On Turning the Other Cheek
Why would we follow Christ's troublesome ethic?
Note: Part 1 of this essay was posted on November 19, 2025. This is the completed essay, and incorporates the material previously posted.
Christ’s instruction to “turn the other cheek” seems the ultimate repudiation of a world that struggles to repudiate God. It doesn’t meet the world on its own terms, or pay it in its own coin. It meets its oppressor and says “Do your worst; I act at God’s command, not mine or yours.” Of all Christ’s admonishments it seems the most absurd to those who struggle to survive the world’s hostilities. It is the starkest reminder of the abyss between men and God, of how God’s justice is impossible for men, since justice and injustice for men are often separated only by ticks of the clock. And how God’s love remains a mystery, if turning the other cheek to our destroyer is an example of it. But of course the real mystery is God himself, since only in God is such love possible.
The general reaction to turning the other cheek, even in the church, goes something like this: Christ often spoke in hyperboles. He certainly doesn’t mean that this can, or even should, be universally applied in the private and public spheres. This goes for the whole list of Christ’s admonishments in the sermon on the mount, where he also reveals that sins of the flesh are no worse before God than the sins of the mind that preceded them.
To be angry and callous with your brother is the same as murdering him
To lust after a person is the same as committing adultery.
To make any oath or vow is idolatrous since you presume you have the power to fulfill it.
To resist your enemy is to dishonor God, whose grace extends to friend and enemy alike.
It’s true that sometimes Christ speaks figuratively or even in parables. But not here. As impossible as this teaching may seem, Christ is speaking literally. He is revealing to his disciples the true nature of the Kingdom of Heaven and its ethic. This is the ethical standard for which God created man, but which became moot with man’s fall. That this ethic has at all times appeared so absurdly radical to fallen man makes it abundantly clear that the barrier of sin that separates our world from Heaven is insurmountable. No matter what good deeds you may think you do, they will never be good enough to allow you entry to God’s kingdom.
The situation is hopeless, but not serious. That’s because in revealing this, Christ prepares his disciples for the advent of the Holy Spirit, who will become available to them as a result of Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, who will allow believers to be with God in eternity in spite of their sin, and who will assist them in overcoming the sins they will inevitably commit while they are alive. To fully appreciate the magnitude of this, they must first understand exactly what God expects of them and the impossibility of meeting that expectation by their own efforts. Only God can assist man in a world that makes every attempt to destroy faith, not the least by logically demonstrating that it’s manifestly foolish to follow God’s ethic in a world that laughs at it. Thus faith and reason endlessly butt heads but God’s ethic remains and Christians are called to act on it. More than this, they are to act on it in the knowledge that their mortal life is the merest fraction of the infinite life Christ brings them in God, and that the consequences of losing their mortal form in God’s service is not the fearful thing the world tells. Certainly this message was not lost on Christ’s twelve disciples, who turned the other cheek to their oppressors and all save one died martyr’s deaths.
It is precisely to Christ as God and his ethic of God’s kingdom that the Romans, and later Marx and Nietzsche, objected to. They all saw quite clearly that Christ and his ethic placed no value whatever in their cultures, civilizations, or social schemes, and that his followers might seriously threaten the body politic. Thus H. Richard Niebuhr:
Christianity seems to threaten culture at this point not because it prophesies that of all human achievement not one stone will be left on another but because Christ enables men to regard this disaster with a certain equanimity, directs their hopes toward another world, and so seems to deprive them of motivation to engage in the ceaseless labor of conserving a massive but insecure social heritage. Therefore a Celsus moves from an attack on Christianity to an appeal to believers to stop endangering a threatened empire by their withdrawal from the public tasks of defense and reconstruction. The same Christian attitude, however, arouses Marx and Lenin to hostility because believers do not care enough about temporal existence to engage in an all-out struggle for the destruction of an old order and the building of a new one. They can account for it only by supposing that the Christian faith is a religious opiate used by the fortunate to stupefy the people, who should be well aware that there is no life beyond culture.[1]
Followers of Christ have always been in considerable tension in the world because of the call of Christ’s ethic. God provides great supernatural aid in resolving this tension but for followers to avail themselves of it requires that they have faith in things they cannot see, and to accept that the ultimate results of their faith will not come to fruition in this world at all. To live this sort of conviction will run one counter not only to one’s common sense, but often to one’s neighbor as well, who more than likely has a very different and far more worldly set of convictions. It is therefore a rare Christian indeed who has the faith to live life as Christ asked. Nietzsche’s ironic reference to Christ as the first and last Christian shows he understood as much. Given this disparity between Christ’s teaching and how it is actually manifested in the world it’s not hard to conclude that “Christianity” and Christ have only passing relations.
