Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Forging Ploughshares

Do We Need the Insight of Islam to See Ourselves Rightly?

One of the most successful bridge builders to other religions was the Catholic Monk, Thomas Merton, who emphasized the need for a Christocentric understanding for engagement with other religions and traditions. His was not the watered-down approach which imagined it was enough to reason together, but like Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, he saw the times as requiring drastic and emergency measures. With Bonhoeffer he concurs, people with good intentions who imagine that a little reason will suffice do not understand either the depths of evil or of the holy. “The news that God has become man strikes at the very heart of an age in which the good and the wicked regard either scorn for man or the idolization of man as the highest attainable wisdom.”[1]

Merton’s advocacy of peace, without compromise, at once appreciated that other religions recognize peace and goodness are to be equated with God, but he also recognized that reasoning together was inadequate to stand-up against political expediency. “Men do not agree in moral reasoning. They concur in the emotional use of slogans and political formulas.”[2] The persuasive power of fear and desire, such as that dealt out by the Nazis or our own Nazified political situation, is untouched by the call to ethical considerations. The evil done in the name of religion, in the name of the good, by those committed to lies and murder, will be unphased by moral or religious theory. The evil and destructiveness of the day, seemingly determined to ignite a world conflagration, is the necessary preparation for man to become a god, or for the president to be the Messiah.

We might have wished the Nazis saw themselves through the eyes of those they were destroying. Shouldn’t we wish the same thing for the United States at this moment. That it might see itself through the eyes of the hundreds of parents slain at a girls school, that it might see itself through the eyes of those suffering oppression and terror in Iran and Gaza. Bonhoeffer understood that the church of his day had failed, as it had been coopted by the Nazi regime. The sickness was too deep for a sermon, a philosophical correction, an ethical or religious discussion, but doesn’t that describe this present moment in the United States? Isn’t the best thing that could happen, in order to expose this present delusion, recognition that Iranians – those whom our military would destroy, may also be in the best position to expose the lie of the times? Isn’t that the point of loving the enemy, that we be enabled to see things through their eyes? If we simply demonize the enemy, and make no attempt to see the good in them, then we also will not appreciate where they are right in their judgment of us. According to Merton, “As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth.”[3]

We are living at a time when Christians would identify themselves over and against the culture of Islam, imagining the West is a Christian culture. In the rhetoric of various evangelical leaders (as Franklin Graham has put it), Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion” and war seems to be part of a “necessary” clash of religions and civilizations? This seemingly Medieval perception is precisely that – Medieval in its theological roots. Steve Bannon, perhaps the key thinker behind Donald Trump, believes the United States is a Christian nation, not just in the sense that a majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, but also in the sense that the country’s culture is Christian. This means our war with evil is a literal war against Islam: “We” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or we will be overrun by dangerous outsiders (Islamists) who will impose a different identity upon us. In a speech at the Vatican, he said, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism.” An article in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Vatican-vetted journal, singled out Bannon as a “supporter of apocalyptic geopolitics,” the logic of which is “no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.” This notion of a clash of civilizations is a delusion.

Christians are not those who align with Western civilization over and against Islamic civilization. The fear of Islam is on the order of a previous generation’s fear of socialism. As a child in Texas, it seemed all of the evils of the world could be attributed to the communists and socialists, and what we were blind to was the “socialist” aspect of the gospel. Because of this inability, Christianity was reimagined as a capitalistic religion, in which concern for the poor was largely absent, and the injustices of Western oppression were excused or made invisible; which is not to excuse or deny the problems of communism, but the demonization of the enemy blinds to the value in their critical perspective on ourselves.

If this is true of “godless communism,” it is even more profoundly true of our coreligionists. Islam shares the early texts of the Bible and a high regard for Christ. The goodness, beauty, and love of God, as with Christians, is a first order reality. According to Islamist Seyyed Nasr, “All reality issues from the One, Who is the sole absolute Reality, which is also absolute Beauty. As the One manifests the many on various levels of cosmic existence, this absolute Beauty is also manifested along with existence, of which it is the splendor like the aura around the sun.”[4] In Sufism, aesthetics is part of ethics and spiritual discipline. One is trained to recognize Absolute Beauty as of God, and it is God for whom the soul yearns in its appreciation of the beautiful. Nasr appeals to Plotinus: “the soul strives after beauty and beauty is a manifestation of that spiritual power that animates all levels of reality. The Sufis agree completely with this view, which once dominated Western aesthetics but was marginalized in the West. . .”[5]

Aesthetics, in Islam, developed as a recognition that all beauty is a reflection of divine beauty, a profound spiritual insight, which may not be entirely lacking in the West, but in my branch of the faith at least, aesthetics has never been a focus. Yet who could disagree with Nasr’s assessment: “The supreme beauty is the beauty of the Supreme Reality; absolute beauty is the beauty of the Absolute. Even the most intense beauty experienced in this world in the beautiful face of a loved one or a supreme work of art or of virgin nature or even the perfume of the soul of a saint is a reflection of divine Beauty.”[6] As the Song of Solomon states it, “For love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, The very flame of the Lord” (So 8:6).

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, attaches great significance not only to the original garden scene of paradise, but to its reenactment in human love. Christians may have lost this significance of peace and love preserved at the heart of Islam: “According to the Quran and a saying of the Prophet, the greeting of the people of Paradise, of the Garden, is salam, or peace; hence the ordinary Muslim greeting, al-salām” ‘alaykim, or ‘peace be upon you.’”[7] Christians might learn from the Islamic mystical tradition, in its assigning spiritual significance to human sexuality: “a sacred reality, hence to be governed by the Sacred Law, [and] not as a sinful act simply resulting from the fall.”[8] Could it be that Western Christianity, plagued as it is with sexual transgression, might benefit from the understanding that “sexual union, which is the most powerful sensuous urge within most human beings, is in reality the search of the soul for union with God, especially when human union is combined with love”?[9]

Connecting human beauty to the divine also comes with a certain realism, seemingly lacking in Western youth driven culture. Outward beauty tends to fade, absent liposuction and face lifts etc., and is primarily the domain of the young. “As we grow older our actions based on our choices and free will become evermore reflected in our outward countenance, and inner beauty, in the case of those who possess such beauty, begins to dominate the outward while the original God-given outward beauty usually fades away.”[10] Still, there is an unabashed recognition of beauty: the “female face reveals a Divine Quality and unveils a Divine Mystery.”[11] Lovers of God in Sufism, are lovers of beauty, which is inseparable “from the Divine Reality and which, being related to the infinitude of the Divine, brings about total peace and liberates the soul from all fetters of restrictive existence.”[12] Shouldn’t Christians share this profound sense of beauty which “liberates” and brings “peace”?

A Christianity and a Western culture driven by egoism also might learn from the Islamic notion that love “is always combined with some degree of dying to one’s ego, to one’s desires, to one’s preferences for the sake of the other.” This is the case “because human love is itself a reflection of Divine Love, which we can experience only after the death of our ego, and can lead to the Divine those souls who are fortunate enough to have experienced this love.”[13] Are Western evangelicals blind and forgiving of the rape culture surrounding Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and the Catholic and Evangelical Church because they are missing the insight which Sufism might provide? Desire of the ultimate kind is fulfilled only by the Divine.

Maybe it is time to listen to our so-called “enemies” to gain the insight gone missing in Western Christianity, the insight to which Islam appeals: “When we ponder the terms pace, shalom, shanti, and salam in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam respectively and their ubiquitous usage by the followers of these religions, as well as terms with the same meaning used elsewhere, we become aware of the universality of this yearning.”[14] Absent focus on the peace longed for in the world religions, the gospel is perverted and its potential to address the hope of the nations relinquished.

When Christians take up the sword in civilizational war imagining this crusader mentality is Christian, they have missed the Christian faith. This civilizational security is not the security of Christ. In addition to denying enemy love, taking up the sword and slaying the enemy is to slaughter the very prophetic voice that is needed. As Christians faced with a Medieval form of Christianity, we must turn firmly from the means and method of empire or Christian civilization. We are not to seek power and security through the defeat of Islam in war. The danger is that in aligning with the powers and methods of empire, Christians have joined forces with the counter-Kingdom of the anti-Christ and have slain the very enemy who might have provided kingdom insight – that of the loved enemy.

[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 58. Merton is quoting but Bonhoeffer, but gives no footnote.

[2] Ibid, 59.

[3] Ibid, 63.

[4] Seyyed Hossein, Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper One, 2007) 71.

[5] Ibid, 72.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 78.

[8] Ibid, 65.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 74.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 66.

[14] Ibid, 78.

The City of God Versus the Earthly City

Before Virginia Giuffre killed herself, she pronounced the entire society, which enabled Jeffrey Epstein to traffic her, as corrupt to the core. Not just those who had sex with her as a teenager, including those from academia, royalty, and the business world, but those from a much broader swath of society who never spoke up. The billionaires, media moguls, corporate leaders, political leaders, and those who carry influence and shape society, were represented by those who raped her, but they also made up the cadre of people who did not object. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were known as sex traffickers, it is the first line in Epstein’s Wikipedia profile, and had been for years, yet this was overlooked. Epstein was able to groom hundreds of young girls for sex trafficking, but at the same time the ruling class was willingly groomed by the same techniques. It is not just that he was friends with President Donald Trump and the Democratic President Bill Clinton, but he was able to worm his way deep into Harvard, MIT, Google, the Gates Foundation, and Goldman Sachs. Larry Summers the Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University, turned to his friend Epstein to get instruction on how to seduce a young woman he was mentoring. Mort Zuckerman, CEO of Boston Properties, owner and publisher of U.S. News and World Report, needed help getting a child into an elite school, so he reaches out to Epstein. Heads of state, heads of major institutions, elites from nearly every sector of society, willingly associated with Epstein, and there is no record of any of these individuals protesting or seeking to expose his activities.

The journalist, Anand Giridharadas, confirms Giuffre’s judgment, comparing Epstein to a kind of food poison passing through every major organ of the social body, proving the system is inherently sick.[1] There was no nausea, no vomiting, no diarrhea, no reaction. Out of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people at dinners and parties, no one who blew up at the circumstance or objected to the girls being abused or to the influence being traded. Epstein was a test, and though he is dead and gone, what he has proven is that the system lacks the capacity to react, to notice, to expunge this vileness, because the system is corrupt to the core. The institutions that shape society, the values and incentives held throughout the system, are sick and corrupt.

Add to the Epstein story his proven connections with Israel, and the genocide in Gaza and the war in Iran, and the depth of depravity, involving not just a culture of rape but one bent on murder is evident. Sex was the lure, but Zionism and genocide the goal, so that Israel could abolish the Palestinians and dominate in the Middle East. The problem for the Christian community, Catholic and Protestant, is not simply that the illness infecting culture has not been resisted by the church, but it could be argued, that the sickness proven by Epstein, is that of the church. There is no need to recount the levels of abuse to make the point: sexual abuse, avarice, greed, capitalism, and the grab for power, are not simply at the periphery of church institutions. Christian Zionism and with it, extreme nationalism, are forces that the church unleashed and made possible. Donald Trump is president due to the support of Christians, but this could also be said of the trends Trump and Epstein represent. The question is, why is the church now at the center of the problem?

Christianity began as a resistant community, resisting emperor worship and the ethics and religion of empire, so as to proclaim Christ as Lord and his ethical mandate as overriding the demands of empire. Even into the third century, Celsus (a late pagan traditionalist) is concerned that Christianity is causing the decay of the Roman Empire (not an accusation leveled against modern Christians). He considers Christianity completely subversive to the religious and social order of Rome, which he considers to be the true universal order. It is not monotheism to which he objects, “it makes no difference whether we call Zeus the Most High, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians,”[2] but the problem is Christian exclusiveness. The Christians reject the worship of “daemons and quote the saying of Jesus, ‘No man can serve two masters,’” and for Celsus this is “a rebellious utterance of people who wall themselves off and break away from the rest of mankind.”[3] The Christian teaching on humility, and against wealth, and their refusal of the traditions, their refusal to engage in war, or even to take part in public life, means they cannot be good citizens.

