Ethics
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Ilse Tödt, translator,
Clifford J. Green, editor.
The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint
Stephen R. Haynes.
both from Fortress Press
Years ago when I watched the movie Schindler's List, I wondered how a ranking German officer came to be such a courageous man of conscience in saving a thousand Polish Jews from the fate of Hitler's final solution. What propels a person to live out ethical principles when the stakes are so high and the prevailing culture so seductive?
Under the pressure of the moment, what is the ethically responsible action for any of us? A medical operation, a business decision, a violent act of terror, each in its own way requires a response. For Christians, individually and collectively, how does this response reflect true discipleship?
At a London memorial service, shortly after Bonhoeffer was hanged at the concentration camp in Flossenbürg, Germany on April 9, 1945, Bishop George Bell stated that Bonhoeffer represented "both the resistance of the believing soul, in the name of God, to the assault of evil, and also the moral and political revolt of the human conscience against injustice and cruelty." Under momentous circumstances fraught with extraordinary danger and against much of his own socialization to be loyal to the state, Bonhoeffer manifested an integrity that combined thought and deed, belief and action.
Bonhoeffer, even at the young age of 39, left a monumental legacy in his unfinished magnum opus, Ethics. Although it was originally published in Germany in 1949 (and again in 1963 and 1992), many have found it difficult to understand. This new edition (and translation) makes Bonhoeffer's thought far more accessible, especially with the help of both a lengthy Editor's Introduction and Afterword.
In his popular The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Bonhoeffer reflected on the Sermon on the Mount and resistance to Nazism. The words of Jesus about loving our enemies, he believed, called for a repudiation of the use of violence and a consistent advocacy of peace. This did not, however, prevent his involvement in the conspiracy to kill Hitler, to stop what he called "a life-destroyer." He had to consider very seriously the peculiar kind of responsibility that in certain situations consciously accepts unavoidable guilt. He admitted that acting responsibly entailed being legally and morally guilty even when this action was based on a conscience liberated by Christ. He explains that the person "who acts out of free responsibility is justified before others by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace." It is this spiritual struggle and candor that makes the reader want to explore ethical reflection more deeply.
The reconciling work of Jesus Christ and Christian responsibility in society is at the very centre of Ethics. Bonhoeffer understood that God's will and the reality of the world are inseparable and lead to God's affirmation and also critique of the world. People sometimes lose the capacity for seeing reality clearly, especially under the pressure of ruthless power. This incapacity, Bonhoeffer said, cannot be remedied by instruction but only by freedom that comes through faith in Christ.
Bonhoeffer was a professor of theology but also a pastor and wrote out of concern for people having to make difficult choices. In the midst of conflict, is the other the enemy or another human being? Bonhoeffer wanted ethics to be concretely related to the present. We are not only responsible to God we are also responsible in the very places where life shapes the larger society.
The atrocities of the Third Reich led Bonhoeffer to discuss issues of euthanasia, marriage, contraception, abortion, sterilization and suicide. Taken out of the context of those war years these discussions become distorted. Bonhoeffer was articulating ethical action in the face of National Socialism, not providing universal principles.
We all read classic works out of our own contexts and sometimes distort both what is written and who we understand the writer to be. Stephen Haynes, who teaches religion at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, admits as much. In his thought-provoking The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon he begins with his own way of viewing Bonhoeffer. As an Evangelical Christian in college, Haynes saw Bonhoeffer as a committed disciple of Christ. Later when he was on a secular university campus, Bonhoeffer appeared to be a theological visionary. At the time of Haynes' ordination Bonhoeffer seemed to be a theological liberal prophet. Finally as a professor specializing in Jewish Holocaust studies Bonhoeffer was seen as a person who sought to revise the church's historic misapprehension of the Jewish people.
So Haynes sets out "to illuminate the contours of the Bonhoeffer phenomenon." In the early 1970s some saw Bonhoeffer as a radical critic of religion but failed to note the connection between his ethics and the terrible social upheaval of the 1930s and early '40s. Others saw him as a seer, able to perceive the future with uncanny prescience, or a prophet committed to following Christ in his own time. But many of his thoughts were not so transparent given the conditions under which he wrote and his actions did not always fit with what prophetic voices claimed were prophetic.
While popular in mainline and ecumenical settings, Bonhoeffer has also been hailed by many evangelicals. They saw him as an apostle, a conservative who called for steadfastness of the faith handed down from the Early Church and the Reformers. For him, the person and reconciling work of Christ are central to the development of ethics. But Bonhoeffer's notions of biblical interpretation and his engagement in ecumenical and peace movements would seem to move counter to much in evangelicalism.
Reading Haynes' analysis along side Bonhoeffer's Ethics suggests that we would do better by testing our perceptions of ethics by direct engagement with his writings. Moral behaviour is not so easily transferable through some imitation of another's actions. Bonhoeffer would be the first to emphasize the crucial importance of facing the demands and possibilities of a particular moment. What he gives us, however, is the rigorous process of serious theological reflection that sends us back to the most basic questions of all, how can we act in such a way as to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ?
