At first glance applying the
categories of "hero" and " villain to Adolph Hitler and a man who conspired to
assassinate him should be relatively simple. Hitler is villain. and the
conspirator hero. But the conspirator was a clergyman within a religious
tradition that accepted the legitimacy of any secular ruler and was, himself,
committed to the principles of pacifism. Hitler was a duly elected secular
leader. Under these conditions, who is the hero and who the villain?
Most of us, like Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran clergyman who attempted to assassinate Hitler
and was later executed for his part in the unsuccessful plot, accept the
principle that political disputes, especially within some kind of democratic
system, are not settled by violence. We do not regard the violent acts of a Lee
Harvey Oswald or a John Hinckley as heroic, regardless of our feelings about
the policies of the Presidents they killed or tried to kill. Within our
political system we settle political disagreement by election, persuasion,
lobbies, and compromise. There is even some question about the propriety of
clergymen involving themselves directly in political questions at all.
Regardless of the differences in religious beliefs within our culture, we do
not normally expect ordained ministers to resort to assassination of political
leaders as a resolution of moral conflict. Why then do we instinctively feel
that Bonhoeffer was a hero and Hitler a villain when the former conspired to
kill the latter? Can we justify this feeling especially in the light of the
fact that Bonhoeffer had previously accepted as a binding moral principle that
only literal obedience to the pacifism of Jesus was genuinely acceptable
Christian behavior? And if we can justify our feeling that Bonhoeffer was a
hero for what he attempted to do, what implications does our justification have
for understanding the limits of politically responsible action for religiously
committed persons in our own highly charged political society today?
THE ANTAGONISTS
Let us begin by looking at our
two main characters in this modern-day morality play. About Hitler little needs
to be said. There are few, if any, who would speak in support of his abominable
acts, of the moral grotesqueness of his attempted "final solution" to what he
called "the Jewish question." The hideous records of the pogroms, the stench of
the Holocaust will remain in human consciences forever, or so we hope. All we
need to remember is that he was the legitimate leader of Germany and that the
majority of Germans did not try to oust him from power by political or violent
means while he was Führer.
Our other main character is
far less well known but, in some very important ways, far more interesting.
What is instructive about his life and thought is the development from a stance
of absolute pacifism to a co-conspiratorial role in the plot to assassinate
Hitler. As we attempt to understand this change in his moral position, it is
important to keep in mind that one of the casualties of his transformation is
the applicability of the terms "hero" and "villain." It is also important to
remember that as long as the terms do apply to moral action, they may do so in
a variety of ways. For example, Bonhoeffer's act may have been heroic to a
non-pacifist and villainous to someone who accepts pacifist principles as the
only morally justifiable foundation for Christian behavior. A person can be a
traitor to his own principles precisely because he chooses to appear heroic to
someone with an alternative set of principles. Were Bonhoeffer's moral
principles betrayed, abandoned, or transformed when he substituted a
willingness to engage in violent acts against another person for his previous
unwillingness to use force in any moral situation?
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
1906-1945
The important aspects of
his biography would include the following: he was born in 1906 to an
aristocratic German family. He completed his theological education in 1927 and
became a lecturer in systematic theology at the University of Berlin in 1929.
After a short stint in America at Union Theological Seminary he returned to
Germany and slowly became aware of the Nazi infiltration into the Christian
churches. By 1932 he was opposing the Aryan Clause which the Nazis had imposed
on the churches and which denied ordination to persons born of Jewish
parentage. By 1933, Bonhoeffer was opposing the influence of "German
Christians," to whom the Nazis were giving more and more power in church
circles, and was working on the creation of an alternative church community
known as the Confessing Church. After another short stay at Union Theological
Seminary in 1939, Bonhoeffer decided to return to Germany to share the terrible
times with his people. By 1940 he moved into resistance activity while
officially serving in the German espionage office, and was using his contacts
abroad to further the work of resistance. He was arrested in 1943 while the
plot against Hitler was still being formulated. The assassination was attempted
the following year while Bonhoeffer was still in jail. By early 1945 Hitler
decided to do away with all those suspected of participating in the plot. On
April 8, 1945 Bonhoeffer was removed from his cell at Buchenwald and executed
without trial.
In his early theological work,
especially The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer adopted a stance of
almost complete, literal pacifism, basing his position on a strict construction
of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. He observed that to follow the injunctions of
Jesus will be costly. It will involve suffering and a complete obedience to
Jesus' will in every situation. Christians exist in the world as aliens,
strangers, and pilgrims. "Like a sealed train travelling through foreign
territory, the Church goes on its way through the world."
But when we
turn to his later work, Ethics, never completed and written in part
during the plotting against Hitler and while awaiting trial in prison,
Bonhoeffer's thought undergoes a rather remarkable change which reveals the
degree to which the old moral categories of his previous position are no longer
applicable.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
At the outset of
Ethics, Bonhoeffer makes the rather remarkable claim that Christianity
seeks to invalidate the very basis of traditional moral theory: the distinction
between good and evil. Prior to man's disobedience of God in the Garden of
Eden, he did not know good and evil: he knew only God. Only in his separation
or isolation from God does man gain the knowledge of good and evil. The very
struggle over making moral choices is a sign, according to Bonhoeffer, of man's
alienation from God and the disunity which now characterizes his relationship
with God and with himself.
