"Uncertain Principles"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

04/09/06

Why this sermon today? As I indicated in the newsletter, I found last Sunday’s Fusion very frustrating. We had a significant topic, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and a very knowledgeable speaker. I was prepared. There was a lot to talk about. My guest, however, was one with a deficit in terminal facilities. I was able to work in only three questions in the half hour. It took him 8 minutes to respond to how he became interested in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and about the same for the subsequent questions. There was no time to get to the meat of the subject. [I also had an opportunity to be with him in a small gathering, and his performance was the same.] I don’t think it was a “bad” program, but it fell far short of my expectations.

Today, April 9^th, is also the 61^st anniversary of the hanging of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by the Nazi’s. This Sunday marks the beginning of Easter week, and Bonhoeffer’s life and death were profoundly affected by the example of the life and death of Jesus. It is also the week of Passover, a feast of freedom, and particularly a Jewish feast. Bonhoeffer’s life was indelibly marked by his concern for freedom and justice for Jews. Finally, I believe that many of Bonhoeffer’s writings appear as if they could have been written today. The situations he was addressing are appallingly similar to what we need to be addressing today. Hence, this sermon.

This is an enormous subject, only the surface of which we can scratch this morning, but I want to share with you what I had hoped we could share last week on Fusion. Even being fully in charge of the time, it will nto be easy. I will say something about Bonhoeffer’s life, something about his theology, and then something about his relevance for today – positively and negatively.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany on February 4^th, 100 years ago. He and his twin sister, Sabine, were the 6^th and 7^th of the 8 children of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer. His father became a very prominent psychiatrist in Berlin; his mother, the daughter of a noted historian and of a student of Franz Liszt, was university educated. She insisted on home-schooling her children because, she said, “Germans have their backbones broken twice in life: first in the schools, secondly in the military.

His family was “religiously indifferent” so they were perplexed when Dietrich, at the age of 14, announced that he was going to be a minister. One of his older brothers insisted that was not a worthy occupation since the church was weak, silly, irrelevant, and unworthy of his commitment. Bonhoeffer’s response, we are told, was “If the church is really what you say it is, then I shall have to reform it.”

He was a brilliant student. He began his studies at the noted seminary at Tübingen and earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1927. In 1928 he served as vicar of a German parish in Barcelona. In 1930 he spent a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was not impressed with American religion – he felt the liberals at Union looked down their noses at the fundamentalists and that they were so engaged in being agreeable with one another that there was a low level of intellectual challenge. He observed, “A certain leveling in intellectual demands and accomplishments” dominated so intellectual competition and ambition were lacking, making innocuous the work done in seminar, discussion, and lecture. He believed that “the truth” emerged only when there was intensive debate. Interestingly, while he was at Union, Bonhoeffer taught Sunday School at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, became enamored of spirituals, and had his views of race and social justice shaped.

Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1931 and became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. As Nazism rose, there was tension in the German Evangelical Church. The German church had been heavily influenced by nationalism and obedience to state authority and there were many who saw Hitler as a savior figure. There was a major debate over what was called the “Aryan paragraph” which was proposed as an amendment to the church’s policies. It said that no one who was not Aryan could become a minister or teacher. What this meant was that no converts from Judaism would be acceptable. Some, like Bonhoeffer saw this as a violation of scripture and an intrusion of government into religion. At this point in his life, Bonhoeffer was not as committed to freedom for Jews, as he was with the right of Christians to convert them, and that conversion counted. That view changed later. Bonhoeffer and several of his colleagues resigned from the German Evangelical Church and formed what became known as the “Confessing Church.” That church held out longest against the Nazi’s, although many of its ministers and members eventually compromised.

In a 1933 essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question,” Bonhoeffer wrote that the church had three responsibilities: to fight state injustice and call the state to responsibility; to help the victims of injustice, whether or not they were church members; and “not only to help the victims who have fallen under the wheels, but to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself” to end the injustice.

Two weeks after Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer used his radio program to attack him, saying that he was not a genuine leader, but a false one. He also contacted ecumenical leaders about what was happening in Germany and urged them to recognize the Confessing Church as more Christian than the German Evangelicals who had sold out to racism. Bonhoeffer was not popular and was in jeopardy.

He turned down a pulpit in Berlin in 1933 and went to England where he became minister of two German-speaking congregations consisting mostly of people who had fled the Nazi’s. He suggested this was his journey into the desert.

In 1935 he decided he had to go back to Germany to head a Confessing Church seminary. The problem was that the ministers he influenced found it hard to get work because they were too outspoken in dangerous ways. The seminary was shut down by the Nazis in September of 1937 and 27 of Bonhoeffer’s students had been arrested by November.

Bonhoeffer traveled secretly to the small towns were his students were preaching, but limited his public statements. In 1938 he spoke of Judaism as equal to Christianity in God’s eyes – this at a time when the Lutherans were discussing removing the Old Testament from the Bible. Bonhoeffer was banned from Berlin by the Gestapo and in September 1940, he was forbidden to speak in public.

