"The Nazis were bad" sounds like an obvious enough statement to most levelheaded adults in this day and age. But there was a time when it wasn't obvious at all.
Because it was such a small handful of highly educated
clergy, theologians, public officials, military officers and other leaders who
were able to see what was happening early on and take the stand that everyone
else should have been taking against Hitler, those who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller, Karl Barth, and others, are sometimes spoken of as some sort of oracles or fortune tellers. For those with just a passing knowledge of that time, understand that the outcry of this small minority against the Nazi agenda started almost a full two decades
before the whole world would know what had unfolded at Auschwitz or Treblinka.
Of course, the basic character of Nazi ideology should have
been clear to everyone, even before the atrocities started in earnest: worship
of power for its own sake, the Übermensch philosophy, which says that
there is no truth other than what the strongest guy in the room says is true,
suspicion of minorities and immigrants, disdain for the weak and feeble, glorification
of war, and so on. But few saw or chose to see what was really going on. The
party was not just introducing one more candidate to choose from on election
day. They were subverting civilization and replacing it with tribalism and
subverting sanity with fear. Among the many ways that those in the majority
church justified their silence in the face of this movement was this old
chestnut, which people frequently regurgitate when they want to enjoy their
religious club and not be bothered by Jesus and his whole thing: “the church
shouldn’t be involved in politics.”
The relationship between telling the truth about the world
as it is and reading the writing on the wall for where the world is heading is about
the oldest tradition we have. It begins with Amos and Isaiah, chronologically
the oldest books in the Bible, and is picked up by Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jesus,
John of Patmos and several dozen others.
This is one reason why there is so much confusion now, among Christians, about the biblical job description of a prophet. Most assume
it has something to do with predicting the future, magic 8-ball style, and that the
sole job of the Old Testament prophets was to foreshadow Christmas (also
assumed to be a safely non-political, religious event, all the poems about
bringing “down the powerful from their thrones” and King Herod’s mad attempts
to assassinate an infant, notwithstanding). Even if we accept the go to lines that Christians normally point to, this understanding of prophecy requires us to throw out 99.9% of what the prophets said--which is unfortunate because they said a lot that could really stand to be repeated today.
To be fair, the great prophets do often seem to blur the
line between telling the truth about the present and telling the future, but
that won’t seem like such a magical talent if we simply compare what they were
doing to what Bonhoeffer was doing. If there is predictive power in what Isaiah
or Jeremiah have to say, it’s not because they have some magical sixth sense
about the future. It’s because the future is always a product of the truths of
the present. To put it another way, if they seemed to have seen something
coming that no one else saw, it wasn’t a matter of future-telling but of
truth-telling.
And here is my point about Bonhoeffer. He was a very smart
guy, but it didn’t take great intelligence to see what the Nazis were about. He
was an incredibly well-educated guy, but there were lots of well-educated
people who said nothing. He was a fastidiously moral person, but it didn’t take
a moral giant to see that Hitler and his cronies were in the wrong.
Rather, what set Bonhoeffer apart was something that I call
moral courage.
We can swirl a brandy around in a plushly upholstered arm
chair and discuss the nature of morality until we’re blue in the face, and
we’ll get hardly a little bit closer and maybe quite a lot farther from “the
good” than any toddler who knows to share, talk nicely, don’t hurt, and so on.
But someone with moral courage believes that right action is the only kind of
right there is. They get antsy when they see our uniquely human capacity to
ponder the good become an excuse not to do it, let alone when we use that same
capacity to justify most any evil.
That you should “practice what you preach” sounds obvious
enough. But I don’t believe that moral courage comes from just anywhere. It
requires a profound confidence that our future well-being is not secured by any
worldly attempts to stay safe, defend what we have, or “fly under the radar.” Death
is the biggest guarantee in life, so keeping out of the fray rather than doing
the right thing is no guarantee of safety, but it may well be a guarantee of a
life not lived.
If the story of Jesus the Christ’s life, death, and
resurrection gives us confidence that it’s finally God who gives, redeems, and
then saves our lives, it also broadens the scope of our concerns. To no longer
fear death is to see that there is more to live for than just getting by. It is
to yearn for the kingdom of God more than the preservation of self.