The church’s obligation is to pass on Christ’s gospel accurately and faithfully so that all men have the opportunity to be saved. But in fact the church has more often tried to make Christ’s uncompromising message more acceptable to a world that will never be predisposed to accepting it. This means recouching it in human terms, sizing it to meet human expectations, and adapting it to serve human ambitions. This in turn has spawned innumerable compromises with culture, all orchestrated by an elaborate church bureaucracy that effectively replaces the Holy Spirit with more standardized and state-friendly alternatives. Thus both the eastern and western churches joined themselves to the state for most of their history, which has involved them in the thoroughly compromising business of adapting Christ’s gospel to the service of political ambitions in both war and peace. But it’s not adaptable in ways that human ambitions attempt to direct it. Pity the poor believer: when the gospel in its fullness is effectively little more than a rumor and the historical interplay of church and state become inscrutably intertwined in the ebb and flow of 2,000 years, who does the Christian serve? The full implications of this question are clearly seen in the life of the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer’s Struggle
Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to influence in Germany the 1930s, within the same timeframe as the Nazi party’s rise to power. His unfinished Ethics was mostly written in the five years before he was executed by the Nazis in 1945. Its premise makes it clear that, for Bonhoeffer, the gospel in its fullness was no rumor.
The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. This is the demand, before all others, that must honestly be made of anyone who wishes to be concerned with the problem of a Christian ethic. It places us before the ultimate and decisive question: With what reality will we reckon in our life? With the reality of God’s revelatory word or with the so-called realities of life? With divine grace or with earthly inadequacies? With the resurrection or with death?[2]
Bonhoeffer knew that the churches of his time were mostly vessels of empty pieties, and wrote The Cost of Discipleship to accuse them of peddling what he termed “cheap grace.” Discipleship is a meditation on the serious cost of following Christ; that is, the Christ who spoke the sermon on the mount, and not the dim echo of him that remained in modern church culture. When heard clearly, the Christ that spoke on the mount is every bit the sword he claimed to be, because the ethic of the Kingdom of Heaven has little in common with the ethical costumes commonly worn and discarded in our world, and is therefore greeted with ridicule and hostility. Nevertheless Christ was born in the world, lived in it, and directly addressed men of the world as a man himself. His atonement and sacrifice was a radical measure made in the knowledge that the corruptions of sin are both absolute and invisible. Consider the problem of evil. In Christianity, rejecting and going against the will of God, whether in thought or deed, is the source of all evil. Evil is therefore a possibility only where volition exists. Evil does not necessarily imply deeds that are especially heinous from our point of view; in Christ’s gospel there is virtually no distinction between thought and deed, and it is clear in many of his examples that an evil thought is as sinful as an evil act. The sins that are singled out for special note in the new testament are the sins of pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, and vindictiveness. These sins are largely invisible to us because they drive our actions whether we admit to them or not; when we do see them, we are prone to glorify them as virtues. Given Christ’s emphasis on turning the other cheek and doing so in the faith that you follow the will of God, evil can also be characterized by a lack of faith that breeds lovelessness. Love, seen as charity and reconciliation in spite of damage done to you, is not reasonable in human terms and requires faith. And faith requires courage.
Evil is therefore not a property of the universe per se, but rather “lives in the moment” of our choice, which includes how we choose to think as well as act. Since we can choose not to act on it, it would seem to be self-limiting. But in fact it perpetuates itself endlessly in cycles of hidden envy and resentment followed by open retribution and is persistent in all human conduct, from mother love to ethnic butchery. Because it is more pervasively a feature of thought than of deed, it has the dismaying tendency of running all good action into the ground, of having grand enterprises inevitably go sour in time. Since it can be pervasive in thought long before it actually emerges in action, it can be quite invisible until the right circumstances arise. Evil particularly hides in cowardice. You may refrain from doing something bad for no other reason than you fear the possible consequences, so evil in the form of resentment and vindictiveness lives in your mind even while it’s absent in your actions. Conversely you may be afraid to do something good because of unpleasant social consequences such as ridicule, ostracization, pariahship, or even worse. Thus you fearfully continue to do evil for the greater fear of doing an unpopular good.
Evil also hides in deceit. We like to present a picture of ourselves to the world that we feel best serves our ambitions. This is the ultimate aim of any lie, white or black--to manipulate the subconscious realities of other people so that they perceive and then behave as we’d like them to. This is the universal mask of polite culture and conventional morality. It allows you to smile and shake hands with someone you’d like to skewer given the opportunity.
All these social currents were present when the German churches of Bonhoeffer’s day struggled for footing during the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party. The mainline German churches that acquiesced to Hitler’s demands did so only partly out of fear of Hitler’s possible reprisals. They were also enthusiastic about his successes. Most Germans harbored deep resentment over Europe’s treatment of Germany after its defeat in World War I, and Hitler’s successes encouraged this resentment to surface and flourish as opposition to the sanctions imposed by the victors. Most of the churches were thus quite willing to serve the state in its newfound strength. But at the same time a minority opposition emerged which became known as the “Confessing” church. The initial impetus of the Confessing Church was simply to maintain a strict separation of church and state and continue to preach Christ’s gospel unadulterated by Nazi race ideology, or any political position for that matter. But to strictly follow the teachings of Christ when political lines are drawn is always interpreted by political parties as a political act, even a treasonous one. So as no surprise the Confessing church was quickly censured and banned by the state.