This accusation of being different, a testament to the resistance of the early church, describes the faithfulness of the early Christians to being a peculiar people. As Thomas Merton sums up, “Christians not only believed that Celsus’ world was meaningless, but that it was under judgment and doomed to destruction. He interpreted the otherworldly Christian spirit as a concrete, immediate physical threat.”[4]

Origen responded, however, that Christians are not simply subverting society but make good citizens:

Christians have been taught not to defend themselves against their enemies; and because they have kept the laws which command gentleness and love to man, on this account they have received from God that which they would not have succeeded in doing if they had been given the right to make war, even though they may have been quite able to do so. He always fought for them and from time to time stopped the opponents of the Christians and the people who wanted to kill them.[5]

The evident linchpin in this argument is the role of violence and war. Celsus presumes war is necessary for human society, while Origen argues for a more profound understanding of peace: “No longer do we take the sword against any nations nor do we learn war any more since we have become the sons of peace through Jesus who is our author instead of following the traditional customs by which we were strangers to the covenant.”[6] Origen makes reference to the passage in Isaiah, Christians are “to beat the spiritual swords that fight and insult us into ploughshares, and to transform the spears that formerly fought against us into pruning hooks.”[7]

Origen argues that Christians play their part in the city through their spiritual influence and activity, especially in prayer: “The more pious a man is the more effective he is in helping the emperors – more so than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops that they can.”[8] Christians as a “priesthood of all believers,” are not unlike the pagan priests who devote themselves to offering sacrifices: “that it is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of the sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders. And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests.”[9]

Origen counters Celsus’ notion that all citizens “help the emperor with all our power . . . and fight for him,” arguing that Christians offer an even greater service: ”We may reply to this that at appropriate times we render to the emperors divine help, if I may so say, by taking up even the whole armour of God.” He quotes Paul, who exhorts Christians to take up spiritual armour: “I exhort you, therefore, first to make prayers, supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings for all men, for emperors, and all that are in authority.”[10] If not even pagan priests kill in war, then neither should Christians offer violent resistance, but they do a higher service “keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed.”[11] Origen concludes, “We who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths and disturb the peace, are of more help to the Emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.”[12] As Merton notes, “If these evil forces are overcome by prayer, then both sides are benefited, war is avoided and all are united in peace. In other words, the Christian does not help the war effort of one particular nation, but he fights against war itself with spiritual weapons.”[13]

Unfortunately, this singular idea of the early Christians is gradually eroded with the Constantinian shift, and the rise of Augustinian theology, which now dominates among both Catholics and Protestants. In the two hundred years between Origen and Augustine, Constantine had his vision at the Milvian bridge in 312, and Christianity is officially recognized by Rome, and then in 411 Rome fell to the Goths. In 430, Augustine as bishop of Hippo, is confronted with the invasion of the Vandals and he develops his theory of just war. He understands Christians as split between two cities and two types of love. Confronted with the same objection Origen faced from Celsus, Augustine formulates a very different answer. Christians do not simply pray, but they may participate in the military, as long as the war is just, and as long as the Christian has the right motives. “Christians may participate in the war, or may abstain from participation. But their motives will be different from the motives of the pagan soldier. They are not really defending the earthly city, they are waging war to establish peace, since peace is willed by God.”[14] Origen would argue this false peace, through war, is unworthy of Christian peace, but Augustine succeeds in creating a lasting confusion.

Augustine agrees with Celsus, against Origen, maintaining that war is inevitable, and universal peace impossible. Maybe the early church was too intent on the Parousia, but Augustine is more of a realist amidst the collapsing empire, and he felt war was unavoidable. The question was not if, but how Christians might fight in war, and thus appealing to Cicero, Augustine drew up his notions of just war theory. But even in a just war, the Christian must be only motivated by love: “The external act may be one of violence. War is regrettable indeed. But if one’s interior motive is purely directed to a just cause and to love of the enemy, then the use of force is not unjust.”[15] Augustine poses the new possibility of a distinction between interior motive and exterior action, which will have tragic consequences. The divide between church and world is more or less demolished, as the Christian can serve the world with his exterior body, and reserve his mind for spiritual activity. This divide marks Christian entry into serving state values and purposes. One can even kill fellow Christians, given the right motive and circumstance. For example, better to kill heretics and save their souls, which will become the motive behind the crusades. “And so, alas, for centuries we have heard kings, princes, bishops, priests, ministers, and the Lord alone knows what variety of unctuous beadles and sacrists, earnestly urging all men to take up arms out of love and mercifully slay their enemies (including other Christians) without omitting to purify their interior intention.”[16]

The contradiction of Augustine’s logic should be felt, and yet is not, even in this nuclear age, in which the world may need to be destroyed so as to achieve peace. The Augustinian logic consigns the world to hell, not imagining that the church or the Christian might act as a constraint on the voracious appetites of the flesh. Along with the Conquistadors, who felt the need to destroy civilizations in Christianizing them, and the inquisitors willing to torture to death so as to save, we, in the United States, are subject to a leader ready to destroy a civilization, supposedly in the name of peace.

Jeffrey Epstein, like one emerging from the primeval depths, exposed the lie undergirding our culture. As with Nazi Germany, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description, it is a “time of confirmed liars who tell the truth in the interest of what they themselves are – liars. A hive of murderers who love their children and are kind to their pets. A hive of cheats and gangsters who are loyal in pacts to do evil.”[17] If as Gandhi maintained, “The way of peace is the way of truth” then according to Merton, “lying is the mother of violence.”[18] A world of necessary violence and war is built upon a lie, and this lie serves in place of truth. As long as evil takes accepted forms and there are no objections, then it is “good.” The Augustinian (Constantinian) merger of church and empire through just war, the division between internal and external, creates a split mind and necessary duplicity. Killing in love makes nonsense of morality. The unfalsifiable claim of good intention opened the floodgate to the crusades, the inquisition, and ultimately to a series of holocausts. This church can no longer claim any likeness to the resistant New Testament Body of Christ or to the counter-ethics of Christ.

Merton quotes Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as the counter to the stink of this moral decay: “It is not astuteness, by knowing the tricks, but by simple steadfastness in the truth of God, by training the eye upon this truth until it is simple and wise, that there comes the experience and knowledge of ethical reality.[19] The truth, peace through Christ, is the singular resistant counter to the lie of the reign of death in the city of man. It is easy to convince ourselves that the lie is irresistible, that peace and purity are an impossibility, and that truth cannot endure, yet, Christ has spoken and those who hear his voice have a singular obligation to this Truth and Peace.

[1] See the interview on the Daily Beast, I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57xynBbVUuw.

[2] Origen, Contra: Celsum, tran. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) xvii.

[3] Origen, xix.

[4] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (New York: Orbis Books, 2004) 35.

[5]Origen, III: 8, 133, cited in Merton, 35.

[6] Origen, V: 33, 290, cited in Merton, 37.

[7] Origen, V: 33, 290.

[8] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37.

[9] Origen, VIII: 73, 509,

[10] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[11] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[12] Origen,Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37-38.

[13] Merton, 38.

[14] Merton, 40.

[15] Merton, 42.

[16] Merton, 43.

[17] This is Merton’s summation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 60.

[18] Ibid, 79.

[19] Ibid, 60.

Missing the Mark Exposed by Christ

Sin is one of the most complicated concepts in the Bible, yet in modern teaching and preaching it is often reduced to breaking a law and legal guilt and then in turn the work of Christ is reduced to getting rid of guilt. The richness of the original context reduced to the judicial or legal, misses the variety of words and concepts in the Hebrew, translated in the Septuagint as “hamartia.” The TDNT notes that the Hebrew poses a special difficulty because the terminology is not exclusively religious or theological, and in fact none of the Hebrew words can be captured in the English word “sin.”^[1] It can involve something as slight as a “misdemeanor” or “negligence” or it may mean “to bend,” to “go astray,” to “miss the right point,” to “fail to find what you are seeking,” or it may refer to “those who have lost their way.” There is sometimes only slight or even no moral culpability, so sin cannot automatically be associated with guilt. At other times it may indicate a criminal offense such as murder and is inclusive of guilt.^[2] But sin does something other than just cause guilt, as in a strictly legal understanding.

The first usage of hamartia in the Septuagint, is in God’s warning to Cain prior to his slaying of Abel: “sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen. 4:7). God equates sin with an animate desiring force that can and will gain mastery. Sin, like diabolos (διάβολος), is not a person but a power of “separating.”^[3] Sin takes on an animate quality (“crouching,” seeming to speak, lying), in the serpent or the devil and “tries to disrupt the relation between God and man.”^[4] Sin or “the satan” (this sub-personal force) causes enmity, and the fact that an angel sent by God is called the adversary or the satan, the one confronting Balaam and the one confronting Joshua the High Priest, indicates it is a force and not a particular personage (Num. 22:32; Zech. 3:1ff).[5] More often sin or the devil is “the one who separates,” “the enemy,” “the calumniator,” “the seducer.”^[6] This force is a malicious liar aiming to create enmity and separation from God.

In the fall the serpent points to obtaining knowledge (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) rather than life with God (the tree of life representing God’s presence) and in acting on this lie the first couple are cast out of the garden. The text focuses on the shift in desire, from desiring life with God (the tree of life) to desiring the fruit of the other tree: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate” (Gen. 3:6). Adam and Eve in rejecting the model of God become the model: “In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God” (Gen 5:1). “When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image” (Gen. 5:3). There are varying degrees of individual moral turpitude in refusal of God (self targeting) but there is a downward inclination from Cain, to Lamech, to the generation of Noah, until humanity is corrupted by violence and separated from God.

The corruption involves a displacement of the divine model, as Cain turns his jealous attention off of God onto Abel, Lamech is filled with revenge and focused on his enemies, and the generation of Noah turn on one another and away from God: “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). The focus off God onto parent, brother or enemy creates an exponential desire in pursuit of an unobtainable goal. “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11). The target (indicated in hamartia) that poses itself in sin is a false goal based on a deadly deception, and this understanding, as pictured in Genesis 3, is thematic. The mark or goal is not external to God, but in sin the target is obscured.[7] As Isaiah indicates, “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Is. 59:2).

Sin is missing the desired mark, but the mark is not only obscured but displaced by what is unachievable, creating exponential desire. In Genesis 3 knowledge which would achieve divinity displaces knowing God (as with Adam and Eve); in Genesis 4 a sacrifice of the brother so as to attain his place of favor is focused on the obstacle (Cain focused on Abel); endless revenge enacted to obtain justice is focused on the enemy (as with Lamech and the generation of Noah). In each instance an obstacle, sin, satan, a lie obscures God. Knowing God, finding favor with God, and enacting justice are worthy goals, obscured and displaced. (As will become clear in the New Testament, the law becomes an obstacle as it becomes the goal and this is the archetypical problem.)

The New Testament clarifies the nature of the deception and the hostility it creates. According to the TDNT, “A complete transformation takes place when the NT uses ἁμαρτία to denote the determination of human nature in hostility to God.”^[8] With the coming of Christ culpability comes to bear as the deception and blindness are exposed: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:21). Jesus exposes the murderous intent of the scribes and Pharisees, not because they are peculiarly bad, but because they are perhaps the best, and what the best would do when confronted with God in Christ is kill him (in a fatal case of mistaken identity?). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer states: “When a human being confronts Jesus[,] the human being must either die or kill Jesus.”[9] The ego or “I” becomes the false goal and Jesus is unambiguous; either the false self, given over to sin dies, or one joins in those who kill the Messiah. As Rowan Williams puts it, in Christ the falsehood is exposed, “so that if we do not accept the mortality and death of our human logos we are going to be complicit in the death of the Word of God.”[10]

In the midst of their plotting to kill Jesus, the leading Jews are deceived about their violence and opposition to God: “If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” (Matt. 23:30). They know their forefathers were deceived but cannot recognize their own delusion, made obvious in their opposition to Jesus: “So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers” (Matt. 23:31–32). They are deceived killers and Jesus exposes this reality: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:27). According to Luke they are like unmarked graves that men unwittingly walk over, and the danger is falling into the deadly trap (Luke 11:44). The corruption is hidden in the façade but the intent is clear in their action.

