Loving your victim and enemy neighbors

The question, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would insist, isn’t whether to love my neighbor. It isn’t even whether to love my enemy as my neighbor. The question is how to love when one neighbor—whom I am called to love—is kicking to death another neighbor—whom I am also called to love—without cause. The duty of neighbor love can be simply carried out when the situation is without complexity—that is, when there isn’t a competing duty. When duties compete, it sometimes seems that the degree to which one duty is followed is the degree to which the other duty is necessarily shirked. This tension is at the heart of Todd Komarnicki’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. Some critics insist the tension is overplayed and the manner of its resolution false.

In question is the extent of Bonhoeffer’s connection to a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer, while not trivializing the complexity of the matter, has no qualms linking its eponymous hero directly to assassination plots—better defined as tyrannicide attempts. Detractors, less sanguine, insist that while Bonhoeffer clearly was aware of various plots to kill the führer, there’s no hard evidence proving his personal involvement. They find assertions to the contrary unsettling. They shouldn’t.

For starters, Bonhoeffer’s willingness to oppose Hitler even to the point of actively helping to kill him should give no offense. Hitlerism, let us never forget, was responsible for the systematic murder of Jews, Romani, political dissidents, homosexuals, Slavs, the disabled, and religious minorities, among others, and launched a war that would ultimately claim well north of 40 million lives in the European theater alone.

To get some sense of what these numbers mean, consider the following. I attended the 50th anniversary commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the end of the formal ceremonies, the names of all the lost were read over the loudspeaker. I lingered for several hours afterward. The whole while, the litany of names accompanied me. Name, after name, after name. I later worked out how long that terrible recitation would continue. Reading the names of all the approximately 1.2 million victims at an estimated rate of one name per second would have taken nearly 14 days. That’s from just one camp. Ratchet it up to 17 days if you read the names of the Jewish children annihilated throughout Nazi-occupied lands. Bump that to just under 70 days to read the names of all 6 million Jewish victims.

In the face of such an onslaught, it was clear to Bonhoeffer that the duty of love is simple: It requires that we rescue the victims. Less clear is how this duty squares with Bonhoeffer’s pacifist convictions. Critics of Bonhoeffer charge that in resolving this tension, the film abandons the Bonhoeffer of deep theological conviction for a caricature willing to “leave behind prayer for conspiracy, Bible teaching for political espionage, and theology for activism.” It’s an odd charge, for the film continually portrays a prayerful Bonhoeffer struggling through Scripture to know how to walk obediently in the way of Jesus in a world in which some neighbors are hell-bent on annihilating other neighbors. Bonhoeffer doesn’t abandon any of the components of Christian devotion. He simply acknowledges that “we can’t keep pretending that praying and teaching is enough.”

This doesn’t mean that critics are right when they insist that Bonhoeffer reduces its hero to “a man for whom moral convictions are a flexible and useful tool, a man whose actions are determined … by perceived historical necessity.” This is to misunderstand Bonhoeffer himself. Necessity—reality, he continually calls it—itself imposes normative claims on human—including Christian—behavior. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “The attention of responsible people is directed to concrete neighbors in their concrete reality. Their behavior is not fixed in advance once and for all by a principle but develops together with the given situation.”

This is not, as some fear, situationalism—nor consequentialism or relativism. It’s not freedom of choice regardless of what is chosen. Rather, it’s a careful contextualism—moving from disembodied principles to the careful pursuit—grounded in wise reflection on experience, shaped by the Word of God in continual prayer—of the way principles work in specific moments. It is trying to determine the will of God to do “something relatively better over something relatively worse” when the absolute good is not possible. It is recognizing that while one must love both the victim neighbor and the enemy neighbor, one cannot love both in exactly the same way in exactly the same moment. Sometimes, the answer to prayer might be an assassination plot.

For Bonhoeffer, supporting tyrannicide as a means of saving the innocent must have manifested this kind of free responsible action. It was love in the last resort. Bonhoeffer is all about how to be a follower of Christ when, as he puts it, “Hallelujah won’t do all the work.”