Anarchy and Apocalypse. Ronald E. Osborn

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Anarchy and Apocalypse - Ronald E. Osborn


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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

      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?

      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