The following quote regarding Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his friend and first biography, Eberhard Bethge, aptly captures the mental wrestling of Bonhoeffer and remains applicable to us when considering the times we are living in with respect society’s treatment of the unborn children.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian during the Nazi regime who was most famously involved in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was later arrested and killed just days before American forces would liberate the POW camp Bonhoeffer was at.
Bonhoeffer helped found the Confessing Church to distinguish the group of Christians from the German Church who sought to submit itself to the rules and orthodoxy of the Nazi party.
And here, in that historical context, Eberhard Bethge writes:
Bonhoeffer introduced us in 1935 to the problem of what we today call political resistance. The levels of confession and of resistance could no longer be kept neatly apart. The escalating persecution of the Jews generated an increasingly intolerable situation, especially for Bonhoeffer himself. We now realized that mere confession, no matter how courageous, inescapably meant complicity with the murderers, even though there would always be new acts of refusing to be co-opted and even though we could preach “Christ alone” Sunday after Sunday. During the whole time the Nazi state never considered it necessary to prohibit such preaching. Why should it?
Metaxas, E. (2010). Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Thomas Nelson.
Thus we were approaching the borderline between confession and resistance; and if we did not cross this border, our confession was going to be no better than cooperation with the criminals. And so it became clear where the problem lay for the Confessing Church: we were resisting by way of confession, but we were not confessing by way of resistance.
Knowing the treatment of unborn children today, dehumanized and valued as commodities, inaction and mere confession did not seem appropriate responses to the reality that God, alone, is Creator and that every human being is created in the image of God (imago dei).
Is “mere confession… complicity”? Are we, too, “approaching the borderline between confession and resistance” such that “our confession [without resistance is] going to be no better than cooperation with the criminals”? I believe we are.
Deliver those who are being taken away to death,
And those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back.
If you say, “See, we did not know this,”
Does He not consider it who weighs the hearts?
And does He not know it who keeps your soul?
And will He not render to man according to his work?
– Proverbs 24:11-12
Foreknown and Created 