Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture

Keith L. Johnson, Timothy Larsen, Keith L. Johnson, Timothy Larsen

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780830827169
• eBook ISBN: 9780830864577
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was one of the most compelling theologians of the twentieth century. A complex mix of scholarship and passion, his life and writings continue to fascinate and challenge Christians worldwide.He was a pastor and profound teacher and writer on Christian theology and ethics, yet was also involved in the resistance against Hitler which plotted his assassination. Bonhoeffer graduated from the University of Berlin and earned his doctorate in theology at the age of twenty-one. While pursuing postgraduate work at New York's Union Theological Seminary his life and ministry was profoundly influenced by his unanticipated involvement with the African American Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem during that time.Protesting the unconstitutional interference by Hitler of the established national Protestant church and the persecution of the Jews, and rejecting the alignment of the German Christian movement with the Nazi regime, Bonhoeffer became head of an underground seminary for the resisting Confessing Church in Germany.At the 2012 Wheaton Theology Conference, Bonhoeffer's thought and ministry were explored in stimulating presentations. Bonhoeffer's views of Jesus Christ, the Christian community, and the church's engagement with culture enjoyed special focus. Throughout it is clear that in the twenty-first century, Bonhoeffer's legacy is as provocative and powerful as ever.

1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A Theologian of the Word of God

Philip G. Ziegler

Introduction

What kind of theologian was Dietrich Bonhoeffer? What motivated his theological questioning? What commanded his attention in matters of Christian doctrine? From whence did his theological thinking and writing proceed? At what did it aim? In what follows, I suggest a way in which we might begin to ask and answer such questions. I do so aware that more than a half century after Bonhoeffer’s execution in Flossenbürg in April 1945, women and men by the thousands continue to be fascinated by the story of his life and death, and moved by the integration of clear Christian conviction, civil courage and “moral leadership,”[1] which mark him out as an extraordinary figure in recent church history. This capacity of Bonhoeffer’s life story to continue to seize imaginations is remarkable and welcome. And yet among the proliferating portraits of this Protestant saint it is more than possible to lose sight of Bonhoeffer’s central vocation as a theologian.[2] It can be difficult for contemporary readers to access and understand the character, substance and import of Bonhoeffer’s work as a teacher of Christian doctrine in its historical context despite being very well positioned to do just that, possessed as we are of a complete critical edition of his writings and many recent historiographically sophisticated studies of the landscape of church and theology in early twentieth-century Germany.[3]

There are two decisive contexts for understanding Bonhoeffer’s theological identity. The first, and more narrow, is the German church struggle of the 1930s and its wider ecumenical environment in which Bonhoeffer was immersed. The struggle for the integrity of the Protestant churches in Germany under Nazism was a matter of burning concern for Bonhoeffer, and he aligned himself from the very first with its most radical proponents and served its cause up to the time of his imprisonment. Explaining his decision to return to Germany from America in the summer of 1939, Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Edwin Sutz simply: “I am being pulled irresistibly back toward the Confessing Church.”[4] The second and wider context within which to understand his profile as a theologian is that provided by the intellectual ferment of European Protestant thought during the first decades of the twentieth century. Bonhoeffer learned and practiced his theological art amidst the churn of the “high” liberal theology of his Berlin teachers, impulses from the contemporary “Luther renaissance” and the explosive development of dialectical or crisis theology, of which Karl Barth was the leading exponent.

In this essay, I want to recommend that we approach Bonhoeffer as a theologian of the Word of God in order to illumine something crucial of the form, substance and scope of his theology as a whole in view of these two decisive contexts. The phrase “Word of God” is a compact and polyvalent designation for the center of Bonhoeffer’s theology, and provides, I suggest, a key for its interpretation. A theology of the Word of God comprises several motifs. It sets out from acknowledgement of revelation understood as a divine performative address which judges, forgives and commands. It sees this divine activity concentrated definitively in the person of Jesus Christ. Attending to the Bible as a unique creaturely medium of the Word, such a theology affirms the concreteness and contemporaneity of God’s promise and claim. It does so because it acknowledges the vital and eloquent presence of Christ to the world. Given that God’s Word of redemption determines the very reality of the world in some deep sense, such theology seeks further to discern the contours of the world as it has been remade by grace and to reflect on the shape of a truly human life therein. As Bonhoeffer observed, “Revelation gives itself without precondition and is alone able to place one into reality.”[5] Whether treating the doctrine of God, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of the church or the matter of Christian life, the vocation of a theologian of the Word of God is always to hold reason in obedience to Jesus Christ, for “the relevant is and begins where God himself is in his Word.”[6] The prospect for an authentic and powerful Christian theology exists, Bonhoeffer argued, “as long as only one word, that is to say, the name of Jesus Christ, is not extinguished in us. This name abides as a word, the Word, around which all our words revolve. In this Word alone lies clarity and power.”[7]

