"OKAY GUYS" & the 'Thousandfold Hullo'

Kevin Rudd’s ‘OKAY GUYS!’ speech as Bonhoeffer’s ‘Thousandfold Hullo’.

Kevin Rudd, on the very moment of his ascension to the podium as Prime Minister elect of Australia, his face beaming, his hands waving minimally to the crowd much as a pop celebrity would do, came in a slow entrance through a hail of camaraderie made by much cheering and clapping, and finally began his speech by directing two simple déclassé American words down into the Las Vegas style Queensland party melee.

‘Okay Guys!’

‘Okay Guys!’ he said! Not: ‘Men and Women of Australia.’ ‘Okay Guys’ was telecast across the continent. Two Americanisms were the first words the new Prime Minister said to the Australian People. I admit they were as if asides, in the passive voice, and uttered as a prelude to gain quiet for the speech itself. But they are likely indicative of a certain impotence, an emasculate beginning in terms of saying something. A failure of backbone to address a nation and confess to real matters of judgement and truth.

Hands raised in silence would have said more in Australian…in any nation.

My complaint is not against America, just as Bonhoeffer’s criticism of certain American traits is not; it is maybe, rather, that comradeship (or mateship) and a hollow sense of being a community, are allowed to ride roughshod over truth.

Rudd’s ‘okay guys’ party style was American Presidential. ‘Okay Guys’ - to be one in common with the people. His ‘Okay Guys’ soothed out the message that he was not so much a leader coming from above us with a higher path to help us up to, but merely one of us, a common man, even a mate, in a levelling of leader and led, a levelling that in its smothering of truth, of critical intelligence, shed all high benchmarks of public purpose.

And Rudd is the leader who claims to follow Bonhoeffer. A man whose public political engagement is driven by the strong principle and backbone of his beliefs.

Stanley Hauerwas writes: Bonhoeffer saw little point to theological engagement if truth does not matter. He was, for example, quite critical of his fellow students at Union Theological Seminary. In his report of his study at Union in 1930-1, he noted that the upbringing and education of American students was essentially different from the education German students receive. According to Bonhoeffer, to understand the American student, you need to experience life in a hostel which produces a spirit of comradeship as well as a readiness to help one another. The unreservedness of life together, “the thousandfold ‘hullo’,” manifests the American desire before all else to maintain community. In America, in the tension between the attempt to say the truth and the will for the community, the latter always prevails. Fairness, not truth, becomes the primary commitment necessary to sustain community for Americans. As a result “a certain levelling in intellectual demands and accomplishments” shapes the life of the American educational institutions. Intellectual competition and ambition are lacking, making innocuous the work done in seminar, discussion, and lecture.6
Bonhoeffer’s views of his fellow students reflected his general account of American religious and political life.”

And so us Australians become American as we enter into this gratuitous comradeship, this gratuitous public policy that tells us ‘to have a nice day’. We call it mateship over here, and think we are unique.

Then the ‘Fair-Go’ got taken out and was given a shiny polish as well, and all admired and cheered for the old ship even if she had lost her sails. But climate change seemed to have sent only contrary winds. Bonhoeffer said: ‘Fairness, not truth, becomes the primary commitment to sustain community for Americans.’ Well the ‘Fair-Go’ might be repainted, but the old girl has too long been economically rationalised, and kept as a museum piece in dry dock, no labour winds will move her down the gangplank into real water again.

Water is too scarce anyway, and there is something going to be done about that. What it is escapes us all, this balmy weather is too fair for intelligence. And I’m sure there must be a convivial party to get to.

Where is Bonhoeffer's Conscience & Courage in Rudd?

LINKS - Fellow Questioners on this ISSUE

Desert: Bonhoeffer, Ethics and Kevin Rudd - 12:21am
Is Kevin Rudd correct? Just as Bonhoeffer was prepared to accept the murder of Hitler as a necessary but lesser evil in the affairs of state, is Rudd's ...eaglesnestcompanion.blogspot.com/2007/07/bonhoeffer-ethics-and-kevin-rudd.html

Kevin Rudd's political cowardice - aus.general Google Groups
Perhaps it is time for Rudd to consider Christ’s warning, which had seared itself into Bonhoeffer’s conscience: 'What does it profit a man ...
http://groups.google.com/group/aus.general/browse_thread/thread/aa55e720c6c6d700

