Bonhoeffer’s Ethics

On April 5th 1943 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested for his part in opposing Adolf Hitler. His book on Ethics had already been confiscated by the Gestapo. In this book he calls for a radical, costly Christian discipleship based on four stations on the way to freedom:

• Self-discipline. “None will learn the way to freedom except through self-control”.
• Action. “Do and dare what is right, not swayed by whim, and come into the tempest of living”.
• Suffering. In weakness we find our strength in God.
• Death. “”Now as we die we see you and know you at last, face to face”.

The way Bonhoeffer was following was the way of Jesus himself, the way of the cross, where “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and became obedient even to death on a cross.” (Phil 2:19).

Incarnation

Our goal as Christians is to receive the form of Christ himself, a gift of God’s grace. “To be conformed with the Incarnate – that is to be a real man. It is man’s right and duty that he should be man. The quest for the superman…is not the proper concern…for it is untrue” (Ethics p18). This pattern is one of daily suffering-death-resurrection.

The will of God

A Christian asks above all else, “what is the will of God?” Obedience to God’s will is the essence of belief and discipleship. “To believe is to obey”

Action

For Bonhoeffer, Christ was, above all, the “man for others,” the one who emptied himself, who poured out his life in serving human needs. To be worthy of his name, Christians also need to pour themselves out in service to others. Ours is a time for action rather than words, for example such as Christ gave. “Real action,” he wrote, “arises from the rediscovered unity of man with other men and with himself.”(13) Such was the thrust of Bonhoeffer’s life, and it gives weight to his writings. Here is someone who lived by what he believed, who died witnessing to that belief.

Agape love

Bonhoeffer’s ethics is at heart an ethics of loving others as Christ loved human beings. It is an ethics of taking Christ’s words “I am the way, the truth, the life” and making his life-style one’s own.

“It is the call of liberation, the call to simplicity . . . that knowledge which is entirely contained in doing the will of God.”(14)

For him, the moment a person accepts responsibility for others, the truly ethical situation arises. An ethical act for him is one which is based on faith in the transcendent God, acting within the world in accord with reason and social necessity. The goal of Christian ethics is not conforming to a universally recognizable Kantian principle but acting, at the moment, in a way that will help my neighbor become a human being before God.(15) Such was Christ’s effort, even though it led to his being nailed to a cross.

If we are to live as Jesus lived, then we must act as though everything depended on us (or, to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase, “as if there were no God”). We need to assume responsibility for what goes on around us, to the extent that it lies within our power to do so. If we so live, God will be with us, as God was with Jesus. God may not save us from death, any more than Jesus was saved from dying, but God will raise us from the dead as Jesus was raised.

Man come of age

Bonhoeffer’s, it would seem, is an argument for ethical maturity – and courage – enough to risk setting aside abstract solutions when concrete circumstances demand it. “For Bonhoeffer, ethics is a matter of history and blood,” said James H. Evans, president of Colgate Rochester Divinity School. “There is no universal ethics. There are no principles to resort to. Yesterday’s ethical decisions can’t be prescriptive – every situation is unique. You have to seek God’s will anew each day. It is through this freedom that Christians become creative in ethical actions.”
Moral authority for this creativity, it follows, has to be earned. Evans, an expert on African-American theology, noted that both Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King were demonstrably committed, to the limit of their lives, “to causes that could justifiably be called not their own,” both having come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds. Furthermore, “both were deeply rooted in spiritual connectedness. It was only by being in touch with God that you could reduce the risk of ethical decisions.”

Contextualism

J. Deotis Roberts, professor of Christian theology at America’s Duke University, also brought up the importance of “the values that people draw on when they make ethical decisions.” Bonhoeffer, Roberts said, “was not a situationalist or a relativist but a con-textualist,” the difference being that “con-textual is thoughtful, careful, prayerful, based in long, deep experience.”

Within his particular context, Roberts noted, King clung unequivocally to his own non-violent roots, influenced by both his theological training (during which he had read Bonhoeffer) and the powerful exam-ple of Mahatma Gandhi. “Put these together,” Roberts said, “and non-violence became a formal absolute principle for him, consis-tent with natural and divine law. It was non- negotiable. He was consistent in emphasizing this, even when non-violence didn’t work. This was King’s dilemma.”

Non-violence, King and Mandela

King’s context, of course, was markedly different from Bonhoeffer’s. While Bon-hoeffer faced what Roberts called “a kingdom of evil,” King, noted John de Gruchy, lived in a democracy: “The problem was the democracy wasn’t working.” De Gruchy, a professor of religion at the University of Cape Town who was active in the South African anti-apartheid movement, outlined parallels between Bonhoeffer and Nelson Mandela, long-time leader of the African National Congress. Although, “the comparison must not be unduly forced,” de Gruchy said. The ANC, since its founding in 1912, had been committed to non-violence, he noted, for both strategic and moral reasons. “Peaceful resistance had again and again been rebuffed, met with increasing force. It was only when all else failed . . . that the decision was taken to embark on violent forms of political struggle. ‘We did not choose,’ Mandela told the court when he was tried for treason in 1961; ‘The government gave us no choice.’ He felt morally obliged to do what he did. But he had an acute awareness of the need for control of the violence that would be unleashed, of the danger of all-out civil war. The cycle of violence had to be broken, not perpetuated.

