people living now, in a particular nation, under a particular government, with real enemies to love.
Bonhoeffer's Life and the Cost of Discipleship
Bonhoeffer grew up in a cultured Berlin family, studied theology, and might have settled into a comfortable academic career. When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, he saw quickly that the regime demanded loyalty belonging only to God. The so-called German Christians wanted to fold the church into Nazi ideology, and the church's response was divided and often cowardly. Bonhoeffer helped form the Confessing Church, which resisted that takeover, and he taught at its illegal seminary at Finkenwalde until the Gestapo shut it down.
In 1939 he was in the United States, safely out of reach. He chose to return to Germany on the last ship before war closed the Atlantic. His reasoning was pastoral: he could not help rebuild Christian life after the war if he did not share his people's trial. That decision is not required of every believer, and Scripture does not demand it. But it flowed from his conviction that faith is lived in the concrete, not in abstraction. He refused a discipleship that cost nothing.
Back home, he was drawn into the circle of conspirators working against Hitler. His role included courier work and using his ecumenical contacts. He was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned, then moved to concentration camps. In April 1945, weeks before the war ended, he was hanged at Flossenburg. He is remembered as a martyr, and the word fits - not because he was flawless, but because he held to Christ to the end under a regime that demanded he let go.
His best-known book, The Cost of Discipleship, argues that cheap grace is the enemy of the church: forgiveness proclaimed without repentance, a gospel that leaves the hearer unchanged. Against that, he set costly grace - the call of Christ that puts a person's life at stake. Matthew 5:43-48 was central to his reading of that call. The man who wrote about obedience to Jesus' words died obeying them as best he understood, in a prison cell, awaiting execution.
What It Means to Love an Enemy
Jesus' command does not require a warm feeling. In the passage, love shows itself in blessing, doing good, and prayer. Bonhoeffer insisted that love for enemies is concrete and particular - the enemy is a real person with a name, not a category. If a Christian says in general that they love their enemies but cannot name one, they probably have not begun. The command becomes real only when we identify the individual who has harmed us and then ask how to act toward them.
It also does not mean pretending harm is harmless. Jesus does not instruct his hearers to call evil good. Later in Scripture, evil is named evil, injustice is confronted, and truth is spoken. The command governs the manner of response, not the moral assessment of the wrong. A Christian can acknowledge that an enemy is guilty of real wickedness and still refuse hatred, still bless, still pray - which is precisely what Jesus did at the cross, though not what we manage easily.
Nor does it mean an absence of boundaries or an obligation to be endlessly abused. Scripture elsewhere allows protection, lawful appeal, and refusal to be complicit in evil. The command addresses the heart and the response; it does not command foolishness. Bonhoeffer himself helped shelter Jews, trained pastors, and eventually worked against a regime that was murdering millions. He did not read the command to pray for enemies as a command to cooperate with evil or to stand by while others were destroyed.
What the command does require is that we give up vengeance. That is where it bites. When someone wrongs us, our instinct is to repay. Jesus says to leave that to God and to act in the offender's favor where we can. This is not passivity; it is a transfer of responsibility to the one who judges justly. The person who has learned to bless instead of curse has begun to look like the Father, which is exactly what verses 45-48 say is at stake.
When Love of Enemy Meets a Murderous State
Here we reach the hardest question Bonhoeffer's life raises. How can a man who taught love of enemies join a plot to kill a man? Christians have answered this in sharply different ways, and honest readers should not pretend the answers agree. Some hold that the plot was a denial of Jesus' teaching and that Bonhoeffer's participation, however understandable, was a failure. Others hold that a ruler slaughtering millions is not a private enemy but a tyrant, and that resisting him is an act of love toward his victims.
The passages often invoked on the other side are Romans 13:1-7, which says, "Let every soul be in subjection to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those who exist are ordained by God." The text continues that rulers are a terror to evil and a praise to good. Bonhoeffer knew the passage well. The question is whether the governing authority that demands obedience against God's own commands can claim submission. Peter answered that question before the Sanhedrin: we must obey God rather than men.
Lutheran tradition usually separates the two kingdoms: the Christian loves as a disciple and wears the sword as a magistrate. Bonhoeffer was formed in that tradition but found it inadequate under a regime that was destroying both church and people. He concluded that in such an hour, the disciple and the citizen were one person, and one of them had to act. He did not claim to be right. He confessed to guilt, even the guilt of the just - the guilt of having taken responsibility when no clean option remained.
Most readers today are not in that situation. But the assumptions we bring to it are revealing. If we find Bonhoeffer's decision obviously noble, we may have quietly accepted that Jesus' teaching can be set aside in emergencies. If we find it obviously damning, we may have quietly assumed that evil must be answered only with words. Neither is simple. What we can say is that he did not arrive at his position lightly, and that he took the command to love enemies more seriously than those who use it to justify doing nothing.
Grace, Guilt, and the Forgiveness of Enemies
One of Bonhoeffer's most useful contributions is his honesty about guilt. He never wrote as if resistance left his hands clean. He spoke of taking guilt upon himself for the sake of others - a kind of vicarious responsibility. This is a thoroughly Protestant insight, though he pressed it farther than most: the same grace that forgives the enemy also forgives the one who fails. The command to love enemies does not create a category of people who have obeyed fully. It makes everyone a recipient of mercy.
That has pastoral consequences. If we read Matthew 5:43-48 as a standard we must reach before God accepts us, we will either despair or self-deceive. The passage is placed in the Sermon, where Jesus also tells his disciples to pray for daily bread and forgiveness. The law that exposes our hatred drives us to the cross, where an enemy of God was reconciled. Only forgiven people can forgive in the way Jesus describes, because only they know how much they have received.
