No Longer a Bystander
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hannah Arendt were both born in Germany in 1906. Bonhoeffer was executed on April 9, 1945 by direct order of Adolf Hitler for participating in a plot to assassinate his Fuhrer. Arendt died in New York City in 1975. Bonhoeffer was born to privilege, the son of Germany’s most famous psychiatrist, Karl Bonhoeffer, and his mother, Paula, was of German royalty. Arendt was raised in a secular Jewish home, she loved books, concepts, and was an independent thinker from an early age. Arendt studied with philosopher Martin Heidegger and wrote her PhD dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, under Karl Jaspers. Bonhoeffer was awarded his PhD from the University of Berlin, his work, Sanctorum Communio [Holy Community], was supervised by Dr. Reinhold Seeberg. Later Karl Barth called it a “theological miracle.”
Precocious would be an apt description for both Arendt and Bonhoeffer. Arendt was exceedingly independent from an early age which manifested itself in that she knew exactly what she wanted to study and from whom, and she went after it with all her might. Her infamous love affair with Martin Heidegger was part of that, as was leaving him to study with Karl Jaspers. Bonhoeffer went against family tradition and chose theology as a profession at age fourteen. He loved his Plutarch and his Luther Bible, once owned by his older brother, Walter. He recognized evil early, and was quick to step up and be counted against it.
Both grew up and were in school during the Great War (World War I). Germany lost and was humiliated through the Treaty of Versailles. This was Hitler’s primary apologetic to base his movement to return the fatherland to its once great glory. It would be fair to say that the German population was in favor of a stronger, unified, and more pure German people. Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 by President Paul von Hindenburg as head of the National Socialist German Workers Party. In February 1933, Hitler blamed a devastating Reichstag fire on the communists and suspended individual and civil liberties which silenced his political enemies with false arrests. This, says Hannah Arendt, is what caused her to stop being a bystander and decided to oppose Hitler and the Nazi cause at the age of seventeen. Arendt escaped across the open border into France where she lived for several years before arriving in New York City in 1941.
Two years earlier Bonhoeffer arrived in New York in order to sit out the Hitler regime. He was not able to speak freely in Germany. Neither was he able to teach, preach, publish, or escape being drafted into the Army. He walked the streets in great distress, and he only lasted twenty-seven days until he returned to Germany just a few weeks before Germany invaded Poland which officially started World War II. When Germany invaded France, Arendt was placed in an internment camp for Germans. It was called the Gurs camp in the Pyrenees with 6,000 other stateless Germans. She escaped in May of 1941 and was able, along with her husband, to get to New York City. Bonhoeffer was back in Germany, Arendt found “paradise” in New York. From their respective perches, they lived, wrote, spoke, and were no longer bystanders. One thing that was easier for Bonhoeffer and Arendt to recognize than it is now, two generations later, was the line between good and evil two generations later. It is true that most theologians in the theological world, and philosophers in the philosophical world, are bystanders. Either by disposition, or training, or fear, or ignorance, they simply watched. They only become alarmed when it is too late to stop it. The questions for an American Christian are, how do I know good from evil, when do I shut up, and when do I step up?
I have found these questions something between an internal struggle and a mental conundrum. Because my way of life has not been officially challenged, I have the luxury of mulling it all over and over in my prayers, mind, and self-conversation. On the other hand, as a follower of Christ, what does my discipleship to him call for? After all, discipleship is learning to live my life as though Jesus were living it. So this means, if Jesus were a 70+ year old writer, teacher, and leader in 2020, what would that look like? I suppose I could think, and have thought, that this is not an important question because no large group of people really care what I think about or do. But for me, regardless of audience or influence, it is a matter of conscience. Lesslie Newbigin helps me here.
“A preaching of the gospel that calls men and women to accept Jesus as Savior but does not make it clear that discipleship means commitment to a vision of society radically different from that which controls our public life today must be condemned as false.”
