Tag Archives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Religion

The Kingdom and the zebras

4 Comments
Photo credit: sutirta budimansutirtab. Unsplash license.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:1-4, ESV)

I’m still reading the next book I’ll be reviewing (it’s a little slow, but I also have other business demanding my time just now). Last night I filled the void with talk about my work. Tonight I sink even lower – I’m going to write down my thoughts, such as they are.

Jordan Peterson’s most famous animal anecdote concerns lobsters. But he also talks about zebras, and what he says of them intrigues me.

He tells of some biologists in Africa, observing herds of zebras. They found it impossible to track any single animal. The moment you blink or glance away, you lose the individual. It disappears into the herd.

So the researchers tried marking them with paint.

The marked zebras were immediately chased down and killed by lions.

Because the zebra’s safety is found in the anonymity of the herd.

People, Peterson notes, used to wonder why zebras have stripes. Evolutionists suggested the stripes helped them blend into the tall grass. But that doesn’t work. Zebras stick out like hi-viz vests against the backdrop of tall grass.

No, what zebras blend into is not the grass, but the herd. Each individual gets lost to sight among all that chaos of stripes. It’s the individuals who stand out – either due to deformity or weakness or age (old or young) who get eaten. Individuals are lost, but the herd goes on and remains strong.

Which leads me to think about The World.

Growing up in a pietist church, I had clear ideas about what the World is. Drunkenness, and gambling, and questionable entertainment. The singleminded pursuit of money. Compromising one’s values to gain power and status.

But it occurs to me that, in a real sense, the World is the Herd.

Continue reading The Kingdom and the zebras →
Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

The conservative resistance to Hitler

1 Comment

My friend Gene Edward Veith has a review up at the Acton Institute. He reports on the book, White Knights in the Black Orchestra, by Tom Dunkel. Although the book is not primarily an examination of conservatives in wartime Germany, it does make it plain that the conservative conspiracy to kill Hitler was much bigger than Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his circle, and that German conservatives constituted a major, and serious, challenge to the Third Reich. He writes.

My impression had always been that Bonhoeffer was caught up in a quixotic and poorly planned attempt by a small group of German aristocrats and military officers at the very end of the war, and that his role was minimal, basically that of a courier. But Dunkel shows that the Black Orchestra conspiracy began in the earliest days of Hitler’s regime, that it penetrated to the highest levels of the German war machine, and that it carried out many anti-Nazi missions, some of which had an impact on the outcome of the war…..

Meanwhile, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was battling the so-called German Christians, who wished to Nazify the Protestant state church by turning Christianity into a cultural religion (as liberal theologians were already doing) and expunging its “Jewish elements” to the point of removing the Old Testament from the Bible altogether. (This, too, was made feasible by piggybacking on the work of generations of liberal Bible scholars who had succeeded in undermining biblical authority within the state church.)….

That National Socialism is thought of today as an extreme kind of conservatism is one of the biggest victories of Marxist propaganda. This book shows that Hitler and his followers were radical revolutionaries, who sought to liquidate—not conserve—the traditional Western values of faith, morality, and freedom.

Dunkel does not play up the conservative and Christian angle as such, beyond saying that the conspirators “tended to be politically conservative to the bone” and describing the key figures as devout Christians.

Read the whole thing here.