Bonhoeffer on Christian Ethics, Politics, and Social Justice

Introduction

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor who was arrested and imprisoned by the Third Reich and eventually executed after being found guilty of participating in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer's writings have since become influential in the modern world for their focus on the role that Christians can play in politics. Since the separation of church and state — a foundation that America helped establish through its secular constitutional order — many people have been conflicted or confused about the role Christians should have in modern politics. For hundreds of years, the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church influenced the politics of Christendom, and vice versa. With the Protestant Reformation came a push toward secularism, and the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century — forged without papal participation — demonstrated that states could handle their own affairs. As the centuries wore on, however, the Enlightenment Era significantly affected modern philosophy through its rejection of Old World values and a Christological worldview, and people grew accustomed to the idea of government minding its own affairs while the church tended to its.

What Bonhoeffer attempted to do was show that these two spheres could be bridged. He developed these ideas after visiting the United States and witnessing firsthand the lives of the underprivileged and marginalized, gaining a sense of the urgent need for social justice. Bonhoeffer sought to address the gap between Christianity and social justice by showing that Christians could and should take part in politics for the purpose of advancing Christian social justice in a world where Christ was acceptable in private but not on the political stage. In a way, Bonhoeffer sought to restore the rights of God in a world focused solely on the Rights of Man, as developed by the American Enlightenment thinker Thomas Paine.

The thesis of this paper is as follows: Bonhoeffer's unsystematic theological approach to ethics, rooted in the Christological worldview, led to new ways of understanding responsible Christian action in politics and ethics. This paper addresses the theological problem in the modern era that Bonhoeffer sought to tackle, explains why it remains a significant issue, and details how a biblical response to the problem would be possible based on his key arguments.

This thesis is valuable to scholars of modern and contemporary Christian thought because it provides insight into what constitutes responsible Christian action in politics. Given the separation of church and state in many societies across the globe, many people believe that Christians should not engage in politics at all. Some Christians believe that politics is a strife of competing interests that does not represent foundational biblical principles. The role and extent to which the Christian voice should be heard in the political space has remained a major issue for modern and contemporary scholars. Controversies surrounding this issue have been exacerbated by the rise of Christian politicians who believe that believers should assume positions of political power for the greater good of all. This paper will establish the theological grounding for responsible Christian action in politics based on Bonhoeffer's beliefs, thoughts, and actions.

Theological Problem in the Modern Era

Social justice is not merely a modern political problem — it is also a theological one, and has been for centuries. Even Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum in an attempt to guide the Catholic Church on social justice issues from a Christian standpoint. Liberation theology arose in the middle of the 20th century to address social justice issues from a revamped Christian orientation that placed greater emphasis on secular concerns than on spiritual ones. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, wanted the focus to remain on Christ and on faith. He wanted social justice to be interpreted through the lens of faith, and he condemned deviations from it. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes:

Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand — from the very outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: "How can I be good?" and "How can I do something good?" Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: what is the will of God? This demand is radical precisely because it presupposes a decision about ultimate reality, that is, a decision of faith.²

Faith was central to Bonhoeffer's conception of ethics. Ethical systems such as virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, or utilitarian ethics tend to be rooted in non-Christian paradigms. Bonhoeffer did not see why Christian theology and ethics should be kept in such separate spheres. Just as he did not see why theology and social justice should be separated, he did not believe that a Christological worldview was at all irreconcilable with ethics.

To Bonhoeffer, faith was the ultimate reality because God was the ultimate reality.³ God was the ultimate reality quite simply because He was the source of all things and Christ was the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). That is why Bonhoeffer explained that "the source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one's own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. This is the demand, before all others, that must honestly be made of anyone who wishes to be concerned with the problem of a Christian ethic."⁴ Because Christ is reality, Bonhoeffer argued that Christ should be the moral yardstick by which all actions are judged. People failed to realize this because they too often failed to make Christ a reality in their own lives — they failed to become like Christ, or to bring Christ among them. To address this absence, Bonhoeffer argued that a Christian ethic must be comprised of "God's reality revealed in Christ becoming real among God's creatures."⁵

In other ethical systems, such as utilitarianism, the notion of "the good" used to measure an action's morality remains to some extent undefined. In Christian ethics, by contrast, the good must be defined by one's participation in the reality of Christ. Christ altered the real world through His Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. Just as the Fall by mankind's first parents skewed reality away from God, Christ restored reality in grace through submission to the will of God.

That Christians should ask themselves what is the will of God when attempting to define the right course of action is therefore not surprising, for Christ Himself taught that to do the will of God is to be saved. What Bonhoeffer argues, however, is that there cannot be a disconnect between doing the will of God for one's own salvation and doing good in the world in a moral manner. To think ethically, one ought to think from the standpoint of Christian ethics. To define the Good means to define something in terms of its proximity to Christ. The Good cannot be defined outside of Christ — it does not exist outside of Christ. Whatever is good is in Christ and is involved in the reality of Christ.⁶ This is the essence of Bonhoeffer's thought on Christian ethics.