Bonhoeffer’s struggle was whether to go beyond the passive disobedience exhibited by the Confessing Church. To do so meant going underground and participating in the always cloudy political arena where deceit is the common strategy, and “turning the other cheek” a complete non-starter. Bonhoeffer was acutely aware that this would mean departing from Christ’s clear ethical teachings. But he was extremely alarmed by what the Nazi party was shaping up to be and feared that in the end it would mean the destruction of Germany in addition to the lands it was in the process of conquering. In Bonhoeffer, Christ’s ethic struggled with his dismay over the transformation of German society and culture and his desire to preserve it.
Bonhoeffer’s Decision
In the end Bonhoeffer aligned himself with a conspiracy that aimed to overthrow Hitler, even by assassination if necessary. What made him take this course when such involvement betrayed Christ’s ethic? Other members of the confessing church, though already censured and even imprisoned by the Nazi state, wouldn’t follow him that far. Bonhoeffer’s decision involves what is an ongoing struggle for any devout Christian:
to attempt to live Christ’s transcendental ethic with faith and the Holy Spirit as your guide, or
to leave Christ’s transcendental ethic in the transcendental realm and deal with the world on its own terms.
Can these two poles be reconciled in action? No, one excludes the other. Christ’s claim is absolute. If the intent of the believer is to faithfully follow Christ in thought and deed and he has the courage to let the chips fall where they may then option one is the only option, though it places you outside your political world and whatever ethical systems extend from it. This is a rare believer though. For most, allegiance will first be given to family, friends, community, party, country, intellectual circle, or the like, with God simply being part of the criteria that distinguishes membership in such groups. Here Christ’s absolute claims are ignored, or at the very least rationalized to a point where they no longer bind. Here turning the other cheek to those who aim to tyrannize or destroy you is simply a capitulation to your enemy. What’s not evident is that in fighting your enemy you also embrace him in a common wish to thwart if not dominate all who might oppose your chosen way of life. This is where even “fighting the good fight” inevitably results in unintended consequences and problematic results. We can’t know the outcomes of our actions, all ethical calculations of likelihood notwithstanding. Also, we invariably fail to recognize the pervasiveness of evil and its ability to further itself in good deeds as well as bad. Thus every departure from the ethic of the Kingdom of Heaven is stepping on flypaper. But this is the nature of our world and if you would protect others, or yourself, from predators, you will do so on the world’s terms. There is often no escape from this and so you must fight. Whatever fleeting political freedoms and justice exist in the world are the result of such struggles.
The modern Protestant church preaches a deception when it encourages the believer to think that turning the other cheek and similar good deeds will be recognized and reciprocated, and eventually change the world for the better. Reinhold Niebuhr inveighed against this attitude which he believed the church inherited from the secular culture of the Enlightenment:
[...] modern Christian and secular perfectionism is a very sentimentalized version of the Christian faith and is at variance with the profoundest insights of the Christian religion. The modern liberal Protestant Church has tried to eliminate the compromises of the Orthodox Church by accepting and diluting the ethic of sectarian Christianity. The optimism and rationalism which it inherited from the Enlightenment give it confidence that the Gospel of Love needed only to be adequately preached to be universally accepted, and therefore envisaged a new society achieved by gradual evolutionary process and practically identical with the Kingdom of God of the Gospel.
The fact is that this whole pitiless perfectionism, which has informed a large part of liberal Protestantism in America, is wrong not only about war and international politics. It is wrong about the whole nature of historical reality. It worries about some of us “crucifying the Lord afresh” by accepting involvement in war when necessary, and does not recognize that the selfishness of the best of us is constantly involved in the sin of crucifying the Lord afresh. It thinks there is some simple method of extricating ourselves from conflict, when as a matter of fact all justice that the world has ever known has been established through tension between various vitalities, forces and interests in society. All such tension is covert conflict and all covert conflict may on occasion, and must on occasion, become overt.[3]
Niebuhr was no pacifist. He articulated a position that came to be known as Christian Realism. This was primarily a corrective to modern Protestant/secular culture’s naive assumption that man is perfectible and something approaching the Kingdom of God can be achieved on earth through proper education and social engineering. Niebuhr insisted that Christ’s transcendental ethic strictly concerns life’s vertical dimension, that is the relation of man to God, but not the very messy horizontal relations of men to men in the devil’s world. These horizontal relations are strictly the realm of politics and whatever ethic serves it. A Christian element in politics is only revealed when a social order assumes man’s sinfulness and imperfectability yet allows his freedom, and maintains social justice by holding people personally accountable for their actions, particularly when they violate a moral code based on the ten commandments. But while such an order may acknowledge sin, only Christ redeems it, and Christ stands outside of any social order.
Bonhoeffer was well aware of Niebuhr’s position. He respected Niebuhr but disagreed with his position against pacifism. He and others in the Confessing church briefly toyed with Gandhi’s approach to non-violent resistance. But Christ’s ethic is non-resistance, which goes much further than non-violent resistance.
Bonhoeffer never proceeded from a naive assumption of man’s perfectibility through the gospel. The very basis of his Ethics is to engage with “the reality of God’s revelatory word” over “the so-called realities of life.” Yet he could not bring himself to withdraw from political events in Germany and chose to fight the man in power, evidently on the assumption that the structure of Hitler’s government, and its supporters, would collapse with him removed. I say “evidently on the assumption” because Bonhoeffer did not leave an account of his thoughts on this.
