Clifford Green has written a very persuasive essay, like I don’t see how its thesis can be defeated, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his ‘conditional pacifism.’ Green underscores that while this pacificism, after a time of theological maturation, served as an ethos for Bonhoeffer; that it would be better to call Bonhoeffer’s mood as a ‘theological peace ethic.’ Certain pacifists, like in the Anabaptist tradition, seem to want to recoup Bonhoeffer for their own sort of fundamental pacifism, but this simply does not cohere with Bonhoeffer’s concrete situated ethic vis-à-vis what he calls ‘vicarious representative action.’ Green writes:

In a revealing autobiographical letter sent from his Finkenwalde seminary in 1936, Bonhoeffer wrote that he had recently experienced ‘a great liberation’ cuased by ‘the Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount’. As a result, he was devoted to renewal of the church and the pastorate, and ‘Christian pacifism’ was now ‘something utterly self-evident’ (DBWE 14: 134). Statements like this, and his book Discipleship, have led some to argue that Bonhoeffer was a pacifist who was committed to a consistent nonviolence, one who did not participate in, nor approve of, any plot to kill Hitler and overthrow his regime. Others have reasoned that, since Bonhoeffer was involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime, and did indeed approve the effort to kill Hitler, he must have abandoned his pacifism for just war thinking or something like Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. Neither approach interprets Bonhoeffer on his own terms or identifies the distinctive components of his peace ethic. Instead I propose that Bonhoeffer’s peace ethic is based on its theological components, not on a commitment to nonviolence, and that he does not abandon these fundamental convictions to work in the conspiracy which was planning the coup d’état.1

Green, right from the get-go (of his essay) problematizes the typical facile readings of Bonhoeffer. And this is it how it should be. Bonhoeffer wasn’t a tradition of thought, instead he was a dynamic person, who in turn represents a complex; just as his sitz im leben was highly complex. This is how he ought to be read. He shouldn’t be co-opted by the Anabaptist ‘peace trad’; conversely, he shouldn’t be hijacked by ‘just war theorists.’ The reality was that he was motivated, in a general mood, by the ‘peacefulness of the Gospel reality,’ while at the same time driven by that same Gospel message to be for the other (so his so-called ‘vicarious representative action’). It was this latter reality that led him into his work with the conspiracy to commit tyrannicide on Hitler and company.

Green’s essay in toto is excellent; you’ll have to read it for yourself. Until then let me close this by sharing a long passage (in fact the total conclusion for Green’s essay) which summarizes all that Green had heretofore provided argument for. Even in this summarization he offers some of his best evidence in regard to Bonhoeffer’s complex position with regard to his ‘peace ethic’; indeed, Green quotes some of Bonhoeffer’s best friends and compatriots in the ‘Confessing’ movement.

How best to summarize Bonhoeffer’s overall position, in his specific historical context, on peace and war, on resistance and tyrannicide? It would be a serious misunderstanding to read Bonhoeffer’s statement that ‘you can’t give a final answer to the question of whether a Christian can participate in war’, or the statement that he had not ‘made up his mind about participating in a war under different circumstances’, and then conclude that he stood in a neutral, uncommitted place, above the fray. It was not as if the choice about war and violence was always an open question for Bonhoeffer, which could be decided one way or the other. Rather, his default position is against war, and for peace, for nonviolence against violence, for the church condemning all war as sinful rather than justifying it. In other words, his peace ethic led his contemporaries who knew him personally to call him some sort of pacifist.

Karl Barth, later discussing in the Church Dogmatics when tyrannicide would be justified, wrote that Bonhoeffer belonged to the Christian circles who gave a definite positive answer in regard to Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer, he said, ‘was really a pacifist on the basis of his understanding of the gospel. But the fact remained that he did not give a negative answer to the question’ (Barth, 1961: 449).

Eberhard Bethge wrote that ‘after meeting Lasserre the question of … the biblical injunction of peace and of the concrete steps to be taken against warlike impulses never left him again’. But he was a ‘conditional pacifist’, who never became a thoroughgoing, unconditional pacifist, a grundsätzlich Pazifist (Bethge, 2000: 153, 127).

