Thanksgiving weekend, I visited Larry at OSG and found several booksby and about Bonhoefer , including the title of this post, subtitled “Essential Writings of German pastor and theologian who joined the resistance against Hitler and was executed in 1945”. The Editor’s introduction is inspiring in itself.
re: Fano, August 1934:
“Peace on earth is not a problem,” he said, “but a commandment given at Christ’s coming.” He attacked those attempts to soften that command by interjections in favor of national security and legitimate defense needs.
I found these words of Bonhoeffers’ extremely relevant to today. Although the circumstances are not of such extremity of evil, neither was it perceived to be as such at the time. People refused to believe that such could be the case. While I do not see the present tendencies leading to murders of the scale of the Holocaust, I see a different type of pressure emerging, one which is economic, socail. political, and like in Bonhoefer’s case, VERY much a SPIRITUAL issue. Even one in which the very soul of the American Church is at stake. While some lends their “theological support” and offer various “Biblical supports”, others avoid support but choose silence out of a desire to maintain “agreement” and focus on “common ground”. But where Christ and even faithful Church history seem most clear, to focus on issues of “commonality” while allowing insidious advances to break form the way of Jesus and construct systems of justification and capitulation to nationalist interests, is to suggest that our common ground in Christ rests upon selective aspects of Christ, while ignoring the more demanding and counter-cultural calls to stand up for the opppresed, oppose violence and war as a means to an end instead of “defense at last resort”. Even “defense at last resort leaves open the easy out of claiming to “exhausted alternatives” when these “attempts” were but a formality leading to the pursuit of a predetermined goal (the overthrow, occupation, and imperial establishment of a “democracy” which is but a cover for opportunism (which is having an increasingly hard time maintaining the myth of the “greatest good” sought by this campaign.
Read a larger conteext of the above quote below:
Fano, August 1934:
Peace on earth is not a problem,” he said, “but a commandment given at Christ’s coming.” He attacked those attempts to soften that command by interjections in favor of national security and legitimate defense needs. God, he retorted, did not say anything about that, but he did clearly enjoin peace among all peoples, The church, he declared, must be in the vanguard of this struggle for peace. “There shall be peace because Christ is in the world, that is to say, there shall be peace because there is a church of Christ for whose sake alone the whole world still exists And this church of Christ exists at one and the same time in all peoples, yet beyond all boundaries, whether national, political, social, or racial.”56 The real issue, he argued in that sermon, was whether the churches could justfy their existence if they did not take steps to halt the match toward war The churches must not mistake peace for security. “Peace means to give oneself altogether to the law of God, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not vying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.” He asked the ecumenical council finally to begin to act like the holy church of Christ by speaking out “so that the world, though it gnash its teeth, will have to hear, so that the peoples will rejoice becuase the church of Christ in the name of Christ has taken the weapons from the hands of their sons, forbidden war, proclaimed the peace of Christ against the raging world”
No Rusty Swords: Lectures and Notes 1928-1936, pp.291-296.AT