BLNZ: XT, News, Arts, World, US.
PROFILE: Rudd ditches ideology to win over Australians ... whose inspiration is not a tub- thumping politician but German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. ...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and His Role Within the Labor Party ...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Adams and Schwietzer realised this. 1 comment(s): ... Rudd falls for neo-jerk reaction to Fake BDO Flag Furore · Green or Gray. ...bloggers.laborfirst.com.au/bloggers/blog.asp?entryId=67412 - 25k -

Club Troppo » What would Bonhoeffer say?
In an article for the Monthly, Rudd described Bonhoeffer as the man he admired the most. .... Rudd gets a mention as a sort of modern-day Bonhoeffer, ...clubtroppo.com.au/2007/08/19/what-would-bonhoeffer-say/ - 25k

Rudd has got to live up to his words - Opinion - theage.com.au
In an essay in The Monthly in October, Rudd called Bonhoeffer "the man I admire most in the history of the 20th century". Bonhoeffer was repelled by the ...www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/rudd-has-got-to-live-up-to-his-

NO RUDDSY SWORD

NO RUDDSY SWORD:

The Bonhoefferian unacceptability of Kevin Rudd's acceptance speech

With gilded words, soft as a sunset, dull as a pillow and sheathed in pillow talk, we saw and heard Kevin Rudd, the new prime Minister of Australia, draw out his sword for our future. There was no sharp delineation of difference, no acute challenge, no cutting edge, only the faint reflections of dim light breaking through from the hill.

This is the same Kevin Rudd, who, in his essay: ‘Faith in Politics’ published in ‘The Monthly’ some time back, wrote: ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, pastor and peace activist. Bonhoeffer is, without doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the twentieth century.’

This is Dietrich Bonhoeffer who defied Hitler, who called for German Christians to act in confession to the risks of the Cross - ‘The Church and the Ecumenical Movement,” - published in his book “No Rusty Swords”. Also saying (in his ‘Ethics’): ‘Yet our business now is to replace our rusty swords with sharp ones.’

But the spin and propaganda politics that Hitler was master of have leant the duller sword to ongoing history, and to our own times. Had Kevin Rudd been got at by the spin doctors for the campaign? Then he should have stopped campaigning once he had won. His espousal of Bonhoeffer bears no justification for this Ruddsy Sword.
After all, Mr Rudd did vow to "work together ... to carve out our nation's destiny".

In his essay ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Truth and Politics’, Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University, writes: ‘Bonhoeffer was a relentless critic of any way of life that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness.” On any reading of Bonhoeffer it becomes clear that he would also be a critic of any policy, speech or program that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness, and even more so, a critic of any Government that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness just to achieve populism, and rightly so, given Hitler’s mass movement appeal there and then in Bonhoeffer’s Germany.

But then we have Kevin Rudd’s acceptance speech.

You must watch it, listen if you can bear to concentrate on the words, but you cannot read it, for it its not meant as words - to be weighed in any balance. KEVIN07, the snapshots of Kevin Rudd's vision for Australia are only to be found on the Official Website of the ALP ... Kevin's Acceptance Speech. I am told you need Adobe Flash plugin version 8 or higher. The question as to why it has not been published is interesting, one maybe answered by media-arts analysts, for scrutiny of the text soon reveals what a limp thing it is.

If this my-space style video is the only vision for Australia, then God save us.

Rudd’s speech is in two roughly equal parts; the spin, and then the thanks. The thanks, including his introductory words about John Howard, are simple and personal, noble and down-to earth, seeming true to the man who admires Bonhoeffer. Maybe the man who might lead us with Bonhoefferian insight is still within.

The rest of the speech seems to have other origins: it is vague, generalised and slavishly following of ideological and attitudinal fashions. It seems to owe its create to spin doctor and liars.

It was the Americans who invented Boosterism and then later named it spin. In his essay ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Truth and Politics’ Stanley Hauerwas writes “Christians came to America having fought hard to renounce confessional struggles. Subsequent generations born free of the battles for which their forebears fought no longer think it necessary to fight about anything. The struggle over the creed which occasioned the flight of their fathers and mothers becomes—for their sons and daughters—something that is itself unchristian.”

And maybe Australia is becoming more like America in these times of reality transvision. The essay ‘What is Meant by Telling The Truth’ that Rudd quotes in his article ‘Faith in Politics’ contains these writings by Bonhoeffer about the USA: ‘Thus for American Christianity the concept of tolerance becomes the basic principle of everything Christian. Any intolerance is in itself unchristian.” [from A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson. (San Francisco: Harper/San Francisco, 1990), p. 498]

Bonhoeffer writes: 'Because Christians in America have no place for the conflict truthfulness requires, they contribute to the secularization of society; [No Rusty Swords, pp. 286-287] a society, moreover, which finds itself unable to subject politics to truth and the conflict truthfulness requires. [ No Rusty Swords, pp. 168-169] Tolerance becomes indifference and indifference leads to cynicism. '

Tolerance, conflictlessness, these seem like peace, but such peace breeds its violence in secret.

