The Bonhoeffer Reader

42. What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth?

749 1. [DBWE 7:1, editor’s introduction.] 2. [DBWE 16:601, n. 1.] 42. What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth? DBWE 16:601–608 On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested for his participation in the conspiracy to overthrow the Third Reich. He was sent first to Tegel military interrogation prison in Berlin, where he spent the next eighteen months, then to a Gestapo prison in Berlin for four more months. He was moved briefly to Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar and then to Flossenbürg near the present-day German-Czech border. He was executed there on April 9, 1945.1 Throughout these last two years of his life, Bonhoeffer remained remarkably productive . The concluding portion of this Reader includes selections from his prison writings. In the unfinished essay below, Bonhoeffer asks, What makes speech true? He rejects a number of theories that ground truth in the intention of the speaker, the character of the speaker, the formal truth of the statement, and elsewhere. Instead, he argues, speech is true when it expresses reality. This makes telling the truth a sometimes complicated matter, since reality is complicated and, in its fallen state, contradictory . Speaking the truth can mean different things depending on the situation and the office of the speaker. This essay was no academic exercise, since Bonhoeffer composed it in prison as he was actively misleading his interrogators.2 But it would be a mistake to read this essay as opportunistic rationalizing by a man under extreme pressure. Rather, this essay is a case study of the framework Bonhoeffer outlined in Ethics, where he rejected a series of competing ethical visions in favor of his own account of responsible action as that which accords with reality as it is structured by God’s mandates. The Bonhoeffer Reader 750 601 602 603 3. [“Cf. DBWE 4:128–131 on Matt. 4:33–37, under the heading ‘Truthfulness,’” DBWE 16:602, n. 3.] From the moment in our lives in which we become capable of speech, we are taught that our words must be true. What does this mean? What does “telling the truth” mean? Who requires this of us? It is clear that initially it is our parents who order our relationship with them by demanding truthfulness;3 and accordingly this demand is also related and limited initially—in the sense our parents intend it—to this closest circle of the family. We note further that the relationship expressed in this demand cannot simply be reversed. The truthfulness of the child toward parents is by its very nature something different from that of parents toward their child. While the life of the small child lies open to the parents and the child’s word is to reveal all that is hidden and secret, the same cannot be true of the reverse relationship. In regard to truthfulness, therefore, the parents’ claim on the child is something different from that of the child on the parents. From this we can see immediately that “telling the truth” means different things, depending on where one finds oneself. The relevant relationships must be taken into account. The question must be asked whether and in what way a person is justified in demanding truthful speech from another. Just as language between parents and children is different, in accord with who they are, from that between husband and wife, between friend and friend, between teacher and student, between governing authority and subject, between enemy and enemy, so too is the truth contained in this language different. The objection that arises immediately, however, that persons owe truthful speech not to this or that person but to God alone, is correct as long as we do not thereby disregard that even God is not a general principle but is the Living One who has placed me in a life that is fully alive and within this life demands my service. Those who say “God” are not allowed simply to cross out the given world in which I live; otherwise they would be speaking not of the God who in Jesus Christ came into the world but rather of some sort of metaphysical idol. This is precisely the point, namely, how I bring into effect in my concrete life, with its manifold relationships, the truthful speech I owe to God. The truthfulness of our words that we owe to God must take on concrete form in the world. Our word should be truthful not in...