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| navigate: home: magazine: spring/summer 2000: article | |
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Turning away from violence By Celena E. Kusch | ||||||||||||||||
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In the midst of Adolf Hitler’s rule over Germany, members of the German resistance formed a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, believing that his death would topple Nazi rule and end the Holocaust. Among the group, comprised of predominantly military dissidents, was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pacifist theologian whose ethical dilemma with the use of violent resistance to end an immoral regime led him to produce some of the most important philosophical and theological writings of the 20th century. In recognition of Bonhoeffer’s importance, international scholars and students gathered at Penn State for a conference titled Bonhoeffer’s Dilemma: The Ethics of Violence. At the conference, participants discussed the example his works provide for those faced with a decision to take or to avoid violent action. During her conference address, Dr. Victoria Barnett, director of publications for the Churches’ Center for Theology and Public Policy and consultant to the Church Relations Department of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, remarked, “Through Bonhoeffer’s writings, we can begin to understand how someone confronted by the face of evil begins to rethink all concepts from the ground up. His is the resistance of someone very much a part of a world being destroyed and someone who will not yet give up on it.” Although more than 50 years have passed since Bonhoeffer’s death, that world looks familiar to many today. Dr. Randy J. Ploog, associate director of the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, discussed the continued relevance of Bonhoeffer’s legacy in a contemporary context. “In a historical sense, the issues Bonhoeffer faced related to the Holocaust are still with us,” Ploog noted. “Just recently, five synagogues were bombed in California. The ethnic cleansing in Kosovo is another example. But Bonhoeffer’s legacy is also relevant in a more general sense as we consider the issue of whether and when it is appropriate to take violent action in the face of evil. It applies directly to the involvement of peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, East Timor and Somalia. It also relates to issues like capital punishment—really any time you try to justify the use of force or violence.” As a pacifist who participated in an assassination conspiracy, Bonhoeffer provides insight into the complexities of this justification. “When we face the same kind of deliberations Bonhoeffer made, we are not looking for a hero, but for a companion to accompany us through darkness,” Barnett explained. “As we look into the face of evil today—the teens who killed Matthew Shepard, the young men in Texas who dragged James Byrd behind their truck and the countless perpetrators of atrocities in Kosovo and around the world—we could do worse than to take Dietrich Bonhoeffer as our companion.” Librettist Dr. Robert Hatten, formerly of Penn State and now professor of music at Indiana University, and composer Dr. Ann Gebuhr, professor of music at Houston Baptist University, clearly agree. Together they created Bonhoeffer, an original opera dramatizing the moral conflict that accompanied Bonhoeffer’s participation in the conspiracy, his imprisonment and, ultimately, his execution. The opera debuted in concert version at Penn State during the conference. Hatten, a former Fellow of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, conceived the idea of presenting their opera in conjunction with a scholarly conference. Other institute Fellows collaborated on ways to expand the program’s impact and to incorporate teaching, research and service into the outreach program. The result was a semester-long outreach effort sponsored by the institute that incorporated original creative performances, graduate, undergraduate and community education and a scholarly exchange of ideas. These integrated programs culminated in the academic conference that took place at The Nittany Lion Inn last fall. More than 125 historians, theologians and cultural analysts, as well as a number of students and members of the Centre County community, attended. Throughout the conference, community-university partnerships played an important role both in enriching conference offerings and in extending the program to audiences beyond Penn State, especially to local secondary school students. The Community for Peace Education (COPED) of State College sponsored a one-man play, A View from the Underside: The Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written and performed by Al Staggs, an actor from Houston. The play was performed in the afternoon at the Fairmount School auditorium for community members, middle and high school participants in the Delta Program and students in the social studies curriculum. An evening performance reached an audience of 125 on campus as the official kickoff event of the conference. According to Kay McKnight, president of COPED, the organization’s mission is to “support peace through education.” Bringing the play to State College provided opportunities for looking at questions of ethics, violence and resistance in ways that benefit the larger community, especially high school students, McKnight said. Conference speakers, as well, shared this emphasis on applying Bonhoeffer’s example to these questions in ways that are consistent with moral concerns. Dr. John de Gruchy, Robert Selby Taylor Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, presented a comparative analysis of Nelson Mandela and Bonhoeffer, both of whom were committed to peace, but