Christians are also citizens and family members and it’s naive and even somewhat fatuous to expect that they will passively withdraw from political events such as those manifested in 1930s Europe. But it’s important to understand exactly what their engagement means, particularly given the complexity of causes in which Nazism arose, and the nature of evil itself.
Hitler and the Nazi party
How did the Nazis come to power in the first place? How did a nation raised on the ethics of duty and fidelity---the home of Kant, Goethe, Bach, and Einstein---flip over within the same generation to became the epitome of terror and purveyor of the Holocaust? This is one of several related questions Hannah Arendt attempted to answer in her work, and some of her answers were far from popular because they implicated the victims as much as the perpetrators. Arendt’s concept of evil is a close relative to the Christian concept, which is that evil is a pervasive feature of all human conduct and were this not the case leaders such as Hitler could gain no traction. So in some sense, the victims were part of a well-prepared tinder that awaited Hitler’s spark. This is not to diffuse the blame to a point of meaninglessness; as Arendt also maintained, “when all are responsible no one is.” But there is a latent quality to human evil that allows it to remain unnoticed and even forgotten until it is triggered by the appropriate catalyst. This quality is exacerbated by the secular culture of the Enlightenment, which tends to equate evil with ignorance and irrationality (especially in the form of religious dogma), which it believes can be corrected through pedagogy and anti-clericalism.
In Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship Arendt made the following observations:
Morality as something learned and understood can vanish overnight and immediately be replaced with a set of mores completely at odds with the first--without most people feeling much distress of conscience.
People for whom morals are absolute and not to be given up do so because they could not live with themselves otherwise. In other words, they are not driven by custom, peers, or anything external to themselves but rather by internal conviction based on inner dialog with self.
These observations go a long way in explaining why, when a society is at the point of jumping into a maelstrom, it will find little opposition from within, and what little opposition arises will be solely from people of conscience, i.e., the people who can’t live with themselves if that conscience is violated, and when all else fails are willing to sacrifice their lives and all that they have. Thus, in times of crisis, people of conscience clearly stand outside of society. In Nazi Germany they were typically known to history only after the fact--the few who, like Corrie ten Boom, gave safe harbor to Jews and were killed or sent to concentration camps for it. Or the Bonhoeffers who quietly worked to overthrow the regime from within and were executed for their efforts.
Conscience and Self-Interest
Moral behavior is carried out within the domain of ought. When you “ought” to do something, “ought” carries the implication is that it is the right thing to do and you should do it whether you want to or not. But there is a potential divide here: most of the time self-interest drives what you ought to do but sometimes it’s your conscience that drives. What’s the difference?
If self-interest drives, right or wrong are not absolutes but are best seen as goals and obstacles to be dealt with strategically on the road to self satisfaction or social success. If an “ought” dictates something we don’t want to do, it’s usually an issue of withholding immediate gratification for some later real or hypothetical benefit. In the world of self-interest, morality is not really a special category despite its claims. As we grow up, everyone learns, by examples and their implications, that certain behaviors are wrong and to be caught at them will earn you social disapproval at best or severe punishment at worst. The “wrongness” is directly proportional to the severity of the consequences if you’re caught. We abide these rough rules as conventions but hold them with little commitment, since we also learn that they can change substantially from peer group to peer group. Even within a peer group, some much-loved bad behavior may be worth taking the risk of punishment, so you continue to do it surreptitiously without guilt. And if something you dearly want is only to be had via wrong behavior, you will pursue it without guilt (if you can overcome the fear) and hide the bad behavior as best you can.
If your conscience drives, it is a completely different matter. Your conscience is absolute. It doesn’t speak in abstract, relative values that can be managed via utilitarian formulas. When your conscience speaks, it is as another person inside you who demands your personal commitment, and any lack of it leads to remorse and even despair. You can’t argue with your conscience because your conscience is also your judge, who in some strange way stands outside and above you.
Arendt’s description of conscience as an “inner dialog with self” has its larger context in Kant’s Metaphysical Elements of Ethics:
...this [...] moral capacity, called conscience, has this peculiarity in it, that although its business is a business of man with himself, yet he finds himself compelled by his reason to transact it as if at the command of another person. For the transaction here is the conduct of a trial (causa) before a tribunal. But that he who is accused by his conscience should be conceived as one and the same person with the judge is an absurd conception of a judicial court; for then the complainant would always lose his case. Therefore, in all duties the conscience of the man must regard another than himself as the judge of his actions, if it is to avoid self-contradiction.
Kant further assumed that the voice of conscience is God, and it’s no stretch to assume that the people who followed their conscience in Nazi Germany assumed the same, considering that they risked and often forfeited their lives in doing so. But to say that “the voice of conscience is God” needs further exploration, since the correlation between conscience and biblical revelation, at least, is ambiguous.
