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The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson Eerdmans, 2003 312 pp., $17.00 Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence by Stanley Hauerwas Brazos, 2004 256 pp., $14.95

Elshtain has sought to frame the current "war on terror" in terms of classical just-war theory. Her argument has centered on the need to act decisively against those who target the innocent. In Just War Against Terror, she writes that "to do nothing as people are slaughtered makes one complicit in injustice." She goes on to appeal to Bonhoeffer, saying that he "judged harshly those who retreated into the 'sanctuary of private virtuousness' when confronted with hideous injustice," and she rejects standards of moral purity that would cripple the ability to respond to rampant evil. " 'Responsible action,' " she says, "involves contamination—one cannot altogether avoid getting 'dirty hands' when acting in the political world in a responsible way."

Toward the end of Just War on Terror, Elshtain argues that "Unless America proposes to close itself up behind its borders … we can and we must become the leading guarantor of a structure of stability and order in a violent world." For Elshtain, responsible action lies with the United States and other democracies guided by the rule of law. But for Bonhoeffer such action rests on faith and allegiance to God; any state involvement is placed under this allegiance. Against "private virtuousness" Bonhoeffer does not offer the responsible nation state but the Church. In the passage that Elshtain quotes above, Bonhoeffer goes on to say, "Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God."4

Furthermore, security was not among the goals of Bonhoeffer's actions against Hitler. Writing before his involvement in the Abwehr plot, Bonhoeffer addressed "a world which feverishly arms to guarantee peace through arming, a world whose idol has become the word security." He asks, "How could one think that these demons could be driven out, these powers annihilated with a bit of education and international understanding, with a bit of goodwill?" But against these humanist attempts at peace, Bonhoeffer does not offer a theory of just war. "The crucified Christ is our peace," he writes, "The world trembles only before the cross, not before us."5

In a 1996 article in First Things, Elshtain wrote, "Some of Bonhoeffer's later readers have looked to his writings for a general rationale for opposing tyrannical power even to the point of violence. But they have been disappointed, for Bonhoeffer never penned a full-fledged justification of his determination to resist." She goes on to say, "Bonhoeffer refrained from writing such a justification because he feared that it might be taken as grounds for resistance to situations less dire than his own."6 We are left to ask, is our time so dire?

In The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Geoffrey Kelley and F. Burton Nelson argue that "The recent war against terrorism elides well with Bonhoeffer's own decision to join a violent conspiracy, not as a virtuous decision in keeping with the gospel, but as a sinful, albeit tragic necessity in order to protect the lives of the innocent." However, they add, "Bonhoeffer's spirituality that challenges us to 'dare peace' stands as a bracing reminder to America's gung-ho 'patriots' that war … is still a denial of the gospel teachings of Jesus Christ." And if we were to ask what Bonhoeffer might look like in our time, Kelly and Nelson suggest, the answer would be Stanley Hauerwas. "Hauerwas's critique of militarism and of the churches' failure to emphasize the teachings of Jesus Christ in assessing moral issues," they write, "is uncannily reminiscent of Bonhoeffer's own unpopular, lonely struggle for a restoration of gospel values in the Hitler era."

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