This is one of my favorite quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, neo-orthodox theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), whose writings I discovered in English and the original German when I was a university student.

Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo, spent the next two years in various prisons and concentration camps, and was hanged at the age of 39 on 9 April 1945, exactly one month before the end of World War II. He was willing to sacrifice his life because of his resounding “‘no’ to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor…” Are you?

Euer Ja zu Gott fordert euer Nein zu allem Unrecht, zu allem Bösen, zu aller Lüge, zu aller Bedrückung und Vergewaltigung der Schwachen und Armen, zu aller Gottlosigkeit und Verhöhnung des Heiligen. Euer Ja fordert ein tapferes Nein zu allem, was euch daran hindern will, Gott allein zu dienen und sei es euer Beruf, euer Besitz, euer Haus, eure Ehre vor der Welt. Glaube heißt Entscheidung.

Your ‘yes’ to God requires your ‘no’ to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor, to all ungodliness, and to all impiety and mockery of what is holy. Your ‘yes’ to God requires a brave ‘no’ to everything that tries to interfere with your serving God alone, even if that is your job, possessions, home, or honor in the world. Belief means decision.

Bonhoeffer’s admonition is not limited to Christians, others who believe in a god, or Buddhists. It applies to secular humanists (Your YES to your conscience and moral code…), anyone a humanistic moral compass. I embrace the basic tenets of Christianity and Buddhism but am not a “practicing member” of either. I strongly identify with Bonhoeffer’s logically consistent (“konsequent” in German) interpretation of his religion.

Finally, there’s this, one of countless quotes about the price of silence (is complicity) for the victims of injustice and those who choose to remain silent: 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. Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author, said something similar in response to a question about genocide posed by a young national security professional: “Even if you don’t do anything, if you allow the people to kill and destroy … that is also violence. Violence can be action or non-action.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life, teachings, writings, resistance to the Nazi regime, suffering, and death exemplify what Han Kang, the first Korean writer and the first female Asian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (2024), wrote in 2017: “The last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering, which wins out over all of these biases. And the fact that actual, practical volition and action, which goes beyond simple compassion for the suffering of others, is demanded of us at every moment.”

Peace, MAA