Bonhoeffer and Just War

Here's a wonderful essay by Ragan Sutterfield on the use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's legacy in today's just war debates.  An excerpt:

Bonhoeffer's life is wrapped in the dilemma of faithfulness. And we who come after him are left with that dilemma no more clearly resolved. Are we to follow Bonhoeffer in his calls toward peacemaking, or are we to go his way of drastic action for the sake of justice? Some would-be followers deny that there is any ambiguity in his example. They make him a pacifist and only a pacifist, or a model just warrior who rejected his earlier idealism. To step out of line with either position is a step that demands correction.

When John Buchanan, editor of The Christian Century, wrote that Bonhoeffer "move[d] to the Niebuhrian conclusion that the evil of Nazism should be opposed on Christian ethical grounds," he was upbraided by a reader who responded that "there is no hint that Bonhoeffer ever justified this choice on the grounds of Niebuhrian 'Christian realism' or denied that pacifism was the most faithful Christian commitment." In the same vein, Walter Wink wrote a short piece in Sojourners reminding readers that "American thinkers who have used Bonhoeffer as a way of justifying the just war theory overlook his clear statement that he does not regard this as a justifiable action—that it's a sin—and that he throws himself on the mercy of God."

The essay also details the conflicting applications of Bonhoeffer's work by Jean Bethke Elshtain and Stanley Hauerwas, concluding with a point of agreement:

While Bonhoeffer sees the state as an ordained "restrainer" that establishes and maintains order, it is the Church that must remind the state of its obligations. It is the Church's existence as a truth-telling community that gives it this role. "The failure of the church to oppose Hitler," Hauerwas writes, "was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world." And it was in the context of this failure that Bonhoeffer took action at the risk of incurring guilt through violence.

On the imperative of truth-telling Elshtain and Hauerwas agree, and it is here that they are closest to Bonhoeffer. But how can we begin to speak truthfully? Elshtain calls us to the task of describing things as they are. The attacks of September 11 were clearly murder, an act of evil that we must respond to. But Hauerwas is more cautious; with Bonhoeffer, he reminds us that telling the truth sometimes requires more silence than the world would like. "No good at all can come from acting before the world and one's self as though we knew the truth, when in reality we do not," Bonhoeffer once said. "Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the church today than talk which is very unqualified."

Rob