Bonhoeffer warned against cheap grace, but he did not set costly grace in opposition to free grace. He taught that the same grace which costs the disciple nothing to earn costs Christ everything to give. That is why he could speak of discipleship as obedience without making it a ladder to God. The command to love enemies is impossible for us and natural to the Spirit. The Christian does not obey to become a child of the Father; the Christian obeys as one who already is, by grace through faith.
This is where Bonhoeffer is most helpful and most human. He did not present himself as a hero. He wrote of his own cowardice, his fears, his love for his family, and his longing to be free. In prison he read Scripture daily, wrote letters, and composed poems, including one that ends by asking God to keep his spirit steadfast. The man was not made of stone. He was a forgiven sinner learning, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, to love as the Father does, and counting the cost without pretending he had already paid it.
What We Can and Cannot Take From Bonhoeffer
We can take his insistence that the Sermon on the Mount is meant to be obeyed. Many readers, including many Christians, have treated Jesus' teaching as an ideal that cannot be lived, a kind of hypothetical that only shows us our failure. Bonhoeffer would not allow that escape. He read the commands as addressed to real disciples in real circumstances, and he ordered his life accordingly. Whether or not we imitate his specific choices, his approach to the text is a needed correction to comfortable Christianity.
We can also take his example of costly commitment in a compromised church. When the church around him accommodated a regime it should have opposed, he did not simply withdraw into private devotion. He helped form a faithful community, trained pastors, and wrote for the church's renewal. That is transferable wisdom. Christians today face pressures to conform on many issues, and the temptation is the same: go along quietly, keep the peace, and call it prudence. Bonhoeffer shows another way, without guaranteeing it will be comfortable.
We cannot, however, treat his conclusions as binding Scripture, and we should be careful about using his life to settle arguments he could not settle himself. Faithful Christians differ on the use of force, on when resistance becomes rebellion, and on how the two kingdoms relate. Scripture gives real guidance - submission, prayer for rulers, refusal to obey when commanded against God - but it also leaves room for conscientious disagreement among those who hold the same Bible. Bonhoeffer knew this and did not claim the last word.
Finally, we cannot separate his courage from his reading of Scripture. He was not brave because he was naturally fearless; he was formed by daily time in the text. His most famous convictions came from long attention to passages like Matthew 5:43-48, not from a personality trait. That is something every reader can imitate. If we want to love enemies, we should begin where he began: not with admiration for a biography, but with the words of Jesus, read slowly, prayed over, and obeyed in the small, concrete situations where our real enemies actually live.
Biblical fidelity check
What Matthew 5:43-48 establishes is clear: Jesus commands his disciples to love, bless, do good to, and pray for those who oppose them, on the ground that the Father shows common grace to the evil and the good. It establishes that this kind of love distinguishes the children of God from those who love only their friends. What it does not establish is a political program, a doctrine of when a Christian may use force, or a rule forbidding every form of self-defense. The passage addresses personal response to personal hostility, and it must be read alongside the rest of Scripture rather than as a complete social ethic.
A common misreading is that loving enemies means never opposing anyone, never speaking hard truth, and never protecting the innocent. That misreading turns Jesus' command into passivity and quietly excuses bystanders. But the same Lord who commanded love of enemies also confronted hypocrisy, drove out those who corrupted worship, and warned of judgment. Loving an enemy does not mean agreeing with him or enabling his harm to others. The command governs the heart's posture and the manner of response; it does not cancel the call to defend the weak or to name evil honestly.
Other passages that speak to Matthew 5:43-48
Three companion texts help us read Jesus' command with both its breadth and its realism. Romans 12:17-21 says, "Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men." and goes on to urge leaving vengeance to God, which is the same transfer of responsibility Jesus sets before his disciples. Matthew 22:36-40 records the greatest commandments, love of God and neighbor, showing the soil from which enemy-love grows. First Peter 2:21-23 points to Christ as the one who, when reviled, did not revile, leaving an example. Romans 13:1-7 names the civil authority that bears the sword, a text that must be held together with the Sermon rather than played against it. For related studies, see What Does 1 Peter 1:13 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, What Does 1 Peter 1:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, What Does 1 Peter 1:18 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, and What Does 1 Peter 1:2 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application.
Frequently asked questions
Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer a martyr?
Most Christian traditions regard him as a martyr, since he was executed by a hostile regime for his faithful resistance and refused to renounce Christ to the end. He was not killed in a worship service or a public confession, but in a conspiracy against a murderous government. Whether that makes him a martyr in the strictest sense is debated. What is not debated is that he died a Christian, with a clear testimony, at the age of thirty-nine, weeks before the war's end. His life is widely honored for that steadfastness.
Does loving your enemy mean you can never oppose an evil ruler?
No, and Bonhoeffer did not think so. The command addresses personal hatred and revenge, not the responsibility of citizens and officials to restrain evil. Scripture honors those who resist tyranny and protects the innocent. The question is not whether we may oppose evil but how we do it - without hatred, without deceit, without vengeance in our hearts. Faithful Christians differ on when opposition may become armed resistance. Bonhoeffer's own choice is one considered judgment among others, not the only faithful reading of the text.
How does Matthew 5:43-48 apply to ordinary wrongs today?
It applies to the irritating neighbor, the unfair boss, the relative who slanders, and the driver who cuts you off. The command begins there, not with tyrants. Ask what blessing would look like in a particular case, and do it. Ask how to pray for the person and pray it. Jesus did not limit the command to extraordinary circumstances; he addressed the everyday enemies his hearers actually had. If we cannot love the small enemy, we will not love the great one. Begin where you are known and hurt.
