The distinction between church and world is apocalyptic

Dave Belcher has insisted that we all read J. Louis Martyn’s commentary on Galatians. Rarely does one hear that a commentary is “superb in a way you cannot even imagine,” as Dave puts it. I think he might just be right. Here is a gem I ran across yesterday that helps to substantiate the argument I am trying to make about apocalyptic and secularity in Bonhoeffer.

For Paul religion is the human being’s superstitious effort to come to know and to influence God, rather than the faith that is elicited by God’s invasive grace and that is active in the love of neighbor (Gal 4:8-10; 5:6, 13-14; Rom 1:25). To be sure, the new community created by God’s act in Christ engages in the thankful worship of God, indeed worship in everyday life (Romans 12). This community even has rites, such as baptism (Gal 3:26-28) and the eucharist (Gal 2:12; 1 Cor 11:23-26), and it knows that it is distinct from the world at large. . . .worship of God is the corporate act in which the religious distinction of sacred from profane is confessed to have been abolished in God’s redemptive deed in Christ. The Christ who is confessed in the formula solus Christus is the Christ in whom there is neither Jew nor Gentile. Instead of being the holy community that stands apart from the profane orb of the world, then, the church is the beachhead God is planting in his war of liberation from all religious differentiations. The distinction between church and world is in nature apocalyptic rather than religious. In short, it is in the birth and life of the church that Paul perceives the polarity between human religion and God’s apocalypse; and for that reason a significant commentary on Paul’s letters can be found in the remark of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that “God has founded his church beyond religion. . .” (Swords, 118; cf. idem, Letters, 168).

J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: a new translation with introduction and commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1997) 37, fn. 66.

Christians and Unbelievers

Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

Men go to God when he sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

God goes to every man when sore bestead,
Feeds body and spirit with his bread;
For Christians, heathens alike he hangeth dead,
And both alike forgiving.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Fontana Books, 1959) 174.

Religion: some initial thoughts on terminology

It seems to me that what we have in Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison is some thoughts that are largely underdeveloped. That is not to say that the questions he raises in his letters represent a drastic departure from the rest of his work. Yet, there is a distinct sense in Bonhoeffer’s letters that at least some of these ideas seem new to him; perhaps, we can say, at the very least, Bonhoeffer had some flash of new insights while in prison–one’s that he would have obviously wanted to develop himself. But this was not to be.

One of the problems one encounters in reading the prison letters is a matter of terminology. Much of the terminology is ambiguous, even when interpreted within Bonhoeffer’s intellectual context. The case is not helped by the fact that Bonhoeffer’s terms are often taken out of the direct context in which they were written. It seems to me that in order to understand what Bonhoeffer means by “religionless Christianity,” and a “non-religious interpretation” of the gospel, it is important to first of all come to some kind of grips with what Bonhoeffer actually means by “religion.” Unfortunately, I am not at all confident that Bonhoeffer himself knew precisely what he meant by “religion.”

One thing is certain, from Sanctorum Communio on it is clear that theologically understood, the visible community, what the New Testament calls church, is not properly called religious. Even from his earliest work, then, it is evident that Bonhoeffer sought something of a “religionless Christianity,” though perhaps in a differing sense. In Sanctorum Communio Bonhoeffer’s concern was to distinguish his project from sociological accounts of the church, stemming from Weber and Troeltsch, which attempted to categorize the church from “without” so to speak. Bonhoeffer distinguishes his own project in Sanctorum Communio from the sort of “objective” non-confessional social-scientific perspective that viewed Christianity under the category of “religion” and the church as a “religious institution.” For Bonhoeffer, a theological study of the church is a really different undertaking than a non-confessional study of the church as a religious institution. I think even at this early point Bonhoeffer saw such a distinction between church and religious institution as crucial. To speak of the church is already to assume in a certain sense the reality of God’s self-revelation in Christ. The church itself is a revealed reality–in other words, to speak of the church is already to speak within the context of faith. Thus, to see the church as “religious” is already to suggest a sort of unfaith.

The Shadow of Tegel Haunts Me

If there was one thing I was intent on avoiding as I ventured into a thesis on Bonhoeffer, it was spending too much time analyzing what the hell he meant by “religionless Christianity” and a “world come of age” in his letters from prison. In all honesty, it just seemed like too much work to sort through all the secondary literature on the subject, from John Robinson’s Honest to God to the “death of God” theologians. The general consensus today seems to be that Bonhoeffer was misunderstood by Robinson and most everyone else, and perhaps that is the case, but I just didn’t feel like getting into it. I didn’t feel like getting into an already convoluted discussion about a few letters Bonhoeffer sent to Eberhard Bethge. The letters, after all, are short and unclear, and open to a variety of interpretations, as the history of Bonhoeffer interpretation has aptly demonstrated.

