In the previous issue of Sofia I outlined the course of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life, dwelling in particular on his years of resistance to the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. In this article I focus on his theology, which still has the power to inspire and intrigue, 80 years after his death. Much of its continuing fascination stems from certain striking phrases from his writings in prison: phrases such as ‘religionless Christianity’ and ‘a world come of age’.
However, these phrases do not stand by themselves. They belong to a body of work produced by Bonhoeffer from the early 1930s. There is an especially strong continuity of themes and ideas between his writings of 1940 to 1943, when he was at liberty and working for the anti-Nazi conspiracy; and his writings in prison from 1943 to 1945. After the war his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge collated these notes and published his 1940-1943 work as Ethics, and his 1943-1945 prison writings as Letters and Papers from Prison. But the same themes and concerns appear in both books, and there is no sign of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts running off in an entirely new direction after his arrest.
In this article I will therefore treat the Ethics and the Letters and Papers as elements in a continuing meditation in which Bonhoeffer was engaged throughout the war years. I hope that this approach will give us a context for wrestling with those enigmatic phrases.
Christ at the centre
Theologically, Bonhoeffer is a realist. At the centre of all his thought is Jesus Christ, God incarnate, God-made-human, who is not merely ‘real’ but the centre and source of all reality. Bonhoeffer has no time for a Christianity which accepts the ascendancy of secularism and seeks only a modest ‘protected space’ for itself. For him, Christ is as central to the world now as ever.
This realism aligns him with the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who was a personal friend and with whom he worked in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. But their ideas differed. Where Barth was Calvinist, Bonhoeffer’s background was Lutheran, and where Barth argues that God is distant and unknowable, Bonhoeffer emphasises the immediacy and humanity of Christ.
Bethge describes Bonhoeffer’s thought as dialectical, moving within the ‘interdependent triangle’ of three categories: Christ; a world come of age; and religion. I disagree. Bethge’s dialectic implies that Christ, the world, and religion should be understood as having equal status, each encountering and transforming the others. But Bonhoeffer’s vision is entirely unlike this. Christ for him is the centre, the pivot, around which the world and history revolve:
… the whole reality of the world is already drawn in into Christ and bound together in him, and the movement of history consists solely in divergence and convergence in relation to this centre
Ethics, p. 64
Christ for Bonhoeffer is the centre, the pivot, around which the world and history revolve
This world, this life
This view of the world and human history as subordinate to the reality of Christ is entirely orthodox, familiar to Christians over many centuries. Emphatically unorthodox, however, is Bonhoeffer’s passionate commitment to this subordinate human world. Orthodox doctrine traditionally sees this world as the antechamber to otherworldly salvation (or otherworldly damnation) after death. But Bonhoeffer focuses not on otherworldly salvation but on this-worldly redemption, and insists that this is the world that Christ gives to us, and this the life that Christ intends for us.
To be clear: he is not proposing some sort of poetic secularism. Secularism starts from the material world, but Bonhoeffer starts from the Bible. He argues that the Old Testament’s understanding of redemption always refers to this world and this life, and that Christian redemption inherits this:
… the redemptions referred to here (in the Old Testament) are historical, i.e. on this side of death … This world must not be prematurely written off; in this the Old and New Testaments are at one
Letters and Papers from Prison, pp. 336-337
Bonhoeffer’s commitment to this world therefore starts from Christ, and in Ethics he sums up the relationship between Christ and the world in these terms:
In Jesus the world is loved, condemned and reconciled by God
Ethics, p. 200
Ethics, p. 200
These few words express a complex conception. All Christians know from John’s Gospel that God loves the world, but Bonhoeffer strips away the comfortable familiarity of this sentiment by juxtaposing love with condemnation, then resolves the tension with reconciliation., Love and condemnation and reconciliation, fused together, define the status of the world. This world is loved by God through Jesus so it behoves us also to love and value it; and because we are human and flawed, this beloved world is worthy of condemnation; and the offer of reconciliation is nevertheless assured. For Bonhoeffer, to be Christian is to participate in this world fully and unreservedly, accepting its flaws and condemnation, while trusting in the promise of reconciliation.