The history of murder is now revealed, and Jesus’ persecutors are culpable: “upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (Matt. 23:35). The image of God obscured by sin is fully revealed in Christ, but due to sin they destroy the true image so as to preserve the false image. As in the parable of the evil winegrowers (Mark 12), they destroy the Son so as to obtain ownership. Israel as a nation is committed to murder and has always been dominated by the same deadly spirit: “the blood of all the prophets, shed since the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation” (Luke 11:50). Jews are the prime example of the universal problem, as in them is exposed the spirit of murder and violence which would take by force the life that is freely given.

Their intent is exposed with the destruction of the Messiah, which will be followed by the destruction of Israel (Mark 13:2; Luke 19:43-44). The absolute destruction brought on by all-out violence is fulfilled in 70 A.D., but this cataclysmic violence pertains to all nations: “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be frightened; those things must take place; but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will also be famines. These things are merely the beginning of birth pangs” (Mark 13:7-8). Jesus describes war and violence, not as the instrument of God, but as the culmination of evil. The violence on display against the Messiah and surrounding Jerusalem’s destruction will ultimately infect every level of humanity: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death” (Mk. 13:12). The end is upon the world as Jesus exposes the nature of violence, marking the beginning of the end. So, when Jesus accuses the scribes and Pharisees of murderous opposition, theirs is a type of the violence which will ultimately infect the world, in its pursuit of life through death.

Judaism and the law do not save from sin but the law (as both means and end) becomes the characteristic obstruction to God. The law becomes the Thing, holding out life, and there is no life in the law. The question that Paul raises in Romans 7:7 has to do with confusing or equating law and sin: “Is the law sin (Rom. 7:7b)?” Sins confusion, trying to obtain life through the law, makes it seem that the problem is with the law but the problem is in confusing the law with the goal. The law is not God, nor the power of God, nor the presence of God. The law does not contain life, but to imagine it does, creates the impossible situation of making the law the goal, which in Paul’s explanation points to the purpose of the law: “The Law came in so that the transgression would increase” (Rom. 5:20).

Paul does not mention the serpent in his commentary on Genesis 3, but identifies its role directly with sin and the law: “sin taking the opportunity through the law . . . produced in me coveting of every kind” (Rom. 7:8); “sin became alive” (7:9); “sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom. 7:11). Sin’s deception creates the unobtainable goal, the big Other, the false god, the desirable, and the inherently unobtainable.

In the light of Christ, “the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature” (Heb 1:3) the true image and target (becoming like Him) are a reality. The deception is exposed and there is the possibility of defeating sin: “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness” (Heb. 3:13). Now there is the possibility of recognizing, along with the prodigal son, the broken relationship caused by sin: “I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you” (Luke 15:18). The son’s prodigal action of abandoning his father becomes clear. The parable illustrates Jesus’ understanding that sin is to betray the Father for a false reality. “It is going out from the father’s house, i.e., godlessness and remoteness from God working itself out in a life in the world with all its desires and its filth. The event achieved through the coming of Jesus is recognition of this sin and conversion to God.”^[11] In Christ we recognize the true image of God and we can thus be victorious over the deluding effect of sin, causing us to miss the mark.

Sin as missing the mark or failing to achieve a desired end, reduced to a judicial sense, misses the relational, emotional, and the desiring connotation of the biblical word and context. The judicial understanding imagines that the desired end is in view, and misses the biblical notion that sin deceives through a desire that obscures the goal. There is a broken relationship as the lie of sin directs desire onto an unobtainable object. Eve is focused on the fruit, Cain on his brother, the prodigal son on his inheritance, the older son has his eye on his brother, and the Pharisee is focused on the law. God as goal is obscured, but in Christ the root of sin, the obscuring animate lie, is exposed.

^[1] Quell, G., Bertram, G., Stählin, G., & Grundmann, W. (1964–). ἁμαρτάνω, ἁμάρτημα, ἁμαρτία. In G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 1, p. 269). Eerdmans.

^[2] Ibid, 267ff. .

^[3] Foerster, W. (1964–). διαβάλλω, διάβολος. In G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 2, p. 71). Eerdmans.

^[4] Ibid, 76. As in the case of the fall, in the case of Noah, Abraham, in the Exodus, in the episode of the golden calf, in the case of David, and throughout the history of Israel.

[5] “The angel of the LORD said to him, ‘Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out as an adversary, because your way was contrary to me.’”

^[6] Ibid, p. 72.

[7] Thanks to Jonathan Totty for this thought.

^[8] Ibid, ἁμαρτία, 295. Especially in Jn. in the synon. formulae ἔχειν ἁμαρτίαν (9:41; 15:22, 24; 19:11; 1 Jn. 1:8).

[9] The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013) 286. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (p. 186). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[10] Williams, 186.

^[11] Ibid, ἁμαρτία, 303.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Christ as a Lying Half-Truth or Absolute Truth

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Biography - Facts, Childhood, Family Life ...

Even or especially for Christians, telling the truth and discerning lies in this political moment is complicated. Does the truth of Christ apply to every realm, including the political, or is He the truth in a personal, heavenly, and non-political sense? In a somewhat similar situation to our own, Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted it was the inability of Christians to speak truth to the German State which allowed for the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler. The willingness to accommodate, tolerate, or to imagine Christian truth does not constrain the State meant the German Church became an instrument for evil. As in this country, as brothers and sisters in Christ advocate genocide, arrest and murder of children, and destruction of families, the name of Christ is deployed for evil. Bonhoeffer came to an expanded and absolute view of the truth of Christ, recognizing that His truth must pertain to every realm of life, otherwise truth becomes indiscernible. German Christians could no longer recognize truth, due to the lie that Christ was a partial truth.[1]

As a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer once held to Martin Luther’s notion of two kingdoms: Christian truth and salvation pertain to God’s (heavenly) kingdom and not the temporal/secular realm ordered through God-ordained government. The Sermon on the Mount may work in church but it will not work on the battlefield, in the courtroom, or in the government’s suppression of evil. The Christian lives in both of these realms and so, she must sort out one from the other so as to avoid conflicted obligations. The way to do this, is by recognizing Christian ethics and obligations are for the kingdom of heaven and not the kingdoms of this world. Practically this meant the church’s witness was silenced as it allowed State ethics to dictate church action or inaction. In Bonhoeffer’s estimate, this gave rise to the notion that the church exists for itself, rather than for the world.

Recognizing this two-kingdom understanding (and the consequent notion that the Church exists for itself) caused the failure of the German Church, Bonhoeffer takes Luther’s Christocentrism beyond Luther by grounding all reality in the incarnation. The incarnation is definitive of the center of God’s activity, constituting a singular truth: “The most fundamental reality is the reality of the God who became human. This reality provides the ultimate foundation and the ultimate negation of everything that actually exists, its ultimate justification and ultimate contradiction.”[2] Christian life and Christian ethics are not to be centered on some other world or kingdom. Bonhoeffer sees this two-kingdom split as giving rise to a split in ethics and a dividing up of Christian commitment. The Christian life becomes a means of escape – a kind of “redemption myth.” However, “Unlike believers in the redemption myths, Christians do not have an ultimate escape route out of their earthly tasks and difficulties into eternity. Like Christ . . . they have to drink the cup of earthly life to the last drop, and only when they do this is the Crucified and Risen One with them, and they are crucified and resurrected with Christ.”[3]

Christ gives himself completely for the world and the Christian is called, not to serve another world or another kingdom: “The world has no reality of its own independent from God’s revelation in Christ. It is a denial of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be ‘Christian’ without being ‘worldly.’”[4] By “worldly” Bonhoeffer means a commitment to this world: “The earth that feeds me has a right to my work and my strength. . .. I owe it faithfulness and thanksgiving. . .. I should not close my heart . . . to the tasks, pains, and joys of the earth, and I should wait patiently for the divine promise to be redeemed, but truly wait for it, and not rob myself of it in advance, in wishes and dreams.” As Bonhoeffer explains, “Only when one loves life and the earth so much that with it everything seems to be lost and at its end may one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.”[5] Christ’s death and resurrection are not for life in some other place, but speak of redemption and new life in the place he died and was raised. We are not to flee this world and its suffering, but face it and so share in His suffering and thus share in redemption.

Rather than a divided reality or a division between heaven and earth, Bonhoeffer pictures all of reality centered on the incarnation of Christ. Christ opens up the world in a new way. We are no longer bound by alienation and isolation but graced with a new form of human relatedness and community. As Brian Watson writes, “Now that Christ has redeemed the world, a new humanity restored by the grace of God and exemplified by Jesus is bursting forth in this world and this life.” Bonhoeffer replaces the dictum “God became human in order that humans might become divine” with “the view that Christ’s humanity makes true humanity possible – now human beings as they were intended are exemplified by Jesus himself.”[6] Jesus Christ, the truly human one, is “the human being for others” and this human connectedness is the experience of His truth. This is neither a rejection of God’s good creation nor is it the typical ecclesial predisposition to dominate it. God’s presence is not in “some highest, most powerful and best being imaginable.” Christ makes possible a new life in being for others, through participation in His life of self-giving love (pouring out his life in love for the world).[7]

Bonhoeffer did not come easily to the conclusion that “Nazi Christian” is an oxymoron. The Lutheran division of powers resulted in the church continually appeasing state encroachment upon the church, such that it became clear that a decision had to made between National Socialism and Christianity. In Bonhoeffer’s estimate, there had to be a clear delineation between what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a National Socialist. The unwillingness to make this distinction led to a near complete loss of truth. By the same token, “Christian Zionism” or “Christian Nationalism” are inherently contradictory. Support of genocide in Palestine (in the name of “Christian Zionism”), support of destruction of immigrant families (in notions of “Christian Nationalism”), support of arrest and deportation to torturous prison conditions (in the name of “Christian politics”) is as contradictory as “Nazi-Christian.” Bonhoeffer accused the German Church of being a silent witness to “oppression, hatred, and murder,” and of failing to aid “the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.”[8] The church was only concerned, he argued, with its safety and material interests and had become, by its silence, “guilty for the loss of responsible action in society.”[9]

In the end, Bonhoeffer considered the German Protestant church, no church at all. Even the Confessing church, consumed with its own survival “has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption . . . to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.”[10]

This filling out of Luther’s Christocentrism pits the Christian against worldly empire as an end in itself (whether the empires of state, the empire of religion, or the empire of wealth). In the willingness to share in the suffering of Christ and refusing the double standard of an otherworldly ethics, the Church speaks in the world for the world. Christ suffered under the Roman State, and at the hands of the religious, so as to institute a new life of “being there for others” in the world. Rather than offering escape or reconciling himself to empire, Christ challenged and defeated the powers, and He calls his followers likewise, to overcome the world, not by fleeing the world but by being in the world. Christ as a singular truth opens God and the world simultaneously or not at all, as it is in the world that God meets and saves us.

[1] “Only complete truth and truthfulness will help us now.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, translated by Edwin Robertson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 287.

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (Fortress Press, 2004), 223. Cited in Brian Kendall Watson, “The Political Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Ethical Problem of Tyrannicide” (2015). LSU Master’s Theses. 612.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010) 447–48. Cited in Peter Hooton, “Beyond, in the Midst of Life: An Exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in its Christological Context” (PhD dissertation, St Mark’s National Theological Centre, School of Theology, CSU, 2018), 90.

[4] Ethics, 99.

[5] Letters and Papers, 213.

[6] Watson, 14.

[7] Letters and Papers, 501. Summed up by Hooton, 92.

[8] Ethics, 139.

[9] Ethics, 140.

[10] Letters and Papers, 389.

