“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I want to be good. You too, surely. But what does it mean to be good in a world gone wrong?

It is time to think about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was an influential German pastor, who believed it was evil to kill, participated in an unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler, and was executed less than a fortnight before Hitler killed himself. His history hovers uncomfortably over our communal consciousness. It is wrong to kill, most would agree, but to kill Hitler? When is resistance to evil a moral obligation, assassination heroism?

I draw no analogies. I don’t need to. Stories of early Christian martyrs disquiet less. Distance simplifies them into storybook figures. Even Jesus’ crucifixion doesn’t hurt that much, we’re so used to it.

But Bonhoeffer was my dad’s age. My uncle, a minister, knew him briefly during their time at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was a modern man with modern worries. Notwithstanding his faith, I doubt he welcomed a death so young. Life wants to live. But for Bonhoeffer, life was more than breath, it was doing right, living for an ideal more exciting than survival. Dying for the right was preferable to living in the wrong. What might I do, faced with such a choice?

To rehearse drastic dramas is not to recommend them. Rather it is to fortify ourselves against a possibility, to immunize oneself against disgrace. I hope to die well, when I must, so my parting consoles. If I bring that off, it will be because I’ve practiced. John Donne kept a coffin in his study to remind himself; mine is figurative.

How easy to be good when there’s no cost! My paragraphs upraise me to paragon. But what if I am put to it, what if “do or die” becomes more than a phrase? Have I the guts for goodness? Or will I shrivel into panicky excuses, like Peter at Calvary?

Bonhoeffer stiffens spines, as a preacher ought. He distinguished between cheap and costly grace. “Cheap grace,” he wrote,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedis the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

I’m a whiz at cheap grace. Costly’s harder. “Costly grace,” says Bonhoeffer – and we feel him speaking to himself,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedis the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble…

Such grace is costly… because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.

Sell all you have? Pluck out your eye? Risk death if necessary? Give one’s life to get life? Yikes. The stakes in this game are spiraling out of my comfort zone.

I owe the Nameless One thanks. His vileness forces me to define myself by comparison. Bad derives its meaning from Good, Wrong from Right, Disgrace from Grace. The worse he gets, the better must I, in counterpoise. He bleaches me, my spiritual detergent.

“But we’re not there yet,” friends protest, “all this Hitler talk!”

I agree: not yet. But oughtn’t we pack before the train departs?