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In Which I Dialog with Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In Which I Dialog with Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Last updated on: September 29, 2016 at 8:18 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

In Which I Dialog with Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer 2016-09-28T19:56:34-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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The most recent image of I could find in public domain of a man Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The most recent image I could find in the public domain of a German male who is Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

What follows is the correspondence between myself and a person who is Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Sadly, Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer is unavailable for further interviews, but I thought in this time of moral confusion that this dialog with Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer might prove helpful.

My concern began when my social media feed began to explode with advice when facing a bad political situation:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

-Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer*

This call to prophetic Christianity is good, but I became worried. Sometimes we face more than one evil and there is a temptation for a jeremiad against one evil while we justify or even support a second.

Surely our local Brownshirts are opposed to the local Reds, but becoming a fascist to stop the murder of Orthodox Christians by Reds is wrong. No Christian can or should endorse one evil to avoid another. My local miser will never be a spendthrift, but I do not commend his miserly ways to anyone!

If I support a privately corrupt man to avoid a publically corrupt person, then it will be hard to avoid being corrupted myself. As the Victorians might have said (but did not!): you cannot touch spray tan without turning orange. These concerns seemed important enough to contact Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer to get his thoughts. Soon I saw the truth, I wrote Not Dieterich Bonhoeffer and good news, today I got a message from my server- Not responded.

The following is a rough transcript of the Not conversation.

I began:

Dear Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

Do you mind if I call you Not?

I think the citation that actual Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not say is profound. Can we talk about this idea that is Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s most widely distributed quote?

Under the Mercy,

John Mark Reynolds

—————————

Dear Dr. Reynolds,

Please do call me Not. It keeps my friend “Anonymous” from getting credit for the few good ideas I have had and this is my best one. Ano already has so much going on for her online.

What is your question?

With questionable ontology,

Not

————————–

Dear Not,

I am worried that all of us see evil most easily in ideas least like our own. We minimize or downplay evil that benefits us or comes from our community. My own mind easily forgives my own offenses, forgetting that my evil is as bad any other evil.

Imagine an election where it appears one of two people is almost certain to win. Wouldn’t I be tempted to back “my team” regardless? After all, the other team is evil. If they actually are in favor of some grave moral evils, let’s say supporting unlimited abortion, I must prophetically oppose them. But suppose the other side is also deeply corrupted by evil. Don’t I have a duty to speak?

Let me put it this way:

Choosing one evil in the face of two evils is also evil. God will not hold us guiltless. To speak for one is to speak for evil. To act for one is to do evil.

John Mark N. Reynolds (actually)

Under the Mercy,

John Mark

————————–

Dear John Mark,

This is the sort of thing I did not say, but should be said.

The decision to vote for the Brownshirts to stop the Red Shirts led to great evil in the country from I am not from: Germany. Even if better parties could not win, Christians should have shown solidarity to candidates of the center-left and center-right.

Do you mind giving me credit?

With no phylogeny,

Not

—————————-

Dear Not:

I will leave it this way:

Choosing one evil in the face of two evils is also evil. God will not hold us guiltless. To speak for one is to speak for evil. To act for one is to do evil.

Also Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope we can remember that empowering evil will certainly corrupt our own souls. We end up justifying our choices by minimizing the particular evils of our team.

Thank you for the dialog!

Under the Mercy,

John Mark N. Reynolds**

—————————-

*Warren Throckmorton does God’s work tracking down data for all of us. He helped discover that the most common quotation in my social media feed is not, in fact, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

**OK this is Dad humor. I am sorry kids, but there is some truth in this little parody.

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