Does Divine Retribution Generate Human Violence?—Bonhoeffer, Guilt, and Resistance

In contemporary discussions on the atonement, many have drawn a direct correlation, if not causation, between people who presume God’s justice requires retribution for sin and people who justify or have become inoculated to violence.  Consider J. Denny Weaver’s point to this effect:  “It seems far from a mere conjecture that there may be a reciprocal relationship between imaging a God who uses violence on the one hand and human comfort with a resort to violence on the other hand.”[1]  To Weaver, retributive justice, even when wielded by the divine, is still a form of violence and that theological affirmations of such violence lead to humans becoming accustomed to it.  For him, the connection can be substantiated.  Timothy Gorringe goes so far as to use the language of “cause” to describe the relationship between atonement theologies that require the punishment of sin and corresponding theories of criminal justice.[2]  For scholars like Weaver and Gorringe, this connection not only can be established, it calls into question the viability of divine retribution.        

In this paper, I argue that the line between divine retribution on the one hand and the justification of or comfortability with violence on the other hand is not as causal as such authors contend.  To substantiate the point, I turn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer who provides an interesting example because he held to divine retribution and yet refrains from justifying his participation in the German resistance on the other, even if he realized the necessity of the situation demanded such an approach. 

To support the claim that Bonhoeffer constitutes such an example, I begin by tracing his affirmation of divine retribution against sin throughout his writings, beginning with his early work and concluding with Letters and Papers from Prison.  While Bonhoeffer’s prison correspondence takes up some fascinating new directions and sees the cross as God’s participation in the suffering of the world—which would later be taken up in the fascinating way only Moltmann could—there are still elements of divine retribution present in them, such as the poem, “The Death of Moses.”[3]  Thus, I conclude that Bonhoeffer believed throughout his life that God must in fact punish sin and that divine retribution was operative in the way God reconciled humanity to himself. 

The next portion of the paper unpacks Bonhoeffer’s peace ethic and ethics of resistance as developed in his various writings.  The section on his peace ethic supports the notion that Bonhoeffer never became comfortable with violence.  While his ethics of resistance might seem to be a contradiction to his peace ethic, I contend that they can be read sympathetically because Bonhoeffer never justified his actions as free from divine judgment.  Rather, the attempts on Hitler’s life are considered a “trespass” in “After Ten Years.”[4]  Similar themes can be found in  the expansions that Bonhoeffer introduces into his account of “free responsibility” in the Ethics manuscripts when compared with similar accounts in Discipleship.  Rather than seeing the situation under the Third Reich as justifying any form of action, Bonhoeffer curiously continues to speak of such actions as inculpating the actors.  In fact, acting from free responsibility and being like Christ requires one to be willing to become guilty.[5]  The prison writings substantiate the same theme, namely, that before God the conspirators were not without guilt.[6]  Thus, I contend that in the places where Bonhoeffer is spelling out his theological reflection on his participation in the Abwehr, he never does so in a way that assumes he and his co-conspirators are without guilt before God.  As a result, the necessity of the situation under the Third Reich did not serve to justify violence or inoculate him to it, even against Hitler.

This leads me to the following conclusion.  Despite the fact that there might be individuals who hold to the necessity of divine retribution for sin in the atonement on the one hand and who therefore justify their own violent behavior in pursuit of what they deem to be right on the other, I think it is in error to conclude that this is a causal connection.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was able to hold to divine retribution for sin without having that translate into a justification of his own personal involvement in the German resistance.  Bonhoeffer may be a rare example.  However, if we are concerned about individuals justifying their violence, the problem is not necessarily divine retribution as much as it is the human desire for self-justification.    

[1] J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent God (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2013), 148-9.

[2] Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance:  Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 225.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al, DBWE 8 (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 2010), 540. 

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al, DBWE 8 (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 2010), 46.   

[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford Green, trans. Ilse Tödt, et al, DBWE 6 (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 2005), 282-83. 

[6] For instance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Prison,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 1, no. 3 (1946):  7.