What Is Theology?

Christian Thought and Contemporary Life

Adam Kotsko

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780823297825, 9780823297818
• eBook ISBN: 9780823297832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory

The secular world may have thought it was done with theology, but theology was not done with it. Recent decades have seen a resurgence of religion on the social and political scene, which have driven thinkers across many disciplines to grapple with the Christian theological inheritance of the modern world. Adam Kotsko provides a unique guide to this fraught terrain. The title essay establishes a fresh and unexpected redefinition of theology and its complex and often polemical relationship with its sister discipline of philosophy. Subsequent essays build on this framework from three different perspectives. In the first part, Kotsko demonstrates the continued vibrancy of Christian theology as a creative and constructive pursuit outside the walls of the church, showing that theological concepts can underwrite a powerful critique of the modern world. The second approaches Christian theology from the perspective of a range of contemporary philosophers, showing how philosophical thought is drawn to theology even despite itself. The concluding section is devoted to the unexpected theological roots of the modern world-system, making a case that the interplay of state and economy and the structure of modern racial oppression both build on theological patterns of thought.Kotsko's book ultimately shows that theology is not a scholarly game or an edifying spiritual discipline, but a world-shaping force of great power. Lives are at stake when we do theology—and if we don't do it, someone else will.

PART I

Theology beyond the Limits of Religion Alone

Bonhoeffer on Continuity and Crisis

From Objective Spirit to Religionless Christianity

Serious difficulties confront any interpreter of the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The first is the great diversity of genres represented: two deeply scholarly works, lectures and seminars, devotional and spiritual works, sermons, and posthumous fragments. The second is the fact that his untimely death meant that his theological project remained essentially unfinished, in the sense of being unsystematized. But from another perspective, this difficulty is Bonhoeffer’s greatest strength. As Ernst Fiel says, “All [Bonhoeffer’s] texts lead again and again to those last letters from prison which stimulated all the interest in Bonhoeffer and without which little notice would be paid today to the earliest writings.”¹ The compressed and fragmentary comments in the posthumous Letters and Papers from Prison have proven very productive for later theologians who have taken them as the starting point for more sustained reflection, in a way that they might not have been had Bonhoeffer lived to attempt to answer his own piercing questions.

Yet even if the importance of the Letters and Papers from Prison is unquestioned, the proper way to interpret them in light of Bonhoeffer’s other work is not. Fiel lists several approaches to his work, with every possible starting point, and he remarks that the “possibility of making an unambiguous interpretation is quite slim if one cannot determine whether one is dealing with a work marked by qualitative leaps or by a continuous unfolding of its development.”² While not providing a conclusive answer to this question, he notes Eberhard Bethge’s caution against periodizing Bonhoeffer’s work and then sets out to provide a reading of Bonhoeffer’s whole theology in terms of his understanding of the world. In addition to this secondary testimony, one could point to the fact that while many thinkers (such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Barth) come to understand their thought as having undergone a fundamental transformation, Bonhoeffer himself evinces no such self-understanding. Although in a letter to Bethge he writes that he believes his friend “would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by [his] theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to,”³ only a week prior, he had written, “I don’t think I’ve every changed very much, except perhaps at the time of my first impressions abroad and under the first conscious influence of father’s personality. It was then that I turned from phraseology to reality.”⁴ He can “see the dangers” of The Cost of Discipleship,⁵ but he stands behind it in a much less ambiguous way than, for example, Heidegger comes to stand behind Being and Time. Fundamentally, this is because “one can never go back behind what one has worked out for oneself”⁶—even if corrections and later developments must be made, the fundamental insights of one’s intense theological reflection cannot be discarded.

This essay will be a partial experiment in reading Bonhoeffer’s theological work as a coherent whole. There are, of course, many works that find clues to the meaning of the Letters and Papers in his earlier work; for instance, John de Gruchy, in his introduction to his anthology of Bonhoeffer’s works, says that the basic theological viewpoint of Sanctorum Communio “provides a key building block for what follows, and is influential to the end.”⁷ I contend that we must go further than that: The concepts developed in such detail in Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being continue to undergo further development in his later works. A shift in style from the dissertations to the later more spiritual works does not indicate a shift in fundamental concerns or in conceptual framework. In order to test this contention, I analyze the place of the Hegelian concept of objective spirit from Sanctorum Communio. With some reference to the works in between, I then shift to the Letters and Papers from Prison to indicate the ways in which Bonhoeffer is still attempting to develop a distinctly Christian concept of objective spirit. Finally, I conclude with some brief remarks on the ways in which we can understand Sanctorum Communio as already providing some of the resources necessary to answer the questions raised in Letters and Papers from Prison.

