Lying

Lying and Christian Ethics62

when placed in terms of their full spiritual significance involve the pursuit of God, which within the broken character of the world and the sinful- ness of one’s life will often, if not always, require special repentance in the recognition of how far one falls short of perfection.”13 The force of such an objection is not difficult to see against the absolutism defended by Augustine, Aquinas, or myself. For while acknowledging the broken- ness and sinfulness of humankind, the absolutist tradition holds that on each occasion where a lie might seem necessary, nevertheless, the agent must resist the temptation to lie. But in the tradition of which Cassian is an important representative, there is a sense in which our brokenness and sinfulness – indeed, not just our own, but that of the world – makes it impossible for us to avoid sin; there are genuine cases of necessity in which one must act in a way that is imperfect, guilty, sinful – yet never- theless, to repeat, one must act in that way. This is a tension with which, as we will see in the next section, contemporary Protestant thinkers have also struggled. And while I disagree with this approach, it is worth acknowl- edging its power: the sense, when confronted by evil men seeking to do wicked things to the innocent, of being forced to lie, or worse, must be immense, as must be the temptation to rationalize what one is doing as entirely correct. The approach of Cassian, Dorotheus, and others in the eastern tradition refuses to succumb to the second of these pressures, and acknowledges that lying for a good cause is both lying and, in some important sense, an action that falls short of the mark; yet it holds that one can be forced to do so for the sake of the good.

Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an especially important voice in the tradition that accepts that sometimes one must lie for a good cause, for Bonhoeffer faced a confluence of circumstances and exigencies in Nazi Germany such as to be almost unimaginable, and did so with courage and integrity, yet also with an important degree of deception and dishonesty.14 After taking up a position at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, following the persecution of his Confessing Church in Germany, Bonhoeffer decided that he needed to return to Germany or sacrifice the legitimacy of his Christian voice in any postwar future Germany might have. Accordingly,

13 Engelhardt, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, p. 289, ft. nt. 19. 14 Bonhoeffer’s story is ably told in Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville,

TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 4 . C a m b r i d g e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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The Christian Case for Lying 63

he returned, where he continued to preach and train covertly, and he joined the German abwehr, an intelligence service, within which he was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Arrested for reasons having noth- ing to do with the assassination plot itself, his involvement was neverthe- less discovered shortly before the end of the war, and he was hanged two weeks before Germany’s surrender.

Before addressing Bonhoeffer’s most explicit discussion of lying and truth telling, it will be helpful first to give a sense of Bonhoeffer’s overall religious framework and concerns, aspects of his thought for which I have considerable sympathy.

Bonhoeffer frequently situates the primary obligation of the Christian in contrast to the obligations imposed by law or systems of ethics. What is rather of the first importance is the call to follow Christ: “[W]e are summoned to an exclusive attachment to his person. The grace of his call bursts all the bonds of legalism.”15 Bonhoeffer acknowledges a moment of obedience, for we are commanded by Christ; yet faith, and with it justifi- cation, is not “the consequence of obedience, but of the gift of him who commands obedience”16 – in other words, it is the consequence of grace. To Catholic ears, this sounds distinctly Lutheran, as it is; but Bonhoeffer’s warnings against “cheap grace” are well taken by both Protestants and Catholics. On the one hand, obedience itself is not grace and does not justify; but on the other hand, there can only be grace with obedience, and Bonhoeffer’s discussions of the importance of the “penultimate things” and of “the natural” will strike a resonating chord with Catholics:

Even in the midst of the fallen, lost world, it makes a difference in God’s sight whether a man observes or violates the order of marriage and whether he acts justly or arbitrarily. Certainly he is still a sinner, even though he is blameless in marriage and a protector of justice, but it still makes a difference whether the penultimate is attended to and taken seriously or not.17

Nevertheless, “Humanity and goodness should not acquire a value on their own account, but they should and shall be claimed for Jesus Christ.”18

The fellowship and union with Christ that, by grace, comes with fol- lowing His call is itself a restoration of a form of union with God through the Word that once characterized the relationship between Man and God, a relationship Bonhoeffer characterizes as “the creature living in the unity

15 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 59. 16 Ibid., p. 68. 17 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Last Things and the Things Before the Last,” in Ethics, trans. N. H.

