Eighty years ago this year, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in Nazi Germany by the Gestapo. He was first held in a wartime prison and later transferred to a concentration camp. He was executed shortly before the end of the war. Halfway around the world and seventy-five years after Bonhoeffer’s arrest, another pastor was arrested in southwestern China and sentenced to nine years in jail, the longest sentence given to a house church pastor in recent decades. For five years now, Wang Yi has slept, awoken, eaten, and struggled through the day in his own prison camp, suffering for the same rea- sons given his brother from a former cen- tury and different nation—subversion of a state seeking the ultimate allegiance of its people.
When I realized that 2023 marks these two anniversaries in the history of politi- cal dissent, religious freedom, and apolo- getics, I decided to revisit some of the questions Bonhoeffer asked at the end of his life about the nature of the church, and to consider the answers being given by a Chinese pastor who is more truly continuing his legacy than anyone in the Western world can claim today.
The ongoing dismantling of Christendom as well as the loss of traditional Christianity’s cultural cache in the West has many leaders scrambling to figure out what the public witness of the church should look like, particularly in the United States. Though he lived one hundred years ago, Bonhoeffer was not unfamiliar with this conundrum. He lived and was edu- cated in the German intellectual milieu that predicted and helped create the world in which we now find ourselves.
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HANNAH NATION serves as managing director of the Center for House Church Theology and as content director for China Partner- ship. She is an editor of Faith in the Wilderness: Words of Exhortation from the Chinese Church (Kirkdale Press, 2022) and Wang Yi’s Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement (IVP Academic, 2022).
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