Sadly as far as I know no one has Bonhoeffer's sermon or those of the other members of the Confessing Church who preached that day.
But they did preach and in Berlin and at the invitation of the German government.
Edwin Robertson in his book, "The Shame and the Sacrifice: The Life and Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer", details the events of those days. He writes:
"Daily addresses were given by leaders of the Confessing Church in a central church in Berlin and Bonhoeffer was one of those chosen to speak. He was invited in July and at first thought he would refuse. He was obviously going to be used for propaganda purposes and this fear was intensified when he was asked to provide a photograph, which he refused to send. He did however agree to lecture on the Wednesday of the Olympiad at 5 p.m. His chosen subject was 'The Inner Life of the German Evangelical Church Since the Reformation,' which he had to deal with in half an hour!He chose to speak largely about the hymns of the church, from Luther, Gerhardt, Zinzendorf and Gellert."
As Bonhoeffer read the words he was appalled by some of the piety of the words of the authors especially Zinzendorf. And some might ask why? Robertson writes that Bonhoeffer, "felt the air to be much cleaner when he was dealing with the Bible - 'We need the fresh air of the Word to keep us clean.'"
Robertson writes that the lecture was given in St Paul's Church and that Bonhoeffer wrote a letter about the lecture:
"Yesterday evening was very good. The church filled to overflowing, people sitting on the altar steps and standing all around. I wished I could have preached instead of giving a lecture! Some 1,500 or 2,000 people came and an overflow service was needed. "
But the official report was one of displeasure. Robertson gives the "Die Christliche Welt's" report.
"While the lectures given in the church of the Holy Trinity were academically satisfying, they were hardly well attended; those in St Paul's were the opposite of this. Night after night the enormous church was not only filled to overflowing, but parallel meetings had also to be held in another large church to cope with the mass of visitors. Dr. Bonhoeffer struck the same note as Dr. Jacobi had done and illustrated his exposition with a number of hymns. According to him, the decline began as early as Paul Gerhardt; pietism and the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century sink lower and lower. Only in the present and especially in the hymns of Heinrich Vogel (!) do we begin to rise again to the heights of the Reformation. The Speaker tried to prove his thesis by means of selected hymns and was even successful because of the complete arbitrariness of his selection. He did not shrink from quoting the first half of a verse, when the second, left unquoted, made the quite opposite point. When we consider that here we have a pupil of Harnack, we can only deplore this treatment of history. The third speaker, Dr. Iwand of Konigsberg, followed much the same line.
To sum up: in Holy Trinity, valuable theology developed in a scholarly way, but a very small audience; in St Paul's, narrow and very suspect theology, but great religious enthusiasm and vast congregations, listening with the deepest devotion. This state of affairs must cause great alarm among those concerned with the future of the Evangelical Church."
What is important to know here is that pietism set the stage for a faith totally wedded to experience rather than the word of God. By the time one gets to Friedrich Schleiermacher and then Harnack the Christian faith is simply grounded in human experience. Schleiermacher grounded the Christian faith in the experience of a sense of dependence which only God could meet. He and others denied all but the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Jesus Christ was only human, not God. Humanity should strife to be perfect as the Father was and there was no need of redemption. Undoubtedly Bonhoeffer and others of the Confessing Church made their case against such unbelief during the Olympics.
I have looked in vain for a hymn by Heinrich Vogel, but I did find that he was a Confessing pastor and theologian. And I found this prayer given by Vogel on the German Repentence Day of 1945. It is from a Time article, Bowed Heads, written in 1945. "God has made us as dirt and dung among the nations.... We are deserving of all that is happening to us at this time. It is our, fault, our great fault.... O God... watch over those who have power over our powerlessness and show them that hate can never accomplish anything."
