“You will not die,” the serpent said to the woman, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
I always have found the story in Genesis 2 and 3 of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil a curious one. Why did God forbid Adam and Eve from eating the tree’s fruit and gaining knowledge of good and evil? Was this some power struggle between the divine and human like other ancient mythologies? What did those early Hebrew writers want their readers to learn from this story? What is it supposed to teach us about God’s character — or ours?
Kristopher Norris
As a Christian, I am bound to the unending task of faith seeking understanding. And as a Christian ethicist, tasked with discerning and deliberating with others what human behaviors are good and evil, I always have understood moral knowledge to be a good — not something to forbid or avoid. It was not until I came to know Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I began to make some sense of this ancient story. Not complete sense, since we all read Scripture and interpret our faith through a mirror dimly. But in a way, that incompleteness is the very point Bonhoeffer teaches us.
About the film
Theologians and Bonhoeffer scholars have written a flurry of reviews of the recent Bonhoeffer film, and most have been highly critical, for example, of its deployment of racial tropes or connections with rightwing ideologies. The review I found most resonant after seeing the film myself was Mac Loftin’s observation that it portrays a Bonhoeffer who heroically and self-assuredly runs boldly into violent confrontation with political authoritarianism.
For the film’s Bonhoeffer, tyrannicide is not only politically necessary but also morally justified, and this Bonhoeffer confidently enlists in the plot to assassinate Hitler. But this cowboy Bonhoeffer who struggles not with moral clarity in the midst of impossible choices betrays the most beautiful and human aspect of Bonhoeffer’s ethics and life.
“This cowboy Bonhoeffer … betrays the most beautiful and human aspect of Bonhoeffer’s ethics and life.”
The real Bonhoeffer, so to speak, did not see the assassination plot as morally justified. His participation was a sin that required repentance and haunted him until his death. He flung himself before the grace of God but understood that any action or inaction in that situation would require the same.
In fact, for him, knowledge of good and evil, or any form of moral justification, remained ever elusive as the Christian seeks to be formed into “Christ for others” within a dimly lit world. Bonhoeffer asks, “Who is Christ for us today?” and it is the disciple’s job to seek the Christly action without feeling justified by it.
In one film scene, Bonhoeffer defiantly tells his friend Eberhardt Bethge, “Dirty hands are all I have to offer.” The actor offers this reply as a confident, almost triumphant justification to join the conspiracy. And while the sentiment is actually consistent with the real Bonhoeffer’s thought, the actual Dietrich would have expressed this as lament, not justification.
Jonas Dassler as Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the film, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin.”
Christian ethics
For Bonhoeffer, Christian ethics is entailed in a person or community’s responsibility to the particular situation of the neighbor. As he writes in Ethics, “We can and should speak not about what the good is, can be or should be, for each and every time, but about how Christ may take form among us today and here.”
This means directly responding to the “concrete neighbor in their concrete reality,” not in a way that is filtered through ethical systems, ideologies or principles of what is right or wrong, nor relies on interpretations of moral calculation. Virtues and actions are not universal but are shaped by the conditions of the context and situation — how does Christ take shape right here, right now?
“Every action is a risk of faith that dislodges us from concerns over our own self-justification or moral purity.”
Bonhoeffer writes that those who act based upon an ideology or set of principles consider themselves “justified by their idea.” In contrast, those who act responsibly “place their action into the hands of God and live by God’s grace and judgment.”
In a conversation with British Bishop George Bell in 1942 — a scene not included in the film — Bonhoeffer confessed to a collective guilt, confiding that no German was immune from responsibility for Germany’s crimes. All owed repentance. Even the resistance movement against Hitler, of which he was part, must be understood as an act of corporate repentance and offered without the guarantee of forgiveness.
Responsibility “involves willingness, in following Christ’s example, to bear the guilt of others,” a phrase Jennifer McBride helpfully interprets as “the church’s acknowledgement of its complicity in social sin.” Every action is a risk of faith that dislodges us from concerns over our own self-justification or moral purity. The responsible action means accepting the collective and unavoidable sinfulness of our position without promise of forgiveness.
Ted Danson, Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, and Jameela Jamil in “The Good Place.” (2016) (Image via IMDB)
Being good
One of my favorite televisions shows is Michael Schur’s The Good Place. One memorable episode features a character named Douglas Ewing, formerly of Scaggsville, Md., who ended up in the “bad place” due to losing moral points in the afterlife’s comically archaic point system because he gave his mother a dozen roses. Confused, he questions this surprising judgment and is told the flowers were ordered using a cell phone made in a sweatshop, picked by exploited migrant workers, grown with toxic pesticides and profiting a racist CEO with a penchant for sending unwanted photographs to his female employees. As one character exclaims, “Every day the world gets a little more complicated and being a good person becomes harder.”
This is the reality Bonhoeffer knew too well, as do we. Perhaps our world, interconnected and entangled as it is in systems that push down many in order to lift up the few, has rendered every action morally ambiguous. Not only is it impossible to know the thousand moral implications and consequences of every action, but each context and situation calls for a new range of considerations and criteria. When we each are complicit in a system of injustice that stretches from economics to race to the environment, how is one to know if they are acting morally?
“When we each are complicit in a system of injustice that stretches from economics to race to the environment, how is one to know if they are acting morally?”
To be clear, Bonhoeffer is not promoting Martin Luther’s mantra to “sin boldly,” but offering a reminder of our finitude, a recognition of the limits of our knowledge, and a call to moral humility. This is also not to say Bonhoeffer lacked bravery. While he likely did not challenge an armed SS officer to go ahead and shoot him, as depicted in the film, Bonhoeffer did speak out early and publicly against Hitler and ultimately chose to return to Germany after a brief escape to New York in order to face the same consequences as his countrymen. Still, the moral clarity of the film’s Bonhoeffer renders him a static character, unfamiliar to the complexity of human experience especially in our politically divided and dangerous context.
We need the truth
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Perhaps we need an embellished hero to stoke courage in the midst of an American church tempted by power and the cult of political personality. One could certainly make the case. But even more, we need the truth, in all its flaws and failures. The real Bonhoeffer was less a profile in moral courage than a man stumbling through a crisis as best he could in which there were no good choices, throwing himself at the grace of God.
Bonhoeffer preached of the “strange glory” of God, the title of a wonderful biography by Charles Marsh that effectively portrays the complexity and flawed humanity of Bonhoeffer and his moral struggles. But perhaps the ethical lesson we need from Bonhoeffer today is of the strange grace of God as well.
The grace of God is not only that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, but also that it is made present in weak and wonderful, good and guilty people as we seek to respond justly to our concrete neighbor in need without any knowledge of our ultimate justification.
In a time of loud self-assurance, the real Bonhoeffer calls us to a quiet humility, acting justly in a world of bad choices and kneeling before the strange grace of God.
Kristopher Norris earned a Ph.D. in Christian theology and ethics from the University of Virginia, as well as a master of theology degree from Emory University and a master of divinity degree from Duke Divinity School. He currently works with the Shalom Project of Winston-Salem, N.C., and is writing a book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ethics, to be published in early 2026. This article is adapted from the introduction to that forthcoming book.
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