The Bonhoeffer Reader

5. Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic

74 359 360 1. [DBWE 10:10.] 2. [DB-ER, 119–120.] 3. [DBWE 12:258–262 (Reader 128–134).] 5. Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic DBWE 10:359–378 As Clifford Green notes in the introduction to DBWE 10, “Bonhoeffer’s third lecture . . . contains some characteristic ideas that will continue to be important in the Ethics, his magnum opus, some views that will change through the next decade, and some that will mercifully disappear forever.”1 Among the characteristic ideas is the rejection of ethical principles, which are a way to “control my own relationship with God,” in favor of a life in “immediate relationship with God.” The latter, Bonhoeffer argues, is compatible with the paradoxical, amoral character of Christianity introduced in the previous lecture; the commandments of Jesus do not deliver moral principles but rather place the believer in immediate relationship to God where the human will can be guided by God’s will. Among the ideas that “mercifully disappear forever” are Bonhoeffer’s appeal to the people or nation (Volk) as an order of creation , and the “conventionally Lutheran”2 dismissal of the nonviolent Sermon on the Mount, both of which support Bonhoeffer’s justification of war. In the years following this lecture, Bonhoeffer deepened his appreciation of the Sermon on the Mount (see especially Discipleship) and spoke out against those who relied on orders of creation to justify war.3 In speaking today about basic questions of a Christian ethic, we do not intend to embark on the essentially hopeless attempt to present universally valid Christian norms and commandments applicable to contemporary ethical questions. We intend instead merely to examine and to participate in the peculiar movement of ethical problems in today’s world from the per- 75 Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic 361 4. [“Illegible,” DBWE 10:360, n. 3.] 5. [“The generational problem as a specifically German problem following World War I still informs the presentation in March 1933 (DBWE 12:268–282 [Reader 359–369]),” DBWE 10:361, n. 4.] spective of basic Christian ideas. The deepest reason why we confine ourselves in this manner is that, as we will see in greater depth later, there are not and cannot be Christian norms and principles of a moral nature. Only in the actual execution of a given action do the concepts of “good” and “bad” apply, that is, only in the given present moment; hence any attempt to explicate principles is like trying to draw a bird in flight. But more on that later. Ethics is a matter of blood and a matter of history. It did not simply descend to earth from heaven. Rather, it is a child of the earth, and for that reason its face changes with history as well as with the renewal of blood, with the transition between generations. There is a German ethic as well as a French ethic and an American ethic. None is more or less ethical than the other, for all remain bound to history and all are [. . .]4 decisively influenced today by the terrible experience of the world war and by how that war is viewed from various perspectives. The only common feature is that this experience has stirred up the depths of the people’s soul and that now things are everywhere emerging that have hitherto gone unnoticed and have remained concealed in the depths of the sea. In Germany the experience of war was joined by the experience of revolution, and the one absolutely unmistakable result seems to be that these historical events have prompted a hitherto unprecedented revolution in morals. If I see it correctly, we can distinguish four groups of people in working Germany today, each of which has arrived at a different ethical ideology through recent historical developments . The first are those whose years of development and maturation lie before the beginning of the war; then those whom sooner or later the war itself brought to maturity; then the generation of youth associated with the revolution, those whose awakening and development took place between 1918 and, say, 1923; and finally, let us not forget those to whom the future belongs, those who know war and revolution only from hearsay and who are now eighteen to twenty years old. Hence the rapid sequence of events spanning fewer than twenty years has produced four spiritual or intellectual generations, and if we are to understand the unprecedented confusion with regard to the ethical problems in their broadest scope within...