I was a junior in high school on September 11, 2001. I was 16 years old, and I honestly had no idea what was going on when it all happened. I followed politics pretty closely for a teenager, but I couldn’t tell you much about the World Trade Center or Jihadist terrorism or any number of things that would come to dominate the headlines in the early years of my adulthood. I probably thought a lot more about my sweet 1991 4-cylinder Ford Mustang or the girls I wasn’t dating than I did about the difference between various Christian positions on the ethics of war and peace. Things like war and peace, right and wrong, bad guys and good guys seemed more simple back then. That all changed pretty quickly, as I dove more and more into the study of history, politics, theology, and eventually, Christian ethics. Now, as we witness yet another President try to bring the “forever war” in Afghanistan to some kind of conclusion, with all the complications involved and lives at stake, I’m reminded of how much more complex things have become, at least in my own mind, over the past two decades.
As the years went on, I encountered more and more Christians who identified as pacifists, and knew many who subscribed to Just War Theory, and many more who didn’t see the problem with defending your nation from military aggression in the first place. In my twenties and into my thirties, I attended 4 institutions of higher learning, including 3 seminaries, and the perspectives on war and pacifism were no less diverse in those settings, although perhaps slightly more thought out.
In my ThM and then doctoral study, which centered on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I realized that there was a kind of academic war over just how much Bonhoeffer affirmed any kind of violence, say, against a tyrant like Adolf Hitler, and how much and what kind of a pacifist he had been. Books have been written on this topic, from multiple angles, and people’s agendas are pretty easy to spot fairly early on if you know what to look for. Some seem to be comfortable twisting or omitting facts, reframing historical correspondence and events, and putting their thumb on on one side of the scale or another, to arrive at the kind of Bonhoeffer that they wanted to find when they picked up a pen to start writing.
What I wanted in my own study was something like the truth, and in my last year at Boston College, I set out to find at least some small shred of it when it comes to what Bonhoeffer, a famed pacifist who nevertheless seemed to have affirmed the attempted coup against Hitler, actually wrote and did. This is an adaptation from a section of my exploration of Bonhoeffer’s evolution on these crucial human concerns of peace, war, tyranny, and violence:
Resistance
In the introduction to the English translation of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, the editor, Clifford J. Green, begins like this: “The Ethics is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s magnum opus. Although the work is incomplete and was published posthumously, it is nevertheless the rich result of mature reflection during a decade of Christian resistance to National Socialism.” It is here that we will find Bonhoeffer’s ultimate position on violence and war articulated. It is a series of careful theological reflections on Christian ethics during concrete times of war and peace. It is in Ethics that we also find his rationale for participating in an attempt to violently overthrow the government of Germany under Hitler and the Nazi party.