Smith (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 139. 18 Ibid., p. 142.

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Lying and Christian Ethics64

of obedience.”19 But the Fall brought about division between God and man; no longer capable of living in the unity of obedience, Adam is con- demned to seek to “go behind the Word of God and establish what it is by himself, out of his understanding of the being of God.”20 It is for this reason that Bonhoeffer speaks of the division incurred by the Fall as mani- fested by the search for, and application of, a criterion of moral judgment. Bonhoeffer then connects the Fall, disunion, conscience, and judgment back to the need to turn to Christ, to follow his call, and to become rees- tablished in the form of unity that Christ makes possible:

For man in the state of disunion good consists in passing judgment, and the ultimate criterion is man himself. Knowing good and evil, man is essentially a judge. As a judge he is like God, except that every judgment he delivers falls back upon himself. In attacking man as judge Jesus is demanding the conversion of his entire being, and He shows that precisely in the extreme realization of his good he is ungodly and a sinner. Jesus demands that the knowledge of good and evil be overcome; He demands unity with God.21

Here, some characteristic themes of Bonhoeffer become present. What is of concern to Bonhoeffer is action, not judgment; fellowship with Christ, not knowledge of good and evil; a concrete life in the Church, which is the body of Christ, not any systematic presentation of abstract principles of right and wrong.

A further characteristic theme, of special importance here, is our con- stant failure in the face of these demands, and the inevitability of sinful disobedience and disunion. There is thus a need for the “recognition of guilt” at our “defection from Christ.”22 The place for this recognition is the Church, as the body of Christ, and thus it is the Church’s job to con- fess her guilt: not, again, to pass judgment and identify guilt in others, but to herself confess disunion, to bear the guilt of the defection of her mem- bers, and to be the place where the “sight of this grace of Christ blots out entirely the sight of the guilt of other men and compels a man to fall upon his knees before Christ and to confess mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”23

There is little in this admittedly brief and inadequate summary with which a Christian defender of absolutism, about lying or anything else, need disagree. Bonhoeffer writes with an intensity and urgency of the

19 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall; Temptation: Two Biblical Studies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 78.

20 Ibid., p. 72. 21 “The Love of God and the Decay of the World,” in Ethics, p. 34. 22 “Ethics as Formation”, in Ethics, pp. 111, 110. 23 Ibid., p. 112.

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The Christian Case for Lying 65

need to commit entirely to life with Christ that is altogether admirable. And even Bonhoeffer’s points about the need for a standard of judgment being a (negative) consequence of the Fall and being a fundamentally dif- ferent standpoint than that of living in obedient fellowship to God in the Word can, I think, be accepted by the absolutist. Surely in the condition of original union with the God who is Truth, human persons would not need to seek an external standard by which to judge whether or not to tell the truth or lie; and true union with and transparency to Christ would equally surely bring about a revolution in our understanding of what we were personally called to do here and now.

Nevertheless, in Bonhoeffer’s late discussions of the ethics of lying and truth-telling, certain aspects of his thought that are in tension with the absolute view I am defending in this book become more prominent. Let us consider first the essay “History and Good,” which introduces several of the themes most important to the question of lying for a good cause,24 before turning to “What Is Meant by ‘Telling the Truth’?” “History and Good” might seem to some like a telling criticism of precisely the sort of position I defend in this book. Bonhoeffer begins by criticizing the fact that ethical thought is “still largely dominated by the abstract notion of an isolated individual man who applies the absolute criterion of a good which is good in itself and has to make his decision incessantly and exclu- sively between this clearly recognized good and an equally clearly recog- nized evil.”25 We have seen already Bonhoeffer’s analysis of a criterial ethics as a fall away from life in obedience to Christ. In “History and Good,” he goes on to describe what he takes to be a further key failing of this abstract approach:

[I]t thereby fails to bring about that authentic decision in which the whole man, complete with his knowledge and his will, seeks and finds the good in the equivo- cal complexity of a historical situation solely through the venture of the deed. In this abstraction from life the ethical is reduced to a static basic formula which forcibly detaches man from the historicity of his existence and transposes him into the vacuum of the purely private and the purely ideal. The ethical task is now conceived as consisting in the realization of certain definite principles, quite irrespective of their relation to life.26

This point is not, in fact, distinct from the Bonhoefferian theme of the necessity of following Christ, for the “abstract approach” is criticized for

24 Both “History and Good” and “What Is Meant by ‘Telling the Truth’?” are to be found in Ethics, pp. 211–258, and 358–367, respectively.