In the modern secular world politics and most systems of ethics attempt to avoid metaphysics, and limit unbridled self-interest in the interest of a collective order that is rationally conceived. “Collective order” is defined on the basis of the self interest of the dominant political order of the day. In the modern world such collectives have become more and more ideological in their attempt to transcend national or traditional ethnic boundaries. Like any collective (and perhaps more than most), ideological collectives are culturally imperialistic and seek to dominate other societies, which they justify by claims of cultural or moral superiority. This whitewashes their own foibles and allows for an easy demonization of dissenters. Thus Reinhold Niebuhr again:
In human collectives and social groups the imperial impulse is clearly the most dominant. Since the life of a nation, a race or a class seems, from the perspective of the individuals who compose it, to be the very universal life and value to which individual life ought to be subordinated, it is inevitable that much of the force of “spirit” in life should be wasted in covering the arbitrary and partial forms of social life with the aura of the absolute.[4]
With the state, individual self-interest is held in check by laws and social mores that are coercive and thus incentivize good behavior through fear if not respect. But those who appear, or are declared to be, outside the collective are regarded as enemies and an existential threat to the state. The enmity in which they’re held can be soft or hard: soft being state tolerated social discrimination and ostracization, and hard being forcible removal, imprisonment, or death. When hard, the rights accorded to citizens won’t apply to them.
This dynamic was undoubtedly present in Nazi Germany. Jews who had heretofore been regarded and treated as citizens of the state but were often treated with soft enmity, were suddenly subject to the hard enmity of the Nazi regime, and thus excluded from the moral framework that continued to apply to other German citizens. Most non-Jewish German citizens, insofar as they were aware of this change, adapted to it, and many even participated in it. Oddly the moral framework they were raised in did not substantially change, except at the top; a defined segment of the population was simply dehumanized and excluded from it. That the general population would largely accept this was understood and indeed anticipated by the Nazis, but to this day the liberal Enlightenment culture of the West views it as a perplexing anomaly. Reinhold Niebuhr attributes this to the illusions of the trading and professional classes that since the 18th century have been the foundation of secular culture in the West:
Neither class understood the power and persistence of irrational egoism in human behavior, particularly in collective human behavior. The mechanistic and impersonal relations of the trader’s civilization supported the rationalistic illusions of academics. Together they gave us a moral culture built upon the quicksands of prudential self interest and a philosophy of life which understands neither the heights to which life may rise nor the depths to which it may sink. The whole tragic conflict between the ethical and imperial force in life is effaced in a theory which does superficial justice to both. That is how the liberal culture of modernity is defective in both religious profundity and political sagacity. An adequate religion develops only where the ethical impulse is set in vivid juxtaposition to the forces of nature in man; and man is forced both to seek after an impossible victory and to adjust himself to an inevitable defeat. An adequate politics is possible only if the task of achieving some kind of decent harmony in social relations is essayed with a clear understanding of the stubborn inertia which every social purpose meets in the egoism of individuals and groups.[5]
People who act on the basis of their conscience are answering to a higher authority than themselves or the civil authorities that govern them, and when their actions come into conflict with the state it puts them at risk. It also places them outside the dynamics of self-interest and marks them for exclusion by the state and its common culture.
That said, there is a difference between the Corrie ten Booms and the Bonhoeffers. Corrie ten Boom and her family did not engage in any sort of political opposition to the Nazis except in helping Jews to escape Europe. They lived their life as best they could under their rule. However, in helping Jews to escape extinction they risked all they had. When they were found out, arrested, and brought before the Gestapo they did not protest. A Gestapo officer even took pity on Corrie’s old, frail father and offered him an escape from the concentration camp if he would simply promise to not help Jews in the future. The father replied that he would do the same again if the opportunity arose. Thus the whole family was incarcerated and only Corrie survived.
Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, consciously made a decision to fight Hitler in the political arena. This meant plotting and conspiring in secret to achieve a strategic advantage whereby a coup could succeed and remove him from power, by assassination if necessary.
The actions of Corrie ten Boom’s family are closely aligned with Christ’s commandments and examples given in the New Testament. Their involvement was immediate and personal: they took in real individuals who were in a state of terror. They had a hiding place in their own house and they put them there. They fed them until they could move on to their next destination. When the ten Booms were found out, arrested, and accused they addressed their accusers with equanimity, without accusing them in turn, and accepted their fate with no excuses or apologies.
Bonhoeffer’s actions were less biblical and more political. He wanted to subvert and bring down the Nazi regime so that its influence in the world was eliminated, especially in Germany. He worked towards a plan to accomplish this. That’s only simple if you say it fast. The “Nazi regime” was obviously a complex, many faceted phenomenon involving millions of people and it did not arise simply at Hitler’s command. In the end, it was not overcome with a “plan,” but with an overwhelming military force that crushed it militarily, economically, and socially. When whole societies rise up against one another in a political arena, they become headless and “turning the other cheek” or following Christ at all is meaningless. In joining this headless mass Bonhoeffer entered a problematic world where plans are equally problematic. Hence the devil’s question to Bezdomny in The Master and Margarita:
Allow me to enquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term, such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow?
No social action, even those of the ten Booms, are entirely devoid of political implications or motivations. But Bonhoeffer’s political path more clearly departed from the biblical, though after his arrest and incarceration, and up until his execution, his actions and writings were often Christ-like and hugely inspirational.
