Dr. Mohler published an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune yesterday on the murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller. Dr. Mohler masterfully contrasts the murderer of Dr. Tiller with the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was hanged for his role in an attempt to murder Adolf Hitler).
In 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested for his opposition to the Nazi regime. The Lutheran pastor, a prominent leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, had been involved in espionage and an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This theologian sought to defy the regime that was murdering the Jewish people and destroying human life with homicide on an unprecedented scale. Bonhoeffer acted in defense of human life, and for this he was executed in the Flossenburg prison camp in the final days of World War II.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed abortion with full force. In his writings he explained: “The simple fact is that God had certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”
When it came to defying Hitler’s regime, Bonhoeffer saw that several excruciating moral questions were on “the borderland” and could not be settled with absolute certainty. Eventually, he was convinced that the Nazi regime was beyond moral correction. Christians, he then saw, bore a responsibility to oppose the regime at every level and to seek its demise. He acted in defense of life and was finally willing to use violence to that end.
America is not Nazi Germany. George Tiller, though bearing the blood of thousands of unborn children on his hands, was not Adolf Hitler. The murderer of Dr. Tiller is no Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dr. Tiller’s murderer did not serve the cause of life; he assaulted that cause at its moral core.
Read the whole thing.