25 Bonhoeffer, “History and Good,” p. 212. 26 Ibid.

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Lying and Christian Ethics66

its neglect of “life,” and Bonhoeffer specifically means by this its neglect of the life of Jesus Christ, a concrete person who is the true, the good, and the life, and who is the reconciliation of God and Man. This “life” for Bonhoeffer embraces “reality” – life is not the life of God as “a general principle,” but rather as “the living God who has set me in a living life and who demands service of me within this living life.”27 And to relate genuinely to reality, to life, and to life in Christ is to become “answerable” or “responsible”: “I am at the same time accepting responsibility for men before Christ; I stand for Christ before men and for men before Christ.”28

Bonhoeffer characterizes responsibility as a kind of “deputyship,” an essentially other-regarding stance: “Deputyship, and therefore also respon- sibility, lies only in the complete surrender of one’s own life to the other man. Only the selfless man lives responsibly, and this means that only the selfless man lives.”29 This call to responsibility through deputyship is fundamentally, for Bonhoeffer, a call to action; as Albert Jonsen notes, Bonhoeffer is keen to reject a “pseudo-Lutheran” dualism in which

there are two commands of God to man. God does not confront man in Jesus and in the Gospel, ordering him to live a life of private selflessness, and then confront him again in the order of the world and in the Law to command public dutifulness. He meets him only once, in Jesus Christ, in the concrete command, which demands responsible action and decisions in the concrete world of the mandates and of his vocation, and of the “here and now.”30

The Pseudo-Lutheran view was responsible for a kind of quietism, an unwillingness to, in Jonsen’s phrase, “get involved.” To get involved would be “too risky”; but Bonhoeffer thinks risk is necessary, even the risk of guilt (and, as I discuss later, perhaps more than risk). The risk is bound up with the particularity of the situation that calls for a responsible action. Abstract and general rules are incapable of providing the neces- sary guidance. Rather, there must be submission to Christ in his concrete command.

It is here that I see a significant challenge to my absolute approach. Consider, as I shall in greater detail in Chapter 8, the circumstance of those committed to hiding Jews from the Nazis, but committed as well to

27 Bonhoeffer, “What Is Meant by ‘Telling the Truth’?” p. 359. Bonhoeffer makes similar remarks about freedom in Creation and Fall: to be free is to be free for an other, p. 40.

28 Bonhoeffer, “History and Good,” p. 220. The importance of the concept of responsibility, as it appears in both Catholic and Protestant thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, is the focus of Albert R. Jonsen, Responsibility in Modern Religious Ethics (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968).

29 “History and Good,” p. 222. 30 Jonsen, Responsibility in Modern Religious Ethics, p. 121.

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The Christian Case for Lying 67

the absolutist approach. It might seem to Bonhoeffer that the combination is untenable and would lead to a refusal to act. To hide Jews would be to bring upon oneself an occasion of sin; to refuse to lie would be to refuse responsibility, to shield oneself from guilt behind the walls of one’s abstract principles, a “pious indolence which abandons the wicked world to its fate and seeks only to rescue its own virtue.”31 I acknowledge the temptation and the challenge, but in my later discussion I outline a way of respond- ing to the situation that neither accepts the need to lie nor involves an abandonment of responsibility in Bonhoeffer’s sense.

