Rain and the Rhinoceros

In the previous post I quoted from a paper that John Howard Yoder presented to the Bonhoeffer Society at the 1987 American Academy of Religion conference. There are two points that I want to highlight about this quote, which pertain to the key differences and perhaps points of convergence between the theology of Yoder and Bonhoeffer: discipleship and secularity.

In his paper Yoder explores the concept of “discipleship” in Anabaptism and in Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yoder concludes that the concept of discipleship carried a variety of different meanings within the Anabaptist heritage. The term, discipleship, took on something of an identity marker for Anabaptists especially after Harold Bender listed it among the key “principles” of the Anabaptist vision. This is not to say that discipleship was not important to Anabaptists before Bender, only that the term itself took on a more self-identifying function after Bender. Yoder, I think, rightly asks if Bonhoeffer had some role in bringing this out for Bender, as a core “principle” of Anabaptist faith.

Now, Yoder concludes that “Bonhoeffer neither began nor ended with a vision of discipleship cognate with that of the Anabaptists.” He makes this assertion on the grounds that what motivated Bonhoeffer’s Christology was “more dogmatic than exegetical or historical.” According to Yoder, Bonhoeffer “was not driven either to concreteness about the pre-passion Jesus nor to any abiding challenge to the axioms of Constantinian political ethics.” And this is Yoder’s central challenge to Bonhoeffer’s conception of discipleship. Bonhoeffer, according to Yoder, paid more attention to the dogmatic significance of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, while tending to sideline the concrete historical life of Jesus of Nazareth. For Yoder, if discipleship in some sense means a following after, then we must be given some clue as to what kind of person we are following. In Yoder’s interpretation, Bonhoeffer focuses heavily on the importance of obedience in his conception of discipleship. In Yoder’s words, “At the core, the issue put to a person by the ‘call to discipleship’ is a concern not first of all with how he will behave if he follows Jesus, but with the renunciation of self-determination and of one’s own reasoning.” The demand to renounce self-determination and one’s own devices is certainly a key feature of Bonhoeffer’s work, especially in Discipleship. Yet, Yoder points out that such demands could be made by any lord, or any moral teacher. Such a demand is not “intrinsically linked with how that particular master himself behaved, or with whether what he asks of me is the same as his own behavior.” Yoder does note that in Bonhoeffer’s discussion of discipleship he does speak of the importance of the cross. The disciple will suffer as Jesus suffered, by rejection. Yet, even here, Yoder does not think Bonhoeffer is concrete enough, as the discussion remains too much on the level of “existential self-understanding” and not enough on the behavior and concrete decision-making that leads the disciple to rejection and the cross. Other key questions remain for Yoder: will the disciple that follows Jesus by going to the cross be “a monk or a politician? An emigrant or a conspirator? Or does the meaning of bearing the cross exist on a level unrelated to such concrete decisions?” Even at the point when Bonhoeffer brings the Beatitudes into the discussion, it is still not concrete enough. The discussion of the Beatitudes focus more on disposition and tend to be stated by way of negations: the disciple is called to renounce power, honor, and violence, but there are no concrete examples in the affirmative about the way the disciple should then live.

In all of this, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of discipleship runs parallel to the “mystical” and “moralistic” strand of Anabaptism which manifests itself by the logic of renunciation and obedience without question. According to Yoder, however, the most “original” and “socially realistic” strand of Anabaptism is the position that the church must be ready to “give up her control over society.” In Yoder’s words, “This realism perceived that the model of Christian social participation is not simply the cross of Christ in some symbolic or emotional sense, but also the attitude toward political office which helped to bring him, the Jesus of the gospels, to the cross.”

Yoder’s concern is that Bonhoeffer’s Christology leaps “from the crib to the cross.” What is perhaps most interesting in all of this is that Yoder finds Bonhoeffer’s suggestions about a “religionless Christianity” in his prison letters to point in exactly the right direction. An awareness of the secularity of Christ, the immanence of God’s action in Christ, opens up Christological reflection to attend to the constitutive life history of Jesus. Yoder points out that Bonhoeffer’s leap “from the crib to the cross” is “precisely to leave out of one’s christology the substance of (“secular”) social living in occupied, rebellion-torn Palestine.” Thus, the much disputed meaning of Bonhoeffer’s letters about “the world-come-of-age,” “secularity,” and “religionless Christianity” is perhaps the most interesting point of contact between Bonhoeffer and Yoder.

In some of the conversations about Craig Carter, the accuracy of his interpretation of Yoder has been called into question. Some of us have spoken of a “shift” in Carter’s theology, because many of us had read and enjoyed his book on Yoder. Now, Carter himself admits of such a shift, but one cannot help but wonder whether there are seeds of this shift in his earlier work. In a recent comment, Tim Kumfer helpfully observes that such a seed might be evident in Carter’s insistence on the orthodoxy of Yoder in his The Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder. I have been re-reading Carter’s book today, partially because I am in the middle of writing a chapter of my master’s thesis on Yoder, and partially because I apparently have all things Carter on my mind as of late.

