We need to be wary of generalising from one context to another as George Bush did. Has Bonhoeffer become all things to all men, beloved by all, everybody’s saint? A. In the 1960s, radical death-of-God theologians claimed that they were building on Bonhoeffer’s insights in Letters and Papers from Prison, but a couple of years ago the evangelical biographer Eric Metaxas told Christianity Today that Bonhoeffer was as orthodox as Saint Paul. The Presbyterian minister Paul Hill, on the other hand, murdered an abortionist in Florida in 1994, claiming that his violence was the same as Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazi regime. Some Bonhoeffer scholars were indignant, arguing that Bonhoeffer would have opposed the “war on terror.” In 1966 Joseph Fletcher honoured Bonhoeffer as a key inspiration for his book Situation Ethics he argued that situation ethics meant that (among other things) abortion was permissible in some situations. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, he invoked Dietrich Bonhoeffer to help justify his action on a visit to Germany in 2002.
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