I thought I was relatively safe in making this move; after all, doesn’t Bonhoeffer deserve a careful interpretation of his much-neglected published works? The first chapter of my thesis, following Philip Ziegler, focuses on the “apocalyptic” character of Bonhoeffer’s entire oeuvre, extending Ziegler’s argument (which is limited to Ethics). Drawing from Nate Kerr, David Toole, and Douglas Harink, my second chapter is devoted to highlighting the work “apocalyptic” does for Yoder. But when I ran across this old presentation Yoder gave on Bonhoeffer, I realized that I had found a real gem here for my last chapter. Thinking back on it now, I suppose I should have drawn the line myself, but I have to say I was surprised to see Yoder speaking highly of Bonhoeffer’s references to a “religionless Christianity” in his prison letters. The secularity of Yoder’s Christ, that Dan Barber and Nate Kerr have highlighted so well for us, may indeed mark a rather serious point of connection between Bonhoeffer and Yoder. This is good news for me–because I was really searching for some point of connection, some reason to bring the two together in a thesis. This is bad news for me–because it means I have to explore the dirty waters of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters.

So, here’s my question to you all: what do you make of Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” and which Bonhoeffer interpreters have it right? John Robinson? Harvey Cox? Eberhard Bethge?

Discipleship and Secularity

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.

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.

A Denial of the Church is a Denial of Christ

One of the central emphases in Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology is that the church is not optional for Christians. In fact, for Bonhoeffer, one cannot even be a Christian outside the concrete church community. To be Christian is to be in the church and to be in the church is to be Christian. Bonhoeffer insists on this point because he believes the Christian life is an inherently social affair. To be ‘in Christ’ means to be in the church community. In large part, Bonhoeffer is reacting against what he identified as the rising individualistic conception of Christianity in Protestantism. Certainly, this type of individualism is evident in many parts of today’s church, not least in evangelical circles. Perhaps it is no different in the mainline Protestant and Catholic world either. An individualistic conception of faith is driven by and reinforced by our current sociopolitical and economic context. The idea that faith is a private affair is, in fact, a central tenet of liberal democratic societies. Indeed, I suppose I take it for granted that in many important ways the sociopolitical shapes the way people think about matters of faith.

Among many Christians and non-Christians today one often hears a lot of vocal disdain for ‘the church.’ In fact, it seems to me that one hears this more from Christians than non-Christians. I have personally encountered this disdain for the church among former or lapsed evangelicals, many of whom still claim to be Christian. For many, there seems to be a sense of embarrassment attached with ‘the church’ but not so much with being Christian per se. In this perspective, Christianity is seen as a legitimate way to think and live in the world, but the church is believed to be a disastrous mistake. Now, on the one hand, who can blame this way of thinking. Let’s be honest, the so-called ‘church’ is, by and large, unfaithful to the man Jesus Christ. In America, the church sings songs about Jesus, goes on mission trips to save the lost, while at the same time being utterly enamored or complacent about American civil religion and global capitalism. When we say ‘the church’ we tend to think of right-wing political agendas and general intolerance to others. And so, in this framework it is not so bad to be a Christian (or ‘Christ-follower’) but ‘the church’–that old thing–now that’s got to go.

From a theological perspective, however, I am with Bonhoeffer on this one: the church is not optional. God’s self-revealing act in Jesus Christ is a social event and there is no way to get around it. There is, however, no logically compelling argument to be made on behalf of the church’s continuing existence in history. Put simply, the church is not a ‘logical’ reality–it is not a human innovation. This is an extremely important point one that is often missed. The legitimacy of the church does not rest on the faithfulness of its participants, but on the faithfulness of Christ. The church is a revealed reality and therefore it is something which must be believed. Thus, a denial of the church amounts to a denial of the efficacy of Christ’s cross and resurrection.

The “once-ness” of revelation

If all human thinking does violence to reality, then theological reflection is no exception. To its credit, theological thinking at least recognizes its limitations. Bonhoeffer frankly states that the reality of God “can never be conceived by theological thinking” (Concerning the Christian Idea of God, 454). In fact, the only theological “truth” is that theological speech cannot grasp the reality of God. In other words, there simply is no epistemology that is adequate to theology. As Bonhoeffer states elsewhere, “the concept of revelation must, therefore, yield an epistemology of its own” (Act and Being, 31). The only limit to the self, according to Bonhoeffer, is the person. To speak of God as person is to say that God is other and remains free from my grasp. God as person is always free and beyond my thinking of him. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “The task of theological thinking must be to make room for the transcendent personality of God in every sentence” (Concerning the Christian Idea of God, 455). The knowledge of God as person is not a metaphysical concept derived from human thinking, but rather the reality spoken by God in his self-revelation in the history of Jesus Christ.

