clueless

some educated dude posted about how bad trump is. i know trump isn't great but he isn't terrible either. if we waited for the perfect politician, we'd die, or we'd find the antichrist. obama had a lot of antichrist markers: promising to save everyone, well-liked, gay, worshiped, prayed to... Jesus wouldn't even make these kinds of people happy. he pissed off a lot of religious people.

here's the article

http://eerdword.com/2020/01/10/your-bonhoeffer-moment/

like bonhoeffer is some great example. sure he wanted to murder hitler, but HE WANTED TO MURDER HITLER. maybe trust God? idk. preach the bible? allow the Holy Spirit to change hearts? isn't that the end goal? hearts for God? what do i know? i'm just a nobody anyway. scripture never commands us to murder anyone, no matter how evil he is. is stephen haynes gonna murder the antichrist when he takes power? gimme a break. does the book of Revelation command us to murder the false prophet? bonhoeffer wasn't that smart, and he was a terrible writer.

"let's take matters into our own hands and MURDER THIS GUY"

here's what i said. i doubt they even post it. currently it's "awaiting moderation"

Is this your standard? Feeling good? Moral superiority? Self righteousness?

Do you not understand that most politicians hide their flaws? That we only know of Trump’s many flaws because he has been in the public eye for decades? You use Obama as this shining example of moral blamelessness but you conveniently ignore his support for abortion and gay marriage. What is wrong with you? Is that what you want? To cover your eyes and pretend that everything is ok? So when the next Obama comes around and you can’t see his flaws because the atheist liberal media props him up, you will gladly promote him as the politician that all Christians should vote for? Good grief. Do you not understand that the Antichrist will come in the same way? Loved admired professing a solution for every problem, just like Obama who said “the oceans levels will fall”, like some Messiah. I can’t believe this ignorance. Abraham lied. David committed adultery and murder. Paul murdered so many Christians but if you are completely ignorant of someone’s crimes, they will be your man. At least we know what Trump has done. At least it’s out in the open. He’s pro life. He supports the troops and doesn’t use them as a political prop. He actually calls the grieving families personally. When did Obama ever do that for the men that died under him? He protects the borders. He doesn’t bend to terrorists or give them billions of dollars. He supports Israel and doesn’t undermine them. Trump doesn’t visit funerals of criminals killed by law enforcement who become symbols of national riots and anti white racism (Michael Brown). Gimme a break. Get a basic level of discernment

Oh yeah

Bonhoeffer was just a man. His problem was that he believed in his strength instead of God’s word. I might respect the man if he died preaching the Bible, but HE TRIED TO MURDER SOMEONE. Also he used a thousand jumbled redundant words to say what a simple man could say in a dozen. I’ve never read anyone who so needlessly obfuscated everything he talked about

at the end the guy suggests writing in "Bonhoeffer" when you vote and, "That will be a Bonhoeffer moment you can feel good about." sure, but it will accomplish exactly nothing. what is the point? aren't we supposed to actually affect the world, rather than just "feel good" about ourselves? if you believe obama will do a better job, then write him in. actually do something rather than just feel something. get a clue, man. I honestly care less about what anyone thinks about Trump than I do about Christians actually thinking

the theologian is the enemy of theology

Currently I’m taking a class on Dietrich Bonhoeffer for my master’s degree. Bonhoeffer lived in the early 20^th century in Germany and was part of the resistance movement against Adolf Hitler. He conspired with other believers to assassinate Hitler. He also wrote a lot of books. One of them was Ethics, in which he uses the Sermon on the Mount to argue that Christ is the foundation of all Christian ethics. This seems pretty straight forward, right? Check out this sentence:

The decision between the clearly known good and the clearly known evil excludes human knowledge itself from the decision; it transposes the ethical into the struggle between the knowledge, which is already oriented towards the good, and the will, which still offers resistance, and it thereby fails to bring about that authentic decision in which the whole man, complete with his knowledge and his will, seeks and finds the good in the equivocal complexity of a historical situation solely through the venture of the deed.[1]

That is a single sentence, and I’ve read it a few times and I’m still not sure what it means. Granted, Bonhoeffer wrote in German, and this is a translation, but even if you separate it into two sentences, I doubt it would be less confusing. What is “clearly known good” or “clearly known evil”? Clearly known by conscience? If we know good and evil clearly, how is knowledge excluded? How is knowledge “oriented towards the good”? Why does the will offer resistance?

Placing the quote in context doesn’t help either:

The absolute criterion of a good which is a good in itself, assuming that a notion of this kind can be conceived in the first place without an inherent contradiction, makes good into a dead law, a Moloch to which all life and all liberty are sacrificed, and which fails to even impose a genuine obligation, simply because it is a metaphysical and self-contained construction which bears no essential relation to life itself.[2]

I have no idea. I don’t have the time to find an idea. There’s the problem. Maybe if you’re a seminary student, or a preacher, or a professional theologian who is paid to study this and make sense of it, maybe then you will invest the time and energy to find whatever golden nuggets of truth lie buried deep in the bowels of this single sentence. Maybe, but me? No way. I have a job and I have children and I have bills to pay and another job and a second course I’m taking to complete my degree and I don’t have the will or the strength to bury myself into this single, aggravating, obfuscating, abstract piece of horrible prose. I just want to learn and I don’t believe it should be this difficult. Obviously, learning takes effort, but many men have written on the same themes without this sort of profoundly infuriating and confusing word pile.

You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Apart from Me, you can do nothing.

Love one another, even as I have loved you.

It’s not hard to speak clearly and concisely. Theologian, do you want non-theologians to read what you write? Do you want anyone to learn anything or do you want your theology to stay confined in your own little echo chamber? Write better. Thanks. 

---

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), page 212.

[2] Ibid.