Friends around the world urged Bonhoeffer to leave Germany while he could, and in 1940 he came to the US to teach at Yale. He was here only a couple of weeks before he decided that it was cowardly for him to leave and that his place was in Germany with the German people, speaking out against tyranny. He said, “I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. . . I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share in the trials of this time with my people.”

Bonhoeffer had strong pacifist leanings and, in fact, had planned to go to India to study with Gandhi. He, however, went to work as a double agent with the German Intelligence, the leadership of which was working to overthrow Hitler. [I have found no explanation of how someone who had been as outspoken as Bonhoeffer was allowed in the Intelligence service. Apparently the leaders of the resistance had enough power to get him in.] He was involved in a program to get Jewish refugees out of Germany and when 14 surfaced in Switzerland in 1942, the Gestapo traced the money and their papers back to Bonhoeffer. He was arrested for that and for using his intelligence position to work against the regieme, and was put in Tegel prison in 1943. With his Christ-like personna, he established close relationships with some of the guards and was able to write his famous “Letters and Papers from Prison” and send them to friends, and to receive visitors, some of whom were resistance leaders. Even from prison he remained in contact with the resistance leaders and was involved in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. When the Gestapo discovered his involvement, he was moved to the Gestapo prison, and then to Buchenwald in February of 1945, and finally to Flossenburg, an extermination camp. Even with the end of the war in sight, Hitler was determined to get rid of those who had plotted against him. Bonhoeffer and two of his co-conspirators were forced to walk to the gallows naked and were hung and their bodies burned on April 9, 1945, just days before the camp was liberated. The SS doctor who witnessed the execution spoke of Bonhoeffer as “devout. . . brave and composed. I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

I have survived 41 years in parish ministry in spite of the fact that I am bored to tears by most of what is called theology. I can take a complex theological sentence, diagram it, contemplate it, and still find it to be Greek to me, even if it is allegedly written in English. It is like my trying to understand advanced physics, contrapuntal theory, or linguistics. I am sure there is something there, I respect those who make their livelihoods dealing in it, but I cannot relate much of it to the world in which I live. There are ways in which much of Bonhoeffer’s writings fall into this category. What makes me feel better about my ignorance is the reality that those who claim to be experts come to radically different conclusions about what Bonhoeffer was saying.

He is held up as a great prophet by many very Evangelical Christians, and by many radical Christians. He is attacked as a heretic by some Evangelical Christians. Dr. G. Archer Weniger ,a fundamentalist wrote:

If there is wholesome food in a garbage can, then one can find some good things in Bonhoeffer, but if it be dangerous to expect to find some nourishment in a garbage can, then Bonhoeffer must be totally rejected and repudiated as blasphemy. It is worse than garbage.

Another conservative commentator described Bonhoeffer as “in reality a practical atheist and a religious humanist who denied virtually every cardinal doctrine of the historic Christian faith.” Obviously, Bonhoeffer should have some appeal to us.

But, then some radicals reject Bonhoeffer as dangerously orthodox. The difference in evaluation is in part, of course, due to apparent changes in his theology over time. The Bonhoeffer of the “Letters and Papers from Prison” is not the same as the young Bonhoeffer of his early theological dissertations. I am unable to completely track even some of the later writings. His Christology does not fully make sense to me, but I am compelled to respect a belief system that enables one to endure what he endured, as he endured it, without faltering.

While he was in prison, as a result of seeing the Christians of Germany roll over to Hitler, he came to the conclusion that the time of religion was past. “What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.” The problem, as he saw it, was that God had been used by the church for so long to explain the things that were not explainable, except that science was explaining them and religion was trying to hold on to the old ignorance as a way of maintaining itself and its power. The God of traditional religion had become more and more irrelevant. Religion, as he saw it, had encouraged people to turn away from responsibility and away from this world rather than engage in it. He saw the gospels as a challenge to people to live with the kind of courage that Jesus had demonstrated – Jesus being, in his eyes, God coming to the earth as helpless rather than powerful.

The church, as he saw it, marketed “cheap grace.” It told people that if they said the right things and performed the right rituals, they would know grace. Cheap grace is:

. . . the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

What he meant by “Jesus Christ, living and incarnate,” as I understand it, was people manifesting the presence of Jesus, making him real by being willing to live for others

The other, expensive, real grace required people to be willing to renounce the ways they had lived and to risk their comfort and even their lives to pursue the truth and to live according to it. The religious establishment did not teach this, it encouraged turning one’s back on integrity.

In his book, Ethics, which was publised after his death, Bonhoeffer insisted that ethics was not a theory, but a way of living in which one acts in response to evil on the basis of what one knows to be “the will of God.” If we do not respond to evil, then we are part of it.

The first is resorting to reason. That demands that we calculate all the facts and details and carefully judge how to proceed as objectively as possible. The problem is that the evil can manipulate the system and the rationalist becomes powerless.

The second is the moral fanatic who believes that purity of will and respect for rigid laws. Because real world situations do not fit within rigid laws, the fanatic is also manipulable by the evil ones.

