Niebuhr/Bonhoeffer and the Personal Use of Violence

Session 2: by Darrell Wesley and Chris Dowdy, Racial Wholeness

During the Jewish Holocaust, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and author of the Christian classic The Cost of Discipleship, struggled to apply Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence in response to Adolf Hitler. In the 1932 classic Moral Man and Immoral Society, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr addressed the difficulty of applying biblical principles to this topic as well. How can these texts guide our thinking and Christian convictions on whether the personal use of violence is justified?

BSB 114