Still, Bonhoeffer’s ultimate answer here is different from mine, and reflects his understanding of situations of necessity; that understanding brings with it, I believe, a third relation to the idea of guilt. As we have seen, Bonhoeffer believes it necessary to acknowledge our constant guilt in falling away from Christ, and he urges the necessity to risk guilt in responsible action. In this latter case, one cannot be sure of one’s right- eousness, and thus “commits his action into the hands of God and lives by God’s grace and favor.”32

But Bonhoeffer moves beyond this, it seems to me, in his discussion of “necessity”:

[A]t this point responsible and pertinent action leaves behind it the domain of principle and convention, the domain of the normal and regular, and is con- fronted by the extraordinary situation of ultimate necessities, a situation which no law can control. . . . There can be no doubt that such necessities exist; to deny their existence is to abandon the attempt to act in accordance with reality.33

What must one do in such circumstances? Bonhoeffer returns to the notion of responsibility, a responsibility that is “bound by no law.”34

In accepting such responsibility, an agent is faced with a special kind of freedom – for she is outside the law – but also with the need for a special kind of guilt, the one that comes from transgressing the law as it is. The responsible agent becomes a breaker of the law, in response to what she takes to be the call of Jesus; so the conscience of the law-breaking agent is, on the one hand, set free by Jesus. Yet on the other hand, in perhaps the most striking passage of “History and Good,” Bonhoeffer writes:

When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, and no responsible man can avoid this, he imputes this guilt to himself and to no one else; he answers for

31 “History and Good,” p. 229. 32 Ibid., p. 231. 33 Ibid., p. 235. 34 Ibid.

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Lying and Christian Ethics68

it; he accepts responsibility for it. He does not do this in the insolent presump- tuousness of his own power, but he does it in the knowledge that this liberty is forced upon him and that in this liberty he is dependent on grace. Before other men the man of free responsibility is justified by necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience; but before God he hopes only for mercy.35

There seems to be a shift in Bonhoeffer’s emphasis here, if not his thought. The situations with which Bonhoeffer was faced, or that were easy for him to imagine, were circumstances in which great goods were threatened by the evils of others, and in which the only possible means to ameliorate those evils appeared to involve the violation of God’s commandments. But where an absolutist thinker – a Catholic, for example, such as Aquinas – might hold either that the actions in question were sinful, and therefore not to be done even though the sin might be minor, or hold that the actions in question were not sinful, and therefore not to be regretted mor- ally, the particularly absolutist response to such circumstances is still, it seems to me, to hold that what is sinful is simply not to be done.

Bonhoeffer, by contrast – and in a way that echoes Cassian, Dorotheus, and subsequent Eastern Christian thinkers – is nevertheless willing to hold that the responsible agent will lie, or kill, and that he thereby incurs guilt which he must take before God to ask for God’s mercy. Guilt here is not something that is simply acknowledged, or risked; rather, in this discussion, it is something deliberately incurred. This represents a point in Bonhoeffer’s thought beyond which the defender of the absolute approach cannot follow.

How does this bear on Bonhoeffer’s ethics of truth and lying? In “What Is Meant by ‘Telling the Truth’?” Bonhoeffer undertakes an initial investi- gation into the importance of telling the truth, and what that concretely means. In this discussion Bonhoeffer, despite his eventual divergence from the absolutist view, makes some very Augustinian points and frames his approach by means of the central Augustinian concern already noted. Ultimately, concern for God is concern for truth, and vice versa. Because of this identity, “[e]very word I utter is subject to the requirement that it shall be true.”36 It is the failure to meet this requirement that is, after all, the immediate response to the Fall, as Adam and Eve clothe and hide themselves from God; and in meeting this requirement by union with Christ, one is, as it were, made true by that union. Truth, even in a “word,” is ultimately a matter of the truth of life for Bonhoeffer.

35 Ibid., p. 244. 36 Bonhoeffer, “What Is Meant by ‘Telling the Truth’?” p. 360.

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The Christian Case for Lying 69

Of course, as Bonhoeffer goes on to argue, this obligation cannot sim- ply mean that there is a requirement to say what is true on every possible occasion, nor does it mean that everyone is equally owed all truths, or that one’s positive obligations as regards truth-telling are not governed by offices and roles, by circumstances and needs, or by commitments and obligations. All these points are well made, and I pursue a similar line of thought in Chapter 6, when I investigate what it means to have a right to the truth, or an obligation to tell it.

Nevertheless, these points are not counterclaims as such to the absolutist view, which is more narrowly configured. And neither, to a certain extent, is a well-known example that Bonhoeffer uses to illustrate at least two points about what is clearly, in fact, a lie by both his and the absolutist’s standards.

