Not Just Another April 9th and Remembrance
“Who Stands Firm?”
Perhaps you are bewildered that a Deviant and Convicted Criminal who blasts invectives and expletives on one Faith’s Holy Day while deriding the Faith of another half of the world’s population could be running and ruining America’s foreign policy while also gutting our domestic strengths. Perhaps you are astounded at the kindergarten jealousies and power plays communicated by social media posts and you are more than worried that personal whims rather than national deliberations will send more bombs and more than bombs hurling. Perhaps you can’t believe what is going on and that nobody in the Republican Caucus in Congress will actually do what they signed up for and for what we elected them: Check and Balance. Protect and Defend the Constitution. Especially when the President does not and will not.
Listen please to a short excerpt from what Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. April 9, 1945) wrote to his friends and family at Christmas in 1942 after 10 years of exhausting resistance to the rise of Hitler and Nazism.[i]
“The huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion. That evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice is absolutely bewildering for one coming from the world of ethical concepts that we have received. For the Christian who lives by the Bible, it is the very confirmation of the abysmal wickedness of evil.”
What we have with President Trump is this “huge masquerade of evil” which has gone beyond making us scratch our heads in disbelief to the point of fearing for our lives. What makes our situation even more confounding is that we have this additional confusion of just what it means to “live by the Bible.” We have a huge number of so-called Evangelical Christians swear by the Bible as they swear fealty to Trump (do you remember Trump literally holding the Bible upside down in front of the church in D.C. when he staged a scene trying to paint himself a supporter of Christianity!?). These Trump supporters know nothing of the biblical ethic even as they purport faith in Christ.
In this 1942 correspondence Bonhoeffer asked “Who Stands Firm?” So we must ask ourselves the same today. Who stands firm against the tyrannies of fascism and the desecration of democracy?
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[i] The correspondence is literally entitled “After 10 Years” and covers a lot of territory reflecting on the resistance to Hitler’s Fascism. Four months later Hitler had Bonhoeffer arrested and imprisoned and after two and a half years in prison Hitler would order Bonhoeffer executed just shortly before he, Hitler, committed suicide.