To be Christian is also to participate in the Church:
The Church is nothing but a section of humanity in which Christ has really taken form …
Ethics, p. 21
In other words, the Church is not an institution defined by its structures or traditions or practices, but rather a community defined by its embodiment of Christ’s presence. And for Bonhoeffer, this means that the Church is not intrinsically ‘religious’. This may strike us as a contradiction in terms, but it reflects Bonhoeffer’s particular understanding of ‘religion’. Religion, for him, is distinct from faith. It is, rather, a worldly response to faith; a naïve or vulgar response which privileges outward forms and trappings, and which looks to divine power for easy solutions to worldly problems. Religion and religiosity attach themselves to Christian faith, but they are not essential to it, and often they distort its real meaning:
Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. (But) the Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help
Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 361
… religion is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at different times
Ibid, p. 280
Responsibility
All of this has profound implications for ethics. Many of us assume, perhaps without giving the matter too much thought, that ethics is, by definition, concerned with ‘the good’, with distinguishing good from bad. But Bonhoeffer disagrees. For him, the key ethical category is not ‘the good’ but responsibility. He argues that ethical systems based on notions of ‘the good’ inevitably lead to an inward-looking emphasis on personal virtue, whereas Christian ethics are outward-looking and emphasise responsibility for others in a shared world, with Christ as the model. This shared world is:
… the sphere of concrete responsibility which is given to us in and through Jesus Christ
Ethics, p. 202
He goes on to explore the connection between responsibility and guilt. It is impossible, he argues, to act responsibly in a complex world without incurring guilt. At the extreme, there are some situations where to act responsibly is to break the law, offend conventional morality, or even commit grievous sin. In writing these passages Bonhoeffer must surely have had in mind his own situation, as a Christian minister committed to an assassination plot. He wrestles with this by returning, as ever, to Christ. He argues that Christ’s incarnation, his humanity, necessarily implicates him in “the fellowship of human guilt” (Ethics, p.213). And Christ responds to this not by denying that guilt but by embracing it with an offer of redemption and reconciliation to those among the guilty who have faith in him.
Even where responsible action incurs guilt it should be undertaken, trusting in Christ’s offer of redemption
For Bonhoeffer then, Christian ethics require us to choose not between right and wrong, but rather between responsible action rooted in care for others, and irresponsible action rooted in self-regard. Even where responsible action incurs guilt it should be undertaken, trusting in Christ’s offer of redemption. And conversely, to avoid responsible action in order to avoid incurring guilt is both selfish and unChristian: selfish because it prioritises one’s own spurious sense of innocence above care for others; and unChristian because it spurns Christ’s offer of redemption. A person who seeks to escape guilt in this way:
… detaches himself from the ultimate reality of human existence, and what is more he cuts himself off from the redeeming mystery of Christ’s … divine justification… He sets his own personal innocence above his responsibility for men, and he is blind to the more irredeemable guilt which he incurs precisely in this…
Ethics, p. 210
Religionless Christianity and a world come of age
If Christ loves the world as it is and intends us to realise our humanity by participating fully in it, as Bonhoeffer argues, then it follows that Christ also intends the world to have its own history and to find its own way. This, I think, is the clue to the meaning of those enigmatic phrases ‘religionless Christianity’ and ‘a world come of age’. Bonhoeffer believes that the world is out-growing old religious traditions:
We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more …
Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 279
However for Christianity this need not be a disaster, firstly because ‘religion’ is not faith and often undermines it; and secondly because it remains the case that Christ is the source of value and meaning in the world. So, if the world is moving beyond naïve and vulgar religiosity and godliness, this may clear a space for Christian faith to express itself more simply and truly, as a way of living in this world rooted in care for others:
The world that has come of age is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age
Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 362
Personally, I do not subscribe to Bonhoeffer’s theology. I do not share his theological realism. Christ is not, for me, the centre and source of the world’s meaning. For me, value and meaning in the world derive from our shared human culture and history – and in saying this, I am confessing that I belong to Bonhoeffer’s godless world come of age. Nevertheless, I cannot fail to be fascinated and moved by this man, his faith, and the pattern of his thought. My own reverence for this world and this life is enriched by encountering his.
Footnotes:
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ed. Eberhard Bethge), 1955, Ethics, SCM Press, London.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ed. Eberhard Bethge), 1971, Letters and Papers from Prison (enlarged edition), SCM Press, London.