Jesus as the Answer to Nothing or the Alpha and Omega: The Jesus Logic of Robert Jenson

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that he became “reluctant to mention God by name to religious people – because that name seems to me here not to ring true.”[1] He describes something like a feeling of disgust at religious jargon (he says “I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable”).[2] When I see billboards or bumper stickers advertising “Jesus is the Answer” or “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” I get a similar feeling. I am suspicious of the question Jesus might be thought to answer, or the “reason” behind such sloganeering. The language is largely unintelligible. As Robert Jenson has noted, this is true not simply of slogans but “That Christianity’s language about God has become unintelligible to its hearers is finally apparent also to us who speak it – in that we find it increasingly unintelligible to ourselves.”[3] The sloganeering like much of popular religion, seems to be on the order of “Coke is It” – spoken with enough force by enough smiling people the product is consumed for an unspecified “it” factor. To ask after the meaning is already to have missed the point. The implication is Coke/Jesus will bring on a certain toothy happiness, devoid of specifics and requiring a hollow intensity of “faith.” This Jesus answers nothing and does nothing, and yet rather than assume this name is a cipher, preachers and believers blindly committed to the faith, increase the intensity of the sloganeering. It cannot be admitted the meaning is uncertain, as this implies it may have no meaning.

The problem is not that too much is made of Christ. As Jenson has noted, much of Christian thought is falsely construed as part of a “possessed rationality” in which an idea, an image, or a mental picture serves in place of the person of the Logos and this results in human striving toward God, rather than a reception of the Word. From his Lutheran context, this is “works righteousness” – with focus on ascent to God, rather than on a relinquishing of human logic. The Logos is not received on the basis of an already possessed logic, as if the Word is one word among many. This Word which establishes all of creation and which is its fulfillment, is an order of reality which exceeds human speaking and thinking, as it is the summation and creation of reality. As Michael Brain has written of Jenson, “All of the disparate words of creation coalesce into one: the Word of God, whom Jenson identifies exactly with the person of Jesus Christ.”[4] This is not a Word subject to verification by other means, or testable according to scientific positivism, but is a Word that surpasses this sort of reason.

On the other hand, this Word is not an abstraction, an analogy or an image, but a person. Brain maintains, “Jenson emphatically taught the unqualified and exhaustive identity of the Word with this person, for the Word that establishes creation in the beginning is the exact history of Jesus in our midst and the Kingdom he enacts. Creation has its being from the historical life of Jesus Christ, from 1 to 30 A.D., so that statements of reality are true insofar as they narrate the story of Jesus as both the story of God and the story of creation.”[5] Of course, this makes no sense according to a reason built on the logic of cause and effect, in which the life of Christ is subsequent to the eternal life of God, but neither does a suffering God, a God that is human and is born, a God that experiences time and history, or a God who in Christ grows in wisdom and stature.

In Jenson’s reading and expansion upon Maximus, he maintains the Logos is “a triune identity” (tropos hyparxeos): “he is a subsisting relation to the Father, the subsisting relation of being begotten.”[6] Jenson recognizes that to follow Maximus, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[7] If God the Son suffered, then one of the Trinity suffered, and if one of the Trinity suffered, then God suffered. “We may still apprehend paradox in his position, but the paradox is now not that the presumed impassible Logos suffers, but that the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[8] As Maximus states it, he is “Suffering God.”[9]

Jenson, following Maximus and Origen and deploying a metaphor of Augustine, asserts a peculiar first century understanding, that the Trinitarian God is accomplishing his identity in Christ. Deploying Augustine’s psychological analogy, God the Father is like “consciousness” or the locus of awareness, while God the Son is as God’s “ego,” the “diachronically identifiable individual” while the Holy Spirit is God’s freedom. God in Christ is not a disembodied logos asarkos, but the historical person Jesus.[10] “The second identity of God is directly the human person of the gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[11] Jesus find his “I” “in the same way that other human beings do – or, rather, that other humans find their ‘I’ and are free” as he is and does.[12] “This human personality is then an identity of God in that before the Father in the Spirit he lives the mutual life that God is. . .”[13]

According to David Bruner, “A Father without a Son – that is, without an incarnate son of the kind Jenson specifies – would be the same as an apparatus of mental perception without any lived history.”[14] God would have no lived content or actuality and Trinity and theology are rendered abstract and unintelligible. For Jenson, apart from the historical Jesus, God would not be who he is, Trinity would not be a fact about God, and the love of God or the very definition of God would not be the case. This is a paradoxical logic which accounts for the synthesis found in Christ between God and human, between Creator and creation, which is definitive of the personhood and love of God. This paradoxical, cosmic, synthesizing, love of God found in Christ, is directly accessible and intelligible.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), 141–42. The title of this blog was inspired by Jordan Wood’s lecture 8 on Maximus at PBI, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-and-the-love-of-god-in-synthesis-personhood-and-humility/

[2] Bonhoeffer, Ibid.

[3] Robert Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 3.

[4] Michael Raymond Brain, The Metaphysics of the Gospel: Christ, Reality, and Ecumenism in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Toronto: Wycliffe College Dissertation, 2023) 70.

[5] Brain, 70.

[6] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 136

[7] Ibid, 137.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Maximus, Ambigua, 91:1037B, quoted in Jenson, Ibid.

[10] David Bruner, “Jenson, Hegel and the Spirit of Recognition,” International Journal of Systematic Theology (Volume 21 Number 3 July 2019) 317.

[11] Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 137, Cited in Bruner, Ibid.

[12] Jenson, Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bruner, Ibid, 317.

Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric Answer to Empire

The focus of the Book of Revelation, along with other apocalyptic literature in the New Testament, is aimed at resisting empire. The Roman Empire is pictured as the Beast doing the bidding of the Serpent (Rev. 13) and the means of defeating this power is through the Lamb who was slain (Rev. 12 and 19). No entity today explicitly identifies as empire or would recognize itself as the Beast, so the nature of empire may not be readily evident to its subjects. The United States, born as it was in resistance to the British Empire, may not acknowledge that instituting slave labor, partaking of genocide of native peoples, colonization of other lands (e.g., Hawaii, Alaska, the Philippines, etc.), constitutes its identity as empire. Empire enfolded within the church may make naming the Beast even more difficult. The MAGA cult would equate American greatness with Christian greatness, melding church and empire. Or, it may be that it is not any particular national entity but global capital that represents empire in our day and age. If empire is equated with power and money, transnational corporations now control the bulk of wealth, including the power of the media (the news media, but also marketing and advertising). Media, in all of its various forms, shapes and determines the perception of reality (e.g., the case of Rupert Murdoch in his support of Margaret Thatcher, Rudolph Guliani, and Donald Trump, and his simultaneous support in Hong Kong of the central communist government). Perceptions may vary, but the point is reality is obscured by the matrix of empire which always undergirds the powerful.

To maintain Christocentrism contains the answer to empire may not be very helpful (apart from explanation and qualification), considering the failure of Lutheran Christocentrism in its resistance to German National Socialism. Luther affirmed the centrality of Christ, captured in his slogan “Christ alone” (solus Christus) which is the culmination of “Scripture alone,” “faith alone” and “grace alone.” Luther laid the foundation of Christocentrism in acknowledging God suffered in Christ and in his insistence the cross is the only approach to God. As he explains in the Heidelberg Disputation, “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened (Rom. 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 1:21-25).[1] Rather, “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”[2] The theologian of glory would begin with his own wisdom and imagine he can come to God on the basis of the invisible things of God rather than the suffering of the cross. This results in confusing good and evil: “A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.” [3]

A major problem though, is that like Augustine, Luther held to the notion of two kingdoms, and his Christocentrism applied to the kingdom of God and not the temporal/secular realm ordered through God ordained government. The Sermon on the Mount may work in church but it will not work on the battlefield, in the courtroom, or in the government’s suppression of evil. The Christian lives in both of these realms and so, must sort out the one from the other so as to avoid conflicted obligations. The way to do this, is by recognizing Christian ethics and obligations are for the kingdom of heaven and not the kingdoms of this world.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, faced with the failure of the German church, accused it of being a silent witness to “oppression, hatred, and murder,” and of failing to aid “the weakest and most defenceless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.”[4] The church was only concerned, he argued, with its safety and material interests and had become, by its silence, “guilty for the loss of responsible action in society.”[5] Faced with this failure, Bonhoeffer takes Luther’s Christocentrism beyond Luther by grounding all of reality in the incarnation. The incarnation is definitive of the center of God’s activity, constituting a singular reality: “The most fundamental reality is the reality of the God who became human. This reality provides the ultimate foundation and the ultimate negation of everything that actually exists, its ultimate justification and ultimate contradiction.”[6] Christian life and Christian ethics are not to be centered on some other world, but in this world. Bonhoeffer sees the split as giving rise to a split in ethics and a dividing up of Christian commitment. The Christian life becomes a means of escape – a kind of “redemption myth.” “Unlike believers in the redemption myths, Christians do not have an ultimate escape route out of their earthly tasks and difficulties into eternity. Like Christ . . . they have to drink the cup of earthly life to the last drop, and only when they do this is the Crucified and Risen One with them, and they are crucified and resurrected with Christ.”[7]

Christ gives himself completely for the world and the Christian is called, not to another world or another kingdom but to this world: “The world has no reality of its own independent from God’s revelation in Christ. It is a denial of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be ‘Christian’ without being ‘worldly.’”[8] By “worldly” Bonhoeffer means a commitment to this world: “The earth that feeds me has a right to my work and my strength. . . . I owe it faithfulness and thanksgiving. . . . I should not close my heart . . . to the tasks, pains, and joys of the earth, and I should wait patiently for the divine promise to be redeemed, but truly wait for it, and not rob myself of it in advance, in wishes and dreams.” As Peter Hooton comments: “Bonhoeffer does not give up on heaven, but he thinks it wrong—indeed unchristian—to divert ourselves with thoughts of another world until we have fully satisfied the demands of this one.[9] As Bonhoeffer writes, “Only when one loves life and the earth so much that with it everything seems to be lost and at its end may one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.”[10] Christ’s death and resurrection do not point to life in some other place, but speak of redemption and new life in the place he died and was raised. Only with this understanding can we recognize we are not to flee this world and its suffering, but we are to face it and so share in his suffering and thus share in redemption.

An ethics willing to use evil on earth for the greater good in heaven, is neither incarnational nor Christian. Rather than a divided reality or a division between heaven and earth, Bonhoeffer pictures all of reality centered on the incarnation of Christ. Christ opens up the world to us, in a new way. We are no longer bound by alienation and isolation but we are graced with a new form of human relatedness and community. As Brian Watson writes, “Now that Christ has redeemed the world, a new humanity restored by the grace of God and exemplified by Jesus is bursting forth in this world and this life.” Bonhoeffer replaces the dictum “God became human in order that humans might become divine” with “the view that Christ’s humanity makes true humanity possible – now human beings as they were intended are exemplified by Jesus himself.”[11]

Bonhoeffer’s notion of a “worldly Christianity” is also captured in his notion of a “religionless Christianity.” Religion, according to his definition, is preoccupied with otherworldly or heavenly obligations, personal salvation, and the tendency to see God as the solution only to problems we cannot solve. Religionless or worldly Christianity is focused on new life with God and the sharing in Christ’s suffering. Where religion presumes to share in the power of this world, religionless Christianity embraces the reality of being pushed out of this world of power: “God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence but rather by virtue of his weakness and suffering!”[12] Where religion “directs people in need to the power of God in the world” (to God as deus ex machina), the Bible reveals “the powerlessness and the suffering of God” and only this suffering God can help.[13] This suffering in and with the world speaks of a total commitment, not to a divided reality, but to the reality of the incarnation.