In his introduction Carter I think rightly states that pacifism is “not the point” of Yoder’s theology, rather “Jesus is the point.” Carter, however, goes on to say that, “Not only is Jesus the point, but protecting, declaring, and unpacking the claims of classical Christology is what Yoder is about” (17). In contrast to the early Anabaptist theologians who did not have the leisure of developing a systematic theological account, according to Carter Yoder is “a thinker who is steeped in the writings of the church fathers and the Reformers, who has a firm grasp of the history of Christianity, and who has a deep respect for the creeds and historic Christian orthodoxy” (17). Now, certainly Yoder read deeply, but he is by no means uncritical of the “classical” tradition, even to the point of being critical of creedal tradition. Now, that is not say Yoder did not have a “deep respect” for the creeds, but he was decidely not overly concerned with “protecting, declaring, and unpacking” the Christology of classical orthodoxy especially if this meant abstracting from the particular narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. Yoder did think his Christology was in line with the creeds, but he certainly was not in the business of deriving his Christology from the creeds.  I think Alain Epp Weaver is correct in saying that “Yoder’s approach to Nicea and Chalcedon followed a two-pronged strategy of appealing to the creeds while simultaneously relativizing their centrality” (Weaver, “John Howard Yoder and the Creeds,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 74:3 (July 2000): 425). Carter states that the central thesis of his book is “the conviction that Yoder’s work shows us how the trinitarian and christological orthodoxy of the fourth and fifth centuries contains the key to the survival and flourishing of the church’s witness to Jesus Christ in the post-Christendom era that is now dawning” (23). I find it interesting that Carter thinks that such a “key” can be found in Yoder’s corpus. Yoder, in fact, was most centrally interested in rigorously maintaining that the “only normative point of orientation can and must be the Jesus of the New Testament witness” (Royal Priesthood, 191). In fact, for Yoder any other starting point was structurally sectarian. He states, “If I say I am committed to the authority of Jesus plus a particular church or of Jesus plus common sense or of Jesus plus my own best insights, or of Jesus plus a particular creedal heritage, that very addition of something extra is structurally sectarian” (Royal Priesthood, 191). Further, I find it odd that Carter would associate such commitment to the creedal tradition to the survival and flourishing of the church’s witness to Jesus Christ in a post-Christendom era. I think we begin to see “seeds” of Carter’s shift in his reading of Yoder here. I think the sort of protectionist mentality and survival mode of thinking that Carter reads in Yoder is really problematic. Such an approach seems to me to be the very antithesis of what Yoder’s nonviolent method and style was all about. Moreover, such a mentality seems to be at the heart of Carter’s conservatism, concerned as it is most fundamentally with the protection and survival of Christianity against the onslaughts of liberalism.

In a previous post, I explained that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s central criticism of Barth’s theology in Act and Being had to do with the character of God’s freedom. Indeed, Barth’s early work, particularly his Epistle to the Romans, was apocalyptic (as Nate Kerr has brilliantly argued). Barth’s “apocalyptic” gospel emphasized the gratuitiousness of God’s act in Jesus Christ. God’s act was sheer gift–it is underived, unconditioned, and indeed, unexpected. God freely acts. It is perhaps important to clarify that Bonhoeffer’s entire theological project would have been scarcely possible if it wasn’t for his discovery of Barth’s theological universe. Despite Bonhoeffer’s criticisms, Barth remains Bonhoeffer’s primary theological guide.

Bonhoeffer’s critique of Barth in Act and Being on the issue of freedom provides the groundwork for his own positive proposal, focusing on God’s freedom for humanity made manifest in the sanctorum communio which is “Christ existing as community.” In some ways this idea is already present in Sanctorum Communio, but it becomes more clear in Act and Being. In God’s self-revelation in Christ, God has freely bound God’s self to humanity. In Act and Being Bonhoeffer uses the word, “covenant” to describe this boundedness. The significance of this is that human being is actually transformed and taken up into the being of Christ–this happens in the concrete Christian community, called church.

For Bonhoeffer all of this is an attempt to get beyond what he sees to be problematic with Barth’s account of God’s freedom rooted as it is in transcendental actualism. Bonhoeffer doesn’t reject Barth’s actualism, but wants to unify it with the best elements of the ontological tradition. In other words, Bonhoeffer wants to emphasize that “being” itself is transformed in the event of revelation. For Bonhoeffer, all of this is has its basis in christology. In his christology lectures, Bonhoeffer writes, “Christ is Christ, not just for himself but in relation to me. His being Christ is his being for me, pro me” (47). The statement that Christ is pro me is not only a historical statement about the man Jesus, but an ontological one, which is to say that in the very structure of Christ’s being, this person is in some way bound to me. Bonhoeffer doesn’t understand this in an individualistic sense. Rather, this is an ecclesiological statement. To say that Christ is pro me is to say that Christ is only Christ in the church.

