“Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty”: Reading Bonhoeffer’s Free Responsible Action, Relative Sinlessness, and Participation in Conspiracy through the Lens of Moral Injury

In “Moral Injury and Human Relationship,” Michael Yandell explores the many layers and scales of responsibility and relationality in the waging and fighting of war. After locating himself as a US veteran and reviewing core literature in the study of moral injury, which is yet only in its nascence, Yandell turns to offer substantive theological engagement with more clinical definitions. His theological light in this regard is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with particular attention to his account of conscience and shame in Ethics. He observes where Bonhoeffer describes the conscience as a kind of prison—“It is an impossible burden to be fully autonomous—to be the one who determines what is good and what is evil, to deliberate in every moment and try one’s best to act accordingly”—and Jesus as the liberator of each one’s conscience so that one may freely serve God and concrete neighbors. Then Yandell explains how, in his own story, “I placed my conscience on the foundation of the military because I knew that I was incapable of deciding and dealing with the world’s ‘good and evil’—though I wished to serve the good.” And more than that, he goes on to describe a more agentic form of moral injury (in comparison to the “receptive” form just named) that revealed one of his own relational failures in the wartime context that continues to haunt him. Yandell does this partly to demonstrate his willingness to own his part in the mess but also because he has a view to Bonhoeffer’s explication of shame, here quoting from Bonhoeffer’s account of Adam and Eve’s moments in the garden post-fall: “Shame seeks a cover to overcome estrangement . . . human beings also preserve an ultimate concealment with respect to themselves, they protect their own secret from themselves, by refusing, for example, to become consciously aware of everything that is germinating within them.” Against the backdrop of this growing awareness and understanding of moral injury as a phenomenon as well as Yandell’s theological reflection drawing upon Bonhoeffer’s theology, this paper will reverse the hermeneutical flow to explore how Yandell and others’ work on moral injury might serve as a helpful lens for reading Bonhoeffer’s theological moves most nearly associated with his decision to join a conspiracy.

For idealist pacifists who wish to read Bonhoeffer as committed to nonviolence in word and deed down to the bitter end, the temptation (fully embraced by Mark Thiessen Nation) is to fight against even the notion that Bonhoeffer would have been involved in a coercive, violence-dependent campaign even against Adolf Hitler. For those disinclined toward pacifism, Bonhoeffer’s involvement in such a conspiracy exemplifies both (a) moral courage amidst a real-world, worst-case scenario and (b) the feebleness of idealist pacifism in the face of concrete challenges. This paper will argue that both stories are a bit too neat and tidy for Bonhoeffer’s life and writing. When we embrace one of these accounts, we risk being seduced by their tidiness and lulled into a false sense of moral security. Once we determine the genuine reading of Christian tradition, we may think Christian faithfulness means just sticking to our principles—our conscience serving as a well-founded prison.

When we hear the cries of fellow human beings rising—whether an individual down the street or masses half a world away—we sense that we are somehow responsible for their well-being. We have choices to make about how to exercise that responsibility, and no rational application of our preformulated “knowledge of good and evil” should make us feel at ease about a decision to exercise violence—or a decision against intervention. Whatever the outcome, we should continue to feel the weight of our choices and to wrestle with their adequacy long after moments of decision.

We gain nothing by denying core convictions about God’s kingdom or commitments to nonviolence and problems solved through repentance and forgiveness, as Bonhoeffer expresses in letters and in Discipleship. Yet we must ask some hard questions about the role of our ideals in the context of a life following Jesus. As Bonhoeffer explains, only after the fall does the conscience bind humans to their personal knowledge of good and evil. Trying to be sicut deus, humans listen to their inner voices rather than the living God who speaks a word hic et nunc. In other words, when we find our security in our stories (or our understanding of the biblical worldview), we evade the living, biblical, historical Jesus. Conversely, in calling us to follow him, Jesus sets the conscience free to fulfill its purpose vis-à-vis our concrete neighbors and God. As Bonhoeffer tells us, the effect is quite disorienting:

“The freed conscience aligns itself with the responsibility, which has been established in Christ, to bear guilt for the sake of the neighbor. . . . As responsible action, in contrast to any self-righteous action justified by a principle, it does participate indirectly in the action of Jesus Christ. Responsible action is thus characterized by something like a relative sinlessness, which is demonstrated precisely by the responsible taking on of another’s guilt.”

Although this sounds like a nightmare to many Christians, we cannot be justified by our fastidious obedience to what we think we know of God’s will. Jesus frees us from our personal knowledge of good and evil so that we may be open to his lead. Moreover, as Bonhoeffer sums up the truth in six deeply unsettling words: “Everyone who acts responsibly becomes guilty.” This is exactly the kind of situation into which moral injury can meaningfully speak some new words.