Lecture 4-4: Twentieth-Century Christian Ethics — Bonhoeffer and the Limits of Otherwise-Clear Commands

This verse states the general principle every position in this lecture's dispute already accepts: when human authority commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, obedience to God takes precedence. Nobody engaged in this lecture — not Bonhoeffer, not his critics within the Christian tradition — disputes that principle itself. The entire difficulty this lecture examines lies downstream of it, in a much narrower and harder question Acts 5:29 does not by itself answer: what does obedience to God actually require, in concrete action, when the injustice in question is not a direct command to worship a false god or to stop preaching the gospel (the situation Peter and the apostles faced) but a state's broader program of persecution and mass killing, and when the specific action under debate is not merely refusing to comply but joining a conspiracy to kill the head of that state? Acts 5:29 supplies the general principle. It does not, on its own, settle Bonhoeffer's case — which is exactly why this lecture treats that case as genuinely hard rather than as a simple application of a text everyone already agrees with.

Costly grace, revisited: Bonhoeffer's theology before the crisis

Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship (Nachfolge, 1937), written well before the events this lecture will describe, developed the distinction between "costly grace" and "cheap grace" that 3-1 already introduced in connection with the danger of antinomianism. Cheap grace, in Bonhoeffer's description, is "grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate" — forgiveness treated as a static possession that excuses continued sin rather than a summons that transforms a life. Costly grace, by contrast, "confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart," but it "costs a man his life" because it demands genuine, ongoing obedience, not merely intellectual assent to a doctrine of forgiveness.

It is worth noticing, reading this book with hindsight, how directly Bonhoeffer's own later life would come to embody the very costliness he had already described in theory. Writing in 1937, well before his own resistance activity began in earnest, Bonhoeffer could not have known exactly how literally "it costs a man his life" would apply to his own case; but the theology of costly discipleship he articulated there — that following Christ makes real, concrete, sometimes dangerous claims on a life, not merely private, internal claims on belief — is continuous with, and arguably makes intelligible, the decisions he would go on to make in the years that followed. This continuity is part of why Bonhoeffer's life is studied in Christian ethics at all, rather than merely in twentieth-century history: his theology and his biography are not separable case studies but a single argument, made partly in prose and partly in action.

From the Confessing Church to the conspiracy: what Bonhoeffer actually did

The historical record here deserves care, because popular accounts (including some widely read biographies) have occasionally stated Bonhoeffer's specific role with more confidence than the surviving evidence fully supports, and this lecture aims to state only what is well documented. Bonhoeffer was an early and vocal critic of the German Christian movement's accommodation to Nazi ideology, and a founding figure in the Confessing Church, the minority body of German Protestants who rejected the state-aligned church's capitulation and, through documents like the Barmen Declaration (1934, principally authored by Karl Barth), affirmed the church's obedience to Christ alone as its head. Bonhoeffer's opposition to the regime, in other words, began years before the conspiracy this lecture is most known for, in the more conventional — if still dangerous — form of ecclesiastical resistance and public preaching against a false theology being used to justify the state's demands.

By the early 1940s, Bonhoeffer had become connected, chiefly through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, to a small circle within German military intelligence (the Abwehr) that was engaged in active conspiracy against the regime, including planning for Hitler's assassination — most notably the failed July 1944 bomb plot associated with Claus von Stauffenberg, though Bonhoeffer's own arrest in April 1943 preceded that specific attempt and was initially connected to currency-smuggling activity used to help German Jews escape the country, only later understood by his captors to connect to the wider conspiracy. The precise extent of Bonhoeffer's own operational involvement — whether he functioned primarily as a courier and a theological voice within the conspirators' circle, or took a more direct planning role — remains a matter some historians continue to weigh carefully against incomplete documentary evidence, since much of what the conspirators discussed was, of necessity, never committed to paper. What is not disputed is that he knew of the conspiracy, sympathized with and supported it, and was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, weeks before the war's end, for his connection to it.