My concentrated effort here to profile Bonhoeffer as a theologian of the Word of God involves two steps. First, I offer a few remarks concerning Bonhoeffer’s relationship with the theologies of Martin Luther and Karl Barth—two great and formative practitioners of the theology of the Word. Second, I explore some tracts of Bonhoeffer’s corpus which may not be so familiar but which—as the scale of this material in the new critical edition suggests—represent his main theological preoccupations throughout his extended engagement in the German church struggle after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Here I focus in particular on his vigorous embrace of the evangelical truths attested in the Barmen Theological Declaration of 1934, the chief text of the church struggle. Reflecting on the intensity and focus of Bonhoeffer’s devotion to Barmen as a confession of the church may serve to help illustrate simultaneously the crucial importance of Scripture in Bonhoeffer’s theology as well as the unshakable centrality of Jesus Christ, the present and powerful Word of God’s own freedom ever addressing himself to the church. While not “evangelical” in the sense this term now carries broadly in English language theology, Bonhoeffer’s theology is profoundly evangelisch in the historic sense of that term in the European usage: that is, his theology is a sustained effort to learn afresh the substance and significance of Pauline and Lutheran faith and to attain to a better witness to the gospel of God which has been honored, as he once styled it, by “all genuine Christian thinking from Paul, Augustine, Luther, to Kierkegaard and Barth.”[8]

Between Martin Luther and Karl Barth

Bonhoeffer was a highly cultured European intellectual of his era—widely read, musically talented and trained, uncommonly well-traveled, excellent at tennis, fond of smoking. He was a prolific amateur (in the best sense) in the study of languages and literatures, philosophy, history and popular scientific writing. His family home and formal education led to theological studies at the leading German faculties of the day, most importantly in Berlin where he worked under world-leading modern historians of the Christian tradition including Karl Holl, Reinhold Seeberg and Adolf von Harnack. While Bonhoeffer would ever acknowledge his personal debt to his Berlin teachers, he came rather quickly to chafe against them and steadily moved beyond their theological ambit through the influence of two encounters, on the one hand with Martin Luther and on the other with Karl Barth.[9]

Having previously only known Barth from his writings, Bonhoeffer enthused about his first meetings with the older Swiss theologian in Bonn in 1931, saying: “There is really someone from whom one takes away much; yet I sit in the impoverished Berlin and complain because no one is there who can teach theology. . . . When you see Barth you know at once . . . that there is something worthwhile to risk your life for.”[10] It is fair to say that Barth was for Bonhoeffer the most significant contemporary theological authority and that he wrote his own theology with Barth always in mind.[11] Right up into the late years of the war, Bonhoeffer understood himself to be one of Barth’s few loyal advocates in Germany, and saw to it that he both visited Barth and acquired proof copies of the newest volumes of Church Dogmatics on each of his trips into Switzerland.[12] His criticisms of Barth—present forthrightly from the outset though varied in content over the years—were ever fraternal and friendly, looking for ways to do better justice to the promise of the essential theological convictions they shared, chief among them the primacy, particularity and concreteness of God’s gracious self- revelation in Jesus Christ as the formal and material principle of any Christian theology.[13] From his early dissertation criticisms of what he considered Barth’s abstract view of God’s freedom through to his late prison worries about the atrophy of the Confessing Church into a fixation on orthodoxy owed in part at least to a “positivism of revelation” arising from Barth’s teaching, Bonhoeffer aimed to take Barth’s insights and to drive them further—in these two cases respectively, first, to press beyond a formal notion of divine freedom (freedom from) to a substantive one (as freedom for) christologically understood; and second, to radicalize even further the theological critique of religion pioneered by Barth in order to win a new and powerful hearing of the claim of the gospel upon the world through a “non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts.”[14]

