This paper draws from the ethical insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in order to present a restructured evangelical ethic of responsibility, especially but not exclusively for Filipino evangelical Christians Such restructuring is important in light of the ethic of responsibility promoted by the “War on Drugs” led by former Philippine President Rodrigo R. Duterte, which a majority of the Filipino people, including most of the evangelical churches, did not oppose. This drug war ethic holds that one should care and be responsible only for members of society who are good and decent, that we are not to offer the same kind of concern and regard to drug addicts who, according to President Duterte himself, are like animals. It is, in effect, an ethic of selective responsibility that is built on dehumanizing people involved in illegal drugs.
Given that the drug war and the ethic it espouses were met with meager opposition, in just three years (from 2016-2019) according to the International Criminal Court, an estimated 12,000 to 30,000 civilians were killed with thousands perishing brutally through extra-judicial killings. Based on a 2019 survey, the Filipino people gave Duterte’s anti-drug campaign an excellent rating. Today, with Duterte no longer in power, still, there doesn’t seem to be any signs of deep regret or sorrow among the Filipino people, even among the evangelical churches, for the killings. Have evangelical Christians accepted the drug war’s moral vision of responsibility? If so, what led them to do so? One underlying reason is that many evangelical Christians in the Philippines hold to a dichotomized view of reality that sees the church as addressing only spiritual matters.
This writer rejects such notions and believes that the drug war’s concept of responsibility is utterly misguided and must be displaced thoroughly if another similar catastrophe will be avoided. This paper therefore seeks to counter it by presenting an ethic of responsibility that shapes and urges Christians to care for and be concerned even with those deemed to be “nonhumans” and are outside the walls of the church. For this purpose, Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric ethical insights are valuable. As someone who witnessed the failure of the church in Germany to resist Nazism’s inhumanity, and who incisively addressed this along with some of the most problematic ethical questions of our time in his works such as Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer can surely guide us toward the needed ethical reconstruction. Central to this reconstruction is Bonhoeffer’s concept of responsibility which recognizes that all reality is united or grounded in Christ, who is essentially “for others.” It is on this notion of being “for others” in deputyship (Stellvertretung) that this paper directs its efforts toward reconstructing an evangelical ethic of responsibility.