This untruthful existence is exactly the danger into which Rudd might fall, if he has not already.

Faith in Politics by Kevin Rudd

So that readers of this site can gain some perspective here is Kevin Rudd talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer

from


http://www.themonthly.com.au.


Faith in Politics

By Kevin Rudd

Above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey are arrayed ten great statues of the martyrs of the Church. Not Peter, Stephen, James or the familiar names of the saints sacrificed during the great Roman persecution before Constantine’s conversion. No: these are martyrs of the twentieth century, when the age of faith was, in the minds of many in the West, already tottering towards its collapse.

One of those honoured above the Great West Door is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, pastor and peace activist . Bonhoeffer is, without doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the twentieth century. He was a man of faith. He was a man of reason. He was a man of letters who was as well read in history and literature as he was in the intensely academic Lutheran theology of the German university tradition. He was never a nationalist, always an internationalist. And above all, he was a man of action who wrote prophetically in 1937 that “when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” For Bonhoeffer, whatever the personal cost, there was no moral alternative other than to fight the Nazi state with whatever weapons were at his disposal.

Three weeks before the end of World War II, Bonhoeffer was hanged by the SS because of his complicity in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This year marks the centenary of his birth. This essay seeks both to honour Bonhoeffer and to examine what his life, example and writings might have to say to us, 60 years after his death, on the proper relationship between Christianity and politics in the modern world.

In both George Bush’s America and John Howard’s Australia, we see today the political orchestration of various forms of organised Christianity in support of the conservative incumbency. In the US, the book God’s Politics, by Reverend Jim Wallis, has dragged this phenomenon out of the shadows (where it is so effectively manipulated by the pollsters and spin-doctors) and into the searching light of proper public debate. US Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians are now engaged in a national discussion on the role of the religious Right. The same debate must now occur here in Australia. As Wallis notes in his introduction:
"God is not partisan: God is not a Republican or a Democrat. When either party tries to politicize God, or co-opt religious communities for their political agendas, they make a terrible mistake. The best contribution of religion is precisely not to be ideologically predictable nor loyally partisan. Both parties, and the nation, must let the prophetic voice of religion be heard. Faith must be free to challenge both right and left from a consistent moral ground."
*
Had Dietrich Bonhoeffer been at Oxford, he would have been one of the gods. He was at 21 a doctoral graduate and at 23 the youngest person ever appointed to a lectureship in systematic theology at the University of Berlin, in 1929. His contemporaries saw his career as made in heaven. Along Unter den Linden, just beyond the faculty walls, however, the living hell of the Nazi storm-troopers was being born.

At the core of Bonhoeffer’s theological and therefore political life was a repudiation of the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. As James Woelfel has noted: "According to this doctrine, the proper concern of the gospel is the inner person, the sphere where the Kingdom of God reigns; the Kingdom of the State, on the other hand, lies in the outer sphere, the realm of law, and is not subject to the gospel’s message. German Christians used this argument to justify devotion to race and fatherland as ‘orders of creation’ to be obeyed until the final consummation. "

These debates may seem arcane in twenty-first-century secular Australia, but in the Germany of the 1930s they were central to the decision of the majority of German Lutheran ministers to submit to the Reichskirche (resplendent with swastikas on their ecclesiastical stoles) and to retreat into a politically non-threatening quietism as the political repression of Hitler’s post-1933 chancellorship unfolded. Equally, it was Bonhoeffer’s theological dissent from the perversion of this Two Kingdoms doctrine that led him, at the tender age of 29, to establish in 1935 the German Confessing Church, with its underground seminary.

Bonhoeffer’s seminal work, his Ethics, was not collated and published until after his execution. Its final essay is entitled ‘What is Meant By Telling the Truth’, and it represents a call to the German Church to assume a prophetic role in speaking out in defence of the defenceless in the face of a hostile state. For Bonhoeffer, “Obedience to God’s will may be a religious experience but it is not an ethical one until it issues in actions that can be socially valued.” He railed at a Church for whom Christianity was “a metaphysical abstraction to be spoken of only at the edges of life”, and in which clergy blackmailed their people with hellish consequences for those whose sins the clergy were adept at sniffing out, all the while ignoring the real evil beyond their cathedrals and churches. “The Church stands,” he argued, “not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.”