The gospel we preach determines the disciple we make. I don’t want to make more disciples who stand by, who watch, who wonder, and then ask, “What happened?” when a godless society rolls over their lives and crushes them. The first impulse of so many followers of Christ is to be a peacemaker; this is because they misunderstand peace and want to avoid the discomfort and anxiety they feel. I’m sure many a leader had wanted Stalin to go away, or Hitler, or Mao, or their next door neighbor. But before you get peace there is usually a fight. Isn’t this the way the bible ends? God himself must use violence to end evil. And the most immoral act of a Christ follower is to abdicate, to step back, to pat the tyrant on the back and say you will pray for him or her, maybe kindness will do the trick.
The pacifist argument is disconnected both from the reality of scripture and human experience. Bonhoeffer did his best to live out the Sermon on the Mount, he was attracted to the pacifist movement, but when the chips were down, he choose counter intelligence, planting bombs on Hitler’s airplane, blowing him up at a conference, and various other assassination attempts. Bonhoeffer even volunteered to kill Hitler with his own hands if necessary. This is why it troubles me that many Christian leaders find and look for ways to theologize their way out of action that would threaten their power or position. It could very well be, and probably is, that since American pastors have not encountered a world like this before, we are learning very fast and are making mistakes as we move forward. I just know that I no longer can be a bystander, I can’t ignore what is going on around me.
Bonhoeffer ended up at the end of a rope, but with his dignity and integrity intact. Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi Colonel that had been the primary implementer of the Final Solution, or extermination of the Jews during the Second World War. Israel decided to violate international law and to kidnap Eichmann from near his home outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1960. Arendt covered the trial and wrote the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem series of articles for the New Yorker Magazine. Eichmann was found guilty and was hanged within two hours of the verdict, his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean Sea outside of Israeli waters.
Arendt didn’t take the typical view concerning Eichmann. She didn’t see the extermination of millions of Jews as banal, which by definition means obvious and boring. She saw Eichmann as banal. This created a firestorm because she didn’t see Eichmann as more evil than most people. She said Eichmann’s crime was that he refused to think, to stop and reflect morally, on what he was engaged in. He wasn’t antisemitic, he was part of a system in which he broke no law. He did exactly what the authorities duly elected told him to do. Israel, in fact, broke laws - not only international law in kidnapping Eichmann, but their own laws of justice normally afforded an accused Israeli citizen that were denied Eichmann. It was a show trial in that they prosecuted him for crimes against humanity. It was not only a trial for the ages, it was for all Jews for all time. It was for history and the good of humanity. Israel appealed to a higher law that superseded the mere legalities of sovereign nations. Later Arendt accused Israel of the same hubris in their treatment of the Palestine people. With the formation of Israel as a state, this formerly stateless and rightless people became a nation. The people of Palestine were left out of the decision and even now are stateless. For all this and more, Arendt was attacked unmercifully by the New York academic and leftist elites. Arendt stood strong when the chips were down.
Where did Bonhoeffer and Arendt get the courage to take a stand? Bonhoeffer said it was God. For Hannah Arendt, God does not seem to be a major force in her life in any formal way. The closest one gets to an answer is this statement:
People go about, no one is lost-- Earth, heaven, light and forests-- Play in the play of the Almighty.
Ambiguous at best, but she did write her doctoral dissertation on “Love and Saint Augustine”.
She doesn’t seem to be antagonistic toward the divine, but mostly reflective and general in her acknowledgement of some personage greater or different than humans. Let’s just say that being made in the image of God, and in God’s good common grace, she found a resource to stay committed to the truth. She believed what she saw and what she heard, her instincts, which takes great courage when others around you are being cowered by convention.
Here is my plan. Like Bonhoeffer, I will take the opportunity to freely speak and, like Arendt, I will write what I think is true. And like both, live with the consequences. I doubt that I will encounter what they did, but my purpose is to help build and move forward the Kingdom of God through the tools that God has given me. I will strive to talk about the issues under the issues. Always reminding myself that God is over all things, his word is my guide, his calling my assignment. I will also take special care to work with the church first, the culture second, and the political world third. Because, as I do believe, I have written about in my books and spoken about on The Bonhoeffer Show podcast, religion is upstream, culture is midstream, and politics are downstream. If we plan to engage in our world, then all of these are important because they do affect our lives. But I will always remember what drives it all, the living God who loves us, calls us, and disciples us every day.
