Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment?
Is Lessons for American Christians from the Confessing
Church in Germany.
This article appears
in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine.
ARE WE IN a “Bonhoeffer moment” today?
It is common to
wonder what we would have done if we lived in history’s most challenging times.
Christians often find moral guidance in the laboratory of history—which is to
say that we learn from historical figures and communities who came through
periods of ethical challenge better than others. Christians who wish to discern
faithfulness to Christ often look back to learn how others were able to
determine faithful discipleship when their contemporaries could not.
With this in mind,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer may help us out today.
Bonhoeffer was a
German theologian and pastor who resisted his government when he recognized,
very early and very clearly, the dangers of Hitler’s regime. His first warning
about the dangers of a leader who makes an idol of himself came in a radio
address delivered in February 1933, just two days after Hitler took office.
Despite an abiding
Christ-centered peace ethic, a desire to study nonviolent political resistance
with Gandhi, and extensive writing about loving one’s enemies, Bonhoeffer
eventually became a member of a conspiracy that was responsible for a coup
attempt against Hitler. Twelve years after he became one of the first voices in
Germany to offer public opposition to the Nazis, Bonhoeffer was executed by
them, as a traitor.
By Bonhoeffer’s own
account, he and his co-conspirators were living in a time and place in which
“the huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion”
and in which evil appears in the “form of light, good deeds, historical
necessity, [and] social justice.” They were living in a time that required a
radical form of ethical discernment, attuned to concrete reality, historical
urgency, and the desperate cries of help from victims of the state.
Throughout his life,
Bonhoeffer developed theological themes that made social interaction the point
of departure for understanding Christian faithfulness. He emphasized redemptive
suffering in solidarity with the most vulnerable as well as what he called
“costly grace,” and he made a distinction between religion and
Christ-centeredness; religion is our effort to reach God while
Christ-centeredness embraces God’s self-revelation to the world in the
incarnation and in the church. In his final years, Bonhoeffer emphasized
Christ-centeredness as religionless, or this-worldly, Christianity.
These are themes that
qualify him as one of Martin Luther’s “theologians of the cross”; that is,
people—like Bonhoeffer—who join God in the world, in solidarity with those who
suffer, and who make difficult, even countercultural decisions, especially in
times when evil is disguised as good.
Perpetrators,
bystanders, and resisters
We live in a time of
moral obscurity. . .
Read more at https://sojo.net/magazine/february-2018/this-bonhoeffer-moment-American-Christians
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