Bonhoeffer Today

Totalitarian movements, such as National Socialism, seek to reorganize the entirety of human life. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed for his resistance to the Nazis, believed that there was a deeper resistance built into the order of nature. Bonhoeffer was ambivalent toward the tradition of “natural law,” insisting that the natural order must be understood Christocentrically, that is, in relation to God’s saving purposes in Christ. But there is no doubt that he had a profound respect for the natural, as is evident in the following from his Ethics:

The fact that it is at all possible to injure the natural is adequately explained by the relative liberty of the preserved life. In the abuse of this relative liberty some given entity within the fallen world posits itself as an absolute, declares itself to be the source of the natural, and thereby disintegrates the natural life. There now begins a struggle between the unnatural and the natural, in which the unnatural may for a time forcibly prevail, for the unnatural consists essentially in organization, and the natural cannot be organized but is simply there. It is possible, for example, to organize the undermining of children’s respect for their parents, but respect for parents itself is simply practiced and cannot by its very nature be organized. For this reason the natural may be temporarily overcome by the unnatural. But in the long run every organization collapses, and the natural endures and prevails by its own inherent strength; for life itself is on the side of the natural. In the meanwhile, however, there may indeed have occurred serious disturbances and revolutionary changes in the external forms of life. But, so long as life continues, the natural will always reassert itself.