turned to violence when all other avenues of resistance seemed blocked. In it, he explored what he called “the perennial challenge such icons of political resistance present to us in our own time and respective contexts. “Looking to these icons, we must perform a careful, historical, contextual analysis and warn against romanticizing their models,” he added. “As we consider the contexts and realities facing us, we must follow their example: they weigh both moral and strategic considerations and accept the moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions. In every case, these moral considerations should drive the strategy of resistance. Only those committed to peacemaking have the moral authority to move to violent resistance. Only those who risk their own lives for the good of others deserve our acclaim, even if in our own struggle we do not agree with them.” Indeed, other speakers discussed Bonhoeffer’s ethics of violence from the perspective of such nonviolence advocates as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. J. Deotis Roberts, Research Professor of Christian Theology at the Duke University Divinity School, compared the theology and actions of King and Bonhoeffer in the context of the kind of “evil” each faced—the rule of Hitler and the extermination of the Jews for Bonhoeffer and systemic racism for King. According to Roberts, despite the dramatic differences in their political climates, both faced the same complex questions: “Is it ever feasible to engage in evil to achieve good? Are there situations so diabolical that to do nothing is to side with a demonic regime? Their answers came from their theology,” Roberts explained. Because Bonhoeffer faced a “kingdom of evil,” Roberts added, the limited violence of an assassination attempt was consistent with his ethics. By contrast, the democratic political climate in which King lived led him to a different answer. “King approached the dilemma through the perspective of African American Christian agape and his Howard Divinity School dialogue with Gandhi. As a result, nonviolence was at the heart of his life view and worldview. He never had to consider violence, having achieved the integration of the goals of racial equality and democracy,” he said. Such fruitful comparisons of the context of ethical choices and philosophies were also the basis of much of the teaching component of this outreach effort. Penn State faculty members Dr. Emily Grosholz, professor of philosophy, and Dr. James Stewart, professor of labor studies and African and African-American studies, for example, included Bonhoeffer’s writings in a course in African-American philosophy. Along with Grosholz and Stewart, nearly a dozen faculty incorporated Bonhoeffer into courses ranging from introductory to specialized, advanced classes. In some required composition classes, students used the conference as the basis for writing assignments after the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies made information about Bonhoeffer and the conference available to composition instructors. Similarly, one performance art course required students to create a performance dealing with social issues. Integrating the conference into the course, the instructor pointed to Bonhoeffer and particularly the Al Staggs’ performance as a model. In all these courses, Ploog explained, the conference materials were “used to inspire. Students were directed to the conference as a resource.” Beyond the scholarly presentations and discussions, other conference offerings provided a resource for understanding the ethics of violence at a more personal level. The Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) offered participants a chance to experience one of their workshops. The AVP program was developed nearly three decades ago through a partnership between New York State prison inmates and Quakers who were conducting nonviolence training for civil rights activists. Today, their workshops are offered worldwide in prisons, schools and communities in such areas as Bosnia, Russia and Cuba. According to Shirley Tuttle, Alternatives to Violence Project facilitator, members of the local AVP became part of the conference “because of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism and commitment to solving problems nonviolently.” The conference workshops, conducted by Tuttle and co-facilitator Dorothy Habecker, led participants through exercises in community building, listening skills, cooperation, communication and self-esteem. “The philosophy behind these exercises is that everyone has something inside enabling them to deal with conflicts without violence,” Tuttle said. Workshop exercises help participants find those coping skills. Like the creative performances, the workshops and other weekend programming were designed to attract many community members to the conference, including members of church organizations and local educators. The combination of community and academic participants contributed to the atmosphere of dialogue throughout the conference that organizers hope will continue in the future. Ploog commented, “From the beginning, we were hoping the conference itself would spawn community meetings and interest in the ethics of violence and Bonhoeffer himself. The day after the conference, a member of the State College Presbyterian Church called. She had spoken with her assistant pastor after attending the conference, and they are interested in organizing a series of faculty talks at their church during Lent. This is exactly what we were hoping would come out of this conference.” Other conference outcomes may include an edited anthology on the ethics of violence and other scholarly collaborations. An outreach program of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies | |||||||||||||||
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