Bonhoeffer gives the example of a child who is asked by a teacher if his father comes home drunk. The child denies it, though it is true. Bonhoeffer makes two claims about this, one of which I believe the absolutist abso- lutely should agree with, the other not. The point of agreement is this: the guilt of the lie falls largely (Bonhoeffer says “entirely”) on the teacher who asked an inappropriate question the answer to which he has no right. Given the child’s immaturity, he cannot be expected to answer as he objec- tively should (on the absolutist account): by evasion, silence, or some other appropriate measure. As Bonhoeffer says, “The lies of children, and of inex- perienced people in general, are often to be ascribed to the fact that these people are faced with situations which they do not fully understand.”37

This seems correct. Yet the point works, not as a justification for a lie, but as an exculpatory factor, something that the absolutist can certainly embrace. The lies of the Hebrew midwives, for example, were not, accord- ing to both Augustine and Aquinas, justified. They should not have lied as they did. Yet they were in extreme situations, and their intentions were good. Their guilt, to the extent that they had any (for they might have believed without fault that their lies were permissible), was minimal.

But Bonhoeffer seems to me to draw a second lesson from the story, and here his teaching again begins to run up against the absolutist approach. For he suggests that while the child’s answer was a lie, for which someone was guilty (the teacher), nevertheless, in a deeper sense, “this lie contains more truth, that is to say, it is more in accordance with reality than would have been the case if the child had betrayed his father’s weakness in front of the class.”38

37 Ibid., p. 363. 38 Ibid.

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Lying and Christian Ethics70

Now in a sense, the absolutist can even agree with this. Had the child told the truth, perhaps this would have been a graver wrong than the lie in defense of his father.39 But some defenders of the Christian case for lying are inclined to go beyond this claim and to suggest that the deeper truth – the truth of the family, and the rightly ordered goods and relations within that family, which are protected by the lie – justifies the telling of the lie in situations where multiple goods are at stake. There is, we could say, an inevitable conflict in this situation for the child between the goods of the family – among which, of course, is the good of truth – and the good of truth taken on its own in independence from what Bonhoeffer called, in the passage quoted earlier, the “equivocal complexity of a historical situ- ation.” In this historical situation, one must appeal to the deeper truth, even as one violates truth in a narrower sense.40

What is essential here, however, and in keeping with a theme of this chapter, is that Bonhoeffer still sees the lie as in some way disordered, contravening of the truth, and guilt-incurring. We have seen this already in our discussion of “Good and History,” and in that essay too Bonhoeffer discusses lying:

[I]f I refuse to tell a robust lie for the sake of my friend (for it is only the self- righteously law-abiding conscience which will pretend that, in fact, no lie is involved), if, in other words, I refuse to bear guilt for charity’s sake, then my action is in contradiction to my responsibility which has its foundation in reality. Here again it is precisely in the responsible acceptance of guilt that a conscience which is bound solely to Christ will best prove its innocence.41

Let us here take stock and identify some of the thematic similarities that have emerged to the discussion of Cassian, which illustrate what I take to be the strongest Christian position in favor of lying for a good cause.

First, as noted, the situations described by Bonhoeffer are, to varying extents, situations of emergency or extremity, even if not necessarily on a national scale. Bonhoeffer is plainly not encouraging every possible form of officious lying; no doubt much positive good could be accomplished by unprovoked but helpful lies, but Bonhoeffer is envisaging situations in which a lie is in some sense forced on one.

39 Bonhoeffer claims elsewhere that it is “worse for a liar to tell the truth than of a lover of truth to lie” (“Ethics as Formation,” p. 67), and the absolutist can even agree with this too, for truth in the mouth of a liar can be delivered precisely for its maliciousness when a more characteristic lie might have softened a blow.

40 In some respects this resembles the approach suggested by MacIntyre in his Tanner Lectures; see “Truthfulness, Lies, and Moral Philosophers,” p. 357.

