April 21, 2011
Introduction
Perhaps the most dangerous thing about the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 21st century North America is the relative obscurity of the bulk of the details of his life and thought; the only thing that virtually everyone knows about him is that he died as a martyr in Nazi Germany due to his role in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. There is certainly a sense in which this fact is a credit to him—throughout his writings, Bonhoeffer consistently emphasizes the importance of concretely living and enacting the Christian faith as a ‘man for others’ and he is critical of the church’s loss of credibility by failing to act in the world for justice and peace. In that sense, Bonhoeffer would likely be glad that his fame was won through the way he enacted his Christian faith rather than what he wrote about it. The danger, however, lies in the fact that Bonhoeffer’s writings give us the context for his actions and the hermeneutic through which they ought to be interpreted. Without his writings, it has been all too easy for American Christians to construe Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assassination plot as paradigmatic, and then to make this fact normative for subsequent Christian engagement in plots to kill other ‘Hitlers’ like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, or Kim Jong-il.
This kind of thinking plays into our desire to distill a black and white, good versus evil narrative out of historical situations while ignoring the nuances and shades of gray. That his decision was not gladly and easily made becomes evident when one reads in Discipleship that for Bonhoeffer, the true nature of the love Jesus called his disciples to live out is only fully understood in his injunction to love our enemies (Mt. 5:43).
While for many of us, Hitler has become a cliche for the most evil person we can think of, what Bonhoeffer really struggled with was how he should love Hitler—to love him as Christ demands love of the enemy, not as der Führer in the way the German Christians loved him.
A second danger has manifest in a tendency to abstract certain strains of his thought from the context of his written work as a whole, which has often led to misinterpretation and misappropriation of Bonhoeffer’s thought. Perhaps the best example of this is the misreading by both liberal and conservative scholars of his provocative theme of Christianity in a religionless world—a “world come of age.” On one hand, Bonhoeffer has been made the champion of the so-called ‘death of God’ theologies and on the other, he has been denounced as erroneously prophesying the defeat of religion by a rapid secularization of the world that never came to be. Both misinterpretations ignore the nuance of the word ‘religion’ as Bonhoeffer uses it in the Letters and Papers from Prison and especially in his earlier writings. To avoid these pitfalls, we need to approach Bonhoeffer as a whole person whose life and theology unfolded in a specific context, and as a man who sought to be a faithful witness to Christ by laying down his life for others and taking on the suffering and injustice of his time. Certainly christology plays a central role in all of his theology, but this must be understood as complementing and informing Bonhoeffer’s concept of religionless Christianity rather than contradicting or superseding it. It is absolutely vital that we recognize that his christology was never an abstract dogmatic theologizing, nor was it an uncritical appropriation of traditional Christian doctrine. When taken in context, it becomes clear that his christology is always pressing toward a concrete understanding of who was Lord (Christ) and who was not (Hitler, the Nazis and the German Christians); this can be seen in the fact that he delivered his famous Christology lectures at Berlin University just months after Hitler became chancellor in 1933.
Thus, we can see his christology developed while he sought out the full implications of the question, “What is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?”
If we begin to truly understand Bonhoeffer in his own time and place—his ‘us’ and his ‘today’—then we can begin to articulate and enact our own response to these questions in our context. As we examine how Bonhoeffer interacted throughout his life with this “nagging” question, we can begin to highlight the implications for the church in the 21st century to strive to exist for others out of true loyalty to Christ.
Who is Us? – The Problem of the Church and the World
In his essay for the Seventh International Bonhoeffer Congress in South Africa, Peter Selby poses this ungrammatical question as an entry point in discussing Bonhoeffer’s question of who Christ is for us. Contrary to the question “who are we,” which is a matter of identity, Selby suggests that asking “who is us” is a question of solidarity—of whose right it is to define who the “us” includes:
If the question, Who is Jesus Christ, for us, today? is to be addressed, therefore, it has to be on the basis that Jesus Christ is not the one who accommodates himself to prior decisions…about who “us” is, but on the basis that only in and through him is the decision about the boundaries of our solidarity to be made. When we know him we know who “us” is, and without submitting our decisions about who “us” is to him we shall not know who he is.
While certainly for Bonhoeffer, as well as many who have sought to apply his insights, this issue of solidarity was a matter of race—the so-called Jewish question in Bonhoeffer’s time, as well as the racism he addressed in America, and the issue of apartheid in South Africa (doubtless a major concern taken up at the Congress)—Selby seeks to apply Bonhoeffer’s insights to “a world in which the power to decide who ‘us’ is has been handed over to those who have the capacity to succeed in the market and ultimately to control it.”
In this sense, the question of “us” leads to conflicting claims: the “us” delineated by the so-called sovereign entities of nation states and markets as opposed to the “us” called into the body of Christ. It raises the question of the relationship between the church—the community of disciples called by Jesus—and the world at large; the border line of the church’s “us.” For Bonhoeffer, this question emerges out of his much maligned, misunderstood, and misappropriated reflections on “religionless Christianity” in his correspondence from Tegel prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge. The point of these reflections was to wrestle with what it meant to be a Christian in “a world come of age,” in which “human beings have learned to manage all important issues by themselves, without recourse to ‘Working hypothesis: God.’”
