UPDATE: Expansion on the phrase “Hitler’s execution crews” has been added at the bottom of the post.

On page 338 of Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he comments on Bonhoeffer’s observations of America when he was in New York City during the summer of 1939.

His friends had begged him to “get out of Germany while the getting was good” — they knew what was coming. He was absorbing the American scene and saw first hand the extent to which  “tolerance trumped truth.”  He was “fascinated” by it.

Tolerance, when first presented, just looks like good manners.  We usually miss the fact that if tolerance is indeed needed, that means that something has occurred or is present that is inherently contrary to established beliefs and practices.

Tolerance is the allowable deviation from a standard; esp: the range of variation permitted in maintaining a specified dimension in machining a piece.  

Well, that last line is obviously referring to tooling, but “pieces are being machined” in broad daylight today, right in front of us.  Are they “maintaining a specified dimension” or has the tolerance factor, at long last, finally exceeded the standards of our consciences as well as our established beliefs and practices?  

We presently have news detailing the fact that babies’ feet are cut off and stashed in jars, preserved. The news has color photos of the backs of tiny necks with clear holes gouged in them for the purpose of killing them by severing their spinal cords because they were accidentally born alive.

Are these serial, paid-for, doctor-committed murders contrary to established beliefs and practices in the United States of America? Yes. They are.  Or…. are they not?  Well, not really.  It’s not so simple, is it?  What say you?  The tolerance rut has been cut deep: it’s a fact that since 1973, most of those who actually do consider such things contrary to established beliefs and practices have nevertheless extended the covering of tolerance to this evil.

Individual reasonings don’t matter: the covering of tolerance has been extended and has comforted those who lived in the gray area of “not being sure how much to resist; how much to raise their voices” because they had the benefit of being able to remind themselves of religious and moral people who are extending the covering of tolerance.

I actually am quick to sympathize when you tell me you “really don’t want to look” and,  frankly, that does not automatically speak well of me. Is that tolerance on my part? Or cooperation with advancing darkness?

Darkness is cumulative, you know. It usually doesn’t happen all at once. On any given evening, you can see dusk approaching.  Look there — see the shadows advancing.  See the translucent become the opaque, the opaque become the unreadable and the shadows eventually disappear because — out there — has gone dark.

How shall we consider the evil photos and consequences of dead babies with holes in the back of their necks? How shall we consider the role of wisdom and consider our own true limits? Is discernment an excuse for not looking?  

There is no sense in allowing ourselves to be sucked into the black hole of horror and over-exposing ourselves to the point of being spiritually over-whelmed, and ending up in an unsafe place personally.  That matters.  But I believe we are able to consider our motivations and choices, intellectually and spiritually if we are willing.  We’re able: are we willing?  

About thirty years ago, criticisms were launched against a choir I directed because when we were preparing to present the passion of Christ, it “looked too real” — folks were upset four days before the first performance because they had heard that it “looked real.”  The pastor finally just put out the word that if they cared to learn something in our poor and simple portrayal of the sufferings of Christ, they actually would have to look.  If they didn’t care to look, they could just shut their eyes.  Personal choice.

Three months ago some of us declared in the wake of the deaths of the little ones at Newtown that no one was ever going to forbid us from seeing the body of our dead child (as it was reported those parents were forbidden).  “No one, but NO ONE, is going to tell me I can’t see my child’s body, no matter how many times they were shot” was the sense of it.

This current call is actually far less passionate because it’s not my child.  It’s not your child. We don’t even know the parents.  We’re not related.  It’s “just a dead baby.”  And yet, we don’t want to look, some refuse to look.  Why? I’m betting there are some who enjoy horror movies and X-rated porn — who refuse to look.  Why?

I propose this uneducated possible answer: there’s something intimate and holy about looking on raw evil.  Judson Cornwall talked about it along these lines, in addressing just one aspect of the thing:

The truth is, man must find a way to respond to the mysterious that surrounds him, but the depraved, sinful heart does not want to respond to the Lord God.  Our solution to that dilemma is to deify the mystery and build an altar to the creation instead of to the Creator.

Or just avoid looking, which is actually what he describes: if we “deify” it and make it “too much to deal with” well then we have a good reason to not look.

Do we think it’s somehow indecent?  How?

Christ was plumb naked on the cross. The Jews thrown into the ditches in Germany were often plumb naked.  In William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he documents the efforts of many German generals who, early on, took photos of what was happening to the Jews long before it had reached its zenith, and they tried get those photos out of the country to governments in the west, begging for help in stopping Hitler.  These generals documented the lists, the names, took pictures of the bruised and dead bodies, tried to get help.  Bless their memories.  Those German generals looked.

This is where the approaching darkness is at this moment.  So you can look.  Or not look.  The looking or not looking perhaps isn’t as important in the present moment except in this: the present moment gives us a context in which to consider our reasons for doing or not doing whatever it is we do or don’t do.

As early as 1931, Bonhoeffer was examining closely his own motives (literally trying to deal with what he knew about the darkness that was coming and exactly what he was going to do about it) and he confessed that “…the reasons one gives for an action to others and to one’s self are … inadequate.  One can give a reason for everything.  In the last resort one acts from a level which remains hidden from us.  So one can only ask God to judge us and to forgive us.”  There was no cocky self-assurance in his self-examination, not in 1931, nor in the time between then and his death in 1945 at the hands of Hitler’s *execution crews. (See expanded note at end of post)

This is also true: We were not created to absorb or “learn” unlimited evil things. It will impact us. Those who must deal with this stuff regularly, who are normal/Godly/prayerful folk are careful how they do it.  Priests and lay Christians who have had responsibilities with regard to exorcisms are very careful.  Looking is not the same level as full on spiritual combat, and I tell you that from personal experience in both.

It’s appropriate that we document and inform and it is appropriate for us to talk about safety, discernment and wisdom. Both those who claim to be people of faith and those who want nothing to do with personal faith do well to make careful judgments.

Bearing witness means:

1. We look.

2. We see.

3. We say.

We are being asked to tolerate this thing that is inherently contrary to established beliefs and practices. 

If we are not willing to bear witness with regard to dead infants who were accidentally born alive, then why are we so concerned about a few lies about the cause of Trayvon Martin’s death?

Just as there is such a thing as false modesty, perhaps we will discover there is such a thing as false indignation.  In matters of degree — if we must go there — the events that surround the dear, dead infants who were accidentally born alive are in a seriously more depraved and different realm.

Keep your face always toward the sunlight, and the shadows will fall behind you.  – Walt Whitman

Re *Hitler’s execution crews: Such “crews” (the casual designation I used as I was preparing the post) included everyday office people who processed the paperwork, prison guards showing up for the shift, the intervention of Hitler himself, and the SS prosecutor Huppenkothen who traveled with all the proper documents to Flossenburg (where Bonhoeffer was being held) in his haste to set a “summary court-martial” to assist Hitler’s attempt to “preserve the fiction of legality  in the German state.”  Also involved in “the charade was Dr. Otto Thorbeck, an SS judge.  So on that Saturday night, Canaris, Oster, Dr. Sack, Strunck, Gehre and Bonhoeffer would be tried…”  They were executed by hanging the next morning.

It would have been better if I had taken the time to say these things instead of summarizing them in the phrase “Hitler’s execution crew.”  The phrase was essentially accurate, of course: (1) they were Hitler’s; (2) their task was to execute the people Hitler wanted executed and (3) together, they did comprise a crew.  –Sharon