Abstract
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Knud Ejler Løgstrup were WWII contemporaries: Lutheran theologians and religious figures in their respective German and Danish communities; both active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Being involved in the resistance, Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup were required to rethink what it meant to be ethical, in particular in relation to disclosure and the telling of truth, in a situation of war. In this paper, we consider the grounds on which both Løgstrup and Bonhoeffer acted, their belief in a duty or requirement to resist, in light of the more general problem presented by resistance as action undertaken in a state of exception. We investigate the distinction between the normativity of ordinary or stable time, and action required in a state of exception, using the specific example of truth-telling as a normative demand and its conflict with the exceptional imperative to lie. The example of truth-telling raises important questions about the role of agency and phronetic judgment in a state of exception. In order to determine a foundation for such judgment, we turn to the framework adapted by both Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup to ground their requirement to lie: Luther’s concept of three estates. We consider how their respective concepts of mandates and laws of life/sovereign expressions of life both illuminate and highlight the more general problem of the relation between norm and exceptional action.
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Notes
The Evangelical Church of the Old-Prussian Union, the largest regional Protestant Church and part of the German Evangelical Church Confederation (Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund) that would become the German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) in 1934, led by the so-called German Christians who supported National Socialism. Bonhoeffer was a founding member of the Confessing Church in 1934, alongside Karl Barth, which saw itself as the true Church, in contrast to the German Evangelical Church, which for Bonhoeffer and others represented a heretical movement away from Christianity.
When Bonhoeffer joined the resistance, it was as a civilian, ostensibly using his ecumenical contacts as a pastor and theologian to gather information for the German state. In fact, Bonhoeffer was part of the resistance movement within the Abwher, providing information to the Allies. Bonhoeffer undertook a number of official assignments where he was able to use his church contacts to relay information between the resistance and the Allied forces.
Løgstrup was a member of the Ring, one of several groups that made up the Danish resistance movement. Løgstrup’s involvement appears to have consisted of acting as a courier and allowing clandestine radio communications from his house. The Danish resistance more broadly, however, carried out something approaching 400 assassinations, mostly of Danish collaborators and only later of German nationals. Whether these killings were morally justified only became a matter of open discussion in Danish society during the 1990s. Around 850 resistance members were either killed in operations or subsequently executed or died in concentration camps.
While the relation between legal and moral norms is itself contentious, this paper presumes a continuity between the two. See Kant who argued that “Juridical and ethical laws […] share a generic unity as moral laws” for whom both juridical and ethical laws belong under the broader structure of moral law, both are governed by categorical imperatives that provide obligations and attendant duties. Cited in Laurence (2015: 210). This is also in line with pre-modern understandings of law and morality, where the separation between the legislative power of law in regulating human behavior and customary rules of behavior that were considered obligatory was less clear. See Ratnapala (2009). The writing of Schmitt, Bonhoeffer, and to some extent Løgstrup likewise reject a strong distinction between the two domains that govern human life and interaction.
On these laws, see Andersen (2017).
Contrast this with theologian (and Bonhoeffer’s friend) Karl Barth’s response to the failed coup d’etat. Barth thought that the “extreme case” or the Grenzfall, which he defined as murder in obedience to God’s command, was a situation faced by Bonhoeffer and his fellow conspirators. However, several of the assassination attempts were aborted due to the desire for self-preservation by those involved. Barth therefore concluded that the would-be “assassinators” lacked whole-hearted commitment and probably God did not actually command the action, for had he done so, those involved would have overcome their sense of self-preservation, and they would have had the strength for obedience to the command. See Barth (2006: 449). Barth’s concept of the Grenzfall informed by his theology of a sovereign God provides an interesting contrast with Løgstrup’s explanation for resistance from “below.”
From the same passage: “the point at issue was not people’s right but their duty to resist… Our generation, on the other hand [unlike Luther’s], knows something about people having been driven to active resistance by a sense of responsibility, of the kind we expect to find in the government.” Interestingly, Bonhoeffer also appeals to duty and the responsibility of the individual in such a situation, rather than right.
There is a long and troubled history of Protestant political resistance that can in part be attributed to one of the key theological ideas arising from the Reformation: the diminishing of justice and natural law, as “justification by faith” as an act of God’s revelation took center stage. For reformers, the natural law tradition “failed to take seriously the condition of human sin and … [placed] misguided trust in the powers of human reason, which … [had] been debilitated by the fall” (Charles 2008: 113). Claims to a natural moral law come to be seen as a demonstration of human pride that should properly learn humility under the divine imperative. While Catholic natural law affirmed a continuity of grace between the creation ordinances of law and morality, for Protestants, “justice” only functioned as an indicator of our guilt and our need for “justification.” See McGrath (1998). Gustafson (1978) understands the Protestant separation between natural law and morality as connected to ‘occasionalism’, where moral action emphasises the uniqueness of each moment rather than the continuities of human experience as informing moral order.
See DeJonge (2017).
In reality, Rosemarie Løgstrup nee Pauly (1914–2005), who met Løgstrup in 1933 while both were students of Heidegger’s in Freiburg.
On this passage, see Niekerk (2017: 192).
Stände: Oeconomicus, politicus, and eccelsiasticus or hierachicus. These estates were envisioned by Lutheran as enabling various human goods to flourish in society.
In interwar German theology, das Volk also sometimes came to be regarded as a fourth ordinance. Yet, not only fervent National Socialists reinterpreted Luther in this way. For example, moderate conservative Lutherans, Werner Elert and Paul Althaus, signed the Ansbach Memorandum 1934 that included the statement: “The law, “the unchangeable will of God”…obligates us to the natural orders to which we are subject, such as family, people [Volk], race (that is, blood relationship)” (cited in Bonhoeffer 2009: 56, n 33)
Bonhoeffer outlines what he means by “mandates” in two manuscripts in Ethics: briefly in “Christ, Reality, and Good” and elaborated in the concluding Ethics manuscript, “The concrete commandment and the divine mandates” (concluding manuscript in Ethics).
Bonhoeffer uses the two terms interchangeably.
Only through their interaction do the mandates “communicate the commandment of God as it is revealed in Jesus Christ.” (Bonhoeffer 2009: 393)
Bonhoeffer’s dissertation, published as Act & Being (1930) contained extensive references to Heidegger’s Being & Time (1927).
See Lenowitz (2008: 25).
See Niekerk’s introduction to Løgstrup (2007: 21).
On the relation between the ethical demand and the social norms in Løgstrup, see Stokes (2017b).
For an excellent overview of Løgstrup’s theological trajectory and his move away from the theological outlook of the Tidehverv movement, see Rabjerg (2007).
For a response to MacIntyre, see Stokes (2017a).
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Brown, P., Stokes, P. Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup: the Ethics of Disclosure in a State of Exception. SOPHIA 59, 229–246 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0683-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0683-4