It remains a problem not only for theologians but also for people involved in politics, because it is so fundamentally Christ-centric. In a secular world it is difficult for people to see life, the world, or anything at all from a purely Christ-centric orientation. Part of the issue is that they lack the necessary faith to see the world and themselves in such terms.⁷

Bonhoeffer faced the rise of the Third Reich in his own country in the 1930s and sensed that its politics were distinctively anti-Christian because the regime defined its own reality in terms that were not Christ-centric. There was a mythology of Germany that resonated with the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and that Hitler and the rest of the Party leaders used to motivate and inspire the masses. Bonhoeffer took offense at what he saw as the persecution of the Jewish race. Millions of Germans attributed their afflictions to International Jewry, and many Zionists — particularly in America — fiercely condemned the Third Reich, even as so much remained uncertain and difficult to interpret about Germany's new rulers.

For many people in politics today, as well as for many Christians, discerning the truth or discerning the good in life remains the major challenge. As Iyabo asks, how can politics and Christianity come together as one overlapping sphere if there is no agreement upon what constitutes the good?⁸ This is especially pertinent in America, where it is widely held that one's religion should not influence one's politics. When a person is nominated to the Supreme Court, Congress often asks whether that nominee can refrain from allowing his or her religious beliefs to influence his or her interpretation of the Constitution — especially when the nominee is a Roman Catholic. But why should this be so? Either one's religion is real, or it is not. Either the truth that one believes in with religious conviction is true and therefore ought to inform everything one does — including how one interprets the law — or it is not true and one ought to abandon it. For a Christian, according to Bonhoeffer, there should be no shame in refusing to compartmentalize one's religious beliefs so that one's political beliefs remain unaffected. One's belief in Christ ought to influence one's actions in politics. They should align.

To answer that question, Bonhoeffer argued that the good and the real must be seen as one and the same. The person cannot be separated from the works, or the works from the person; they must be seen as unified. Bonhoeffer criticized the modern interpretation of social ethics as developed by Reinhold Niebuhr and argued that there should be no division between culture and Christ. If the latter is the ultimate reality, He should be the source of culture — not something alien to it, as though a purely secular or political culture were sufficient in and of itself. 2 Corinthians 6:17 is explicit: one should leave the unclean and come to God, for He is the ultimate reality. If anything, the Christendom of the Middle Ages was more in line with Bonhoeffer's thinking than anything found in the modern world with respect to the alignment of ethics, politics, and religion.

Today, social justice — and Bonhoeffer uses the word perverse to describe Niebuhr's theology⁹ — distorts how ethics is approached. Social justice is conceived in terms of politically correct concepts divorced from Christian reality. The problem Bonhoeffer had with the Third Reich was that the government under Hitler appeared to be implementing policies not in conformity with Christian reality. Yet in America, all too often Christians are found setting aside their Christian beliefs in order to facilitate some concept of social justice that is out of alignment with Christian principles. From a Christological worldview, it is impossible, according to Bonhoeffer, for a Christian to claim Christianity for himself if he does not insist upon Christian ethics in the realm of politics, since politics should be an expression of governance informed by the light of Christ and the grace of God.

Conclusion

Bonhoeffer's significant contribution to modern theology is that he brought Christian thinking back to Christ. At a time when theologians were losing sight of the unchanging God, he demanded that Christians recognize Christ as the Ultimate Reality — the only thing that can save them, the only thing that truly matters.

Bonhoeffer further argued that this Ultimate Reality should be the bedrock of all action, living, and thinking. One should live in accordance and in union with this Ultimate Reality. All things should be evaluated from the standpoint of Christ. Bonhoeffer rejected the view that there was no room for Christian thinking in politics or in ethics. To him, politics and ethics were to be dismissed to the extent that they failed to recognize Christ as the Ultimate Reality. Bonhoeffer recognized the sacrament of God's command and believed all should do the same.

There is room, as Bonhoeffer shows, for Christians to seek social justice from a Christian perspective. The concept has never been foreign to Christians throughout history — the corporal and spiritual works of mercy have always been hallmarks of the church. Where Bonhoeffer went to extremes was in his direct attacks on his own government, and whether those attacks were justified is, in a sense, beside the point. What he demonstrated was that Christians do have the authority to engage in politics, because all authority comes from God and they belong to God. It would therefore be inappropriate for Christians to sit out political issues and remain on the sidelines. They represent the children of God, and in their own examples of how to live, they should help to lead the way — not for the establishment of an earthly paradise, but so that all people might follow them to Christ in Heaven.