41 Bonhoeffer, “History and Good,” p. 241.

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The Christian Case for Lying 71

This raises the second point. The idea of lies of necessity in the Christian tradition is the idea of lies forced on human beings in the brokenness of their sinful condition. It is in a world shaped by sin that persons can find themselves in a situation in which they must take guilt upon themselves whatever they do, and in which they must therefore accept a measure of responsibility for their actions in the face of evil. From this Christian standpoint, the idea that one can always find a path of righteousness in which one is free of sin appears “abstract” and “legalistic.” Even speech, in this standpoint, is sufficiently shaped by sin that there might be no fully truth-telling approach available to an agent; thus, even while struggling to be truthful in some way, the agent will at the same time always fall short of this ideal.42

And third – and also following from the first two – for these reasons the path one chooses, even if it is the path of responsibility, is nevertheless one in which one incurs guilt. Lies undertaken of necessity should not be told lightly, and one must repent of one’s actions afterward, as Jean Bethke Elshtain puts it in a parallel discussion, “before God.”43 This path of reflec- tion on the morality of lying thus does not lead, as the Grotian path does, to the idea of a clean conscience; the disorderedness of lies is maintained, even as it is held that there are circumstances in which one must enter into that disorderedness.

These thematic differences from the absolutist approach, which I am defending in this book, are significant, and there is no possibility here of entering into a full dialectical engagement with them. But to conclude my discussion of Bonhoeffer, I wish to identify one point at which there is both convergence and divergence.

It is a common belief of both the Christian defenders of lying for a good cause and of the defender of the absolute view that we live in a fallen world in which the effects of sin make themselves known in our possibili- ties for action. In this world, those options are often structured in ways that have no good outcomes, and in which any goods available will be refracted through lens of suffering and tragedy. However, the absolute approach will not go beyond describing the effects of sin on our options and “historical circumstances” as tragic; it will not accept the widespread claim that human persons can, through no fault of their own, be forced

42 This point has been urged upon me in conversation by my colleague George Khushf. 43 Elshtain argues that, when faced with a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking bomb, a

person with responsibility for the community must engage in torture, but must thereafter “stand before God as a guilty person and seek forgiveness”; Jean Bethke “Reflection on the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands,’” in Sanford Levinson (ed.), Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 83.

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Lying and Christian Ethics72

into moral dilemmas. In a true dilemma, agents are, as it were, damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Each path open to them involves sin and, consequently, guilt.44 But the absolutist holds, as I detail in the next chapter, that the particular way that moral absolutes such as that against lying are framed in fact protects agents against dilemmas, by always leav- ing open a sinless alternative: the alternative of compliance with a moral absolute, even if the consequences are tragic.

However, those consequences are sometimes, and perhaps often, gen- uinely tragic. The absolutist approach does not promise that following moral absolutes will always lead to good or even acceptable outcomes. And in light of this fact, for many who are faced with tragic choices, the rationale for adhering to a moral absolute such as that against lying (or torture, or intentional killing of the innocent, forsaking one’s faith, and so on) will begin to seem in practice to be only dimly capable of motiva- tion and intelligibility, and the appeal of the morally unacceptable option will seem correspondingly greater. At such points, a secular absolutist will surely have doubts about her theoretical position; but the Christian abso- lutist will accept that there is a role here for trust in God’s providence.

At the same time, the absolutist can acknowledge that our broken and sinful condition does lead human beings faced with tragic choices to choose wrongly, but with diminished guilt, and hold that such choices should be met, by others, with understanding and sympathy, and by the agent in question with repentance before God. Moreover, the absolute view that I am proposing and defending in this book is offered for action guidance, not for the judgment or condemnation of those who lie under extreme circumstances. So while my view and the Bonhoefferian (and Cassian) view overlap in their recognition of guilt in the telling of a lie, they also overlap in their essential humanity. While I disagree that such guilt should be willingly taken upon one’s shoulders, I do not infer from this that those who have sinned under great pressure should be judged or condemned, nor do I deny that, as with Rahab, and the Egyptian mid- wives, they may in other respects be deserving of great praise and reward. As we will see, I make precisely this claim about those who lied to the Nazis in service of Jews, although at the same time, I argue that there was a better path available for them.

44 For a helpful discussion of moral dilemmas in relation to the tradition of common morality, see Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), chapter 5. An idea found in both the Orthodox and the Protestant traditions discussed in this chapter, by con- trast, is that we are always at fault, and thus that the dilemmatic structure found so problematic by Aquinas (see note 11) is in effect a deep part of our human condition.

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