Objective Spirit in Sanctorum Communio

The concept of objective spirit is well suited to this kind of inquiry for several reasons. First, it is a technical academic concept that would be equally out of place in a spiritual meditation such as The Cost of Discipleship or in a reflective letter written to a friend, so that the recurrence of the term itself in the later works should not be expected. Second, it is not in itself a theological term, but rather one of the ideas from that branch of phenomenological thought that Bonhoeffer calls “sociology.” Since the key to the uniqueness of his theological approach in Communio Sanctorum is his attempt to make sociological concepts “fruitful to theology,”⁸ one can reasonably conclude that his distinctive theological conclusions can be found, not simply in the rather obvious assertion that the church is a social reality, but rather in the ways that he redeploys specific technical sociological terms. “Objective spirit” is one of the most important sociological terms in Bonhoeffer’s lexicon. Indeed, a careful study of the critical edition reveals that the term appears even more frequently in the parts of the dissertation that were edited out of the final publication. From this I conclude that it was an especially formative idea as he was originally formulating his theological argument, even if he recognized that his extensive reflections on the concept would not have appealed to a broader audience. Finally, unlike many of the sociological concepts deployed throughout the work, he explicitly refers to “the difference between the idealist and the Christian concept of objective spirit.”⁹ Although he is always careful to distance himself from idealism, he clearly sees “objective spirit” as a sociological concept that is so fruitful for theology that it can be brought into the fold.

To understand the way that Bonhoeffer redeploys the concept of objective spirit, one must first understand its use in the work of Hegel. Bonhoeffer draws primarily on the third part of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, the “Philosophy of Spirit,”¹⁰ which devotes an entire section to the idea of objective spirit. For Hegel, “objective spirit is the absolute Idea, but only existing in posse [potentially].” The free subject approaches objective spirit as “an external and already subsisting objectivity,” which consists of both “external things of nature” insofar as they appear in the human world and “the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of their own diversity and particularity.” Since Hegel is thinking in the context of the Prussian state, for him objective spirit par excellence is the law, by which he means “not merely … the limited juristic law, but … the actual body of all the conditions of freedom.”¹¹ He includes under this heading not only the explicit law (including property, contract, and the general concept of right and wrong), but also such institutions as the family, the state, and the administration of justice, and even the idea of universal history. All of these are materials that present themselves to the free subject as self-evident and preexisting, but which act to shape the subject’s concrete exercise of freedom. Both the material and conceptual aspects of objective spirit are equally self-consistent and equally beyond the control of the particular subject, and both are provided ultimately by “the plan of Providence …, in short, … Reason in history.”¹²

Bonhoeffer adopts the same basic structure for his Christian concept of objective spirit. In the discussion of objective spirit in his chapter “The Primal State and the Problem of Community,” Bonhoeffer notes:

Mostly without realizing it, people mean two different things when they speak of objective spirit: (1) objectified spirit as opposed to unformed spirit, and (2) social spirit as opposed to subjective spirit. Both meanings are based on the fact that where wills unite, a “structure” is created—that is, a third entity, previously unknown, independent of being willed or not willed by the persons who are uniting.

This concept is called a “discovery of the qualitative thinking that became dominant in romanticism and idealism”—not a speculative flight of fancy, but rather a genuine insight that provides the only means to grasp “concrete totality, which is not a matter of quantity.”¹³ A person who wants to enter an already existing community, even one as small as the bond between two people, finds that objective spirit is already in place, and the two who are already on the inside interact with each other only by means of objective spirit.

