Saying No to Caesar

When Bonhoeffer wrote these words in the 1930’s, his primary concern was not to correct some abstract doctrine of grace but to confront a concrete political dilemma that haunted the church of his day. His quandary was simple: How is one to be a Christian and a German in a nation run by Nazis?

Bonhoeffer’s world found Adolf Hitler using the rhetoric of “God and country” to frightening effect. In 1933, for instance, Hitler expressed his “heartfelt” desire for a

Of course Hitler expected that the church would show the “Government . . . the same appreciation.”4

It is said that Bonhoeffer denounced the idolatry of the Fuhrer long before others recognized the threat. More than that, writer Mark Nation has noted how often Bonhoeffer attacked the one issue that “God and country” seeks most to uphold, and the single issue that tests our discipleship like no other. “War today . . . must be utterly rejected by the church,” Bonhoeffer proclaimed to the nation’s youth. “The church renounces obedience should she sanction war.” What mattered most to Bonhoeffer “was how to shape a Christian people that would embody discipleship seriously enough that an Adolf Hitler could not have his way with them.”5 If Jesus is Lord, Hitler is not. Discipleship must trump nationalism.

Of course, the church in Germany was not prepared to say no to Hitler. When conscription was instated in 1935, most Christians were eager to serve their country. Likewise in 1938 when “all pastors on active duty were required to take an oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer. . . . Bonhoeffer was ashamed . . . [that] by and large,” they did.6 He laments in Discipleship:

By 1939 a confident Adolf Hitler would boast that “With a tenth of our budget for religion, we would thus have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakeable loyalty.”8 With God and country virtually indistinguishable, the church was not prepared to recognize, much less refuse, the evil of the Third Reich. Instead, an undiscipled “Christian nation” loyally participated in the Holocaust that was Adolf Hitler.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” — Mark 12:17

One is either a good German or a good Christian. It is impossible to be both at the same time. — Adolph Hitler9

In this statement, we hear a different Hitler — one who shows the shallowness of any Christ-Caesar coalition. The biblical relationship between “God” and “country” is often characterized by tension and competing allegiances.

Abraham, for instance, begins his journey with God’s call to “get out of your country,” while Israel is taken from Egypt so that she may serve God rather than Pharaoh. Israel is “a people dwelling alone, not reckoning itself among the nations” (Numbers 23:9; Genesis 12:1; Exodus 8:1). But she is not apolitical — only a new sort of politics: a holy nation (Exodus 19:6), visible yet distinct from the nations around her (Leviticus 18:1-4; Deuteronomy 4:6), and YHWH is her king (Psalm 47). When Israel demands, “Give us a king . . . like all the nations,” she betrays her discipleship and her God (1 Samuel 8:5-7). Ironically, in captivity, in a strange land, she learns how to be faithful. While Israel seeks the well-being of her host nations, she does not confuse these places with home (Jeremiah 29:7). Israel belongs to God first — wherever she is — and loyalty to Him requires a discipleship that does not fear even a fiery furnace. It is exodus and exile — leaving or living in someone else’s country — that defines Israel’s story.

This paradigm continues and enlarges in the New Testament. Like Abraham and Israel, disciples of Jesus are redeemed “out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). They are “strangers and pilgrims” in the world (1 Peter 2:9-11, KJV) and citizens of a new society inaugurated by the Christ they call king. The politics of His kingdom orders their lives and defines their allegiance (Matthew 4—7). These disciples are called the church, and they serve the world as witness and foretaste to this present, and future, reality.