In his christology lectures Bonhoeffer identifies a three-fold pro me structure of Christ’s relation to the new humanity:

1) Jesus Christ is pro me in his historicity. He is the first-fruits of the new humanity.

2) Jesus Christ is pro me in his standing as a representative in the place of the new humanity. “Christ stands for his new humanity before God.” In this sense, Christ “is” the church.

3) Jesus Christ is pro me in his grace for the new humanity. The new humanity “is” “in” him and he “in” it.

The notion that “Christ is the church” will be explored more fully in a future post. However, I would like to highlight that Bonhoeffer had already begun to work on this concept as early as Sanctorum Communio.

According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the task of a Christian ethic must begin by giving up the two central questions of standard ethical discourse, namely, “How can I be good?” and “How can I do something good?” In Bonhoeffer’s view, the problem with these two questions is that they presume that the self and the world are the ultimate realities. However, because the self and the world are embedded in a wholly other ultimate reality, namely, the reality of the triune God, the entire task of “ethics” changes.

Our questions about “the good” must begin with Christology, for “the good” is most fundamentally the reality of God revealed to us in the person of Jesus. For Bonhoeffer, “ethics” as such is actually impossible and utterly meaningless, when divorced from Christology, because Jesus Christ is the ultimate reality in which the world and the self are embedded. To say that God alone is the “ultimate reality,” is not a way to “sublimate the actual world” under the guise of a religious conception of some “highest being.” In fact, Bonhoeffer intends on precisely the opposite. He writes, “When God in Jesus Christ claims space in the world–even space in a stable because ‘there was no other place in the inn’ –God embraces the whole reality of the world in this narrow space and reveals its ultimate foundation” (Ethics 63). In other words, reality, and therefore also the good, simply cannot be rightly perceived when Christ is bracketed out of reflection. The good and the real is grounded in God’s self-revelation in the man Jesus. Thus, “all things appear as in a distorted mirror if they are not seen and recognized in God” (Ethics 48).

Thus, the subject matter of a specifically Christian ethic is “God’s reality revealed in Christ becoming real among God’s creatures” (Ethics 49). Christian ethics, then, is not concerned with how to “be good” or how to “do good,” but rather participation in God’s reality in Christ. In contrast to the standard ethical dilemma between the “ought” and the “is,” between the ideal and the real, Christian ethics is occupied with the relation between “reality and becoming real, between past and present, between history and event (faith) or, to replace the many concepts with the simple name of the thing itself, the relation between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit” (Ethics 50). It follows, then, that the world is only really the world when it participates in the reality of Jesus Christ.  For the Christian, to ask the “ethical” question about “the good” is not a matter of evaluating the morality of my actions; it is not to reflect on some general or abstract formula derived from moral principles, for “the good” is nothing other than the reality of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The most substantial challenge for theology posed by the Enlightenment is perhaps best summed up in Gotthold Lessing’s (1729-1781) famous dictum, “the accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” What Lessing and the rest of the Enlightenment project challenges is the specifically Christian confession that universal truth is to be found nowhere else than in the particular, historically contingent, person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Enlightenment project insists on the need for “historical consciousness”—that is, the knowledge that all events and perspectives are historically contingent, unrepeatable, and rooted in particular historical contexts. The Enlightenment insight of “historical consciousness” is, however, taken a step farther in Lessing. For Lessing and other thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition, if every event is necessarily contingent, then the “truth” of a particular event is barred from being universally valid, much less efficacious for the salvation of humanity. Thus, historical events, by their very contingency, are always doomed to relativity against universality.

The Christian claim, however, is that the “truth” of history, indeed, the truth of the world, is to be found in a historically contingent event, or sequence of events, God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The Christian confession that Christ is the “Lord of history” means that every historical event must be seen in light of him and with reference to him. Thus, one thing is certain: a proper Christian response to this Enlightenment challenge should never be a denial of the contingency of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ for the sake of some universally “reasonable” discourse.

