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Bonhoeffer's argument, over a few pages of the _Ethics_, is roughly as follows: Conscience is the call to integrity, to unity within oneself: when we receive the call of conscience, it warns us that this integrity is imperilled, that we risk a loss of self. Conscience thus has a prior claim over responsibility: to discharge one's responsibilities in a way that violated one's conscience would be morally suicidal. The integrity that conscience guards is that of the ego, which seeks justification in its knowledge of good and evil. "Finding no firm support in its own contingent individuality the ego traces its own derivation back to a universal law of good and seeks to achieve unity with itself in conformity with this law" (p. 243). Thus, conscience seeks to secure the autonomy and moral integrity of a person's ego in obedience to "a law of his own finding, a law which may assume different concrete forms but which he can transgress only at the price of losing his own self". Bonhoeffer then states that "the great change takes place" at the moment when one surrenders one's autonomy for an "unconditional heteronomy"; that is, when the "point of unity", moves from the ego secured by obedience to the law to whatever it is that "fulfils the function of a redeemer for me". However, there is a difference between the conscience of the national socialist and that of the Christian. Christian conscience (according to Bonhoeffer) remains the call to unity with oneself, but as this unity can no longer be found in "the autonomy which I derive from the law", it "must be realized in fellowship with Jesus Christ" (who, unlike the Fuhrer, is not a superior being but fully human - fully "incarnated" - and therefore in full fellowship with human guilt). Christian conscience thus entails the taking on of guilt and responsibility: "[Christ] sets conscience free even and especially when man enters into the fellowship of human guilt...The conscience which has been set free is not timid like the conscience which is bound by the law, but it stands wide open for our neighbour and for his concrete distress". After this it gets complicated... * * * We cannot "redeem" ourselves, in Bonhoeffer's terms at least, because "the function of a redeemer" is to be distinguished precisely from that of the "law" that the conscientious ego finds in seeking self-justification. Either "natural" conscience is sufficient, in which case one has no need of "redemption" as such, or one must be redeemed through "unconditional heteronomy", the surrender of one's conscience to a "redeemer". One can't buy oneself out of debt. Bonhoeffer effectively denounces Nazism as an idolotry, and makes what I think is an important distinction between the worship of an idol who is supposedly above one's own miserable condition and the worship of an incarnated Christ who has entered into fellowship with human guilt and can therefore command us to responsibility for one another rather than blind obedience to the dictates of a sovereign. - Dom p.s. I consider murder committed for rational purposes and in cold blood to be marginally preferable to the "crime of passion" which is impelled by sentiment and unreasoning lust. If you're going to do awful things, you should do them for intelligent reasons. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%