When Nazis are at the door

I was having breakfast with three dear believers when the “Nazi-at-the-door question” came up.

“Is lying ever justified?” one person piped up.

These conversations always split the room. Someone trots out Rahab (Joshua 2) and the midwives (Exodus 1). Someone counters that false witness is prohibited by the Ten Commandments. Someone else says the Canaanites and Pharaoh didn’t deserve truth. Then someone changes the subject and asks to pass the salt.

It occurs to me that there is a third way of seeing the question.

An old seminary professor of mine was much esteemed by the student body for his forthrightness. (By nature he is of a bent of mind that is impervious to flattery, that mildest form of deceit; it does not even compute with him.) He visited my house years ago, and I’m afraid I made him sing for his supper: “What would you have done if Nazi soldiers had knocked on your door and inquired about Jews in the house?”

The professor surprised me. “I would not have lied—and there is a practical reason for that. I am so unused to lying that I know my face would have turned beet red and given me away.”

“So what would you have done?” I pursued.

“I would have let them in and prayed a silent prayer for God to act,” he said.

What do you say about a man so sanctified in the area of the tongue that he is “unused to lying” and cannot fib without blushing? About someone so confident in God’s presence with power that he expects divine intervention? Where is the theological error in that? Has the prof’s faith gone a bridge too far? If you think so, then what of the time when Jesus was “amazed” at the faith of the centurion (Matthew 8:10), a faith that was more deeply developed than that of others Jesus had met on the road?

Now let us revisit the scene at the door in the Netherlands, France, or Germany, and consider what God can do in the moments between when Gestapo knock and jackboots cross the threshold. We need not imagine long, for there is a real-life example related in Corrie ten Boom’s autobiographical The Hiding Place:

The two sisters Corrie and Nollie have different philosophies on the Nazi-at-the-door scenario. Corrie leans toward deceiving for a greater good, while Nollie admits under interrogation that the woman Annaliese standing next to her in the living room is a Jew. Result? Nollie and Annaliese are hauled off to jail.

So truth-telling was not wise, right? Nollie should have lied, right? Joseph Fletcher’s situation ethics is vindicated, right?

Not so fast. Nollie and Anneliese are later released from jail. What do we say now? We can say, “To God, the Lord, belong deliverances from death” (Psalm 68:20).

And even if Nollie and Anneliese had not been set free but carted off to Ravensbrück concentration camp, what would that prove? That it was wrong for Nollie to follow her conscience? As Daniel’s three friends told their prison keepers, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us out of the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not …” (Daniel 3:17–18).

The late Pastor John MacArthur said about the Jericho prostitute who saved the spies: “If Rahab had told the truth, God’s purpose would have worked out in another way; there is no virtue in the lie.”

The virtue of Rahab lay in her faith, not her lie. The virtue of the midwives lay in their faith, not their lies. God’s pleasure in young David on the lam from Saul was in David’s faith, not his lie to the priest Abimelech (1 Samuel 21:2). How would these stories have turned out without the lies? It is not for us to know. As Aslan told Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, “No one is ever told what would have happened.”

In 2007, I was asked to sign a statement of faith in order to work at a certain Christian school. I disagreed with the last of the 12 points but signed anyway (my version of King Henry of Navarre’s “Paris is well worth a Mass”). Within two months, I was forced out of the teaching position by bizarre and unforeseen circumstances.

Christian author Andrew Murray (1828–1917) writes in Abiding in Christ, “A command is to be obeyed. The obedient scholar asks no question about possibilities or results.” Radical moment-by-moment abiding in Christ does not concern itself with outcomes. It is content to do this moment’s obedience and trust the future to God.