At the same time, through Christ, there is a breaking open of the human “I” or ego which is otherwise deluded by isolation and alienation. Christ breaks open the path to others and our true humanity is recognized and comes to life in his humanity. There is “no way from us to others than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him.”[14] Religion, grounded as it is in pride, closes off suffering together with Christ and thus closes off access to relationship and communion with God and others. As Bonhoeffer recognized very early, the religious instinct is simply the formalization of the human instinct “to acquire power over the eternal.” Religion is “the most grandiose and most gentle of all human attempts to attain the eternal from out of the anxiety and restlessness of the heart.”[15] Religion, in its pride, is an isolating escape from suffering, while true humanity is something shared and never solitary as there is no such thing as an isolated, autonomous individual. Jesus Christ, the truly human one, is “the human being for others” and this human connectedness is the experience of the presence of God. This immanent experience is the experience of transcendence. This is neither a rejection of God’s good creation nor is it the typical ecclesial predisposition to dominate it. God’s presence is not in “some highest, most powerful and best being imaginable,” but rather “a new life in ‘being there for others,’ through participation in the being of Jesus” in the world.[16]

This being there for others is also the definition and parameter of the church. Bonhoeffer considers the German Protestant church, no church at all. Even the Confessing church is consumed with its own survival and thus “has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption . . . to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organising must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.” [17] This will not and cannot arise from “religion” or the God of the religious imagination. We have rather to “immerse ourselves again and again, for a long time and quite calmly, in Jesus’s life, his sayings, actions, suffering, and dying in order to recognise what God promises and fulfils.”[18]

This filling out of Luther’s Christocentrism pits the Christian against empire (whether the empires of the state, the empire of religion, or the empire of wealth) in the willingness to share in the suffering of Christ and refusing the double standard of an otherworldly ethics. Christ suffered under the Roman state, and he suffered at the hands of the religious, and thus, instituted a new life of “being there for others” in the world. Rather than offering escape or reconciling himself to empire, Christ challenged and defeated it, and calls his followers likewise, to overcome the world by being in the world. Christ as a singular reality opens God and the world to us simultaneously, as it is in the world that God meets us and saves us.

[1] Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 22. https://bookofconcord.org/other-resources/sources-and-context/heidelberg-disputation/

[2] Luther, Thesis 23.

[3] Luther, Thesis 24.

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (Fortress Press, 2004), 139. Cited in Peter Hooton, “Beyond, in the Midst of Life: An Exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in its Christological Context” (PhD dissertation, St Mark’s National Theological Centre, School of Theology, CSU, 2018), 90.

[5] Ethics, 140. Cited in Hooton, 94.

[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (Fortress Press, 2004), 223. Cited in Brian Kendall Watson, “The Political Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Ethical Problem of Tyrannicide” (2015). LSU Master’s Theses. 612. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/612

[7] Letters and Papers, 447–48. Cited in Hooton, 90.

[8] Ethics, 99. Cited in Watson, 14.

[9] Letters and Papers, 448. Hooton, 91.

[10] Letters and Papers, 213. Cited in Hooton, 89.

[11] Watson, 14.

[12] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 478–79. Cited in Hooton, 87

[13] Letters and Papers, 479. Cited in Hooton, 87.

[14] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, eds. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 95. Cited in Hooton, 12.

[15] “Sermon on Romans 11:6,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vols. 1–17 ;10: 481–82. Cited in Hooton, 190.

[16] Letters and Papers, 501. Summed up by Hooton, 92.

[17] Letters and Papers, 389. Cited in Hooton, 94.

[18] Letters and Papers, 515. Cited in Hooton, 95.

The Cultural Formation of the Failed German Church and American Evangelicalism

Who said it: Bonhoeffer (about Germany) or Wehner (about the United States)?

In The Atlantic this week, in an article by Peter Wehner, evangelicalism is depicted as falling apart. There is not only a mass exodus of members but pastors are being driven from the ministry by the prevailing mean spiritedness that has invaded churches. While many factors may be part of the problem (including Covid and the resulting isolation) the primary problem, the article claims, is that Christians are influenced and shaped more by social media and secular politics than by Christ.[1] The depiction could come directly from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, which describes the failure of the German church in the face of the rise of National Socialism. To make this case (that the German and American church failure follow a similar course), below I reference the Atlantic article, which is in each instance quoting church leaders and experts (whose names I have omitted), and Bonhoeffer’s depiction in Ethics. There is an overlap in the two descriptions such that, minus the references provided in the footnotes, it is nearly indiscernible who said it: Bonhoeffer (about Germany) or Wehner (about the United States)?

There is an “aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset” characteristic of the politics of the day making its way into churches in their treatment of pastors and teachers. The same toxic culture, the domineering leadership and bullying on the national scene is now predominant within churches in their internal politics. Churches and Christians “have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics” so that churches are polarized and politicized as they have become “repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized.”[2] On the national scene, the catalyst is a leader with a “profound distrust of all people” who depicts himself part of the community of common people, “he praises himself with repulsive vanity and despises the rights of every individual. He considers the people stupid, and they become stupid; he considers them weak, and they become weak; he considers them criminal, and they become criminal. His most holy seriousness is frivolous play; his conventional protestations of solicitude for people are bare-faced cynicism. In his deep contempt for humanity, the more he seeks the favor of those he despises, the more certainly he arouses the masses to declare him a god.” [3] The leader “was able to add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true believers,’ with “tribal instincts” becoming overwhelming. The result is that many Christian followers of (Hitler?/Trump?) “have come to see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to fight.” [4] Which is it, The Atlantic or Ethics?

Both describe a similar social development. The church “has been held together by political orientation and sociology more than by common theology.” Discipleship is displaced by propaganda: “What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure.”[5] Success by the culture’s standard is the formative factor, “the majority fall into idolizing success. They become blind to right and wrong, truth and lie, decency and malice.” With the successful person as model, “Ethical and intellectual capacity for judgment grow dull before the sheen of success and before the desire somehow to share in it.”[6] There has been a church wide failure “to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”[7] Which is it, Germany or the United States?

The message in each instance is, “culture catechizes.” “Our current political culture has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing . . . People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.”[8] And with this catechesis there develops a forced tolerance in which “evil is reinterpreted as good, meanness is overlooked, and the reprehensible is excused.” It becomes very difficult to resist the majority and so “one shies away from a clear No, and finally agrees to everything.” Admiration for the individualist “a self-made picture of human beings that has little similarity to reality” takes hold, and the result is deadly.[9] Is it Bonhoeffer or Wehner?

The way in which the culture catechizes is through the manufactured consent of propaganda. “Catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them.”[10] The culture has produced its “untouchables” like “a black person in a white country,” or like the poor the ill and the disabled.[11] The propaganda scapegoats a particular group and this becomes the basis for identity formation, with hatred as the common denominator. To stir up hatred is to stir up engagement and blind passion. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred. . . And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it.”[12] “Too often, when (Americans?/Germans?) look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of (Donald Trump?/Adolph Hitler?). The leader “normalized a form of discourse that made the once-shocking seem routine.”[13] In either case, “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power and with its apologia for the weak.”[14]

Christians “have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.” Christian nationalism is “the belief that America?/Germany? is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such.” This “is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward non-Christians . . . on issues such as immigration and race.”[15] Over against the masculine, rugged, Jesus, “God sanctifies pain, lowliness, failure, poverty, loneliness, and despair in the cross of Christ. Not that all this has value in itself; it is made holy by the love of God, who takes it all and bears it as judgment. The Yes of God to the cross is judgment on the successful.” This is the great mystery, that the sign of Christ’s seeming failure in the world, the cross, is the marker of his success.[16]

Perhaps the only difference in the two descriptions, as in the above paragraph, is that Bonhoeffer weaves warning and solutions throughout Ethics, but these too would seem to apply in both cases, as he is describing an alternative ethical formation centered on Christ. Christian “formation,” Bonhoeffer explains, means not “formation of the world by planning and programs, but in all formation it is concerned only with the one form that has overcome the world, the form of Jesus Christ. Formation proceeds only from here.” Formation does not happen by striving “to become like Jesus” but “as the form of Jesus Christ himself so works on us that it molds us, conforming our form to Christ’s own (Gal. 4:9).” As Paul indicates, it is God’s action over and against the world and not through world formation.

Bonhoeffer describes the atmosphere of Nazi Germany as imbued with an idolization of death., “Nothing betrays the idolization of death more clearly than when an era claims to build for eternity, and yet life in that era is worth nothing, when big words are spoken about a new humanity, a new world, a new society that will be created, and all this newness consists only in the annihilation of existing life.” Hitler had planned for a thousand-year Reich or an earthly kingdom without limits. To accomplish this goal “unworthy lives” were to be destroyed, as happened in the “euthanasia” murder action in 1940–41 and then in the mass slaughter of the Jews. “Where death is final, earthly life is all or nothing. Defiant striving for earthly eternities goes together with a careless playing with life, anxious affirmation of life with an indifferent contempt for life.” As the Atlantic describes it and as the disregard for life indicates, “More than most other Christians, however, conservative evangelicals insist that they are rejecting cultural influences . . . when in fact their faith is profoundly shaped by cultural and political values, by their racial identity and their Christian nationalism.”

The atmosphere of fear seems to be the common denominator in the compliance of German Christians to Hitler and American evangelical compliance to a politics of hatred. Fear of the foreigner, fear of the minority, fear of poverty, fear of the future, fear of liberals, fear of conspiracies. Such that “for more than half a century evangelical leaders have found reason to deem the situation sufficiently dire. They rallied their congregations against the threats of communism, secular humanism, feminism, gay rights, radical Islam, Democrats in the White House, demographic decline, and critical race theory, and in defense of religious liberty.” Just as Hitler created fear of the communists and fear of the Jews, evangelical militancy is a response to fear. However, as with Hitler and Trump, “it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”

Fear explains both the “explosion of conflict” and the resulting spiritual deformity. Germany experienced a fear of international humiliation after W.W. I, and in the United States there is a regional fear and shame. “What we’re watching right now in much of our nation’s Christian politics . . . is an explosion not of godly Christian passion, but rather of ancient southern shame/honor rage.” It is a fear and passion “stirred up by the Trump presidency, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection; the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory; and matters related to the pandemic, such as masking, vaccinations, and restrictions on in-person worship.” The biblical depiction of grace and gratitude, but most especially of love, describes an emotional life in which fear is not formative. As Scripture says, “Perfect love drives out fear.”

In Bonhoeffer’s description, it is only Christ’s resurrection that breaks through this culture of fear and death. “Christ is the one who has become human, who was crucified, and who is risen, as confessed by the Christian faith. To be transformed into his form is the meaning of the formation that the Bible speaks about.” This enables a new sort of formation: “Transfigured into the form of the risen one, they bear here only the sign of the cross and judgment. In bearing them willingly, they show themselves as those who have received the Holy Spirit and are united with Jesus Christ in incomparable love and community.”[17]

Love and not fear marks this new community who, though they live in the midst of death, are not controlled by death. In this the followers of Christ are are enabled to be fully human, resembling everyone else in many ways, with one key difference. “They are not concerned to promote themselves, but to lift up Christ for the sake of their brothers and sisters.”[18] Christ conveys what it means to be fully human. “Christ was not essentially a teacher, a lawgiver, but a human being, a real human being like us. Accordingly, Christ does not want us to be first of all pupils, representatives and advocates of a particular doctrine, but human beings, real human beings before God.”[19]

Perhaps Bonhoeffer’s prescription for the failed German church is the only remedy for a rapidly failing American church; to be fully human by being conformed to Christ and not culture.

[1] Peter Wehner, “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart,” The Atlantic (October 24, 2021).

[2] Ibid

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Clifford Green, (Published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2008) from the edition published online by Project Muse file:///C:/Users/Paul%20Axton/Downloads/Ethics%20as%20Formation.pdf, 86.

[4] Wehner.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Bonhoeffer, 89.

[7] Wehner

[8] Ibid.

[9] Bonhoeffer, 87.

[10] Wehner

[11] Bonhoeffer, 90

[12] Wehner

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bonhoeffer, Ibid.

[15] Wehner

[16] Bonhoeffer, 90-91.

[17] Bonhoeffer, 93, 95.

[18] Bonhoeffer, 95.

[19] Bonhoeffer, 98.

