Abstract
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian pacifist who believed Jesus Christ taught nonviolence, yet Bonhoeffer was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. How did Bonhoeffer justify to himself his participation in the plot? This essay makes the argument that Bonhoeffer, influenced by Soren Kierkegaard, distinguishes between ethics and acts of faith, suggesting the possibility that Bonhoeffer believed he was responding in faithful obedience to the direct call of God to participate in the plot despite the fact that this conflicted with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.
Description
Copyright: © 2025 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/).
Publisher
MDPI
Date of publication
4-2025
Language
english
Persistent identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4921
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Bock, Gregory L., "Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Conditional Pacifism" (2025). Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 24.
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4921