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 a recently published collection of lectures entitled Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, John Howard Yoder observes the oddity that the major Mennonite identity crisis of the twentieth century is the consequence of accommodation to a professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary.  The professor, of course, is one of the major American Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr. With the rise of Hitler, the liberal pacifist movement, so prominent after World War I, almost completely collapsed not least due to the stinging critiques launched by Niebuhr. If the threat of the Hitler regime pushed the liberal pacifist ethic to its limit, Niebuhr’s theological critique was just enough to push the movement over the edge. The remaining pacifists in America, found primarily now in the historic peace churches, were also forced to respond to the Niebuhrian challenge, but from a different angle. Niebuhr’s criticism of liberal pacifism questioned both the scriptural basis and the effectiveness of their position. According to Niebuhr, the Jesus of the New Testament teaches nonresistance as opposed to the type of strategic active nonviolence advocated by liberal pacifists. The problem with liberal pacifism, in Niebuhr’s view, is that it attempts to ground its absolutist position in an erroneous interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. Strategic active nonviolence is to be commended as a (sometimes) effective method of social change, but it is a form of coercion, a form of power that Jesus expressly rejects. Thus, liberal pacifists have no basis to attack non-pacifists. Pacifists of the Mennonite variety, however, in their simple obedience to Jesus’ teachings on nonresistance are at least biblically consistent, despite their social and political irrelevance. Niebuhr believed that Mennonites fulfill a particularly important vocation of the Christian church. By their social and political “withdrawal” Mennonites helpfully serve to remind the rest of the Christian church of the lofty ideals of Jesus. Yet, no matter how commendable, such an ethic of nonresistance can never serve as the basis of a Christian ethic that seeks to be responsible in the messy world of politics.

Niebuhr’s back-handed compliment to Mennonites in his critique against liberal pacifism helped to create a division in Mennonite theology along the lines of a dichotomy between withdrawal and responsibility. In response to the criticisms of Niebuhr many Mennonites felt compelled to distinguish themselves from the liberal pacifist position by accepting the role of pacifism as an apolitical socially irrelevant vocation that Niebuhr had created and commended. Yoder observes a strikingly similarity in the responses of the conservative Mennonite biblical scholar John R. Mumaw and the liberal Mennonite Donovan Smucker to the challenge of Niebuhr. In order to section themselves off from Niebuhr’s critique of liberal pacifism, both thinkers chose to accept the role given to them by Niebuhr: to become more fully that nonresistant sectarian withdrawing enclave of Niebuhr’s imagination, in the name of renouncing the type of pacifism that is concerned with effectiveness and responsibility. Yoder observes that more than anything Niebuhr’s impact served to reinforce “a Mennonite tendency to dualistic analysis…that says we cannot do anything in the wider world—because we want to be different from those pacifists who are naïve about the possibilities of the good” (297).  Such a position, however, did not stem from the history of  Mennonite faith, but was rather learned from Mennonite “accommodation to Reinhold Niebuhr.” In short, such a position was invented by “accepting the backhanded compliment that Niebuhr gave us when he said we are consistent but irrelevant” (298).

Here is an index to my series of Holy Week reflections:

1. Holy Thursday
2. Good Friday
3. Holy Saturday
4. Easter Sunday

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 following two paragraphs are an excellent summary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ethics. I’m beginning to think that this is some of the best theological reflections on ethics ever written.

Good is historical action that sees given, concrete reality grounded and sustained by the reality of God’s becoming human. In other words, it is good if it allows the world to be world without ever forgetting that God has claimed this world by loving, judging, and reconciling it. What we are talking about here is an action that is worldly through and through, indeed the only action that is genuinely worldy, and which can only take place where the true nature of this world is recognized.

Good is historical action that receives its laws of historical action from the center of history, from the event of God’s becoming human. Since it is true that God became human in Jesus Christ, that God entered history, so that he was born at the time of the emperor Augustus, when Quirinius was governor of Syria, that he was a man during the time of the emperor Tiberius, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate–then this is the point where the very nature of history must reveal itself to us. Then Jesus Christ is the only source of knowledge about the nature and law of history as it is conceived and intended by God. Good is the action that is in accordance with the reality of Jesus Christ; action in accordance with Christ is action in accord with reality.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) 228-29.

Out of all the new theology book releases this year, one of the most promising works is Gary Dorrien’s Social Ethics in the Making. Dorrien is the world’s leading expert on the American liberal theological tradition. He is a wonderfully balanced and insightful historian of modern theology and this book will almost certainly become the history of modern Christian social ethics.

Here’s a glimpse at the table of contents:
Introduction
1 Inventing Social Ethics: Francis Greenwood Peabody, William Jewett Tucker, and Graham Taylor
2 The Social Gospel: Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Harry F. Ward
3 Lift Every Voice: Reverdy C. Ransom, Jane Addams, and John A. Ryan
4 Christian Realism: Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, and Paul Ramsey
5 Social Christianity as Public Theology: Walter G. Muelder, James Luther Adams, John Courtney Murray, and Dorothy Day
6 Liberationist Disruptions: Martin Luther King Jr., James H. Cone, Mary Daly, and Beverly W. Harrison
7 Disputing and Expanding the Tradition: Carl F. H. Henry, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Novak, and Jim Wallis
8 Dealing With Modernity and Postmodernity: Charles Curran, James M. Gustafson, Gibson Winter, Cornel West, Katie G. Cannon, and Victor Anderson
9 Economy, Sexuality, Ecology, Difference: Max L. Stackhouse, Dennis P. McCann, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Marvin M. Ellison, 10 John B. Cobb, Jr., Larry Rasmussen, Daniel C. Maguire, Sharon Welch, Emilie M. Townes, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, María Pilar Aquino, and David Hollenbach
11 Borders of Possibility: The Necessity of “Discredited” Social Gospel Ideas
Index

“It is the social function of the church to intrude an ultimate vision into the comfortable arrangements and watered-down values of political and economic everyday, to be the unauthorized upsetter of the achieved world.”

Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) 85.

In the sixth chapter of Story and Promise Robert Jenson reminds us that the gospel’s morality is a morality of freedom. Contrary to the legalistic construals of morality that have so often plagued Christianity, the gospel’s specific morality is, in Jenson’s words, “a matter of opened opportunities” (Story and Promise 81). The gospel’s morality is not concerned with what we ought to do, but what we may do, because Jesus lives.

Because Jesus lives, Christian morality is, then, not about laws, but about freedom. It does not follow the pattern “Do this and do that because you ought/must/should/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” Rather, as Jenson rightly emphasizes, the gospel’s discourse on morality “imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all” (82). Instead, the pattern of the gospel’s morality is: “You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen, there is no need to fear . . .” (81).