In his Letters from Prison, he wrote, reflecting in part on the deportation of the Jews, that “We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.” Bonhoeffer’s political theology is therefore one of a dissenting church that speaks truth to the state, and does so by giving voice to the voiceless. Its domain is the village, not the interior life of the chapel. Its core principle is to stand in defence of the defenceless or, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, of those who are “below”.

Bonhoeffer lived what he preached. The day after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Bonhoeffer made on Berlin Radio a direct attack on the so-called “Führer Principle”, before the broadcast was cut off. In April 1933, two weeks after Hitler’s enactment of the Aryan Civil Service legislation banning people of Jewish ancestry from public employment, Bonhoeffer published The Church and the Jewish Question, in which he urged the church to “jam the spoke of the state … to protect the state from itself”.

He then established his Confessing Church which, before being finally suppressed by the SS in 1941, produced much of the leadership of the German Resistance. Internationally, Bonhoeffer spent from 1933 to 1939 seeking to unite the International Christian Movement into a global pacifist movement that would oppose the aggression of his own state. After the failure of these efforts, in 1940 he joined the German Abwehr (military intelligence) as a double agent, and until his arrest in late 1943 he collaborated with the armed forces’ conspiracy against Hitler – and, at the same time, organised the secret evacuation of a number of German Jews to Switzerland.

Bonhoeffer’s was a muscular Christianity. He became the Thomas More of European Protestantism because he understood the cost of discipleship, and lived it. Both Bonhoeffer and More were truly men for all seasons.

The Cheap Word, Cheap Grace & Freedom

The Cost, and now THE COST

Yes! this site is named " The Cost of Prime Ministership" after Dietrich Bonhoeffer's great work "The Cost of Discipleship"

In "The Cost of Discipleship" Bonhoeffer writes about the modern cheapness of idealogy, spirituality and political being as Cheap Grace.

What we heard and saw in Kevin Rudd's acceptance speech seemed to come without cost, to be all about tolerance and affordability.

But as real grace has a cost, and fair dinkum truth has a cost, our spiritual and political freedom has a cost. We aquiesce to cheap words at our peril.

Something seems to have us by the balls! Is it comfort that smothers us at the gonads?

Is it 'fun' that renders us less than endowed with the high freedoms for which our ancestors broke their shackles? Is it the addication to Australian Idols? the seduction of reality TV? or our joining in the emasculating addiction to the cult of celebrities? When we want everything to be fun we become slaves.

As speech hearers we need to be more than blather bathers. If we consent to a political failure to speak with clear principle, to nail definite acts in terms of policy, to make clear statements of concrete differentiation, lulled into agreement with the soft-option toys of policy which lean on the verandahs of centrism, ease and tolerance, then we consent to the cheapening of language, the cheapening of the freedoms and graces which have driven the truth-telling of fair dinkumness in Australia, yes, even in the politics of Australia.

Bonhoeffer writes in " The Cost of Discipleship"

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God." p.45

" Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. "All for sin could not atone." Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin…." p.46

The Cost of Prime-Ministership: Kevin Rudd v Bonhoeffer

KEVIN RUDD versus DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

This web log will compare and contrast the sayings and policies of the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd -and his Government - against the benchmark of the life and teachings of his self-confessed hero, the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

This was inspired by my reaction to Kevin Rudd's acceptance speech on Saturday 24 November 2007. This televised speech made me feel ill, and I had to leave the room where I was watching it, knowing that every next sentence was likely going to be more of the same sacharine cliché, homing in to the seemingly winning centralism of said nothings, emptying meaning out of words in the grasp for power, relegating truth to that place Bonhoeffer called 'The Void'.

Rudd's speech seemed to me to be a circus act directed like a play of soap bubbles into the kindergarten of Australia. It was a play of suds and hot air in obedience to the surface tension so as not to ripple the artificial pond for an Australian ship of fools, sailing down the bubble bath of tolerances that lead to ruin.

If we are reduced to this level of immaturity, if we are taken in by sermons in Newspeak, if we are lulled like licked-chickens by reassurances of taking action about the story that The Sky is Falling, and satisfied with the there-there repetitions of rhetorical nursery lines, well, then we are captivated by soundbites of spin, then this country is democratically choosing a farrago of lies instead of mature policies... from a leader whose words elsewhere raise hope for what could be policies of Bonhoefferan maturity