Similarly, Franz Hildebrandt, a lifelong pacifist and Bonhoeffer’s close friend, is a unique witness. When the news of his friend’s death also informed him that Bonhoeffer was involved in the conspiracy, he was surprised (Green, 2005: 46). But when later asked in an interview about Bonhoeffer’s pacifism he replied: ‘It was never a pacifism unqualified and held-to in principle’ (Kelly interview, cited in Green, 2015: 208).

Herbert Jehle—the physicist who attended Bonhoeffer’s lectures in Berlin, visited him frequently in London from Cambridge, and also visited him in Finkenwalde—said, ‘I became a pacifist exclusively through Dietrich’. In an interview he consistently spoke of Bonhoeffer as a pacifist without qualification (Rasmussen, 2005: 119). But when his widow was asked about Jehle’s attitude to Bonhoeffer in the conspiracy, she answered for him vigorously and without hesitation: ‘Oh, he had to do it!’ (Green, 2005: 46). In other words, Jehle, too, agreed with Bonhoeffer that, in Nazism and Hitler, Bonhoeffer and the coup planners faced an ultimate, last-resort situation.

Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, who became General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, reported that in 1939 Bonhoeffer discussed with him whether he should register as a conscientious objector in the impending war. To the question of how it came about that he became actively involved in the 20 July 1944 plot, Visser ‘t Hooft answered: ‘The very conviction which had made him a man of peace, led him into active resistance’ (Zimmerman & Smith, 1966: 194).

These contemporary witnesses all refer to Bonhoeffer’s ‘pacifism’. Bethge and Hildebrandt are quick to qualify it. So ‘conditional pacifism’ is probably as good a short phrase as any to summarize Bonhoeffer’s position. But unfortunately ‘pacifism’ does not point to the pervasive Christian foundation of his position as does the construct ‘theological peace ethic’. His peace ethic’. His peace ethic cannot be understood apart from its Christological, scriptural, ecclesial, and doctrinal dimensions. Nor can his attitude to the coup d’état conspiracy and tyrannicide be understood apart from his theological ethic of free responsibility in which it is embedded. Therefore we must combine the two phrases and say that Bonhoeffer’s Christian peace ethic was a conditional pacifism.2

For those who want to continue to maintain that Bonhoeffer can be read into the unconditional pacifist tradition, say of Anabaptist pedigree, you must work through and beyond Green’s argument; I don’t see how that is possible. It is better to simply accept that Bonhoeffer does not fit the nice and neat categories that some of us would like to romanticize him into. As I noted he is a complex man in a complex time; but who isn’t?

As I recall, even someone as evangelical as Norman Geisler came up with a category he called selectivism when it came to his preferred ethic. As much as the geeks will not countenance the idea of placing Geisler into a discussion about Bonhoeffer, and I don’t really like it either (maybe I’m a geek), I’d say Bonhoeffer’s ‘conditional pacifism’ fits pretty well with this sort of ‘selectivism.’ That notwithstanding, Bonhoeffer had a much deeper theological development behind his ‘conditionalism,’ which we can see in his so-called ‘vicarious representative action’; I’m a huge fan of this thinking. It recognizes that concrete personhood for the Christian is only found as that is grounded in Jesus Christ’s humanity. And it is out of this humanity, as the Christian participates through union with Christ, that they find their identity first from Christ’s humanity and then in the other [person]. This helps explain Bonhoeffer’s commitment to the conspiracy of tyrannicide (ie taking Hitler and his whole crew out). Bonhoeffer said with reference to Hitler, as reported by his friend Bell, “The murderer had to be stopped.” Bonhoeffer’s ethic for the other led him to concrete action in the face of total evil; this was motivated by his love for the other, as that first came from Christ.

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1 Clifford Green, “Bonhoeffer’s Christian Peace Ethic, Conditional Pacifism, And Resistance,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 345. 

2 Ibid., 359-60.