The God of Empire Versus the God of Passion

There is something of an endless debate about God within the major branches of the Christian faith – What role for Greek conceptions of God? Does the Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son? How is the Father involved in the work of the Son and how do we conceive their difference, etc. etc.? East, West, Protestant, Lutheran, Calvinist, are largely defined by the perceived differences (real and imagined) in regard to fundamental issues about how and what we know about God. These divisions though, may be shaped by more subtle sociological concerns. Sarah Coakley, following Ernst Troeltsch, divides the sociological contexts between church, sect, and mysticism and sees the sociological as throwing additional light on theological emphasis. She sees certain forms of trinitarianism as cohering with particular types of ecclesiastical organization. For example, focus on pneumatology is unlikely to accompany strong patriarchal social and political contexts – given the individualistic, mystical, and “feminine” role of the Spirit. [1] Throughout the history of the church, the more settled the institution (the church type), the more unmoved, settled, and distant, the conception and perceived experience of God. The focus on the Spirit and the experientialism of mysticism have tended to be segregated from the theology of the church type. The adaptation of the Aristotelian concept of God (the Unmoved Mover), came with adaptation to empire, hierarchy, and institutions meant to endure by dint of their alignment with worldly power.

Giorgio Agamben describes the rise of two orders of church, each consisting of its own conceptual and experiential reality. In the biblical mandate, the church is to dwell on the earth as an exile or sojourner captured in the Greek verb paroikein, as in the description of I Peter 1:17 – “the time of sojourning.” In this imagery truth is discovered along the way – or truth is the way (viatorum). The sojourner church stands in contrast to the settled church, which takes on the look of a city, state, kingdom, or empire – captured in the Greek verb katoikein. The katoikia church is built to last, and as opposed to the paroikein church, is not geared to the parousia or the coming of Christ, as it has put down roots in the world. The parousia, in Agamben’s conception, is not in the future or deferred but speaks of the immediate experience of time (fundamental human experience). In the true church (Agamben counts the institution as we have it an imposter), every moment bears the possibility of the inbreaking of the Messiah, made impossible by the katoikia church.[2]

Agamben locates the point of departure from the biblical church within early debates about the Trinity. The distinction between the immanent (ad intra – or God’s self-relation) and economic (God’s relation to creation) Trinity accounts for the development of western politics and economics. However, according to Agamben, this secularizes theology even before there is a secular order: “from the beginning theology conceives divine life and the history of humanity as an oikonomia (economy), that is, that theology is itself ‘economic’ and did not simply become so at a later time through secularization.” Where the political order can lay claim to a first order power relation, Christian’s (through this theological maneuvering) only have to do with an economy (a second order of experience).[3] While one may not agree with the sweep of Agamben’s critique, his depiction parallels Coakley’s sociological contextualization of theology.

In the 20^th century there have been a variety of attempts to correct this theological failure precisely where it had the greatest impact. Where the church (at least the church type, with its institutions) failed in Germany with National Socialism, this gave rise to striking theological innovation. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer turn from the characteristic church type dogmatic speculation to a Christocentric point of departure.

Bonhoeffer in his lectures on Christology locates the Logos, not in the realm of the transcendent. He claims “this will inevitably constitute that Logos as an object for human logos, locating it within the territory of things about which we can ask ‘how is it possible?’ or ‘how does it work?'” As Bonhoeffer puts it, “the question is no longer ‘how?’ but ‘who?’ Who is it that I confront when I look at Jesus? But also, and equally importantly, ‘Who am I?'”[4]

Bonhoeffer depicts the question of the person of Christ as challenging his self-understanding: “When a human being confronts Jesus, the human being must either die or kill Jesus.”[5] The reality of Jesus creates its own context and terms of engagement. Jesus is not Socrates, reminding us of what we already know, but he creates the conditions for knowing him as these conditions do not otherwise exist. He is what he teaches.

Picturing the Logos as on the order of the Aristotelian difference (the apathetic God) is simply to accommodate divine revelation to the human word. “The divine revealed as overwhelming power or unconstrained agency as we understand those things will not recreate us, re-beget us; it will not require the death of our logos.” This sort of God simply accommodates our instincts about the absolute Other, the humanly conceived difference of divinity. If we do not accept the death of the human logos, we will deploy it in defeat of the divine Logos.[6]

Of course Christ allows for his death. He is not a rival to my will or my word. It is precisely his kenotic humility – “taking the form of a slave” (not just being incarnate) that challenges the foundation (foundationalism) of my selfhood. Though it is not as if there is any actually existing foundation – this is simply the “poisonous fiction” that must die or the pride that must fail.[7]

One of the sharpest German attempts at a revisionist understanding came from Jurgen Moltmann, who begins his book on the Trinity by recounting how Greek notions of God effectively corrupted the Christian faith. He suggests that where Greek philosophy has been deployed in conceiving of God, “then we have to exclude difference, diversity, movement and suffering from the divine nature.” He names the resultant heresy of nominalism (God cannot be known in his essence) as giving us a God that is so far from us (impassible and immovable in his remoteness), such that apathetic portrayal of God has trumped the importance of the person and work of Christ. He concludes that, “down to the present-day Christian theology has failed to develop a consistent Christian concept of God? And that instead . . . it has rather adopted the metaphysical tradition of Greek philosophy, which it understood as ‘natural theology’ and saw as its own foundation.” By allowing the “apathetic axiom” to prevail over the person and work of Christ, God became “the cold, silent and unloved heavenly power.”[8]

Moltmann poses the following choice: either the apathetic God prevails and the passion of Christ is seen as “the suffering of the good man from Nazareth,” or the passion of Christ prevails and divine apatheia is no longer determinative. Within this second alternative, Moltmann points out that his depiction of suffering entails a two-fold rejection: the Greek depiction of the divine incapacity for suffering, and suffering defined as incapacity or deficiency. “But there is a third form of suffering: active suffering – the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.”

Without passion God would be incapable of love. Moltmann develops the two-fold meaning of passion – inclusive of passionate desire and the suffering passion of Christ. If God were incapable of suffering in every respect, then he would also be incapable of any form of passion or love. As Aristotle puts it, he would at most be capable of loving himself, but not of loving another as himself. But if he is capable of loving something else, then he lays himself open to the suffering which love for another brings; yet, by virtue of his love, he remains master of the pain that love causes him to suffer. “God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is ‘apathetic’. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is ‘pathetic’.” [9] God is love and his is not a cold love (as if there is such a thing), but the passionate love revealed in Christ.

Sarah Coakley cites Moltmann as an influence in her turn to desire, sex and gender in conceptualization of the Trinity.[10] However, what Coakley avoids and Moltmann spells out, is the historical and theological challenge to notions of divine apathy entailed in discussions of passion. Moltmann finds in Jewish theology and Origen precedent for his depiction of the suffering of the Father as a necessary part of the love of God.

Origen describes the suffering of God in his exposition of Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.” “In his mercy God suffers with us, for he is not heartless.” In his explanation, Origen equates the love of God with the necessity of suffering:

He (the Redeemer) descended to earth out of sympathy for the human race. He took our sufferings upon Himself before He endured the cross – indeed before He even deigned to take our flesh upon Himself; for if He had not felt these sufferings [beforehand] He would not have come to partake of our human life. First of all He suffered, then He descended and became visible to us. What is this passion which He suffered for us? It is the passion of love {Caritas est passio). And the Father Himself, the God of the universe, ‘slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy’ (Ps. 103.8), does He not also suffer in a certain way? Or know you not that He, when He condescends to men, suffers human suffering? For the Lord thy God has taken thy ways upon Him ‘as a man doth bear his son’ (Deut. 1.31). So God suffers our ways as the Son of God bears our sufferings. Even the Father is not incapable of suffering {Ipse pater non est itnpassibilis). When we call upon him, He is merciful and feels our pain with us. He suffers a suffering of love, becoming something which because of the greatness of his nature He cannot be, and endures human suffering for our sakes.[11]

As Moltmann explains, Origen’s talk of God’s suffering means the suffering of love; the compassion of mercy and pity. The merciful person taking pity on another participates in the suffering of the one he pities, “he takes the other’s sufferings on himself, he suffers for others.” For Origen this is the suffering of God, “the suffering of the Father who in giving up his ‘own Son’ (Rom. 8.32) suffers the pain of redemption.” The Father is not removed from the suffering of the Son, anymore than he can be said to be removed from the passion or desire of God. Origen depicts the divine passion of Christ as inclusive of the divine passion between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. “The suffering of love does not only affect the redeeming acts of God outwards; it also affects the trinitarian fellowship in God himself.”[12]

Origen predates the distinction and Moltmann and Coakley, in varying forms, would equate the economic and immanent Trinity. Moltmann notices in Origen what Coakley notices in Romans 8, that it is precisely in conjunction with suffering that the Trinitarian nature of God is most clearly delineated. Like Coakley and Paul, Moltmann also locates the apprehension and participation in the suffering of God in prayer.

Moltmann though, references a Jewish mystical tradition in which praying the Shema is the uniting of God: “To acknowledge God’s unity – the Jew calls it uniting God. For this unity is, in that it becomes; it is a Becoming Unity. And this Becoming is laid on the soul of man and in his hands.”

Franz Rosenzweig takes up this notion to describe an Old Testament and Jewish conception of the suffering of God:

Mysticism builds its bridge between ‘the God of our fathers’ and ‘the remnant of Israel’ with the help of the doctrine of the Shekinah. The Shekinah, the descent of God to man and his dwelling among them, is thought of as a divorce which takes place in God himself. God himself cuts himself off from himself, he gives himself away to his people, he suffers with their sufferings, he goes with them into the misery of the foreign land, he wanders with their wanderings . . . God himself, by ‘selling himself to Israel – and what should be more natural for ‘the God of our Fathers’! – and by suffering her fate with her, makes himself in need of redemption. In this way, in this suffering, the relationship between God and the remnant points beyond itself.”[13]

Just as in Romans 8, so too in the Jewish conception, prayer inserts the one praying within the communion of God. The Jewish depiction is an estrangement or suffering into which God enters, and the estrangement is overcome through those reflecting the Shekinah to God through prayer. Moltmann explains, estrangement is also overcome “through the acts of the good, which are directed towards the overcoming of evil and the establishment of the future harmony of the one world. That is the meaning of the Hebrew word tikkun (world repair).”[14]

Theology proper (talk of God) cannot begin in the abstract, which inevitably depends upon the human logos, but in the fact that God has opened himself to human experience and human suffering, becoming human that humans might participate in the divine. But it is the primacy of God’s love and not human suffering that determines the course of God’s suffering love. The passion of Christ as point of departure suspends talk of an economic and immanent Trinity, with the first order (the ontological reality) of God removed from the contingencies of the second order (the economic). The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, though as Coakley notes, this does not mean that God is reduced to what is revealed, as “there must be that which God is which eternally ‘precedes’ God’s manifestation to us.”[15] However, speculation about what “precedes” Christ cannot be given precedent over the revealed truth given in Christ.

[1] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (p. 156-157). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. by Leland de la Durantaye (Seagull Books, 2012).

[3] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (p. 3). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford]. Green and Michael P. Dejonge, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), 185.

[5] Reader, 268.

[6] Williams, 187-188.

[7] Williams, 190-191.

[8] Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (First Fortress Press edition, 1993) 21-22.

[9] Moltmann, 22-23.

[10] Sarah Coakley, “The Trinity and gender reconsidered,” in God’s Life in Trinity (ed. Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

[11] Homilia VI in Ezechielem (MPG XIII, 714 f). Cited in Moltmann, 24.

[12] Moltmann, 24.

[13] F. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, III, 3rd ed., Heidelberg 1954, pp. 192ff. Cited in Moltmann, 29.

[14] Moltmann, 29.

[15] Coakley

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Christian Martyr, Pacifist, Assassin?

