Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is invoked as the theologian who gives a concise expression to the book’s account of a suffering God: after the Holocaust, “only a suffering God can help us now.” The claim makes divine suffering a way of understanding history as a real struggle rather than a scene whose outcome is secretly controlled from above.

The Cited Insight

The book sets Bonhoeffer’s statement against two other conceptions of God: a sovereign power who always wins, and a finite God who administers justice. It presents the suffering God as a third position, one who assumes the burden of suffering in solidarity with human misery. Bonhoeffer’s words give this position its most direct formulation in the passage.

History and Theological Meaning

The statement matters because divine suffering implies involvement in history: God is affected by what happens, rather than standing beyond it as an untouched master. On this reading, human history is the site of a struggle in which the Absolute itself is implicated and its fate is at stake. The book connects this theological claim to the suffering of the six million, treating its excess over ordinary human measure as a reason to take the language of divine suffering literally.

Role in the Argument

Bonhoeffer’s sentence is placed beside Heidegger’s call for a God who might still save humanity, but it redirects the emphasis from salvation by a powerful rescuer to solidarity with those who suffer. The book uses the contrast to argue that secular-humanist language can feel inadequate to the scale of the Holocaust: theology, despite being challenged by the catastrophe, can also provide a frame for approaching its magnitude. Bonhoeffer’s contribution here is the brief formulation that holds those claims together.