This disunity would be
ultimately tragic, Bonhoeffer says, had God not restored man to unity with
Himself through His Incarnation in Jesus. Bonhoeffer insists that the effect of
the Incarnation is not to make man more than human rather it is to make him
fully human; to be the man he really is and was created by God to be.
The way to achieve the fullness of humanity now is to be conformed to Jesus who
embodied, or actualized, in his humanity what it is to be fully human. By
conforming our lives with his, we too become fully human. The consequences
Bonhoeffer draws from this theological foundation are radical, and, with
respect to his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler, vastly
significant.
CONCRETE RESPONSIBILITY VS.
PRINCIPLES
Conformation with Christ means
specifically acting in such a way that my neighbour is helped to become a man
before God. The emphasis is on the specific. My responsibility as one conformed
with Christ is not to achieve moral purity, or to contemplate divine thoughts,
or to erect ethical theories and systems, but to act concretely, here and now,
in particular, specific situations to bring my neighbour to his or her full
humanity. All moral theory, ethical reflection, system building, handbooks of
moral rules, the creation of moral scorecards, or the desire for personal moral
absolution and perfection must give way before the immediate, specific needs of
the neighbour in his or her own historical, unique situation.
This means, of course, a
willingness to rely less upon the application of general, well-defined rules
and to rely more upon a faith that in the concrete situation one will be given
discernment by God as to what to do to serve the neighbour in conformity with
Christ. It is not one's own justification that is the motivating force in moral
behaviour: it is concern for the other person's need. If we spend all our time
seeking to justify our behaviour by appeal to moral rules and theories, we will
be pretending that we are Gods ourselves: able to provide moral justification
and absolution for and by ourselves. We are free, Bonhoeffer claims, from moral
justification and therefore free for others. It is within the context of this
freedom that Bonhoeffer develops, implicitly (since he was still under the
censor's eye) the foundation for his treasonous act against Hitler.
THE RESPONSIBLE MAN
One immediate consequence of
this understanding of freedom and responsibility is that accountability appears
only in the context of a specific situation. "The responsible man," says
Bonhoeffer, "is dependent on the man who is concretely his neighbour in his
concrete possibility. His conduct is not established in advance, once and for
all, that is to say, as a matter of principle, but it arises with the given
situation. He has no principle at his disposal which possesses absolute
validity and which he has to put into effect fanatically, overcoming all the
resistance which is offered to it by reality, but he sees in the given
situation what is necessary and what is 'right' for him to grasp and to do ....
The responsible man does not have to impose upon reality a law which is alien
to it, but his action is in the true sense `in accordance with reality'."
This connection with reality
means that each situation is different: we must bring to each one whatever
knowledge, wisdom, and insight we are capable of, but having made what
responsible decision we can on the basis of our limited humanity, we leave the
ultimate judgment or justification of the deed up to God, not up to some
abstract moral ideology or theory. ". . . Responsible action does not lay claim
to knowledge of its own ultimate righteousness . . . this deed is delivered up
solely to God at the moment of its performance. Ultimate ignorance of one's own
good and evil, and with it a complete reliance upon grace, is an essential
property of responsible historical action. The man who acts ideologically sees
himself justified in his idea; the responsible man commits his action into the
hands of God and lives by God's grace and favour."
OBLIGATIONS TO GOVERNMENT
As part of his Christian
tradition, from St. Paul through Luther to his own German Lutheran Church,
Bonhoeffer accepted the principle that Christians are obligated to obey the
secular or governmental rulers. It was believed that God had given government
to the world as a punishment for sin and as a controller of disorder.
Therefore, the government is to be obeyed for the sake of order and because it
is a gift from God to a disorderly world. It doesn't matter who the ruler is or
how he came to power, as long as he maintains the peace, establishes law and
order and does not directly challenge the Church's right to worship God. Even
in an extreme case the Christian is not justified in rebellion, only in quietly
refusing to obey laws which would prohibit worship and then accepting his
punishment without dissent, rebellion, or revolution.
But then comes the opening,
the wedge through which the freely responsible person can penetrate who an
extraordinary situation arises. Here we can discover whether Bonhoeffer is hero
or villain, or, as we may now be able to anticipate, neither hero nor villain,
since these categories are no longer suitable for evaluating his actions.
According to Bonhoeffer, obedience to government is binding on a Christian
"until government openly denies its divine commission and thereby forfeits its
claim . . . If government violates or exceeds its commission at any point, then
at this point obedience is to be refused, for the Lord's sake."
