Ethics

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, wrote the manuscripts that compose Ethics between 1940 and 1943, during the height of the Second World War. The Nazi regime had forbidden Bonhoeffer from speaking publicly or publishing, and he was simultaneously involved in political conspiracy through the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence agency. The Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, arrested him on April 5, 1943, preventing the book's completion. Ethics is not the finished work Bonhoeffer intended but a compilation of preserved manuscript fragments assembled posthumously by his close associate Eberhard Bethge. Bethge's sixth German edition, which this translation follows, rearranges the chapters in the chronological order of their composition, revealing four successive theological approaches that trace Bonhoeffer's intellectual development from his earlier work The Cost of Discipleship toward the ideas that would later appear in Letters and Papers from Prison.

Bonhoeffer opens Part One by attacking the assumption shared by all other ethical systems: that the knowledge of good and evil is the proper starting point for ethics. Christian ethics, he argues, must invalidate this knowledge. At the origin, humanity knew only God and all things in God. The knowledge of good and evil, as narrated in the story of the Fall in Genesis, represents separation from God, in which humanity claims to be the origin of good and evil itself. This disunion from God produces disunion with other people, with things, and with oneself. Shame arises as the recollection of estrangement from the origin, while conscience marks only the disunion of man with himself. The New Testament, by contrast, presents the world of recovered unity and reconciliation. Jesus refuses to be drawn into the either-or moral conflicts of the Pharisees, Jewish religious leaders devoted to strict observance of the moral law. His freedom derives not from choosing among possibilities but from the simplicity of action directed by the one will of God. Love is not a human attitude but God Himself, revealed in Jesus Christ.

In the chapter on the Church and the world, Bonhoeffer draws on the experience of Christian oppression under Nazism. Values such as reason, culture, and human rights, which had previously served as weapons against the Church, sought refuge in the Christian sphere when threatened by barbarous political forces. This convergence represents not a tactical alliance but a return to the origin: Jesus Christ is the center and strength of all these values. Bonhoeffer holds together Christ's claim to exclusiveness ("He that is not with me is against me") and His claim to totality ("He that is not against us is for us"), arguing that the greater the exclusiveness of confessing Christ, the greater the breadth of His dominion.

The chapter on ethics as formation contends that Bonhoeffer's generation, overwhelmed by concrete ethical problems, showed little interest in theoretical ethics. He surveys and finds wanting several ethical postures: the reasonable person who tries to hold a collapsing structure together, the fanatic who loses sight of evil's totality, the person of conscience torn apart by inescapable situations, the person of duty who may end by serving the devil. What is needed is the combination of simplicity and wisdom, located in the reality of Jesus Christ as the Reconciler. Under the heading Ecce Homo (Latin for "Behold the man"), Bonhoeffer presents Christ as the one who reconciles the world with God through perfect love, taking upon Himself the guilt of humanity. "Conformation" means being drawn into the form of Christ as incarnate, crucified, and risen. The Church is the Body of Christ, the place where this formation occurs as an example and substitute for all of humanity.

Bonhoeffer then traces the historical heritage and decay of the Christian West. He emphasizes the indissoluble link between the West and the people of Israel, arguing that the expulsion of the Jews from the West necessarily entails the expulsion of Christ. He charts the medieval unity of Pope and Emperor, the Reformation's shattering of the corpus christianum (the unified body of Christian civilization), the process of secularization, and the French Revolution's unleashing of emancipated reason and nationalism, forces whose inner contradictions led ultimately to nihilism. Two forces alone can avert this drift: a new awakening of faith and the "restrainer," the force of state order. The Church must confess its collective guilt for failing to proclaim the gospel boldly and for remaining silent before violence and oppression.

In the chapter on "The Last Things and the Things Before the Last," Bonhoeffer defines justification by grace through faith, God's final forgiving verdict grounded in Christ rather than human merit, as the ultimate event. He rejects two extreme approaches to the relationship between the ultimate and the penultimate, the earthly conditions and time that precede God's final word: radicalism, which destroys the penultimate in the name of the ultimate, and compromise, which protects the penultimate by excluding the ultimate. The true resolution lies in Jesus Christ, in whom incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection form a unity. Preparing the way for Christ requires preserving penultimate conditions: the hungry need bread, the homeless need shelter, the dispossessed need justice. Bonhoeffer develops an extensive treatment of "the natural," the form of life preserved by God for the fallen world and directed toward Christ. He addresses the right to bodily life, argues against euthanasia, examines the ethics of suicide and reproduction, and condemns torture, slavery, and arbitrary imprisonment.

The chapter "Christ, Reality and Good" contains Bonhoeffer's central argument against dividing reality into sacred and secular spheres. There are not two realities but only one, the reality of God made manifest in Christ in the reality of the world. Bonhoeffer introduces the doctrine of four divine mandates: labour, marriage, government, and the Church. These are the concrete forms through which God's commandment addresses the world. He prefers "mandate" to "order" because the term emphasizes divinely imposed task rather than static being.

In the unfinished chapter "History and Good," Bonhoeffer develops the concept of responsible life as the core structure of Christian ethics. Responsibility is the total response of the whole person to the reality given in Jesus Christ. Its structure comprises four elements: deputyship (acting in the place of others), correspondence with reality (acting from the given situation rather than abstract principles), acceptance of guilt (entering into the fellowship of human guilt out of love, as Christ did), and freedom (acting without the support of external authorities, delivering the deed to God's judgment). Responsibility is grounded in vocation, understood as the place where Christ's call is answered.

Part One's final chapter questions whether ethics can legitimately be treated as a subject of discussion. The "ethical phenomenon," the experience of obligation and moral conflict, has a proper but limited place in human life; extending it beyond its boundaries leads to a pathological moralization. Bonhoeffer develops the concept of the commandment of God, which embraces the whole of life, not only forbidding but also permitting, not only binding but also setting free. The commandment as permission allows one to live before God with direction and security, without reducing life to endless moral decisions.

Part Two collects supplementary essays and fragments. Bonhoeffer analyzes the first use of the law, the law's role in maintaining outward civil order, in the Lutheran confessional writings, arguing that the law cannot be preached in isolation from the gospel. He critiques the thesis that Christian ethics concerns only persons and not worldly institutions, insisting that Christ's dominion over secular institutions means emancipating them for genuine worldliness rather than subjecting them to clerical rule. His essay on state and Church grounds government in Jesus Christ rather than in natural law or human sin and distinguishes the mutual claims of government and Church upon each other. A fragment on the Church's word to the world argues that there cannot be a double morality for Christians and non-Christians, since the decalogue (the Ten Commandments) and the Sermon on the Mount (Jesus's collected ethical teachings in the Gospel of Matthew) both demand concrete obedience to the same God. The final fragment redefines truthfulness as a concrete relational practice: Telling the truth means something different in different situations, and the cynic who claims to speak the truth identically to all people at all times destroys the living truth between them.