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In times of war, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is sometimes cited as an example of authentic Christian resistance to tyranny through the tactics of force. In a July 11, 2003, Washington Post article, provocatively entitled “Bonhoeffer: Thou Shalt Kill,” Philip Kennicot writes that any serious debate about violence and nonviolence must deal with the question: What about Hitler? Bonhoeffer, he suggests, offers a compelling example of a conscientious Christian concerned with radical discipleship who nevertheless saw that violence was morally justified in the face of Nazi evil. Political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain has also invoked Bonhoeffer’s name as a rebuke to Christian pacifists and as a summons for believers to embrace the necessity of force in America’s “war against terrorism.” The United States and its military arsenal, she writes, offer the only assurance of “international civic peace.”1 “For Christians living in historic time and before the end of time, the pervasiveness of conflict must be faced,” Elshtain continues. “One may aspire to perfection, but living perfectly is not possible . . . For St. Augustine, for Martin Luther, and for the anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the harsh demands of necessity as well as the command of love require that one may have to commit oneself to the use of force under certain limited conditions, and with certain intentions.”2

In sharp contrast with Elshtain and others who have sought to appropriate Bonhoeffer for the “realism” of the just war tradition, James William McClendon in his Systematic Theology (1986) sees Bonhoeffer’s final political actions as exhibiting a tragic loss of nerve and loss of faith that can in no way be reconciled with the demands of the Gospel. The German pastor’s participation in the Abwehr plot against Hitler, McClendon writes, “was not only inconsistent with Bonhoeffer’s long-formed Christian convictions but was ineffectual as well.”3 For McClendon, Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics were so heavily reliant upon the practices of the Christian community as a community that when the German church “crumbled under government pressure, he no longer had any resource for Christian resistance.” Thus, “he turned to the time-honored practices and skills of his family, and to the ‘practice’ (if it was that) of the Putsch, for which neither he nor his family and friends had sufficient skills of any sort.”4 Far from offering an exemplary justification for forceful opposition to evil, then, Bonhoeffer’s role in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, in McClendon’s view, must be “understood as a remarkable, sinful failure in his life.”5

It may be, though, that the challenge of Bonhoeffer’s life for believers wrestling with questions of violence and war is more challenging than either Elshtain’s or McClendon’s readings allow. Bonhoeffer would certainly not have accepted the distinction of “just warrior” Elshtain wishes to bestow on him. He, of all Germany’s wartime thinkers, believed that neither the church nor society could survive through compromises and utilitarian calculations, as must invariably be made by those who embrace acts of violence in the name of preserving social order. Bonhoeffer’s theology, Stanley Hauerwas has shown, continues to offer critical resources for persons committed to the ethics of Christian nonviolence.6 At the same time, I want to explore the possibility that Bonhoeffer’s final political actions—distressing and problematic for pacifists as they may be—might have been consistent at some level with his earlier theological writings and also stand as part of Bonhoeffer’s witness for peace.

Bonhoeffer expressed his commitment to Christian pacifism from the moment the National Socialists seized control in Germany. When asked by a student in 1934 what he would do if there was war, Bonhoeffer, breaking sharply with Luther’s doctrine of obedience to the state, replied: “I will pray that God will give me the strength not to take up arms.”7 Yet Bonhoeffer knew that war was likely and so that same year corresponded with Gandhi, arranging to visit him in India to study his methods, which he hoped to use against the Nazi government. The trip never occurred, but between 1935 and 1936 Bonhoeffer joined with several friends in Germany to form the House of the Brethren, a social movement based upon the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. In 1937, as the noose of Nazi tyranny tightened, Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship was published in which he charted a radical social ethic for believers, including nonviolence as a Christian imperative.

Bonhoeffer’s hope of Christian nonviolent resistance to fascism was not unrealistic, as history has proved. The French Huguenot village of Le Chambon Sur Lignon, whose story is told in Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, saved thousands of Jewish children through nonviolent noncooperation with Gestapo and Vichy authorities. The entire nation of Denmark, Hannah Arendth reported in Eichmann in Jerusalem, likewise engaged in effective nonviolent resistance to the Nazis. Yet these pacifist responses to Hitler’s assault were rooted in Christian communities where the church could still be counted on for support and moral guidance. After Hitler’s lightening-swift victory over France in 1940, and the jubilant or passive response of his fellow German Christians, Bonhoeffer realized that the ground had fallen out from under believers in Germany. It remained his conviction that the church must be a radical witness against violence. But with the church scattered and in disarray, the situation bore in on him as a personal ethical crisis: was it better for him to participate in the resistance, or to maintain his ethical rigorism in the face of Hitler’s atrocities?