As the need for God as a source for knowledge about ourselves and our world diminishes, God has become what Bonhoeffer dubs a deus ex machina to conveniently provide solutions and comfort only where human knowledge and efforts fail. This is problematic because the better and more comprehensive human solutions become, the farther God is consequently pushed to the margins until we no longer need God at all. Thus, Bonhoeffer addresses his question of who Christ is “for us today” in light of the relationship between Christ, the church and the world:
How do we go about being “religionless-worldly” Christians, how can we be εκ-κλησια, those who are called out, without understanding ourselves religiously as privileged, but instead seeing ourselves as belonging wholly to the world? Christ would then no longer be the object of religion, but…truly lord of the world. This notion of “belonging wholly to the world” is developed much earlier in Discipleship, in which he states that “the disciples and the people are one in that they are all the community called by God…All are called to be what they truly are.”
In short, he summarizes, “Jesus claims all of human life, in all its manifestations, for himself and for the kingdom of God.” Only when it recognizes and takes seriously its identity as the body of Christ can the church begin to exist for others and extend this call to all of humanity. Being called by God and not self-chosen, the church is the actual presence of Christ on earth in concrete historical reality. Thus, like Christ, the church belongs wholly to the world by existing for others in love and service, for it is not the body of Christ as a matter of form, but of function.
The problem of the church, however, is the confusion between its concrete existence as the body of Christ in and for the world and its existence in the world as but one example of a specific sociological type: religious community. This is the problem Bonhoeffer recognized and tackled in his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, in which he identifies the two fundamental misunderstandings of church: confusing it with the sociological religious community on the one hand, or with the actualized Realm of God on the other.
While he consistently reiterates the identity of the church as Christ’s body and the fact that God calls the church into community as an end in itself, Bonhoeffer recognizes the danger of misinterpreting these insights in his later works. In the preface to Discipleship, for example, he notes that “a great number of people who come to our preaching…admit sadly that we have made it too difficult for them to get to know Jesus,” then poignantly asks, “Do we really want to deny being in community with these people?” It is in this work that he begins to establish the inextricable link between faithful belief and obedient action, when he argues that the disciple responds to Jesus’ call not by “a spoken confession of faith in Jesus,” but by the “obedient deed.”
While he argues that this obedient action is what truly sets the disciples apart, the περισσον by which their righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, Bonhoeffer also recognizes that it is precisely here that Christians are most likely to separate too far from the world and begin to despise rather than love the world. This results from the confusion that our righteousness is our own when in fact it is that of Christ reflected onto the whole community. On the contrary, notes Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, “The one who looks at Jesus Christ indeed sees God and the world as one…[and] can from then on not see God anymore without the world and the world without God.”
Who is Christ? – The Problem of Sovereignty and Allegiance
We have seen that Bonhoeffer’s concept of religionless Christianity in the world come of age was developed in the context of Christ’s claim to lordship over all and his call of all humanity into the community that constitutes his “us.” In much the same way that the writers of the New Testament framed the concept of Christ’s lordship as a subversive foil to Caesar’s claim to be “lord and god,” Bonhoeffer developed this christology over against the backdrop of the German Christians’ acceptance of Adolf Hitler as der Führer. While this is rather obvious at face value, what is truly important in both cases is the drastically different and paradoxical nature of the “lordship” of Christ in comparison with that of Caesar and Hitler. While it is true that Bonhoeffer emphasizes God’s claim to be Lord of this world come of age, it “is not the God of power who…overcomes his enemies by force, but the man for others, the God who has come to serve…the suffering God who has let himself be pushed out of this world to the cross.”
Perhaps the most important theological implication of Bonhoeffer’s distinction between Christianity and human religiosity is that while the former “directs people in need to the power of God in the world, God as deus ex machina,” Christianity and “the Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering of God can help.” For the Christian witness to the Lord to be authentic, it must likewise be borne out in “identifying ourselves generously and selflessly with the whole community and the suffering of our fellow human beings.”
When Bonhoeffer suggests that this means renouncing “peace and happiness” by mourning the injustices of the world, he was not being abstract or vague; he was referring explicitly to the mantra of the National Socialists, to whom the German churches all too readily accommodated in the interest of stability and security. This kind of peace in the guise of ‘security’ is never promised to the true followers of Jesus, who are all too often labeled “disturbers of the peace” because “in their poverty and suffering,” they fatally give “too strong a witness to the injustice of the world.”