The genuinely hard question this poses

Christian ethics has a long tradition, reaching back at least to Augustine's just war criteria (engaged in Chapter 5's treatment of war and peace, 5-3) and to the natural-law tradition of resisting manifestly unjust law (Aquinas's own framework in 4-1 already gestures toward this), of asking when resistance to unjust civil authority is not only permitted but required. Acts 5:29's principle — obey God rather than men — is common ground across the whole tradition. The hard question Bonhoeffer's case poses is not whether resistance to grave injustice can ever be right; it is whether this specific form of resistance — participation in a conspiracy to kill a head of state, a category of action the just war tradition and most versions of Christian pacifism alike have historically treated as categorically different from refusing to comply, protesting publicly, or even engaging in armed resistance within a declared state of war — falls within or outside what Christian ethics can justify, and reasonable, serious Christian ethicists have not converged on a single answer.

One position, associated with a substantial strand of just war reasoning applied to internal resistance, holds that Bonhoeffer's action can be understood, even if not celebrated without qualification, as a last-resort response to a regime that had placed itself entirely outside any legitimate claim to Romans 13's authority — an authority Paul grounds in the state's function as "God's servant for good" (Romans 13:4, engaged directly in 5-3), which a regime engaged in genocide has manifestly abandoned. On this view, tyrannicide in genuinely extreme circumstances, where ordinary legal or political remedies have been foreclosed and mass killing is actively underway, sits within — if at the very outer edge of — a tradition of resistance to unjust authority that Christian ethics has never treated as absolutely forbidden in every conceivable case.

A second position, taken by other serious Christian ethicists including some who admire Bonhoeffer's earlier witness through the Confessing Church without following him into this final chapter of his life, holds that direct participation in a plot to kill a specific individual crosses a line that principled nonviolence, or even a strict reading of just war criteria (which apply properly to a state's declared conduct of war, not to individual conspirators acting outside any such declared authority), cannot sanction — arguing that even the worst tyranny does not license private individuals to become killers, and that Bonhoeffer's own writings show him aware of this tension, treating his involvement not as a confident, justified exercise of a right but as something closer to a guilt he was willing to bear rather than a right he was exercising. Bonhoeffer's own later, more fragmentary writings (collected posthumously in Ethics, left unfinished at his death) increasingly stress that in genuinely extreme situations a Christian may be called to act in a way that remains objectively sinful and yet is, in that specific extremity, the lesser of available evils — accepting guilt rather than claiming innocence, and throwing himself on God's mercy rather than on a confident ethical justification. This is itself a distinctive and disputed ethical move, not a resolution of the dispute: it is one way of naming the tension rather than dissolving it.

What this case does not license

This course states as plainly as it can, because the danger of misusing this material is real: Bonhoeffer's case is not presented here as a general precedent for civil disobedience, and still less for violent resistance, whenever a Christian believes a government to be seriously unjust. The circumstances Bonhoeffer faced — a regime engaged in the systematic mass murder of millions of people, operating with no meaningful internal legal or political remedy available, at the most extreme edge of what any state has done in the modern era — are not comparable to the ordinary, even seriously unjust, political disagreements believers face in most times and places, including the political and social questions this course's own Chapter 5 will engage. A student who reasons "Bonhoeffer resisted an unjust government, therefore I am justified in resisting this government I judge unjust" has skipped over exactly the question this lecture has tried to keep open: whether Bonhoeffer's own case was justified in the first place, and if so, on what basis specific enough that its scope of application can be judged honestly rather than assumed. This course does not resolve that question for its readers, and readers should be suspicious of any account — including any account in this course — that resolves it too quickly, in either direction.

5. Going to the Sources

Read the Barmen Declaration (1934), especially its first thesis, rejecting "false doctrine" that would have the church recognize "other events, powers, historic figures and truths" as sources of divine revelation alongside or instead of Jesus Christ. This document — not itself a text about resistance to tyranny in the specific, later sense this lecture has discussed, but the theological ground from which the Confessing Church's more conventional resistance grew — shows what Bonhoeffer's opposition to the regime looked like in its earlier, more clearly defensible form, before the harder questions of the conspiracy years arose.

Read also the closing chapter of Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship on "the image of Christ," where he writes about conformity to Christ's suffering as integral to discipleship rather than an unfortunate accident of it — language that, read after learning how his life actually ended, carries a weight the author himself could not fully have anticipated when he wrote it.