Dispersed throughout the world, the church is a holy nation that transcends all other national boundaries, interests, or claims. Not conformed to the world, she walks that fine line of being in it but not of it (John 17:11-13). She carefully discerns what belongs to God and to Caesar, while acknowledging that they are neither friends nor equals. While the church honors rulers (1 Peter 2:13-15), she realizes that should their demands run contrary to the gospel of peace, she can only respond, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

The early church reflected this biblical model to a remarkable extent. Discipleship had political implications for these saints. Confessing “Jesus is Lord” meant that the expectations of the empire had to be critically examined against the life of Christ. Consequently, Christians withheld from Caesar exactly what they offered Hitler: oaths of allegiance and military service (Matthew 5:33-48). At the risk of persecution, these displayed the costly grace of discipleship by not participating in battle.

All this changed dramatically in the fourth century. Author Roland Bainton remarks in Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace that the pacifist period in church history ended with the rise of Constantine. Significantly, Constantine’s questionable conversion to Christianity coincided with his military victory at Milvian Bridge. This decisive battle was won after he allegedly had a vision that he would conquer by the sign of the cross. The Edict of Milan followed a year later, and the process of establishing Christianity as the official religion of the empire was underway. That year he issued a directive to the prefect of Carthage granting church clergy exemption from imperial service. Shrewdly, Caesar got more than he gave in ceding to a few what all had previously possessed. The expectation was that in exchange for status in the empire, the church would relax her standards and serve Caesar in a capacity that she had heretofore refused in the name of Christ.

Christianity revised its position and accommodated Constantine with alarming speed. Mennonite historian Guy Franklin Hershberger has summarized the process. As early as 314, only a year after the Edict of Milan, the Council of Arles threatened with excommunication those Christians who refused military service. By about 350 Athanasius could write, “Murder is not permitted, but to kill one’s adversary in war is both lawful and praiseworthy.”11

A little later still, Ambrose would laud the warrior defending the homeland as “full of righteousness,” and Augustine would provide a systematic defense for the “just war” even as he endorsed military suppression of heretics. This remarkable reversal was complete in 416 when all soldiers were required to be Christian. “And so,” Hershberger concludes, “the nonresistant Christian brotherhood founded by the suffering Christ, after three and one-half centuries was transformed into a militant imperial state church.”12

Under Constantine, the biblical tensions between God and country are collapsed, church and state are fused, and discipleship succumbs to nationalism. Author Rodney Clapp notes that the question for the church has shifted from “How can we survive and remain faithful Christians under Caesar?” to “How can we adjust the church’s expectations so that Caesar can consider himself a faithful Christian?”13

From Constantine to Char-lemagne, from the Crusades to Cortez, Christians would raise the cross with the sword, making a warrior of the Prince of Peace. War is now a virtue because God is on “our” side; the enemy of the State is the enemy of God.

The Christian compromise with Constantine reached a gruesome climax in the twentieth century when, for national interests, Christians killed Christians in the tens of millions. In World Wars I and II the “Christian West” turned against itself. In Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Northern Ireland, Christians committed genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism against their own brothers and sisters in Christ.
All too often, national and ethnic loyalties regularly triumph over the discipleship of Jesus. The sad truth is that when nationalism calls Christians to subordinate the commands of the gospel to the interests of the State, we too seldom refuse.

Discipleship means taking Jesus seriously. The more dedicated we are to this, the less likely we are to confuse faith with flag or Christ with Caesar. Disciples must be wary of “God and country” when it distorts the universal character of the church, when it tempts us into thinking that God is for “us” and against “them,” when it reduces God’s purposes to our self-interests, when it insists on rebuilding the very walls and borders that the Cross has torn down (Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:11-22).

The truth that Dietrich Bonhoeffer so boldly proclaimed, the truth that his church could not hear, is that the “god” so often invoked to legitimize the ambitions of “country” is rarely consistent with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Adolf Hitler’s elite soldiers fought with the slogan “God with us” inscribed on their belt buckles. This god of nationalism was not the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, but something else entirely. A disciple is simply one who can tell the difference, one for whom costly grace means sometimes saying no to Caesar.

Jason Overman lives and ministers in Jasper AR, with his wife, Stephanie, and their two children, Tabitha and Isaac.

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