Conscience vs Revelation
Acts of conscience are not restricted to Christians. But such acts are motivated by an inner conviction of justice or rightness that’s usually at odds with self-interest to the point where there is an inner struggle over following your conscience. To follow it may come at the cost of losing hard won status or social approval that’s critical to one’s success in life. This indicates that it’s at odds with more than self-interest: it may also be at odds with whatever sense of “right” is obtained from socialization. Yet if conscience doesn’t come from socialization, where does it come from? Speculation is rife, but the Christian intuition says God. And yet Bonhoeffer did not follow Christ’s transcendental ethic. So did he follow his conscience? And if conscience is ultimately the voice of God, how can it possibly differ from revelation?
“Revelation” is the word of God to man. This means it is absolute and must be treated as dogma. More than this, it reveals something about the world that could never be known to us without God revealing it. And most crucially, the New Testament reveals that in Christ all men have the opportunity to be saved from death and delivered from evil. Along with the revelation of Christ comes a clear exposition of Christ’s transcendental ethic, and how it applies to man.
Revelation is the proverbial “red pill.” To the man of the world it may defy reason to the point of seeming incomprehensible. And yet it must be taken exactly as it is. To reinterpret it is inevitably to satisfy human ambitions, to step away from God, and thus fail to realize that when we fight oppressors and predators to protect our own, as we inevitably will, we aren’t doing it in the name of Christ. Here we can also recall Karl Jaspers’ caution about philosophical attempts to reinterpret revelation and the faith it inspires:
To be truthful in philosophizing, we must let the faith in revelation stand as it is, acutely incomprehensible. To rational thinking its statements are contradictory, its actions and existence incompatible. Yet those very contradictions and incongruities become the elements of faith which they enhance and make conscious.[6]
Incredibly, even the church does not allow revelation to stand as it is when it cannot be made reasonable. Turning the other cheek is not reasonable and church traditions make exceptions to it. In fact, it has largely been relegated to a platitude that no one is expected to observe, since it is antithetical to the violence often called for in human struggle and of no value in the defense against human predators. But the exceptions the church makes are compromises, justified by inferences based on what Christ doesn’t say, or by taking Old Testament examples of God’s interventions in history to justify violence of men against men. Since “turning the other cheek” cannot be reconciled with the world at all, the church must resort to special gymnastics to get around it while never giving the appearance of actually repudiating it. But turning the other cheek is clearly what Christ reveals that his disciples should do. Are we not then to fight evil? This was Bonhoeffer’s basic difficulty, and he ultimately came down on the side of fighting evil. But fighting evil does not remove evil, at least not beyond the present instance, and involves another problem: how do we deal with the evil in ourselves when we are fighting the evil in others? Barth and Bonhoeffer seem to come to a point of despair here, and conclude that we are wholly thrown upon God, and cannot know ourselves if we do good or not. Luther’s “sin boldly but believe” seems to arise from a similar conclusion.
In all the theological “modernizing” that occurred in the late 19th to the mid-20th century in an effort to reconcile Christianity with secular culture, Bonhoeffer was one of the few who insisted that the gospel should be understood exactly as it was written, not as modern theology would reinterpret it. “Exactly as it was written” requires some qualification though. Bonhoeffer never advocated that Christ’s commandments and illustrations be reduced to rigid legalism or an ethical program subject to our interpretation, but rather insisted that they force us to look to Christ himself and follow. This is nowhere more true that in turning the other cheek, because here there is nowhere else to go besides Christ. Actions in the world proliferate evil. Areas and times of peaceful coexistence may rise up as bubbles here and there only to eventually pop from currents that arise within the bubble itself. What appears to be peace and friendship is often just a mask. In this environment resisting evil is a continual fight based on the false assumption that in fighting evil you do no evil yourself. To follow Christ in all of this is not avoid or escape evil but rather to remove yourself as its agent through your sacrifice--a sacrifice made solely on behalf of God.
This is why champions of human civilization and culture hate Christ; he leaves them no room to maneuver. But this is where Bonhoeffer was left, and it is also where the distinction between revelation and conscience becomes fuzzy. There seems little doubt that Bonhoeffer was driven by conscience, even though it departed from revelation. But if conscience is ultimately the voice of God, how can it possibly differ from God’s revelation? The short answer is that it won’t, if it is indeed the voice of God, and for the Christian this is a test of conscience: does it conform to Christ’s commandments? This may become murky in the messy world of human events and emotion though.
Bonhoeffer was in considerable turmoil during the Nazi’s rise to dominance. Although he was at first protected from Nazi predations in the United States he felt that, as a German, he could not in good conscience work for the deliverance of Germans while protected from their sufferings. So he returned to Germany. Here he struggled over the passive and non-violent resistance of the Confessing church only to conclude that such efforts amounted to nothing in what was coming, and that Hitler was an evil far too dangerous to simply let matters take their course without active intervention. But it was quickly apparent that there is no “sticking your toe” into this pond to test the water, since even your toe puts you in over your head. His friend and biographer Eberhardt Bethge was perhaps the first to observe this. Bethge refused to raise the Nazi salute when a German cafe crowd spontaneously cheered the surrender of France, but Bonhoeffer insisted he raise the salute and blend in with the crowd for the sake of bigger fish to fry. For Bethge, this conspiratorial turn signaled Bonhoeffer’s crossover into a wholly political realm from which there was no backing out. Of course, Bonhoeffer never intended to back out in spite of his many misgivings to come, and in spite of the fact that he never reconciled his actions with Christ’s gospel.