De Gruchy went on to emphasize, in his concluding remarks, “the need for careful contextual analysis, and not romanticizing violent resistance.” Both Bonhoeffer and Mandela, he said, “carefully weighed the contexts of their actions, and were willing to accept responsibility for them, and for their consequences. . . .
“Only those genuinely committed to peacemaking,” he argued – who devote and even risk their lives, who are clearly acting for the sake of others – “have the moral authority to resort to violence as a last resort.”

Ought there to be other considerations as well? Nathan Stoltzfus, professor of history at Florida State University, began his talk by paraphrasing the Dalai Lama, “who said that although the use of violence may be all right morally, it is not effective.” Bonhoeffer himself, Stoltzfus noted, wrote of the ethical significance of success. “He warned of going out like a Don Quixote,” with no hope of success. “The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live.”

Nazis and non-violent resistance

Were there non-violent avenues that could have been a more effective means of resistance against Hitler? Stoltzfus pointed to the case of intermarried German women, “non-Jewish women who rescued their Jewish partners from death by refusing to divorce or isolate them and leave them vulnerable.” While others acquiesced to ostracize or even denounce their Jewish neighbors, he explained, “These women had the courage to resist Nazi authority openly. In this sense, they ‘stood fast’ like Bonhoeffer – but their methods were much different. And they were effective.”

This effectiveness, Stoltzfus argues, points to a larger possibility “that the Nazi regime may not have advanced to Holocaust in the absence of social acceptance. The Nazis built on social norms and social pressures. It was the passivity of the large majority of Germans that gave the government the green light.”

By 1938, it was too late for nonviolent resistance. “The ‘community’ between the people and Hitler was strong,” Stoltzfus said. “Brute force was the standard method of control.”
The message of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is not an easy message, even for believers. But it was Bonhoeffer’s response to the Jesus who said, “If anyone wishes to be my disciple, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Christ meant this more literally than most of us imagine; that, certainly, was Bonhoeffer’s conviction.

Liberal humanism

The best summary of what Bonhoeffer stood for he himself gives us in the prologue to the collected letters, “After Ten Years” (3-17). Here we see the true Christian who is also a true humanist, striving toward human solidarity and the fellowship of the spirit. We see it shining brilliantly against that great masquerade of evil which was Nazism and which still threatens human solidarity on so many fronts.

Bonhoeffer’s analysis of the reasons for the failure of the liberal humanists of his day, who simply did their duty without giving it much thought, bears careful study today, as does his own analysis as to why he chose to do what he did. What is essential to human values is summed up neatly here: “The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask, is not how to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live” (7). How is the coming generation, our children, to live in the concrete situation we are helping create?

Basic also is his principle that “respect for ultimate laws and human life is also the best means of self-preservation” (11). To this he joined the recognition that necessity may at times move in apparent conflict with this principle, but only to avoid the greater evil.

How deep Bonhoeffer’s faith was seems clear from what he says about sincere prayers joined to responsible actions, about putting our lives in the hands of those we trust, about human dignity and reserve, about modesty and moderation, and about the capacity for suffering, or “large heartedness” (13). All of us, if we are to have some share in Christ’s large heartedness, need to act “with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and show a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer” (14).

A vision of the future

It was not easy for him to suffer, as he did, condemned by his own government as a traitor and shunned by his own church, under suspicion of complicity in crime. But he had foreseen this, too, and had accepted it. He foresaw that the martyrs of the future must all be willing, because of the complex nature of the issues we face, to do what needs to be done and to be ready to be cast out for it, as useless and unprofitable servants. For if it was the lot of Jesus, can we expect any less, if we choose to be his disciples?

Bonhoeffer believed that the future belongs to Jesus and to his followers, provided they follow his way of life, seeking and pursuing human solidarity. Bonhoeffer was, moreover, to the end, optimistic about the possibility of such a future, despite the obvious failure of his own efforts to achieve it. His life seemed to him, as it may to many even today, a jigsaw puzzle for which most of the pieces are still missing. But what we can piece together seems to make marvelous sense.

His vision of the history of the future is a challenge to any historian. He calls the historian to see the future, to act in it, and to record it as it appears to those who are “below,” not, that is, from the viewpoint of the powerful and the wealthy, but from the perspective of “the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, and the reviled — in short from the perspective of those who suffer” (17). Does not such a view give hope to many, perhaps most of us?

Conclusion

In his letter to his beloved friend and incomparable biographer, Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer wrote this testament:

If we are to learn what God promises and what he fulfils, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus. It is certain that we may always live close to God and in the light of his presence, and that such living is an entirely new life for us; that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God; that no earthly power can touch us without his will, and that danger and distress can only drive us closer to him. It is certain that we can claim nothing for ourselves, and may yet pray for everything; it is certain that our joy is hidden in suffering, and our life in death; it is certain that in all this we are in a fellowship that sustains us. In Jesus God has said Yes and Amen to it all, and that Yes and Amen is the firm ground on which we stand. (391)