There was no acceptable answer to the question in Bonhoeffer’s mind. He did not doubt that violence and coercion are tools denied believers in the New Testament. But, he understood, to not allow himself to become guilty of violence might be the greatest guilt of all. “The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts,” he wrote several months before his arrest in 1943. Germans faced a situation in which “every available alternative seemed equally intolerable, repugnant, and futile.”8 These words are from Bonhoeffer’s essay, “After Ten Years,” a declaration of spiritual and ethical convictions in the form of a letter to his close friends, which some theologians consider his finest work. In this brief meditation, Bonhoeffer rejects the idea that “civil courage” requires prudential or self-interested calculations of the sort secular “realism” demands. “Who stands fast?” he asks. “Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.”9

What exactly did Bonhoeffer mean by “exclusive allegiance” to “the question and call of God”? The answer is not at all clear, but Bonhoeffer’s statement may have reflected the influence of the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. According to Barth, the responsibility of the Christian in times of war is never to justify but always “to manifest a distinctive horror of war and aloofness from it.”10 Pacifism, Barth taught, is the rule of the Christian life. The Kingdom of God, of its very nature, stands over and against all human pretensions to power and control by force. And yet, Barth maintained, no word of God can be made absolute by humans in a way that limits the freedom of God to speak a new word in “an exceptional case.” Hence, the Christian must be a pacifist yet at the same time cannot be an “absolute” pacifist since this would amount to a denial of God’s freedom to be God.

Barth’s theology of the Grenzfall, the exceptional case, tempts the kind of casuistry that politicians, generals and theologians have resorted to throughout history to justify acts of violence by the state. But neither secular realism nor natural law categories of “just war” were what Barth had in mind when he spoke of God’s freedom to speak a new word. Rather, Richard Hays writes in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, his account of the moral life demands “a constant reliance on prayer and listening for the guidance of God, believing that God can and does address individuals specifically with particular instructions.” Hence, “we read Scripture thoroughly with the intent of obeying exactly what is commanded there, while always listening prayerfully for the unlikely revelation that in a particular case we may be commanded to do something contrary to the rule given by Scripture.”11

Was Bonhoeffer’s participation in the Officer’s Plot final proof, then, of the failure of Christian pacifism in the face of radical evil? Or was he in fact a living example of the Barthian “exceptional case”? Bonhoeffer’s own words in “After Ten Years” suggest that his subjective experience during the plot against Hitler was very much that of an exceptional summons. His spiritual and moral breakthrough came not as a reasoned move in the direction of universal ethics, but as a sudden awareness of God’s Real Presence and the divine call to an excruciating action in his particular circumstance. Examined closely, “After Ten Years” is therefore the very antithesis of every rationalization for violence, not least those offered by Bonhoeffer’s fellow clergymen in support of Hitler. Bonhoeffer was, by his own account, engaged not in an act of “just warfare” but in an existential “venture of faith.” Significantly, he did not act with any expectation of success (a central requirement in just war thinking as developed by the Catholic Church). Nor did he see his actions as presenting a model for others to imitate. Rather, like Abraham binding Isaac to the altar, he saw his complicity in the plot against Hitler as the peculiar and terrible cross he and he alone was called to bear.

In the end, it was a cross in every sense. On April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was executed by the SS at Flossenbürg concentration camp for treason against the state. Yet Bonhoeffer’s witness lives on as pacifists and non-pacifists alike continue to wrestle with his challenging insistence on obedience to God’s call amid all of the tensions and ambiguities of history.

—2004

1. Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, 6–7.

2. Ibid., 101.

3. McClendon, Ethics, 209.

4. Ibid., 210.

5. Ibid., 211.

6. See Hauerwas, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” 136–49.

7. As cited in Wind, Dietrich Bonhoeff, 93.

8. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 16.

9. Ibid., 19.

10. As cited in Hays, Moral Vision of the New Testament, 233.

11. Ibid., 233.