Yoder on Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer neither began nor ended with a vision of discipleship cognate with that of the Anabaptists . . . As his christological preoccupations were more dogmatic than exegetical or historical, he was not driven either to concreteness about the pre-passion Jesus nor to any abiding challenge to the axioms of Constantinian political ethics. Such a concretization would have been eminently compatible with the ‘non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts’ (for what could have been less cultic or otherworldly than Jesus’ social style?) but it did not occur to Bonhoeffer then. It would have put ‘God’s suffering in the world’ into the form of a politically relevant, ‘non-religious,’ ‘secular’ paraphrase; but instead those slogans were left to the Bultmannians, who somehow think that ‘existential interpretation’ is non-religious, and to Hanfried Müller, who assumes that socialist promises for party-led history are the same as ‘Mundigkeit.’
John Howard Yoder, “The Christological Presuppositions of Discipleship,” unpublished paper presented at the 1987 AAR Bonhoeffer Society.
Dude, that’s a great quote. Where did you get your hands on that paper?
So. What is Yoder saying in plain English?
You wouldn’t happen to have an electronic copy of this paper, do you?
Yoder would be right if he was talking about Sanctorum Communio but not about Letters and Papers from Prison. I’m dying to read Yoder’s full address. I addressed Bonhoeffer’s understanding of “concrete” in my recent paper for Stanley Hauerwas.
Bonhoeffer’s non-religious, concrete, worldly ecclesiology: Making sense of Letters and Papers from Prison in light of the rest of Bonhoeffer’s work
http://www.andyrowell.net/andy_rowell/2009/06/bonhoeffers-nonreligious-concrete-worldly-ecclesiology-making-sense-of-letters-and-papers-from-priso.html