Was Bonhoeffer wrong?

[struggle4progress]

Poll question: Was Bonhoeffer wrong?

Bonhoeffer was wrong
Issue Date: January 27, 2006
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH

... Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the German Lutheran theologian who was author of The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison. He studied briefly at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in 1930, and developed a theory of “religionless Christianity.” He taught that we should not use the concept of God to “fill in the gaps” in our understanding of the world, helped rescue some Jews and, along with several members of his large family, participated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was arrested and hanged in 1945. With the help of liberal Protestant theologians like Harvey Cox, Bonhoeffer’s ideas were rediscovered and became influential in the 1960s ...

Because he saw himself as a pacifist, Bonhoeffer avoided military service by joining the Abwehr, Germany’s counterintelligence service, where an inner circle was part of the conspiracy against Hitler. He was, says the documentary, a “double agent,” posing as a government loyalist while secretly contacting underground movements throughout Europe. Meanwhile, as a sort of pastor to the conspirators, several of whom were devout Christians, he helped them overcome scruples about lying, betraying their country and killing.

How does this film help us rethink the mess we are in today? 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 himself as a prophet: He is the savior who will rescue his people from an insidious worldwide menace. His “menace” is Bolsheviks and Jews. Germany is at war -- a war Germany started -- and the Führer has the right to do anything he wants to protect the Fatherland, he says. And to watch first Hitler surrounded by men in uniform 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 GIs is creepy indeed ...

Consider the traumas our nation endured when Lincoln, two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. were blown away. 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. The Israeli-targeted killings of Hamas leaders with rockets fired from helicopters kill everyone else in the car and bystanders as well. Our targeted bombings in Iraq aimed at Saddam and his generals missed Saddam and the generals and killed hundreds of civilians in the neighborhood. The July 10, 1944, plot, a bomb planted in a meeting room, missed Hitler and killed four others. In retaliation, Hitler purged and executed 5,000 opponents of his regime. Some were tortured to death ...

http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2006a/012706/012706r.php