Bonhoeffer's Agonizing Choice

Today's Scripture

Proverbs 24:11-12 — "Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, 'Behold, we did not know this,' does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?"

Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8 — "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven... a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace."

The Big Idea

Dietrich Bonhoeffer loved the Sermon on the Mount, taught Christian nonviolence — and then joined a conspiracy to kill Hitler. He never called that decision righteous. He called it guilt he chose to carry, trusting God's mercy. Today is about what faith does when every available option is stained: it acts responsibly, refuses to excuse itself, and falls on grace.

Reflection

The pacifist who joined a plot

By his early thirties, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the most committed voices for Christian nonviolence in Europe. He had written The Cost of Discipleship, a fierce book on the Sermon on the Mount. He dreamed of traveling to India to learn nonviolent resistance from Gandhi. Friends arranged a safe teaching post for him in New York in 1939 — and he sailed home to Germany almost immediately, writing that he could not help rebuild Christian life after the war if he did not share the trials of his people during it.

What he shared was a nightmare. Jews were being stripped of everything, then loaded onto trains. Most of the official church looked away, or worse, draped the swastika in Christian language. Bonhoeffer helped lead the breakaway Confessing Church, trained pastors in secret, and watched colleagues disappear. Already in 1933, within months of Hitler taking power, he had told the church its duty was not only mercy toward evil's victims:

"We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "The Church and the Jewish Question"

Scripture had already said as much. Proverbs 24:11-12 — "Rescue those who are being taken away to death... If you say, 'Behold, we did not know this,' does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?" The verse demolishes the favorite alibi of bystanders: we didn't know. God weighs hearts; he knows what we knew. The Hebrew midwives knew it too — ordered by Pharaoh to kill newborn boys, Exodus 1:17 says they "feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded." Sometimes obeying God means defying the state. And James closes every exit: James 4:17 — "whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin." Doing nothing is also doing something.

So Bonhoeffer used his connections in military intelligence to join the resistance — including, eventually, the plot to assassinate Hitler.

No clean hands

Stop and feel the bind he was in. Charles Spurgeon coined a proverb for everyday temptation:

"Of two evils, choose neither." — Charles Spurgeon, The Salt-Cellars

It is wonderful advice for ordinary life: when both options are sinful, walk away. But what if there is no away? For Bonhoeffer, "neither" was itself a choice — and trains kept leaving for the camps. Stand aside, and he shared the guilt of silence. Join the plot, and he took up the very violence Jesus had taught him to renounce. The wisdom writer's words stop sounding philosophical here. Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8 — "For everything there is a season... a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace." Ecclesiastes does not celebrate that line. It states it, with a kind of grief: in a broken world, such times come.

Here is what makes Bonhoeffer's witness so unusual. He refused every available way of making himself feel clean. He did not call the plot a holy crusade. He did not loudly invoke yesterday's just war criteria to declare himself righteous — an assassination plot by private citizens fails the "legitimate authority" test, and he knew it. He did not pretend the Sermon on the Mount had stopped being true. In the unfinished book he was writing during those years, he described what a responsible person does in such a moment:

"When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Read the last clause again. Before God, he claims nothing — no merit, no loophole, no plea bargain. Only grace. Four centuries earlier, Martin Luther had stood before the emperor at Worms and refused to take back what he had written, finishing with words Bonhoeffer knew well:

"I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me." — Martin Luther, Speech at the Diet of Worms (1521)

God help me. That is the posture: act with full seriousness, then throw yourself on mercy. It is the opposite of "the ends justify the means." The ends, for Bonhoeffer, justified nothing; they only made action unavoidable. The justifying would have to come from God or not at all.

Hope at the bottom of the pit

The plot failed. The bomb placed under Hitler's table in July 1944 wounded him but did not kill him, and the conspirators were hunted down. Bonhoeffer, already in prison, was implicated. On April 9, 1945 — three weeks before Hitler's death and a month before the war's end in Europe — he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp, at thirty-nine. The camp doctor who watched him kneel in prayer wrote later that he had hardly ever seen a man die so submitted to God. His last recorded words, sent through a fellow prisoner to a friend, were these:

"This is the end — for me, the beginning of life." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, April 9, 1945

How can a man walk to the gallows like that, carrying an unresolved guilt he never explained away? Only if grace is real. Another prisoner of those same camps testified that it is. Corrie ten Boom's family hid Jews in Holland — and notice, her watchmaker father lied to the Gestapo, broke the law, forged ration cards, all to obey Proverbs 24. She ended up in Ravensbrück, where her sister Betsie died. Out of that darkness she carried one sentence:

"There is no pit so deep, that God's love is not deeper still." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

Most of us will never face their choices, but we know smaller versions: the decision where someone gets hurt no matter what you do; the loyalty you could not keep without breaking another. The parent who takes the job to feed the family and misses the years. The friend who reports the secret and loses the friendship. Paul knew the feeling of being trapped in a self that cannot get clean. Romans 7:24-25 — "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" Notice that Paul does not answer the question with a technique. He answers it with a person.

The psalmist had already discovered why that person can be approached at all. Psalm 130:3-4 — "If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared." If God kept score the way we keep score, no one could stand — not the bystander, not the resister, not you. The shock of the psalm is that forgiveness lives with God as part of his character, not as a loophole he occasionally allows.

So John tells us what to do with real guilt — not excuse it, not carry it forever, but confess it. 1 John 1:8-9 — "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves... If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Confession is simply telling God the truth he already knows. Bonhoeffer's whole life of resistance was built on the freedom of a man who had stopped pretending.

The true guilt-bearer

Why was Bonhoeffer's hope not wishful thinking? Because at the center of the Christian faith stands someone who did, perfectly, what Bonhoeffer attempted brokenly: he took guilt that was not his and carried it to God.

2 Corinthians 5:21 — "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." The sinless one was treated as the guilty one, so that the guilty could be treated as righteous. John Stott, the great London pastor, spent a lifetime studying the cross and boiled it down to this:

"The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man." — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

This is why a Christian can act in a morally impossible situation without either paralysis or self-deception. We do not need our record to be spotless, because our standing was never going to rest on our record. Romans 8:1 — "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Notice what that frees you from: the endless inner courtroom, where you replay the gray decision and argue your own case at 2 a.m. The trial is over. The verdict came down at the cross. Bonhoeffer could carry guilt to the gallows because he knew Someone had already carried it further — all the way down, and out the other side.

The gospel does not promise us clean hands in a dirty world. It gives us something better: a Savior with scarred ones, who holds ours anyway.

Going Deeper

Think of one decision in your life that still feels gray — where you chose, someone was hurt, and you have replayed it ever since. Tonight, write it in a single honest paragraph: what you knew, what you chose, what it cost. Then pray 1 John 1:9 over the page — confessing what was sin without explaining it away — and write Romans 8:1 across the bottom. You are not the judge of that day anymore. The Judge has scars, and he is faithful and just to forgive.