Often, I am just a little too late. I began writing this post on 2025-04-12, eighty years and three days after the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I accept that I am imperfect, and missed the opportunity to publish this post on the anniversary of his death. So I will attempt to make this reflection more relevant to the current age, and publish it on the 80th anniversary of the official end of World War two, 2025-04-08.
In case anyone believes that only the Axis side of the war acted with evil intent, let me remind people that early in 1945-04, the first Allied-governed Rheinwiesenlager camps = Rhine meadow camps, a group of 19 concentration camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany by the U.S. Army to hold hundreds of thousands of captured or surrendered Axis Forces personnel. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force reclassified all prisoners as disarmed enemy forces, not prisoners of war. The legal fiction circumvented provisions under the Geneva Convention of 1929 on the treatment of former combatants. By 1945-10 thousands had died in the camps from starvation, exposure and disease.
A reflection about Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945).
Bonhoeffer lived a short and anonymous life. He was arrested in 1943-04 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison in Berlin for 1½ years. His letters (and other papers) originate from here, but were smuggled out of prison. This correspondence contained provocative concepts about the world and the church. He was then transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp, in the Fichtel Mountains of Bavaria, where he met his death by hanging.
Much of Bonhoeffer’s appeal relates to his radical thoughts about the future of Christianity in the postwar world. It is a world of religionless Christianity, a world without God. These thoughts appealed to the many for whom the old ideas and institutions of the church no longer seemed adequate. My interpretation is that God had died, or at the very least, failed people, by not suppressing the second world war. God was unwilling to intervene on the side of truth or fairness. God was willing to let might rule, and to sacrifice the innocent. This is the situation in every war since then.
Many theologians see a breach in Bonhoeffer’s thought, a demarcation that separates his later life, where he abandons almost everything that he had previously affirmed and confessed as a Christian. Others see a continuity between these later, radical concepts and what he had believed and written before.
Much of Bonhoeffer’s appeal related to Christology, the branch of theology that concerns Jesus. Such as whether Jesus was human or divine or both; Christ’s role as a messiah, including a role in the freeing of the Jewish people from foreign rulers. There are also questions about salvation, and the consequences of sin.
Much of Letters and Papers from Prison, involves a correspondence with Eberhard Bethge (1909 – 2000). Bethge carefully preserved most of what he received, collected additional materials from others after the war, then published the first edition in German in 1951, followed by an English language translation in 1952. Since then, new editions with additional content and improved translations have been published.
It appears that Bethge took years to conclude that these scattered and seemingly random scraps should be published. In postwar Germany there were many who considered Bonhoeffer a traitor because he conspired against Hitler. Bonhoeffer was not regarded as a proper academic, so his opinions were easy to dismiss. The book was regarded as dangerous, because it discusses the end of religion and living in a godless world. In addition, the book was esoteric and fragmentary. Upon its publication, it overcame all these obstacles and now stands as a landmark of theology.
The most relevant part of Bonhoeffer’s writing today deals with stupidity. He writes:
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.
The other writing of Bonhoeffer, that I would like to include here, has to do with cheap and costly grace. He writes:
Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. […] Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son …. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (2003), pp. 47-9.
One of the world’s challenges in 2025 and beyond, is related to hybrid warfare. Frank Hoffman (? – ) defined hybrid warfare in 2007 as: the emerging simultaneous use of multiple types of warfare by flexible and sophisticated adversaries who understand that successful conflict requires a variety of forms designed to fit the goals at the time. Much of it is related to creating then enhancing divisions within a population. A popular way of doing this is through getting people with different religious affiliations to enter into conflicts with each other.
It is particularly easy for enemy agents to recruit different groups to oppose other groups. Imagine enemy agents pretending to be Protestants, attempting to recruit real Protestants to oppose people of other religions, which might include Jews, Catholics, Muslims and others, including non-believers. These same agents could then pretend to be members of these other religions, once again to recruit others. In this way, a country becomes increasingly split along religious lines.
It is important for everyone to know how hybrid warfare works. Its purpose is simple: to divide a nation into factions opposed to other factions.