Responsibility and Guilt

If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? PROVERBS 24:11–12

Between 1940 and his arrest in 1943, Bonhoeffer worked on the book he regarded as his life’s main task: an Ethics. He never finished it. What survives is a collection of drafts and fragments, some polished and some rough, which Eberhard Bethge gathered and published after the war. They were written by a man who was at the same time carrying messages for a conspiracy against the head of his own state. That makes them both more urgent and more difficult to read than anything else he wrote. This chapter sets out the heart of his teaching on responsibility, and then turns, as honestly as it can, to the question every reader asks: was he right to join the plot?

One reality

Bonhoeffer began his Ethics by rejecting a way of thinking he believed had crippled the church. Christians, he thought, had come to divide life into two realms — the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the worldly, the church and the state — each with its own rules. The Christian lived in the first on Sundays and in the second the rest of the week, and the gospel had little to say about the second. Bonhoeffer insisted that in Jesus Christ God and the world have been reconciled, and that there is therefore only one reality: the reality of God made known in Christ, which embraces the whole world. There is no area of life where Christ is not Lord, and no area where the Christian may leave him behind.

And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. COLOSSIANS 1:17

Christ taking form

Ethics, for Bonhoeffer, was not first of all a set of rules but the question of how Christ takes form in his people in the real situations where they must act. The Christian does not ask what is good in general, but what God wills for him here and now, in the light of Christ — a patient, humble discernment rooted in Scripture and prayer.

My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you. GALATIANS 4:19

He also distinguished what he called the ultimate and the penultimate. The ultimate is God’s final word of grace in Christ — justification, the last and decisive word over every life. The penultimate is everything that comes before it: the ordinary human world of bread, justice, freedom, health. The penultimate is not the gospel, but it matters, because it prepares the way. A hungry man must be fed; a slave must be freed; a wronged man must have justice. Christians who care only about the ultimate and ignore the penultimate have misunderstood both.

The shape of responsible life

At the centre of the Ethics is a long section on what Bonhoeffer called responsible life. He described it in several strands. The responsible person acts for others, standing in their place, as Christ stood in ours. He acts in accordance with reality, not with an abstract ideal; he looks at the actual situation and the actual neighbour. He acts freely, not sheltering behind rules or orders, but answering for his own decision before God. And — this was the hardest part — he must sometimes be willing to take guilt upon himself.

Bonhoeffer argued that there are situations in which every choice is stained. To do nothing is itself a choice, and may be a guilty one. The man who keeps his own hands clean while others suffer has not escaped responsibility; he has only chosen his own innocence over his neighbour’s life. Christ, he said, did not stand aloof from human guilt, but took it upon himself for our sake. The responsible Christian may, in extreme circumstances, have to act in a way that incurs guilt, for the sake of others — and then he must not justify himself, but cast himself on the grace of God.

Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. JAMES 4:17

He also wrote movingly, in these pages, about the guilt of the church. The church, he said, must confess its own failure: its silence when it should have spoken, its cowardice before the powerful, its failure to defend the defenceless — above all the Jewish people who were being persecuted and murdered. That confession was written in the middle of the war, by a man who had tried to speak.

We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments. DANIEL 9:5

The conspiracy

Now to the question that cannot be avoided. Bonhoeffer, who a decade earlier had come close to Christian pacifism, lent his support to men who were planning to kill the head of state. How should Christians judge this?

Those who believe he was right point to the extremity of the situation. A regime was murdering the Jews of Europe, the sick and the disabled, and millions of others; it had waged aggressive war and was still waging it; there were no lawful means left to stop it. They point to a long Christian tradition, going back to the Middle Ages and the Reformation, which held that a tyrant who makes war on his own people may be resisted. They point to the Scriptures that command us to deliver those who are drawn to death, and to the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh. And they note that Bonhoeffer never claimed that the plot was righteous. He called it a guilt, and he accepted it as such.

But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive. EXODUS 1:17

Those who believe he was wrong, or who are unsure, have serious arguments too. They point to Romans 13, which calls the governing authority the minister of God and forbids resisting it. They point to his own teaching in Discipleship, that the disciple overcomes evil by suffering rather than by force. They note that the midwives disobeyed, but did not kill. They note that the conspirators themselves had mixed motives, and that some had served the regime for years. And they warn that Bonhoeffer’s example has since been claimed to justify violence in causes he would never have supported.

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. ROMANS 13:1

This book will not pretend to settle the question. Faithful Christians have come down on both sides, and some have stayed in honest uncertainty. But three things can be said with confidence. First, Bonhoeffer did not reach his decision lightly, or without prayer, or out of hatred. Second, he did not treat it as a precedent or a principle for others to follow; he treated it as a terrible exception, carried out under a guilt that only grace could cover. Third, no one living in a free country, with lawful means of opposing wrong, can claim his example as a warrant for their own violence. Whatever the Ethics permits, it permits only in the last extremity, and it never calls it clean.

Forgiveness for the responsible

The Ethics ends where all of Bonhoeffer’s theology ends: in grace. The responsible person who acts and incurs guilt does not stand before God on the merit of his choice. He stands, like every sinner, on the mercy of Christ.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. PSALM 130:3–4

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where have you divided your life into sacred and secular? Choose one secular area — your work, your money, your politics — and ask what it would mean for Christ to be Lord there.

2. Is there a situation in which you have kept your own hands clean while someone else paid the price? What would responsibility require?

3. Name one penultimate need in your community — food, justice, safety — and do something about it.

4. Read Romans 13:1–7 and Acts 5:29 side by side. Pray for wisdom to know how to honour authority and when to obey God rather than men.

5. Pray for Christians who live under tyranny today, and who must make decisions you will never face.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You are Lord of all things, and there is no part of the world where You are not King. Forgive me for keeping You in a corner of my life.

Give me courage to act responsibly for others, and not to shelter behind my own innocence when my neighbour is in need.

Where every choice is hard, give me wisdom. Where I have acted and been wrong, give me grace to confess it without excuse.

Forgive Your church for its silences. And let every one of us, whatever we have done or failed to do, find refuge in Your mercy alone. Amen.