The Steep Price of Grace, Sojourners Magazine/February 2006

The Steep Price of Grace, Sojourners Magazine/February 2006

Larry Rasmussen wrote this article at Sojourners in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Deiterich Bonhoeffer. (You may need to register to read the article. It's free) It may seem strange that I, rather than Wendy, should be posting this. I guess I was lucky enough to find the article first.

As I understand it, Bonhoeffer found himself in the minority among his peers in the church in 1930's Germany, in that he opposed the Nazi regime. From the article:

Religious leadership, too, was largely conservative. Many Protestant clergy shared the nationalism of the Nazis, their disdain for the “loose morals†of the ’20s, and their hostility to the liberal-secular state. Hitler in turn deftly employed God-talk to describe Germany’s calling and destiny. In his very first radio address he declared that “the National Government would preserve and defend those basic principles on which the nation has been built.†These principles, he said, “regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.†“Positive Christianity†was the tag-phrase the party used for its platform and “Kinder, Küche, Kirche†(“Children, Kitchen, Churchâ€) became something of a mantra.

To me, this sounds chillingly familiar. I'm certainly not saying that the Bush administration and the Republican party are comparable to Hitler and the Nazi party. What I am saying is that I'm very unfomfortable with the way things are going in this country. The imfamous "slippery slope."

Again, from the article:

“We were resisting by way of confessing, but we were not confessing by way of resistance,†wrote Bethge in Friendship and Resistance. Or, in Bonhoeffer’s simple formulation from prison, “The church is only the church when it exists for others.†When the Confessing Church did not intervene for Jews beyond its own membership, for gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis, for the euthanized, Roma (“gypsiesâ€), and imprisoned socialists and communists, in that moment it forfeited being church.

Those of us who see these as dangerous times have an obligation to speak up, and do so loudly, or we share the blame for the consequences.

Don't get me wrong. I do not believe that those on the religious and political right are evil people, intent on destruction. I am quite sure that most of them hold their convictions as strongly and as honestly as I do. And they may be right. It's possible that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. But I still think I have an obligation to speak against the dangers as I see them.