2024 Dilemma

 Last September I wrote a blog in which I reflected on the potential negative effects of hypothetical moral dilemmas on ethical decision-making. I was at that time in the beginning stages of teaching a college course on the history of the Holocaust. As I did, this idea was processing in the back of my mind and surfaced in two quite different modalities.

During the class we reflected on the lives of those who intervened or spoke out on behalf of Jews. We considered what it was about these people – their backgrounds, their personalities, their thinking – that enabled them to make that life-giving decision. And we discussed the question of why it is that more people did not do the same. One of the reasons that students often stated, echoed by some of the sources that we read, was that people believed that there were two and only two potential outcomes that were linked to the decision that they made about the Jews. First, they could take a step to save others, perhaps through harboring Jews, guiding them to safety, or creating counterfeit documents. If they did, so the reasoning went, the Germans would inevitably hunt them down and harm them or their families. If they kept silent and accepted the state of things even while privately disliking them, they and their families could remain in safety. As students articulated this, they stated an either/or dilemma. There were only two choices and only two outcomes. However, in the study of those who helped, including some of those denoted as the “Righteous Among the Nations,” one of the traits that shines through is the unwillingness to think in these categories. It is not that these people were heedless of the danger to their families or that they simply sacrificed their families to save Jews. Rather, one of the hallmark patterns is that those who helped Jews were often simply ordinary but quite creative people. They saw that they could carefully seek out ways to intervene. In cases of those devout Christians who were intervening (such as those in Tim Dowley’s Defying the Holocaust), they could believe in the power of God to do the impossible.

Likewise, the notion that the Nazis would not have countenanced any opposition to the Holocaust by the Church is starkly overturned in the story of Clemens von Galen. This German Catholic bishop spoke out publicly against the Nazi T4 program – a mass euthanasia program that targeted those considered “defective,” including those with Down Syndrome and schizophrenia. Galen’s sermons helped spark a protest movement, which cut short the T4 program. Meanwhile, Galen was not arrested or silenced by the Nazis. While Galen was not perfect, surely this example shows that speaking out against Nazi policy would not automatically result in harm.

Those who accepted the dichotomous ethical choice (help the Jews or suffer harm) had essentially acquiesced to the flip side of the Nazi’s own false moral dilemma. The Nazi narrative of the past and analysis of the present had stated forcefully that Germany had two choices – either get rid of the Jews completely or Germany was doomed. By feeding on longstanding cultural suspicions and by creating propaganda in various forms, the Nazis convinced many people that it was “us” or “them.” If you wanted to safeguard your families and your way of life, the hard step of eliminating the Jews from German society was absolutely requisite.

There were Christians in Germany who resolutely rejected the ideological claims of the Nazis. While a political party was declaring to them that they were the authority on the problems that existed and their solutions, Christians such as those who were a part of the Confessing Church reaffirmed that the only final authority for the Christian is Jesus Christ and His revealed Word. They believed that the story of Christ and His Church was unbounded by the claimed imperatives of political structures. While German leaders were seeking to build earthly power in the guise of German “spirit,” these Christians were proclaiming Jesus’s words: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

In 2024, we will be offered political ethical dilemmas by those who claim to know how the world operates and who claim that they are presented a dilemma that comes directly from God. I pray that the Christian Church will instead be captivated by a much more beautiful truth – that we would be drawn into God’s Word in transformative ways. I pray that we will strengthen our understanding of what He can accomplish through us when we call on Him, relying fully on His power, never forgetting that our weapons are not the weapons of the world. I pray for that we would see clearly that Jesus’s kingdom is not one that is built from seemingly sturdy blocks of this world but grows out of the mustard seed of faith.