“We must not be surprised if once again times return for our church when the blood of martyrs will be required. But even if we have the courage and faith to spill it this blood will not be as innocent or as clear as that of the first martyrs. Much of our own guilt will lie in our blood. The guilt of the useless servant who is thrown into the darkness.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a sermon in the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial church in Berlin on June 15, 1932.[1]

The question of whether Dietrich Bonhoeffer should be regarded as a martyr for Christ is not one simply of semantics but pertains to the very nature of Christian witness, to the specifics of his pacifism and the meaning of Christian faith. Though he is officially accorded the title at Westminster Abbey (his statue is among ten others designated as 20th century martyrs, including Martin Luther King Jr., which stand above the west entrance) he fails to make the Roman Catholic list and also misses the attribute in the “Lutheran Book of Worship” and “Evangelical Lutheran Worship” (he is called “teacher” and “theologian” respectively). As a Lutheran pastor explains, “A martyr is one who is killed for his faith but Bonhoeffer was killed for his participation in the plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler.” Instead of not killing, he is accused of attempting to kill. Is the popular attribution of martyr, given to him across ecumenical lines and by biographers such as Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, simply the product of sloppy thinking?

Bonhoeffer’s best friend, Eberhard Bethge, suggests that he is a martyr, but as Bonhoeffer indicates in the epigraph, the term takes on a different meaning in the modern context. Where the church and the world were at one time clear and opposed entities, this distinction has been made impossible in the Nazi (or perhaps just the modern) context. Bonhoeffer, had a premonition that the situation would call for the spilling of martyr’s blood, but he understood that the church and Christians were complicit in the evil which they faced. He had come to feel that he must take extreme measures. But the question is, how far would he be willing to go in this emergency situation?

There is almost no part of a possible answer to this question that is not under contention. Michael DeJong argues he was an orthodox Lutheran, and that Stanley Hauerwas (and friends) are guilty of reshaping him to look like an anabaptist on the order of John Howard Yoder. His understated denial that he is reducing him to a traditional Lutheran makes the point he denies: “I do not mean to suggest that seeing his peace statements in the Lutheran tradition tells us everything we need to know about Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on peace, violence and war.” This underwhelming statement stands against the fact, Bonhoeffer was clearly a pacifist. But what sort of pacifist was he?

Was he a pacifist, perhaps of a Lutheran type as opposed to an Anabaptist sort, who might feel justified in taking action where the normal functions of the two kingdoms had fallen apart? Or was he a once committed pacifist, who by the writing of Ethics, has changed his mind? Or is he a completely committed pacifist who goes against his own good conscience and theological understanding? Or is he, in fact, a pacifist who never abandoned his commitment to nonviolence and was never involved in the plot to kill Hitler? Each of these are proposed possibilities.

What seems beyond reasonable question, is his commitment to the ethic of peace as part of his understanding of following Christ (who is an ethic). His commitment to nonviolence, in this context, is clear in Cost of Discipleship:

Does [Jesus] refuse to face up to realities – or shall we say, to the sin of the world? . . . Jesus tells us that it is just because we live in the world, and just because the world is evil, that the precept of nonresistance must be put into practice. Surely we do not wish to accuse Jesus of ignoring the reality and power of evil! Why, the whole of his life was one long conflict with the devil. He calls evil evil, and that is the very reason why he speaks to his followers in this way.[2]

In the same book he writes,

That is why Christians cannot conform to the world, because their concern is the ‘perisson’. What does the ‘perisson’, the extraordinary, consist of? It is the existence of those blessed in the Beatitudes, the life of the disciples. It is the shining light, the city on the hill. It is the way of self-denial, perfect love, perfect purity, perfect truthfulness, perfect nonviolence. Here is undivided love for one’s enemies, loving those who love no one and whom no one loves … It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, who goes to the cross in suffering and obedience.

The Bonhoeffer of Ethics, it is argued, is more thoroughly Lutheran in his understanding of God’s two kingdoms, and so, in this latter book, his early call for simple obedience now takes into account a more complicated notion of the human predicament of guilt, “the duty to heed God’s creational ‘mandates’, and the distinction between ‘last things’ and ‘things before the last.’”[3] In this understanding, Bonhoeffer was never a pacifist (and certainly not an Anabaptist sort of pacifist) but was always true to his Lutheran understanding of the two kingdoms.

The argument of Stanley Hauerwas and Mark Thiessen Nation is that his pacifism was evident and unadulterated by his Lutheran frame of reference.[4] They point out that in a letter to his friend Elizabeth Zinn on 27 January 1936, he says that “Christian pacifism” is “self-evident.” As they argue, “from the beginning he did not think “pacifism” was a position one assumed that required further theological justification.” Just the opposite, he was a pacifist because of Jesus: “his pacifism and his Christological convictions were inseparable.” They argue, contrary to DeJonge, that he was indeed a pacifist on the order of John Howard Yoder, especially when one considers that Bonhoeffer and Barth shape Yoder’s pacifism. Yoder’s Politics of Jesus, they argue, “is as far as we know, more like Discipleship than any other book written between 1937 and 1972 (not least because of Yoder’s own deep appreciation of Bonhoeffer’s book).”

Though DeJonge and others have attempted to locate Bonhoeffer in a Lutheran context which would override his commitment to nonviolence, it is precisely in that context that he spells out his pacifism. In his lecture at the ecumenical Youth Peace Conference in Czechoslovakia on 26 July 1932, “On the Theological Foundation of the Work of the World Alliance” he says:

Because there is no way for us to understand war as God’s order of preservation and therefore as God’s commandment, and because war needs to be idealized and idolatrized in order to live, today’s war, the next war, must be condemned by the church … We must face the next war with all the power of resistance, rejection, condemnation … We should not balk here at using the word ‘pacifism’. Just as certainly we submit the ultimate ‘pacem facere’ to God, we too must ‘pacem facere’ to overcome war.

Hauerwas and Nation offer details of a long and seemingly irrefutable documentation of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism. They point (a few of their many examples must suffice) to a sermon on 2 Corinthians in which Bonhoeffer makes the extraordinary claim that, “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence.” They reference Lawrence Whitburn, one of his congregants in London, who said that Bonhoeffer’s opinion in favor of pacifism “was so marked and clear in his mind” that their discussion of the subject “soon developed into an argument.” From among his inner circle of students at the Finkenwalde seminary, Joachim Kanitz, comments that “it became clear to us on the basis of this Bible study [an exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, given by Bonhoeffer] that it is not possible for Christians to justify killing or to justify war.”

In a counter to this understanding, it is argued that the dire situation he faces during the writing of Ethics causes a break, in which he would consider employing violent means in this situation of church failure. Hauerwas and Nation counter this with documentation from the writing of Ethics and after. For example, from Ethics:

The Sermon on the Mount as the proclamation of the incarnate love of God calls people to love one another, and thus to reject everything that hinders fulfilling this task – in short, it calls them to self-denial. In renouncing one’s own happiness, one’s own rights, one’s own righteousness, one’s own dignity, in renouncing violence and success, in renouncing one’s own life, a person is prepared to love the neighbour.

Hauerwas and Nation argue in their book, Bonhoeffer the Assasin? that he remained true to his pacifism and was never directly involved in violence or the enactment of violence. They assemble an impressive array of arguments which offer a counter weight to any simplistic or one-sided argument as to Bonhoeffer’s participation in the plot to kill Hitler.

The argument that he did not, in fact, ever abandon his pacifism and did not take part in the plot to kill Hitler seems to be directly contradicted by Bethge, who indicates that he told him he would kill Hitler, given the opportunity. On the other hand, Bethge indicates he knew he was not involved in these plots. As late as 1942 he also tells Bethge he stands behind what he wrote Cost of Discipleship, where he had espoused pacifism. Hauerwas and Nation reference Peter Hoffman, an expert on the conspiracies against Hitler, who describes Bonhoeffer’s role as limited to putting out peace feelers: Bonhoeffer “urged his friends … to use their influence to ensure that the Allies would call a halt to military operations during the anticipated coup in Germany.”

Interestingly Hauerwas and Nation sight the authority of Karl Barth, whom Bethge indicates, knew everything of Bonhoeffer. But his testimony is a mixed bag. Barth had no question, “He was really a pacifist on the basis of his understanding of the Gospel.” On the other hand, Bonhoeffer “belonged to these circles of those willing to kill Hitler.”

From Bonhoeffer’s own description we understand that there is a tension in his thought. The pure martyrs of the first century and beyond, who gave up their lives in a clear witness to the gospel and against the state and the emperor (who claimed to be a god) were not to be found in a Germany and in a German church where Hitler had been embraced as God’s own messenger, on the order of Christ himself. The distinction between church and world had come undone. Humanity itself is threatened and the church, in Bonhoeffer’s conception, has always been for the salvation of the world, but now there is no true church in Germany.

As he indicates in his essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” there are three modes of action that one might take as a part of the church in regard to the state:

first (as we have said), questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does. Second is service to the victims of the state’s actions. The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. “Let us work for the good of all.” These are both ways in which the church, in its freedom, conducts itself in the interest of a free state. In times when the laws are changing, the church may under no circumstances neglect either of these duties. The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself.

In this third category he potentially allows for the sort of action he might have been involved in against Hitler as part of a legitimate Christian response to a government that has overstepped its responsibilities. He expands upon the point, by indicating that with the rise of the Führer we no longer have to do with a political but a religious figure:

This Führer, arising from the collective power of the people, now appears in the light as the one awaited by the people, the longed-for fulfilment of the meaning and power of the life of the Volk. Thus the originally prosaic idea of political authority is transformed into the political-messianic idea of Führer that we see today. All the religious thinking of its supporters flows into it as well.

The Christian/religious thought of the German people is so misdirected by the role of the Führer, that other modes of resistance (DeJonge finds six modes of resistance in Bonhoeffer)[5] would seem to no longer be effective. As Bonhoeffer puts it in Cost of Discipleship: “It is not only my task to look after the victims of madmen who drive a motorcar in a crowded street, but to do all in my power to stop their driving at all.”

DeJonge, Hauerwas, and Nation, make their argument on the basis that Bonhoeffer was self-consistent. If this is true, I think Nation and Hauerwas make the stronger case that what he was consistent with was his focus on the person of Christ in his ethics of nonviolence. But even here there is a tension, as in Bonhoeffer’s conception, “Jesus Christ came to initiate us not into a new religion but into life” and to be engaged in life. As a result, he has a profound concern for the world, for the suffering (Jews, in this case) and by extension for politics. It is not inconceivable that he went against his own conscience and beliefs, willing to give up his own soul (as he indicates in an early sermon, comparing himself to Paul, in his willingness to be counted anathema) so that he might take part in an act to kill the one he is purported to have referred to as the Anti-Christ.

On the other hand, what is clear and irrefutable are the books and written word he has left us, pointing to the need for sole trust in the ethics of Christ. In recognizing him as a martyr, as I think we should, the term will now have to account for “the world come of age” and the possibility of a failed church and the need for a singular trust in the conquering power of the Lamb that was slain.

[1]Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer: Exile and Martyr, (London: Collins St. James Place, 1975) 155.

[2]Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (Touchstone, 1995), 143–144.

[3] Charles Moore, “Was Bonhoeffer Willing to Kill?” in Plough Quarterly Magazine, September 10, 2014. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/nonviolence/was-bonhoeffer-willing-to-kill

[4] The following is from their article, “’A pacifist and enemy of the state’”: Bonhoeffer’s journey to nonviolence” in ABC Religion and Ethics, Thursday 19 April 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/a-pacifist-and-enemy-of-the-state-bonhoeffers-journey-to-nonviol/10094798

[5] 1. Individual and humanitarian resistance to state injustice, 2. The church’s diaconal service to victims of state injustice 3. The church’s indirectly political word to the state 4. The church’s directly political word against an unjust state 5. Resistance through discipleship 6. Resistance through the responsible action of the individual. See his article, “How does the church resist an unjust state? Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance” https://www.abc.net.au/religion/dietrich-bonhoeffers-theology-of-resistance/10766546

Renewing the Mediating Power of Christ with Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard

While I am often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people—because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it is particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable)— to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course. Dietrich Bonhoeffer[1]
As soon as Christ’s kingdom makes a compromise with this world and becomes a kingdom of this world, Christianity is abolished. But if Christianity is in the truth, it is certainly a kingdom in this world, but not of this world, that is, it is militant. Søren Kierkegaard [2]

We are living through a period in which Christian belief is proving implausible if not impossible. This cultural/political moment seems, for many, to have exhausted the possibility of keeping the faith, perhaps because of personal injustices suffered or because of the exposure of the underbelly of religion gone bad. As I see it unfold all around, I completely understand the particular circumstance of friends, acquaintances and former students in their turn from the faith, and by “understand” I mean I feel what they are feeling. The Christian complicity in racism, in religious nationalism, in deadly stupidity, combined with a loss of trust in church institutions and the personal wounds inflicted by the same, is crisis invoking. At a more basic level, there is a huge question mark in front of God’s love, control and providence, and a feeling that the Christian message is implausible, irrelevant and inconsequential.

