Two years ago in a time of rising prosperity, The Monthly published then opposition leader Kevin Rudd's article on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He used the German theologian's life and integrity to define the ethical contribution that churches can make in Australian public life. He understandably described Bonhoeffer's ethical stance in categories that reflected those of Labor Party policy.
Bonhoeffer was a writer for many times. He continues to engage readers as a man whose thought, life and execution for resisting Hitler's policies were coherent. His ethics will be the subject of a conference in Newcastle later this year on the limits of tolerance. So it may be worth retracing the path walked by Rudd and reflecting on how his ethical approach might illuminate a different time of economic downturn and recovery.
Bonhoeffer's ethics are of interest less for his conclusions about particular issues than for his starting point. He was a committed Christian who asked himself how to respond ethically in his world. His focus was theological and practical. He was not an ethical theorist who asked how faith might be relevant to his theory.
The Church was central in his faith. So he did not see ethical response as the province of isolated individuals but of people gathered in the church. This view led him to emphasise the importance of forming the community to respond to their world. When he formed theological students for the confessing Church that was at odds with Hitler's policies, he laid great stress on discipline and the practice of prayer.
The determining factor in making ethical decisions was reality. This included the unique set of relationships and events that compose each situation. But his understanding of reality was also theological. The heart of reality was Jesus Christ, in whom humanity and the created world are joined to God. So reality included human misery and blindness, but also the salvation from these things promised in Christ's death. To situate ethics in reality was to be shaped to Christ and to act in a way that fitted the future world that God wanted.
It is no wonder that Bonhoeffer had a bleak view of human ethical resources. His times were those of crisis, from the disastrous German defeat in the Great European War through Hitler's rise to power ending in another war. He also found his own time as one of intellectual and moral crisis in which people had