Rememberance V

In these last few moments of this years Holocaust Rememberance Day I see that the final surviving member of the 'July20' attempt on Hitler's life has died today. Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager.

I'd like to remember another contributor to that "plot", someone who, as a youth, attended the Union Theological Seminary in upper Manhattan, who would then share in the worship services of the (Afro-American) Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the spirit of social conscience he was exposed to in the sermons would influence his later stance before the National Socialists.

I'd like to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

                                  



Bonhoeffer's experience in Harlem, and his long freindship with Karl Barth seems to have balanced and blended liberal and conservative theologies, a balance which saw through and over-rode the simplistic or reductionist defaults of his time.

How is it that a pastor who wrote, "We are to serve our enemy in all things without hypocracy and with utter sincerity. No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy. If out of love for our brother we are willing to sacrifice goods, honour, and life, we must be prepared to do the same for our enemy."  could have willingly taken part in assassination?

He continues, "We are not to imagine that this is to condone his evil; such a love proceeds from strength rather than weakness, from truth rather than fear... " .

The injunctions to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, pray for those who persecute us... are offen taught as contrasted with the easy, common affections and care that anyone might feel toward their own kind. I believe that Bonhoeffer countered the Nazi mentality, the nationalist-'socialist', developmentally Amber consensus with those injunctions of The Sermon On The Mount.

His father's pioneering in psychiatry, his time abroad, his singing spirituals in a charismatic congregation, must have contributed to planting him firmly in a world-centric broadly embracing mode of conduct and moral disposition.

Shortly before war's end Bonhoeffer was hung in the Flossenburg concentration camp. A few months before his death he wrote of his desire to go to India to visit Gandhi. I tend to see those two men as having already collaborated: kindred beyond kind, satyagraha and 'the power of truthfulness' lighting the way they lead.