Third is the man or woman of conscience. He insists that theya re really seeking peace of mind or a return to the way things were. They are therefore subject to quick solutions because they want to feel good about themselves and the world. They don’t understand that there are times when a bad conscience may be more moral. (I suspect he is speaking here of, for instance, participating in a plot to assassinate a leader.)

Fourth is an emphasis on freedom of the kind of freedom that enables one to turn one’s back on principles and conscience to work out compromises with evil.

Fifth comes private virtue which holds that remaining pure and uninvolved saves your soul, in spite of what might be happening around you. He insists, you either oppose the persecution of the innocent or you share in it.

The last problematic position is that of “duty.” If we feel like we must obey the authorities whatever they tell us to do, we can be trapped in evil.

The true ethical stance, as he sees it, is acting in accordance with the model of Jesus’ selfless behavior in the Christian scriptures. It is not about you, about making you look good or feel good, it is about the love of neighbor. Bonhoeffer says, “. . . what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbor.” Bonhoeffer acknowledges that we can never be certain that what we are doing is right, and we cannot try to justify our actions. We may need to feel guilt because of our uncertainty, but that’s ok. “If I refuse to bear guilt for charity’s sake, then my action is in contradiction to my responsibility.”

This is great Liberal stuff! It comes down to the individual following the inner voice rather than the crowd. This is what gave Bonhoeffer the strength to stand up against the Lutheran clergy and then the compromising Confessing clergy, and the great bulk of the German people, because he knew in his heart that Hitler was a false leader who stood against what was right, which is to say what Jesus had taught by his example. This is great stuff!

But let me share with you my misgivings about this great teacher’s message – let me tell you why I referred to “uncertain principles” in my sermon title.

There is a sense in whcih Bnonhoeffer is speaking to today. As Raymond Schroth pointed out in the National Catholic Reporter:

Every day we read the news from Washington and Iraq – both denials of and justifications for torture from the same administration, condemnations of nations thatw ould be nuclear powers while we ourselves develop more deadly weapons, all without a peep from our so-called religious guides.. . . We can’t help noticing that the Gestapo taps citizens’ phone lines, tortures its prisoners and slaps suspects into jail without lawyers or trials for years. Hitler describes himselfg as a prophet: He is the savior who will rescue his people from an insidious world wide menace. His “menace “ is Bolshevism and Jews. Germany is at war – a war Germany started – and the Fuhrer has the right to do anything he wants to protect the fatherland, he says. And to watch first Hitler surrounded by men in uniform and goose-stepping and “Heiling” and then to see our own Field Marshall Bush in his military leather jacket propped up against a photo-staged background of cheering GI’s is creepy indeed.

In no way does the Sermon on the Mount make wiggle room for political assassination. . . . The argument against assassination is the basic Kantian principle that underlies the Geneva Conventions against torture: For us to kill Saddam Hussein or any world leader, particularly because the leader is the embodiment of his society, is a moral invitation to our enemies to do the same to us. Furthermore, assassinations almost always fail to achieve their purpose and they kill the innocent as well.

My problem is deeper and less specific than that. For the sake of argument, let us assume that George Bush does honestly believe that God told him that he needed to remove Saddam Hussein because of the evil he was doing. How does this differ from Bonhoeffer’s suggestion that we must throw ourselves into the spokes of the wheel that is grinding the innocent. The fanatics who were responsible for what happened on 9/11, whether they were Muslim as most believe, or American political leaders as some of us believe, whichever, believed that what they were doing was responding to what they knew was a greater right. And as Bonhoeffer suggests, maybe they even had some guilt, some misgivings, but they nonetheless acted in accordance with the voice within to combat what they saw as evil.

In a moment I am going to conclude with a prose poem that Bonhoeffer wrote while in prison. I found it on a website that celebrates Anita Bryant’s courage in standing up against “Florida Sodomites” and Lindberg’s standing against the Jews who he believed were trying to get us into World War II. The fanatics who murder doctors who perform abortions also believe they are acting in accordance with the example of Jesus. Is this not where Bonhoeffer’s ethics lead?

There are no easy answers. There are no pure heroes. We can never be certain that we are right. But being human beings living in thsi world compels us, nonetheless to stand up for what we believe is right.

No good at all can come from acting before the world and one’s self as though we knew the truth, when in reality we do not. This truth is too important for that. .

But those are not the words with which I want to conclude there are these entitled Stations on the Road to Freedom:

If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things to govern your soul and your senses, for fear that your passions and longings may lead you away from the path you should follow. Chaste be your mind and your body, and both in subjection, obediently, steadfastly seeking the aim set before them; only through discipline may [one] learn to be free."
Daring to do what is right, not what fancy may tell you valiantly grasping occasions, not cravenly doubting - freedom comes only through deeds, not through thoughts taking wing. Faint not nor fear, but go out to the storm and the action, Trusting in God whose commandment you faithfully follow; freedom exultant will welcome your spirit with joy. . . .