If ever there were someone who understood and dealt with a similar crisis of faith, it must have been Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, partly due to his work with German counter-intelligence, was aware he was living through the complete failure of the church during what would come to be called the Holocaust or Shoah. It was a period in which the church and Christians had not only failed but had, in part, enabled the “final solution” – thus he calls for a new form of the faith called “religionless Christianity.” Christian anti-Semitism was the basis of German and National Socialist anti-Semitism – which is one reason why Bonhoeffer felt that he could no longer speak the name of God and presume to be communicating. Bonhoeffer would propose his religionless form of the faith in the face of what he considered the end of Western Christianity. In his religionless Christianity, along with his notions of “cheap” and “costly” grace, worldliness, obedient faith, the need for personal choice, the rejection of institutionalism and German idealism, he is following Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard too had faced a complete collapse of trust in the institutions of the church and had turned, not to reform so much as an abandonment of Christianity as he knew it. Both Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard speak of a costly grace that bids one come and suffer and die with Christ, as opposed to a triumphalist Christianity that presumes personal safety, comfort, and security as part of the faith. The idea, however, that may best sum up both thinkers, both in their relationship to others and in their understanding of how the Christian, in spite of the failure and complete absence of the church and authentic Christianity, is the notion of Christ’s mediating power in the life of the Christian. Both turn to the existential experience of the individual and the need for Christ to stand in immediate relationship to the “I” so as to mediate God, self, and the world.

My claim here is not without controversy at any level: some see no connection between the two thinkers, some would not make the connection between Bonhoeffer’s relgionless Christianity and Kierkegaard’s anti-Christendom, some see a contrast between Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual and Bonhoeffer’s focus on the community of the church, but more importantly what is contested is that these two thinkers are conjoined in an effort toward the emergence of a new form of the faith as seen in the mediating role of Christ. Afterall, Kierkegaard eschews any role as a reformer and Bonhoeffer is true to his Lutheran context, never envisioning anything more than the church in which he was raised – or so the argument goes.[3] What I would argue (following Mathew Kirkpatrick, among others) is, not only are Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard conjoined in their major categories and focus but they both envision a reform of the definition of faith, beginning with an abandonment of the established church and a reworking of what it means to be human as this is mediated by Christ.

First there is a turn from the mediating role of the established church. In the article, “This Must Be Said, So Let It Be Said,” Kierkegaard encourages a boycott of the church: “Whoever you are, whatever your life is otherwise, my friend—by ceasing to participate . . . in the public divine service as it now is . . . you always have one and a great guilt less—you are not participating in making a fool of God by calling something New Testament Christianity that is not New Testament Christianity.” Kierkegaard calls for the destruction of the established church, “Yes, let it happen. What Christianity needs is not the suffocating protection of the state; no, it needs fresh air, persecution, and—God’s protection.” He compares the clergy to stockholders in a company where the best dividends will be paid out to those who avoid the harsh truth of the gospel. In The Moment Kierkegaard not only denounces the clergy for having discarded authentic Christianity but declares that the state church has made Christianity’s existence impossible. For by employing the clergy the state gives these professional stockholders a vested interest in maintaining the situation. As Kirkpatrick notes, throughout The Moment, Kierkegaard describes the clergy as “parasites,” “wolves,” “swindlers,” “criminals,” “forgers,” “soul-sellers,” “oath-bound liars,” “perjurers,” “hypocrites,” “cannibals,” “thieves,” “huckstering knaves,” etc.[4] He pleads with his readers:

But one thing I beseech you for God in heaven’s sake and by all that is holy: avoid the pastors, avoid them, those abominations whose job it is to hinder you in even becoming aware of what true Christianity is and thereby to turn you, muddled by gibberish and illusion, into what they understand by a true Christian, a contributing member of the state Church, the national Church, and the like. Avoid them . . .

Kierkegaard, by the time he writes this, no longer believes that Christianity exists in Christendom, and that Christendom actively inhibits Christianity. There is no longer any Christianity to reform, Kierkegaard argues in his own voice.

This whole junk heap of a state Church, where from time immemorial there has been, in the spiritual sense, no airing out—the air confined in this old junk heap has become toxic. Therefore the religious life is sick or has expired, because, alas, precisely what worldliness regards as health is, Christianity, sickness, just as, inversely, Christian health is regarded by worldliness as sickness. Let this junk heap tumble down, get rid of it; close all these boutiques and booths, the only ones that the strict Sunday Observance Act exempted . . . and let us once again worship God in simplicity instead of making a fool of him in magnificent buildings. Let it again become earnestness and cease to be play . . .

While this harsh conclusion might be tempered by Kierkegaard’s earlier statements, it remains that he sees only one way forward – and that is through the “single-individual” immediately dependent upon Christ.

In my previous blog (here) I demonstrated Bonhoeffer’s acknowledgement of the failure of the church. In Letters and Papers from Prison he indicates the Christian religion has for 1,900 years rested on the false belief of some sort of instinctive “religious a priori,” in which humankind is naturally endowed with an innate perception of God. Religion has been a garment in which authentic Christianity has sometimes been cloaked and the concern has been with its portrayal of God as a strong, transcendent figure, standing beyond the world. The cloak must be shed, according to Bonhoeffer, because the trappings have displaced the substance. Bonhoeffer calls for the church to sell its land, to cease paying the clergy – who should seek support in free-will offerings or through secular jobs. In Christology, Bonhoeffer attacks the church for its elitist message, such that “for the working-class world, Christ seems to be settled with the church and bourgeois society.” By 1940 with the essay “Guilt, Justification, Renewal,” Bonhoeffer’s understanding is even more severe: “The church was mute when it should have cried out, because the blood of the innocent cried out to heaven.” The guilt of the church is such that it has misused the name of Christ, attempting to secure itself rather than take a dangerous stance alongside the suffering. He concludes, the church is only the church when it is there for others, so the church has failed to be the church.

Both Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer turn to a more immediate understanding of Christ’s mediation. It is not through the institutional church or the clergy, but it is Christ within the individual and their perception of the self and world where Christ mediates. As early as Act and Being (his second dissertation), Bonhoeffer reflects Kierkegaard in the notion that transcending the limits of a world “enclosed in the I” is the beginning of a true experience of God. “A ‘genuine ontology’ requires an object of knowledge—a genuine Other—that ‘challenges and limits the I. The ‘being of revelation’ is just such an object of knowledge. It does not depend on the I, whose being and existing it precedes in every respect.” In this “being of revelation” human knowledge is suspended in “a being-already-known.”[5]

Kirkpatrick claims, “For both Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer, everything concerns the ability to say “I,” and that before God.”[6] Kierkegaard’s psychological writing is forged around the idea that the individual only becomes an authentic (spiritual) self when “grounded transparently in the power that established it.” Both Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard describe individual participation in the Trinity; the Son, mediating relation to the Father through the Spirit. This becomes a possibility and reality through the guidance and imitation of Christ, a Kierkegaardian understanding deployed by Bonhoeffer (Bonhoeffer’s copy of the book, Sickness Unto Death, bore the marks of his heavy underlining, according to Kirkpatrick).

As Kierkegaard describes it, “Despair is a Sickness in the Spirit, in the Self” in which there is a refusal or failure to be a self. This despair has primarily to do with one’s relation within the self – between what he calls the relation between the body and the soul. “In the relation between two, the relation is the third term as a negative unity, and the two relate themselves to the relation, and in the relation to the relation; such a relation is that between soul and body, when man is regarded as soul.” There is an antagonism built into the human self-relation which is definitive of the human disease. The primary importance does not pertain to any one element of the relation (soul or body or the ego) but to the dynamics of the relation or to the negative unity (death drive) or to what Paul calls “the body of sin” or “the body of death.”

The conflict between the law of the mind and the “I” (the ego) is constituted in the third term: “the body of death” or “the body of sin.” The body of death is an orientation of the “I” to itself with “itself” objectified through the law. The relation can be constituted in a negative unity (the body of sin or the body of death) but he also offers another possibility: The one “which constituted the whole relation.” “This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self, namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation.”

Kierkegaard’s psychological portrayal (as in Sickness Unto Death), of the immanent and immediate role of Christ’s mediating role pervades the thought and theology of Bonhoeffer. Kirkpatrick’s dissertation and book argue that Kierkegaard’s notion of the individual, including his understanding of love and the concept of mediation, are behind Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the individual in community and his notions of obedience and discipleship. Bonhoeffer, according to Kirkpatrick, fulfills Kierkegaard’s notion of a reformer as here is the single individual leading people in obedience through the mediation of Christ.

Despite his profound thoughts concerning the nature of community and the authority of the church, the foundation of Bonhoeffer’s theology is that of the single individual, drawn away from direct relationship with others into the mediation of Christ, bound to undivided relationship with God. [7]

The failure of the Church and the failure of Christianity in Christendom might be seen as something on the order of Paul’s thorn in the flesh realized corporately and universally. The church triumphant and the religious version of the faith (focused on defending God’s transcendent might), turn out to be the great weakness and failure of the Western form of the faith. In the midst of this failure Bonhoeffer envisions the emergence of a new form of the faith, largely based on his reading of Kierkegaard. While he never has the opportunity to spell this out (the Nazis kill him before he can even begin his projected work), what it most clearly revolves around is the understanding that Christ bids me come and die so that “I” can be overcome.

In Christ, God’s self-revelation, we are brought to “the boundary of the being that has been given to [us]” and it is only here through “the God who became human” that we become human. Divine and human are not “two isolated realities” as God’s “vertical Word from above” neither adds nor subtracts “but rather qualifies this entire human being as God.” Jesus Christ becomes God for us and we become fully human in faith alone. In his Lectures on Christology Bonhoeffer says, “I can never think of Jesus Christ in his being-in-himself, but only in his relatedness to me.” At the same time, Christ is my limit – the boundary of my being and my true center. As the one “through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6), he is the mediator of every relationship with the Creator.[8]

The way forward in this time of crisis – or the way this time of crisis points – is to the realization that Christ only wants us to become “the human beings that we really are.” As Bonhoeffer says, “Pretension, hypocrisy, compulsion, forcing oneself to be something different, better, more ideal than one is—all are abolished.”[9] The realization is that we can only become truly “human before God” through the mediation of Christ in apprehending all things.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), 141–42.

[2] Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 211.

[3] Both though attack the notion of a state church, with Bonhoeffer hinting to Barth, “Several of us are now very drawn to the idea of a free church.”

[4] I am utilizing Matthew D Kirkpatrick, Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age: Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and the Question of “Religionless Christianity” (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 166) (Kindle Locations 6296-6302). Pickwick Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

[5] This is Peter Hooton’s summation from Act and Being, in the unpublished version of his dissertation.

[6] Kirkpatrick 7568

[7] Kirkpatrick 7530-7536

[8] “Lectures on Christology,” DBWE (Collected works in English) 12: 305, 353, Quoted from Hooton, 192 in Beyond, in the Midst of Life: An Exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in its Christological Context, Dissertation submitted to St Mark’s National Theological Centre, School of Theology, CSU in 2018.

[9] Ethics, DBWE 6: 94. Ibid 193.