Bonhoeffer acted freely in the assumption that he was responsible for his actions and thus accountable to both men and God. He acted in response to his conscience, not his self interest: he was well aware that his actions put his life at risk and he was willing to take that risk. His conscience directed him against turning the other cheek. Bonhoeffer left no account of what led him to this; there is no clue of it in his unfinished Ethics. Perhaps the closest we can come to it is from his Letters and Papers from Prison:
We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by one’s own sufferings, but by the sufferings of one’s brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.[7]
This is more of a sentiment than a prescription, perhaps appropriately: in the world our actions always have complex causes that can’t be reduced to a prescription. We are indeed called to action in Christ. But in addition to serving Christ, “sympathy and action for others” can be a virtuous mask hiding a multitude of sins as well. By not taking Christ literally, we inevitably reduce Christ’s uncompromising ethic to pious platitudes that no one expects to follow literally but which mask a human ethic that answers to the political currents of the day.
To Turn or Not to Turn the Other Cheek
Much of this discussion has centered around what seems to be an inevitable distinction between the sacred, transcendental realm of God and the profane realm of the world. Here Christ’s ethic of turning the other cheek only has relevance in the sacred realm; it is pointless and foolish in the profane world. Yet Bonhoeffer rejected this basic distinction and held that the two realms were united in Christ.
This division of the whole of reality into sacred and profane, or Christian and worldly, sectors creates the possibility of existence in only one of these sectors: for instance, a spiritual existence that takes no part in worldly existence, and a worldly existence that can make good its claim to autonomy over against the sacred sector. The monk and the cultural Protestant of the nineteenth century represent these two possibilities.
As hard as it may now seem to break the spell of this conceptual framework of realms, it is just as certain that this perspective deeply contradicts both biblical and Reformation thought, therefore bypassing reality. There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world. Partaking in Christ, we stand at the same time in the reality of God and in the reality of the world. [...] Because this is so, the theme of two realms, which has dominated the history of the church again and again, is foreign to the New Testament.[8]
In the Christian cosmos, this apparent separation of realms is strictly a feature of the profane viewpoint. In the absolute framework of God the sacred must encompass the profane but the moral relativity inherent in human affairs must exclude the absolutes that constitute the sacred. Christ bridges the two realms by being fully God yet being born a man in the profane world. He addresses men of the world from within the world, but gives them an ethic that comes from a larger framework than the profane provides. This larger framework includes the dimensions of freedom and purpose in addition to the four dimensions that constitute the physical world of the profane. Absent the larger framework, the world can only appear purposeless, but in the larger framework the additional dimensions serve to give all of creation its proper context: created by God with an ultimate end determined by God, yet in the interim governed by beings with the freedom to reject God and attempt to determine their own ends. The freedom to reject God is ironically also the origin of evil and results in a world of endless strife where every man is for himself. Here peace and harmony are at best temporary and provisional, supported by social power and consent and enforced by various forms of coercion.
Turning the other cheek is therefore an action that starts in the profane world but is completed in the sacred. It’s precipitated by an opponent in the profane world but it’s addressed to God. Christ’s insistence on it is a confirmation of Bonhoeffer’s belief that there is only one reality, albeit with sacred and profane aspects, and only in this one reality revealed in Christ can Christ’s ethic be completed. Since the ethic is given to men severed from God by sin, Christ’s atonement via his crucifixion is necessary to bridge the severance. From there a person’s faith in Christ is necessary to cross the bridge and allow the Holy Spirit to provide the strength and grace necessary to work Christ’s ethic in a world that makes every effort to destroy it.
Turning the other cheek does not make the profane world a better place, though it can be a powerful witness to the larger world revealed in Christ. It takes the person saved by faith in Christ and moves them into the realm of Christ-like action--that is to say, sacrificial action that doesn’t count the cost of the profane retribution that’s likely to meet it. The point of Christ’s ethic is not to subvert the freedom that allowed men’s disobedience in the first place, but rather to provide the means and the ethical framework for re-establishing, in freedom, their full fellowship with God in spite of the coercive nature of the profane world.
That Bonhoeffer chose to pursue a political solution to the dilemma of the Nazis made him a culture hero to the secular world as much as the Christian world. But more than anything his choice illustrates the moral anguish that results from seeing the extremes to which a world that abandons God can descend.