In 1932 Karl Barth offered a scathing critique of theological modernism. Although much of his attacks were directed at liberal Protestantism, Barth equally condemned the Roman Catholic church for its doctrine of the analogia entis (analogy of being). For Barth this doctrine was the invention of the anti-Christ. Barth thought that Catholic theology followed a formal analogy wherein an analysis of nature or being was taken up first only to later be read into faith. In Barth’s view, this led to a wrongful legitimation of the secular order, which bracketed political and economic life out of the realm of Christ. In Barth’s perspective, the analogia entis in Catholic thought was symptomatic of a deeply rooted Christological problem found especially in Thomas Aquinas and affecting all of Catholicism. According to Barth, beginning from nature rather than grace implicitly suggests a sort of dualism in Christ’s two natures, which pits Christ’s humanity against his divinity and unacceptably bifurcates the person of Christ so that one nature can exist self-sufficiently without the other. Although Barth correctly locates this position in much of post-Tridentine Catholic thought, he wrongly accuses Thomas Aquinas of

holding such a bastardized notion of the analogia entis. As Henri de Lubac rightly argued, Aquinas never conceived of “pure nature” independent of God’s supernatural grace and therefore did not pit nature against Christology.

Despite Barth’s critiques of the analogia entis and de Lubac’s reinterpretation of Thomas Aquinas’ construal of the relationship between nature and grace, much of contemporary Catholic theology continues to treat nature as an ontological and epistemological category independent of grace. This understanding of nature can be found in Catholic moral theologians as diverse as Jean Porter, Gerard Hughes, and Timothy O’Connell. Each of these theologians maintain an understanding of the relationship between nature and grace that requires one to choose between either nature or Christology. The common assumption is that if one begins with Christology, then one’s work is not sufficiently universal. The effect of this, according to these Catholic moralists, is that such an approach lacks the ability to transcend confessional particularities, rendering moral theologians useless in finding common moral ground with other traditions.

It seems evident that the persistence of such an approach to moral theology is not just the result of a mere misinterpretation of Aquinas, for since Henri de Lubac and the Second Vatican Council this view has been under attack. Rather, such an approach arises out of a deep concern for common moral ground in the context of a radically diverse and pluralistic world. It is, indeed, a world that Aquinas could not have imagined. It is typically assumed that if we cannot appeal to some form of natural knowledge of the good, then we cannot speak to others outside of our tradition, at least not on any rational ground. The argument for a self-contained natural knowledge, however, presumes the ability to transcend all particularity. The attempt to transcend particularity, in part, is a fear rooted in the belief that too much particularity causes conflict and violence. Thus, there is the underlying assumption that such approaches are more “inclusive” and “world-affirming” and avoid “sectarianism” or “exclusivism.” Of course, the “common” approach of which I speak is not monolithic, nor is it peculiar to Catholicism. Obviously, Karl Rahner’s “anonymous” Christianity is different from the pluralism of a John Hick or Paul Knitter. Still, all seem to share a common mode of discourse, which presumes that one must choose between either being more or less “exclusive” or more or less “inclusive.”

Of course, the assertion that Christology is the proper starting point of theological and moral reflection has profound ecclesiological implications and it does, indeed, effect how we speak to people of other traditions. Despite the assumptions of some neo-Thomism, however, basing morality on Christological convictions does not condemn Christian convictions to sectarianism. Indeed, such a position is surely suspicious of claims to transcend particularity and confessional traditions, especially when such claims are proposed to stand alone or seen as more fundamental than faith convictions. For, as John Howard Yoder noted, claims to natural moral knowledge tend to not consider that “dominant moral views of any known world are oppressive, provincial, or (to say it theologically) ‘fallen’” (The Priestly Kingdom 40). In his view, “There is no “public” that is not just another particular province” (The Priestly Kingdom 40). In other words, claims to universality are always rooted, in some degree or another, in a particular tradition. Such a view does not entail a position of moral relativism, but instead it attempts to take seriously the universally salvific character of God’s unique self-revelation in Christ.

Christian Christology maintains that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. Christians believe that Jesus was born of human flesh, lived a human life, and died a human death. Jesus was like every other human except Christians maintain that he was without sin. But is not sin fundamental to being human? If you took away sin would this not make Jesus less than fully human?  I’ve been reading Herbert McCabe lately and I wanted to share his understanding of this problem. In this quote McCabe points out that our view of what it means to be fully human is warped, for to be fully human is, in fact, to be “wholly loving.”

‘Like us in all things but sin’ doesn’t on the face of it sound very like us. We all I think have a suspicion that if you took away our sins and vices, especially our minor vices, we would first of all be very different people, but also we would be less human and less likeable people. There is something repellently inhuman about the man or woman with no weaknesses who is always rather chillingly perfect. I hardly need to say, I am sure, that this feeling is based on a hopelessly negative idea of virtue. Virtue, whatever else it means, at least means being more human; it would not be virtuous if it did not. Sin, whatever else it means, means being less human, more stiff, cold, proud, selfish, mean, cruel, and all the rest of it…What makes us more human is, of course, being more loving. And sin is a defect in this love. To say that Jesus was without sin just means that he was wholly loving, that he did not put up barriers against people, that he was not afraid of being at the disposal of others, that he was warm and free and spontaneous. (Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters (New York: Continuum, 2002) 96.