In the person of Jesus Christ God freely breaks into human history from beyond to reveal God’s very self. God is not an idea; God is a person. Thus, “Every human attempt to discover God, to unveil his secret reality, is hopeless because of God’s being personality” (456). For Bonhoeffer, the concept of personality expresses transcendence and freedom, but also reality and once-ness. Whereas the idea remains in the realm of generality and within human systems of thinking, “[p]ersonality exists in ‘once-ness’ because of its freedom. The only place where ‘once-ness’ might occur is history” (456). God reveals God’s self in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the “personal presence of God in the world” (456).

In Bonhoeffer’s words, “God reveals himself in ‘onceness’ from the years from one to thirty in Palestine in Jesus” (457). The singular history of this Palestinian peasant is God’s self-revelation. God reveals himself not as a religious idea–Jesus is not a moral teacher offering us good ideas–but a singular, unrepeatable, person. For Bonhoeffer, Jesus is not the revealer of an idea of God that can be pulled into the circle of human thought. The key here is in the singular reality of Jesus, the “once-ness,” that is, his history. For Bonhoeffer, Jesus as person remains other and hidden from all human thinking and thus always stands as a challenge to closed theological systems, indeed, to all systems.

Thinking does violence to reality

“Thinking does violence to reality, pulling it into the circle of the ego, taking away from it its original ‘objectivity.’ Thinking always means system and the system excludes the reality. Therefore, it has to call itself the ultimate reality, and in this system the thinking ego rules” (Concerning the Christian Idea of God, 453).

One constant theme in Bonhoeffer’s thought is the idea that “thinking does violence to reality”–that is, all human thinking is held captive to the egoistic attempt to grasp reality in its totality. Put theologically, the fall of humanity results in the corruption of the mind. For Bonhoeffer, the fall “replaced love with selfishness,” giving with demanding (Sanctorum Communio, 107). In thinking selfishness is played out by bracketing out “reality,” that is, by placing oneself at the center of the universe–usurping the place of God. The corruption of the mind is total and there is simply no escape from it, no amount of intellectual maneuvering can finally overcome the fact that human thought has been placed outside of reality. Thus, human thought always remains within the category of possibility. For Bonhoeffer, “Possibility might be conceived of and even proved, reality must be given before and beyond all thinking” (Concerning the Christian Idea of God, 453). Reality, in this perspective, must exist beyond my own self.

Considering that human thinking is fundamentally corrupted, how is truthful theological speech possible? Indeed, all theological reflection takes as a given the reality of God. The question for Bonhoeffer is epistemological. If human thinking is held captive by itself, and therefore, brackets out reality, then how can theology be truthful speech about God and not ideology? How does theology avoid pulling God “into the circle of thought?” Does theology finally have to be talk about God without thinking?

These are the fundamental questions driving Bonhoeffer’s early theology, particularly Act and Being–considering the utter and total corruption of the mind, how does one develop an adequate theological epistemology?

Was Bonhoeffer a Barthian?

In one of his famous passages from his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer accuses Barth of “positivism of revelation.” In the early scholarship on Bonhoeffer’s theology, perhaps especially in America, “positivism of revelation” became shorthand for describing Bonhoeffer’s relationship to Karl Barth. The charge brought against Barth in Letters, as well as Bonhoeffer’s talk of a “religionless Christianity” led many to believe that what Bonhoeffer sought was an alternative to Barth. As Andreas Pangritz observes, “The critical remarks on ‘positivism of revelation’ are always introduced by eulogies on Barth’s approach.”

Now I’m not too sure what to make of Bonhoeffer’s charge, but one thing is certain, the early scholarship on Bonhoeffer’s theology was dead wrong. Far from seeking an alternative to Barth, Bonhoeffer’s theology can be seen as an extension of Barth’s project. Certainly, Bonhoeffer was not an uncritical follower of Barth; quite the opposite was the case. Indeed, I think even today Bonhoeffer’s criticisms remain incisive. In both Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being Bonhoeffer lays out extended critiques of Barth, but ultimately, the two thinkers were in broad agreement. In fact, as I stated in a previous post, I do not think Bonhoeffer’s theological project is even intelligible outside of the theological universe Barth had opened up. Trained in the tradition of liberal Protestant theology, Bonhoeffer’s encounter with Barth’s theology was nothing short of a “liberation.”