Beginning with Act and Being, Bonhoeffer openly aligns himself with Barth’s struggle to reaffirm the sheer contingency of divine revelation and, on this basis, to understand theology itself as form of thinking decisively shaped by the utterly gracious and effective reality of revelation in Christ. Though he disagreed with Barth over various particulars—disputing, for example, the place of dialectics in theology as well as certain Reformed elements of Barth’s Christology and theology proper—Bonhoeffer always affirmed this central thrust of Barth’s theological revolution.[15] Such a view of revelation must, Bonhoeffer contends, “yield an epistemology of its own” in which we know ourselves only as people who have been “placed-into-the-truth” by God’s address, and thus admit that our very existence is “founded by means of and ‘in reference to’ God’s Word,” that is, the Word of the person of Christ.[16] Christian theology must be theology of the Word of God because Christian faith itself arises solely from this source, or not at all.

Both Bonhoeffer’s alignment to and his arguments with Barth on such matters have their mainsprings in the influence of Martin Luther. Recent scholarship is increasingly alert to the abiding influence of Luther and the theological traditions of classical Lutheranism on Bonhoeffer.[17] Luther remained for him a living dialogue partner and is the most frequently cited theologian in Bonhoeffer’s writings. The German Protestant church was, for Bonhoeffer, essentially a Lutheran church, which is to say, a church of the Reformation.[18] For this reason, Bonhoeffer’s theology self-consciously engages in the protracted debate concerning the reception and interpretation of Luther’s legacy for the church in modern Germany. From the time of his two dissertations, Bonhoeffer repudiates Karl Holl’s widely influential portrait of Luther as progenitor of the religion of individual conscience. He does so precisely because Holl’s view illegitimately “circumvents” Luther’s insistence that God has “bound the divine self to the mediating Word.”[19] In works like Discipleship he openly polemicizes against misunderstanding and abuse of Luther’s teachings on radical grace and good works, and indeed throughout the period of the church struggle he refutes as merely pseudo-Lutheran the racialist exploitation and distortion of the doctrines of the two regiments and orders of creation. He consistently called on his students to rediscover the authentic teaching of the Reformer; they should, he said, “Just listen to the Bible. Just read what Luther wrote,” because in confusing times one must “go back to the very beginning, to our wellsprings, to the true Bible, to the true Luther.”[20] This true Luther was himself, in Bonhoeffer’s judgment, simply a skilled hearer of the gospel. And what Luther heard in the gospel was the gracious promise of divine righteousness in Jesus Christ. The most decisive thing Bonhoeffer took over from Luther was precisely this insistence on the solus Christus: the Christian thinks and speaks of God evangelically only as she thinks and speaks of Jesus Christ, the Word of God come low in humility to save.[21] For this reason, becoming a theologian, Bonheoffer held, involves responsible study and listening to the witness of Scripture in order to become “attentive to the Word of God, which has been revealed right here in this world,” for it is a matter of life and death that one hear this truth.[22] We do well to note that Bonhoeffer emphasizes that the Word comes to us right here in this world. This stress on the concreteness of the worldly site of our encounter with God in Christ is something Bonhoeffer learned from Luther: a theology of the Word of God is concerned precisely for this gospel truth in the midst of and for the sake of this created and fallen world.

At the conclusion of his 1931-1932 lectures on the recent history of Christian systematic theology, Bonhoeffer laments the disjunction between the work of academic theology and the present situation of the churches. Observing that Luther himself had been perfectly able to preach powerfully into the church’s need in his own time and write technical theology of a high order, Bonhoeffer pleads rhetorically: “Who will show us Luther?”[23] We can rightly say that in some sense Bonhoeffer labored to provide an answer to this question in his own subsequent the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• 2 The Evangelical Reception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• 3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Christ
• 4 The Evangelization of Rulers
• 5 Modernity’s Machine
• 6 Death Together
• 7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• 8 Bonhoeffer and the End of the Christian Academy
• 9 Bonhoeffer’s Christological Take on Vocation
• 10 The Secret of Finkenwalde
• Notes
• Name Index
• Contributors