The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

This article is an analysis of the ethical texts by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which arose in the early period of his oeuvre (1925–1932). The first part of the article is dedicated to the report “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic” (1929). This is the his first work entirely dedicated to ethics, with the main focus being on reflections on the origin of ethical cognition. In addition to gnoseological problems, Bonhoeffer also discussed several practical issues here, in particular, the question of the Christian attitude towards war. The second part of the article is mainly dedicated to the report “On the Theological Foundation of the Work of the World Alliance” (1932), which deals with the theological justification of Christian pacifism. Here Bonhoeffer also examined both the theoretical question of gnoseology and the practical questions of political theology. Comparing these two texts, we tried, on the one hand, to detect the changes in Bonhoeffer’s views, indicating the development of his ethical views, and, on the other hand, to identify the features that are characteristic of his theological studies throughout the whole period. In our article, we show that, despite the changes in attitudes towards war, from justifying war as an order established by God to condemning war as something that destroys the Divine order, both in the late 1920s and early 1930s Bonhoeffer relied on the same ethical approach, a method that focuses on the will of God about a specific situation and at a specific moment, which is relevant now, at a specific moment rather than universal norms that are always relevant. At the end of the article, we briefly discuss the possibilities for future research in this area and outline some promising spheres for further exploration.