The Cost of Discipleship

Yesterday I gave a short speech on the life of one of my heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When reading him, there is something about the way he writes and challenges me that moves my soul like no other writer can do. Perhaps the reason for this is because Bonhoeffer did not just write good theology, but lived it out. Executed in the Flossenburg Concentration Camp for being linked to a group of conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler, he is widely regarded as a Christian martyr in the fight against the forces of evil. However, I heard something about him that disturbed me. I was referred to an article that alleged Bonhoeffer was not a true Christian, but a proponent of liberal theology. I'm glad I heard about this, because it prompted me to really find out what he thought theologically. I spent several hours pouring over his writings and came out convinced that the article misinterpreted him. Without going into great detail, I would like to present my findings against some of the objections raised to sort of collect my ideas on how he thought.

Objection # 1. Bonhoeffer did not believe in the divinity of Christ.
Answer: Bonhoeffer did believe in the divinity of Christ. In 1933, he gave a lecture on Christology to his students at the University of Berlin. I cannot count how many times he makes reference to the incarnation (that God became a human being). For example, he says "He (Jesus) is not the one adopted by God, he is not the one clothed in human characteristics. He is God who became human, as we became human." Here he affirms just like the historic creeds (not to mention the Bible) that Christ exemplified both God and man, was, in fact, both.

Objection # 2. Bonhoeffer did not believe in the historical resurrection of Christ.
Answer: Read Bonhoeffer and you will see that he did. The article said Bonhoeffer said the resurrection was historically ambiguous. The article conveniently left out the first part of the quote where Bonhoeffer said the world considers it historically ambiguous. In his various sermons he makes references to the resurrection that seem to suggest he accepted it.

Objection #3. Bonhoeffer argues for situational ethics.
Answer: This is a little harder to answer and should probably be left to more educated philosophers and theologians to debate. However, this is how I understand Bonhoeffer's ethics. As a scholar on a Youtube video said, Bonhoeffer believed one should ask what the will of Christ was in every situation. The sermon on the mount gives us an idea on how one should act as a Christian. This is what led him to become a pacifist. He believed that if one took Christ's teaching seriously, you had no choice but to accept the path of nonresistance as that is what Christ did and the early church preached. However, it appears he believed that in some cases, God's will would be to choose the lesser of two sins. That is, violence can be resisted, but in the long run it may give rise to more evil. Professor Craig Slane, a distinguished Bonhoeffer scholar said Bonhoeffer was pretty much forced into the resistance. He was on his way to the concentration camp anyways if he continued preaching, so joining the resistance in defense of the Jews was his only real choice. However, this raises all sorts of questions. What is ethical? Christ preaches against violence and tells us we should conquer evil through love and nonresistance like he did. So if we endorse war or tyrannicide, aren't we being inconsistent to Christ's teaching. But let us not forget the same God who commanded us in the Sermon on the Mount also told the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites in the Old Testament. None of us would say genocide is ethical. Yet God commanded it in the OT. The question remains, how absolute are ethics? Is it ever morally permissible to kill? What do we do with the situational ethics that we seem to come across in the pages of scripture? Is the will of God the basis for morality, or does good and evil exist independently of God? How do we know the will of God? Too many questions that neither myself nor Bonhoeffer has any immediate answer to!