Bonhoeffer, the dramatic conclusion

[dagnabit]

OK, sorry about that. Hopefully I can hang on to the degree of lucid thought required for this to be finished today

Comments

[spritelyone]

I think that most people's principles have a clause for extreme circumstances, if thought about in a brutally honest fashion. Perhaps he felt that in this one circumstance, the evil of what he was planning to do was outweighed by the good that could have resulted from it in his estimation, and that the greater sin was to let it continue.

The movie example that comes to me would be ... Indecent Proposal, I think. A young newlywed couple is offered a million dollars for a rich man to have a date with the wife, with the clear implication that he will bed her. It's not the same thing, of course, but the re-evaluation of principals when faced with an extreme condition is present. I guess that movie with the couple who are given a box a few years ago would be another one. If they push the button, someone dies, but they get a million dollars, or something. These are both more "everything has an acceptable price" movies, but neither couple would have admitted to the possibility of choosing the presented choice before the stakes are

[dagnabit]

To some extent, of course you're right. He took an unselfish act which he'd previously labeled as sin that ultimately cost him his life so obviously in his mental calculations there was a degree of ends justifying the means, but I think there's more to it than just that. Instead of the regular couple in Indecent Proposal, make it Mother Teresa and have her non-hypocritially continue to write and speak in the same vein (although not specifically on chastity- Bonhoeffer stopped on the pacifism thread in his writing per se when the violent plotting started) while maintain a 2 year relationship with the rich guy and aborted several babies along the way. Wouldn't you be curious about the thought process? What went into the continued behavior? How it was justified? Did she think of it as something that needed justification

[wyvernfree]

I'd never heard of this man before and I know little about Protestant theology, but isn't it possible that he did indeed consider his own non-pacifist resistance activities to be a sin, and simply found them so necessary under the circumstances that he thought it was better to sin now and pray for forgiveness later?

[dagnabit]

I don't know, I think there's a lot more to it than that. It's more that his theological ethics expanded to include both aspects and I'm not sure how he pieced it together. Or maybe that expansion was there the whole time and his theology was borad enough to encompass both. I don't see how that can be, but since his life is so rigid in other areas I tend to think it's less situational per se and more a spiritual obligation he thought he was under to act. His thinking was something akin to a philosopher in it's complexity and I think there's a fully orbed school of thought in there somewhere. I just want to find out how it works.

[keithdb]

Novelist Spider Robinson wrote in one of his books (I can't remember which one off the top of my head, and I am paraphrasing here) that pacifists make the most feared terrorists, because if a pacifist reaches the point that they are willing to act, then they have reached the point where they are willing to do the unthinkable.

Or, to quote Popeye, "That's all I can stand, and I can't stands no more!"

[dagnabit]

That's a great paraphrase. Y'all are pacifists, right? I'll keep that in mind. :)