My wife and I recently watched the new film “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin,” and while it is unlikely to earn any accolades from the elitist circles that rule the film industry, I found it to be riveting, and I enthusiastically commend it to you. Its production value is solid, on par with the efforts of any major Hollywood studio, and the acting exemplary. But more than that, it brings into focus a story that we seem to have collectively forgotten, if we ever knew it at all. It tells of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who opposed the Nazis, refused to alter his preaching for their politics of evil, and ultimately paid the price with his life. The movie runs for 132 minutes, an investment of time that is easily justified by the weight of its message, which is one we would do well to heed today. The courage Bonhoeffer displayed in the face of unspeakable evil is a rare commodity, but it is not the evil of Nazism I want to discuss here. It is the evil of silence and appeasement, the moral cowardice that is now a hallmark of much of modern Christianity. For Bonhoeffer, the enemy was Nazism. For us, it’s a fear of offending and ostracization.
It is easy to dismiss Bonhoeffer’s story as a relic of history. It happened long ago, in a world that no longer exists, with dangers that we are no longer confronted with. The movie closes with a caption that reads “Never Again,” a phrase that was no doubt meant to evoke solemn reflection on the horrors of the Holocaust, and that’s appropriate enough. After all, it’s a movie about Nazis. Yet, at the same time, there is something misguided about this sentiment, for it presumes that “Never Again” is a promise that has already been fulfilled, that the lessons of the past have been learned, and that we are not already repeating them.
I emphasize that I am not, in any way, equating the present-day West to the totalitarian nightmare of Nazi Germany. To do so would be both false and facile. We are not being rounded up and sent to concentration camps for speaking our faith. But that’s my point. The persecution we face today, if it can even be called that, is mild, diffuse, and largely cultural. In Bonhoeffer’s day, the church had to fear imprisonment, torture, and death for standing firm against the moral corruption of the Nazis. Today, the church faces merely social ostracism for offending the comfortable moral assumptions of its congregation or outsiders. This seems a small price to pay to fulfill the Great Commission. Yet so many churches seem unable—or perhaps unwilling—to speak the basic truths of our faith, for fear of causing offense.
I ask you: When was the last time you heard a sermon on greed, or abortion, or the perils of sexual licentiousness, or on the host of other moral issues that the modern church would rather ignore? And why are they ignored? Because they are too commonplace, and therefore talk of them would be widely discomfiting. But sin being commonplace is precisely why it needs to be addressed! The church has become, in many respects, a refuge for the comfortable, the politically correct, the apologist for the status quo. The result is a moral vacuum, where truths that were once considered fundamental to the Christian faith are now neglected or twisted to fit the ever-changing demands of societal approval.
The parallels don’t end there. The Bonhoeffer film does well to remind us that under Hitler’s regime, the Bible itself was edited and tampered with—altered to suit the agenda of the regime, with inconvenient truths stripped away and false doctrine added in the name of political expediency. We recoil at the thought! And yet, are we so different? In our modern age, the rewriting of Scripture is not done with the same crude violence. No, today’s church simply ignores the parts of the Bible that are too confronting, too controversial, or too offensive to the self-congratulatory sensibilities of the modern world, and replaces that with a superficial, lovey-dovey, feel-good doctrine that has little foundation in scripture.
We need not dwell on the historical horrors of Bonhoeffer’s time to recognize that the church’s failure to address moral issues today is no less a form of spiritual capitulation. If anything, it’s worse, since the risks are so minor in comparison. And the consequences? Well, it is obviously impossible to compare the violence of Hitler’s death camps to the subtle, pervasive entropy of spiritual neglect. Those are two different kinds of evil and they defy juxtaposition. But it is crucial to understand that spiritual death is its own sort of peril, with effects less apparent, but nevertheless significant. Christianity is not even being rejected today so much as it is being ignored, resulting in the moral and social rot we witness today: fractured families, an epidemic of mental illness, addiction, abuse, crime, nihilism, and a complete inability to understand or embrace the concept of love, both for oneself and for others. And that is to say nothing of the eternal consequences that await those who live without the hope of salvation.
It is all too easy to dismiss Bonhoeffer’s struggle and say, “That will never happen here.” We comfort ourselves with the thought that the political system in which we live is fundamentally different from the one that allowed Nazism to rise. But this is the fatal error. It is not the political system that ultimately matters—it is the courage of individuals to stand firm in their beliefs, regardless of the consequences, especially when they are comparatively minor. God forbid we ever face real consequences for our faith! Bonhoeffer’s courage was in his steadfast refusal to dilute the truth of the gospel, even when it became dangerous to do so. Our church faces no such danger, and by failing to exercise the modicum of courage it should take to stand up to modern culture, the church falls further into irrelevance, society further into disorder, and souls further into perdition.
So what is the lesson we ought to take from Bonhoeffer’s story? It is not enough to admire his courage from a safe distance, to look upon his martyrdom and say, “How brave.” It is that if he could exercise courage in the face of death, we can exercise courage in the face of being unpopular. So much less is required of us, in this moment, in this society, than was required of him. If Bonhoeffer was willing to risk his life to speak the truth in a time of unparalleled moral darkness, surely we can summon the courage to speak the truth in a time that is less foreboding, though no less consequential.
In the end, the most insidious danger we face is not the prospect of totalitarian oppression, but the continued erosion of our moral clarity, the willingness to compromise on truths that have stood for centuries in the name of expedience or cultural acceptance. Bonhoeffer did not bend, even at the specter of certain death. It is time we, too, stop bending to the pressures of a society that would rather we remain silent, conform to the prevailing winds of relativism and convenience, and drift further towards irrelevance and obsolescence. The church must speak plainly, or it will lose its voice altogether.