Today we have villains and saints again, in full public view. The gray on gray of a sultry, rainy day has turned into the black cloud and bright lightning flash of a thunderstorm. The contours are sharply drawn. Reality is laid bare. Shakespeare’s characters are among us. The villain and the saint have little or nothing to do with ethical programs. They arise from primeval depths, and with their appearance tear open the demonic and divine abyss [Abgrund] out of which they come, allowing us brief glimpses into their suspected secrets. It is worse to be evil than to do evil. It is worse when a liar tells the truth than when a lover of truth lies, worse when a person who hates humanity practices neighborly love [Bruderliebe] than when a loving person once falls victim to hatred. The lie is better than truth in the mouth of a liar, as hatred is better than acts of neighborly love by a misanthrope. One sin is not like another. They have different weights. There are heavier and lighter sins. Falling away [Abfall] is far more serious than falling down [Fall]. The most brilliant virtues of the apostates are as dark as night compared with the darkest weaknesses of the faithful.[9]
We can only guess that Bonhoeffer saw things extremely clearly but at the same time not clearly enough. He fully understood the depths of sin in himself and humanity at large. He believed no one in their sin could rightly distinguish good from evil and therefore must rely on Christ alone. Yet in spite of this, in the end he felt compelled to jump swinging into the political realm and let the chips fall where they may, in the hope that somehow it might turn out to fall within God’s will after all. Sin boldly but believe. He often doubted his actions, even to the point of considering suicide, but he never made the mistake of assigning guilt to anyone or anything but himself.
It is remarkable how I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions. Is that a sign of confusion, of inner dishonesty, or is it a sign that we are guided without our knowing, or is it both? ... Today the reading speaks dreadfully harshly of God’s incorruptible judgement. He certainly sees how much personal feeling, how much anxiety there is in today’s decision, however brave it may seem. The reasons one gives for an action to others and to one’s self are certainly inadequate. One can give a reason for everything. In the last resort one acts from a level which remains hidden from us. So one can only ask God to judge us and to forgive us. ... At the end of the day I can only ask God to give a merciful judgement on today and all its decisions. It is now in his hand.[10]
This is where we’re left when we’re convinced, as Christians, that “something different” is required than what Christ demands in his ethic. Though it may lack faith there’s logic to it: turning the other cheek to a juggernaut clearly bent on evil seems preposterous, especially when we entertain even a small hope that our action against it might somehow prevail. But the irony is as rich as the presumption: we judge that a catastrophe is too big to leave in the hands of God, so we step into his shoes. This could not have been lost on Bonhoeffer, given his hesitation and subsequent anguish. But the pull away from God is profound and irresistible. That’s who we are, and even the apostles weren’t above it. It seemed obvious to Peter that when the Roman soldiers came to arrest Christ he should strike them, and he did. Yet Christ told him to put the sword away since it only interfered with the will of God the father. When Christ foretold his death to the disciples and Peter admonished him that it would never happen, Christ went even further and told him: “Get behind Me, Satan!”
Have Christians always struggled with this inevitable waffling? Reinhold Niebuhr speculated:
... the ethical rigor of the early church was maintained through the hope of the second coming of Christ and the establishment of his kingdom. When the hope of the parousia waned the rigor of the Christian ethic was gradually dissipated and the Church, forced to come to terms with the relativities of politics and economics and the immediate necessities of life, made unnecessary compromises with these relativities which frequently imperiled the very genius of prophetic religion.[11]
This effect can only have been magnified a thousandfold in today’s secular world in which Christianity is more of a social club than the prophetic world-changer of its youth. But Christianity is not Christ and Christ is the same today as always. Unfortunately we see him through a glass darkly: in the worst of times he shines with the hope of a new world; in the best of times he’s a fairy tale. For the thoughtful Christian the paradoxes of life in Christ will always be acute, especially for those who manage to see the beauty of God in a world simultaneously bent on destruction. Such things are not reconcilable without Christ and create a tragic sense of life that can threaten to eclipse faith.
What words, what ancient melodies Shiver terribly over me in your unreal presence, Sombre dove of long, languid, beautiful days, What melodies echo in sleep? Under what foliage of aged solitude, In what silence, what music, or in what Voice of a sick child will I find you again, o beautiful, O chaste, o melody heard in sleep? The day weeps for the emptiness of all things.[12]
The eclipse of faith ends in nihilism, and nihilism is the end of life. This great Christian insight is well hidden behind “the world’s bombardment, the maelstrom of appointments which constitute a life.”[13] Christ’s ethic, as alien and contradictory as it seems to everything we’re taught, is how we learn to be Christ. The love of Christ is how the irreconcilable world is reconciled with God, once and for all. In pursuit of this, turning the other cheek is not a bridge too far.
[1]Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture, Harper and Brothers (1951), page 6
[2]Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics, Fortress Press (2005), page 49
[3]Niebuhr, Reinhold. Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1960), pages 139-140
[4]Niebuhr, Reinhold. Reflections on the End of An Era, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1934)
[5]ibid., pages 13-14
[6]Jaspers, Karl. Philosophical Faith and Revelation, Harper and Row (1967), page 57
[7]Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison, Fortress Press (2010)
[8]Ethics. op cit., page 58
[9]ibid., pages 76-77
[10]From Bonhoeffer’s diary, quoted in Metaxas, Eric. Bonhoeffer, Thomas Nelson (2010), page 336
[11]Niebuhr, Reinhold. An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Harper Collins (1963), page 36
[12]Milosz, Oskar. Fourteen Poems, Copper Canyon Press (1983), “Dans un pays d’enfance...”
[13]Hewitt, Christopher. The Enticing Lane (date uncertain)