In Hegelian terms, Bonhoeffer describes objective spirit as the battleground between the past and the present moment, the site where the past turns to meet the future. In Bonhoeffer’s scheme, some principle of stability existing over against particular persons in the struggle of temporality is necessary for community, since he has previously declared that “the person ever and again arises and passes away in time. The person does not exist timelessly; a person is not static, but dynamic. The person exists always and only in ethical responsibility; the person is re-created again and again in the perpetual flux of life.” The person exists only in “the moment of being addressed,” but for this address to take place, that is, for the person to be possible, there must be a means of communication between two persons.¹⁴ The means of this communication is, of course, language, which “combines the objective intention of meaning with its attendant subjective emotion, ultimately enabling empirical objectification and consolidation by sound and writing.”¹⁵ Although it never takes on as thematic a role as those with (post)structuralist sympathies might hope, for Bonhoeffer, language is one of the most basic elements of objective spirit. Precisely as objective, it is “utterly ineradicable, whether by each individual or by all members together.”¹⁶ A community cannot dispense with its objective spirit without ceasing to exist, and the same objective spirit that provides the conditions for their free interaction also has a will of its own that restrains that interaction.¹⁷

When defining his Christian concept of the person, Bonhoeffer criticizes idealist philosophy as being incapable of developing such a concept. This is curious, since his chapter on the primal state, in which the concept of objective spirit is most thoroughly investigated, is essentially a summary of idealist philosophy’s discoveries in this regard. However, between the primal state and the communion of saints stands the problem of original sin. If not for the fall, idealist philosophy would be correct, but as it stands, idealism fails because “it has no voluntaristic concept of God, nor a profound concept of sin.”¹⁸ Where Hegel sees the state as provided by Reason in history to maintain the conditions of freedom, Bonhoeffer sees a community that is irrevocably broken, among persons who originate “only in the absolute duality of God and humanity.”¹⁹ In the primal state, even conflictual human interaction would be productive, just as in Hegel the conflict of opposites results in a higher unity. But in a direct swipe at Hegel’s optimism, Bonhoeffer declares that “since the fall has there been no concrete and productive conflict in the genuine sense.”²⁰ Conflict still produces community, but it is the community of sinners, the community of those who are utterly alone.²¹ In such a state of affairs, where human beings stand in radical judgment under and separation from God, an a priori assumption of the existence of Reason in history is unwarranted.

God enters into this situation of hopelessness in his revelation as Jesus Christ, and he creates the church, which is Christ existing as community. Even at this very early stage of his work, long before the process of disillusionment brought on by the German church’s capitulation to Nazism, this definition of the church is not meant to be a piece of triumphalism. As Luca D’Isanto explains: “The proposition is meant to locate the place in which the divine reality, which showed itself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, can still show itself today.”²² This is not merely a return to the primal state. The existence of sin has rendered the location of the church ambiguous, and all members of the church live both in the community of sin and the community of grace, both in Adam and in Christ. Unlike in Hegel, where the location of the community created by God (Reason in history) is self-evident, for Bonhoeffer, the community is hidden.

It is at this point that one can begin to discuss a specifically Christian concept of objective spirit. As a community, the church does have objective spirit, and Bonhoeffer emphasizes that this spirit cannot be identified with God’s spirit.²³ The church’s objective spirit guarantees a certain degree of continuity. Although the collective person of the church, having “the same structure as the individual person,”²⁴ is every bit as temporal as the individual person, Bonhoeffer confidently states that the “church of Jesus Christ that is actualized by the Holy Spirit is really the church here and now. The community of saints we have outlined is ‘in the midst of us.’ ”²⁵ Still, the actions of the church are never simply the actions of God, as they would be if the objective spirit of the church were identical to the Holy Spirit—that, he says, “would amount to the Hegelian position,”²⁶ in which the status of the community would be a given. As human, the objective spirit of the church is subject to change and to influences from those who are outside the community, but as it is taken up by the Holy Spirit, it has a redemptive role to play:

The historical impact of the Spirit of Christ is at work in the form of the objective spirit in spite of all the sinfulness, historical contingency, and fallibility of the church; likewise the Holy Spirit uses the objective spirit as a vehicle for its gathering and sustaining social activity in spite of all the sinfulness and imperfection of the individuals and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Board
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Half Title
• Introduction: What Is Theology?
• Part I: Theology beyond the Limits of Religion Alone
• Part II: Theology under Philosophical Critique
• Part III: Theology and the Genealogy of the Modern World
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List