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285 Dietrich Bonhoeffer 34 0Born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau, Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis at Flossenberg concentration camp for his alleged connections to the July 20, 1944, plot on Hitler’s life. It was a cruel and meaningless act as the Third Reich was collapsing and, tragically, only two weeks later the camp was liberated by the United States Army. A young theologian of great promise, he first called attention to the problems of Christian ethics in his book The Cost of Discipleship (1937) with its famous attack on “cheap grace”—grace without discipleship. A leader in the “confessing church,” he was soon involved in the struggle against Naziism. He was imprisoned in April 1943 and remained so until his death. His courageous opposition to Hitler and his martyrdom have added luster and gravity to his already profound theological contributions. Because of his long imprisonment and early death, his work, though extensive, is incomplete. Nonetheless , Ethics, from which we are drawing, is a large collection and, along with his other writings, including Letters and Papers from Prison, has been highly influential. Bonhoeffer continues to command the attention of theologians and ethicists to this day. Selection 1: “The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates,” Ethics One of the questions Bonhoeffer raised was “How does the will of God become concrete?” He tried to avoid “general principles” for Christian ethics and his “mandates” are an attempt to safeguard the concrete commandment in and of Christ as the basis of Christian social action. While not dispensing with the traditional term, “orders” (the church, marriage, culture, and government) the term “mandate” helps to make the point that these structures of life are the creation of God’s command revealed in Christ, thus avoiding the suggestion in the logic of the term orders that they have their own intrinsic authority apart from Christ. For some Christians in that day the idea of government as an order of creation tended to militate against opposition to the Third Reich. The Commandment of God revealed in Jesus Christ embraces in its unity all of human life. Its claim on human beings and the world through the reconciling love of God is all-encompassing. This commandment en­ counters us concretely in four 286 # Part 9: Early- to Mid-Twentieth-Century Voices different forms that find their unity only in the commandment itself, namely, in the church, marriage and family, culture, and government. God’s commandment is not to be found anywhere and everywhere, not in theoretical speculation or private enlightenment , not in histori­ cal forces or compelling ideals, but only where it gives itself to us. God’s commandment can only be spoken with God’s own authorization; and only insofar as God authorizes it can the commandment be legitimately declared His. God’s commandment is to be found not wherever there are historical forces, strong ideals, or convincing insights, but only where there are divine mandates which are grounded in the reve­ lation of Christ. We are dealing with such mandates in the church, in marriage and family, in culture, and in government. By “mandate” we understand the concrete divine commission grounded in the revelation of Christ and the testimony of scripture; it is the authorization and legitimization to declare a particular divine commandment, the conferring of divine authority on an earthly institution. A mandate is to be understood simultaneously as the laying claim to, commandeering of, and formation of a certain earthly domain by the divine command. The bearer of the mandate acts as a vicarious repre­ sentative, as a stand-in for the one who issued the commission. Under­ stood properly, one could also use the term “order” [Ordnung] here, if only the concept did not contain the inherent danger of focusing more strongly on the static element of order rather than on the divine author­ izing, legitimizing, and sanctioning, which are its sole foundation . This then leads all too easily to a divine sanctioning of all existing orders per se, and thus to a romantic conservatism that no longer has anything to do with the Christian doctrine of the four mandates. If these misin­ terpretations could be purged from the concept of order, then it would be very capable of expressing the intended meaning in a strong and convincing way. The concept of “estate,” which has proven reliable since the time of the Reformation, also suggests itself here. However, in the course of history it has become so obscured that...

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