THE RISK OF ACTION
However, the decision to
refuse obedience "can never be anything but a concrete decision in a single
particular case." No absolutes or generalizations are permitted. The
responsibility for the deed of refusal must be particular, historical, and
therefore, "a venture, undertaken on one's own responsibility. A historical
decision cannot be entirely resolved into ethical terms; there re mains a
residuum, the venture, or risk of action."
Although Bonhoeffer finds
obedience to the government mandatory, the free responsibility of the
individual Christian, which is guided ultimately by serving the needs of the
neighbour, may conflict with the requirement of obedience in particular
situations. Such extraordinary occurrences require responses outside the
boundaries of traditional moral theory, law, and justification. He writes, "In
the course of historical life there comes a point where the exact observance of
the formal law of a state . : . suddenly finds itself in violent conflict with
the ineluctable necessities of the lives of men; at this point responsible and
pertinent action leaves behind it the domain of principle and convention, the
domain of the normal and regular, and is confronted by the extraordinary
situation of ultimate necessities, a situation which no law can control."
"The extraordinary necessity
appeals to the freedom of the men who are responsible. There is now no law
behind which the responsible man can seek cover . . . here one must make one's
decision as a free venture, together also with the open admission that here the
law is being infringed and violated and that necessity obeys no commandment.
Precisely in this breaking of the law the validity of the law is acknowledged,
and in this renunciation of all law, and in this alone, one's own decision and
deed are entrusted unreservedly to the divine governance of history."
One important consequence of
this willingness to risk oneself in the extraordinary situation is that one
must be willing to take on guilt for that risk. Again, the touchstone is
whether one can move beyond consideration of one's own worthiness in order to
focus upon what needs to be done for the neighbour here and now. The man who
cannot do this "sets his own personal innocence above his responsibility for
men, and he is blind to the more irredeemable guilt which he incurs precisely
in this; he is blind also to the fact that real innocence shows itself
precisely in a man's entering into the fellowship of guilt for the sake of
other men."
RESISTANCE "JUSTIFIED"?
On the basis of these
reflections, we are perhaps now able to see how Bonhoeffer could have entered
into the plot against Hitler and done so consistently with his
religious/ethical position.
Resistance was the first and
foremost deed of free responsibility, based upon the extraordinary necessities
of the situation. Resistance was also, in part, repentance for the sins of
omission by members of his aristocratic class who allowed Hitler to come to
power without opposition. Resistance is also sharing the guilt of those who had
preceded him in opposing Hitler. Bonhoeffer had come to believe that Hitler had
forfeited the divine commission to the State, and had become a false god who
claimed no higher authority than blood and soil. In this situation, the
legitimacy accorded the ruler had been abrogated and the obligation of
obedience to the State removed since this was now no legitimate state at all.
In one sense Bonhoeffer's
pacifism in the Cost of Discipleship falls victim to the reflections in
Ethics. And yet in another sense one could argue that by eliminating Hitler as
an individual Bonhoeffer was working for pacifism between nations. It was war
as a means of settling disputes between nations that could still be
legitimately and resolutely opposed. Hitler could be disposed of, again as a
risk for which one is willing to incur guilt, because he had so easily and
demonically resorted to total war in which life had become cheap and
dispensable.
The frustrating and yet
liberating thing about Bonhoeffer is that he won't permit us to resolve the
debate over whether he was justified morally in conspiring to assassinate
Hitler. He refuses to allow us to fall back into the simple, perhaps even
simplistic, moral categories of hero or villain, good and bad: at least when
these are taken as absolutes and therefore taken out of context, out of the
particular, difficult, unique situations in which only the individual's own
risky venture can resolve the moral dilemma at hand. He refuses to allow us to
generalize from his individual deed of free responsibility. Governments are
still legitimate, obedience is still required. Only at extraordinary moments,
when the necessities of the neighbour overwhelm traditional law and order, does
the question of the extraordinary deed become possible.
But it is precisely there, at
the boundary, where traditional reflection, categories, principles, rules, and
axioms reveal themselves to be fragile reeds, unable to sustain an individual,
freely determined, moral venture. It is only there, Bonhoeffer believes, that
one can both incur real moral guilt and at the same time experience the
forgiving, healing grace of God which can penetrate and shatter man-made
systems of moral judgement.
As to the question of religion
involving itself in political affairs, Bonhoeffer's experience should inform us
that as long as religious people are genuinely concerned with the needs and
welfare of other persons, they cannot help becoming politically and
economically involved. What he would caution against is that we not confuse
narrowly defined, parochial "religious" issues (such as prayer in public
schools) with genuine issues of human well-being and justice. The critical
questions for the religious group or individual are not whether its private
agenda is being implemented or whether individuals score high on a table of
personal morality, but whether the welfare of the society as a whole is being
met by the political and economic powers that be. How and when to make that
decision is what Bonhoeffer has tried to address in the extreme case of
determining when to eliminate a head of State.
Author Frank G. Kirkpatrick, a 1964 graduate of Trinity, is
associate professor of religion and chairman of the department at the College.
His article is adapted from a recent lecture at the Town-Gown Series this fall.