Geffrey B. Kelley employs these insights to extend Bonhoeffer’s critique of the church in America into its contemporary context. He lists a number of atrocities committed by the United States and its allies in the name of “national security” while American Christians either passively stood by, or even worse, openly endorsed their nation’s actions. While these wars and incursions in the name of national ‘defense’ cost the lives and livelihood of countless civilians in some of the world’s poorest regions, the U.S. dismissively labels these innocent fatalities ‘collateral damage.‘ As Kelly notes, this dubious use of dishonest and euphemistic language serves as a dire example “of how Jesus’ preaching of agapeic love for and sensitivity toward one’s supposed enemies could be suppressed by Christians who should know better,” with the result that, “the enemy had been demonized and brutality justified.”
In addition to adopting this brand nationalistic militarism under the guise of triumphalist theologies, the church in America has been led to ignore the devastation caused by such warped values in our own country: that countless billions of dollars are being diverted from programs that can help provide for the basic needs of our most disadvantaged and marginalized citizens to be squandered on overseas conflicts and government contracts that benefit the already well-to-do. It is certainly not an accident that the rate of inequality between the richest and poorest Americans has be rapidly increasing since World War II, and yet the church has remained overwhelmingly silent.
In this case, the sovereignty of Christ as Lord, and the loyalty and allegiance demanded of us to him have been compromised and confused with the sovereignty of the nation and its own claim to authority. While the nation claims to have the authority to break Christ’s commands in the Sermon on the Mount—namely to love the enemy and to not resist evildoers with violence—Christ’s command remains binding. Too often, Christians have divided their lives into two spheres, which Bonhoeffer dubs the ‘private‘ and the ‘official,‘ and have pretended that they were only obligated to heed Christ’s command in the former.
“The world is too evil to avoid resisting evildoers nonviolently,” we have claimed, but Christ replies, “It is precisely because this world is evil that the commandment is at all times binding: do not resist an evildoer.” Obviously Bonhoeffer’s nonviolent ethics were ultimately compromised in his decision to take part in the assassination conspiracy, but should this be counted a glaring inconsistency? Or was it actually an example of Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the Christian should be willing to take on the suffering of the world with Christ, to prefer suffering for oneself over causing others to suffer? In any case we should be careful not to make such an act normative; it must be understood in the context of the extreme circumstances in which Bonhoeffer lived, and with the unusual difficulty of wrestling with how best one should love a man like Hitler as Christ bids us love our enemies. Perhaps this is the point at which we should recognize the importance of seeing Bonhoeffer as a fallible human being and avoid the danger of idolizing him as a Christ-figure himself, placing his words on the same level as the Word of God. What is important is that we see in his witness Jesus‘ claim to total and exclusive loyalty—even unto suffering and death. Nothing and no one can be allowed to compromise or compete with this loyalty; even Bonhoeffer.
Conclusion: Who is Bonhoeffer for us Today?
We have gleaned many insights from examining the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in context, and this has led to some questions and challenges for our own time. The biggest obstacle for understanding the significance and application of Bonhoeffer for us today is undoubtedly the drastically different circumstances in which we live. Few writers have articulated this challenge as sharply as Chung Hyun Kyung does in her letter Dear Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She writes:
Yes, in your time the enemy was clear. But how about our time? In our time we do not have a Hitler character. Our enemies are often so beautiful, attractive, even sexy. They dominate us with the power of seduction…rather than military force. When I look at today’s situation of globalization, CNNization and marketization, I can see that the driver is mad. But the passengers and the person who tried to save them are also slightly mad. We are all to some degree insider-outsiders in this madness of globalization. We are victims and we are also complacent. And also we resist.
She is right to note that in our context, we cannot simply replace the actors from Bonhoeffer’s stage with contemporary names; we do not have a Hitler figure. We do not have such a cliche villain that can suddenly elucidate who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in our narrative because, as she goes on to say, “nobody’s hands are clean.” Throughout her letter, she deconstructs the heroic, almost messianic character of Bonhoeffer’s legacy as saint and martyr, subtly reminding us, as Bonhoeffer himself undoubtedly would, of his humility and humanity. The importance of this deconstruction is the notion that the injustice of our world cannot simply be overcome by the vicarious and self-sacrificial action of one hero on behalf of all (even as our Hollywood movies would have us believe otherwise)—the world’s evil is too pervasive for that. Indeed, she is quite right to assert that “what is at stake in our time is Life itself.”
For this reason, Bonhoeffer’s idea of religionless Christianity is an indispensable resource, helping us to see that “Jesus calls not to a new religion but to life.”
If this is true, then the solution to the death and destruction of life in the world will require the church as a whole, and not just an individual martyr, to serve and protect life where it is most vulnerable. It will require a pro-life stance that makes an ethical claim on our whole being, not just a partisan political slogan on a bumper sticker. It will require Christ’s community on earth to accept its mission to serve God through the least brother and sister and to be willing to endure suffering on their behalf.
As such, it is a call not into random and senseless suffering, but into the suffering that brings reconciliation. It will require us “to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed,” in a new language that is “liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.” We must accept that the word of God is the mark of the life of the whole community, not just professional clergy, and that “preaching does not simply repeat the message but says it anew, does not recount the past but addresses the present.”
Thus, we will be required to denounce the powers of death and destruction that threaten vulnerable life everywhere—both human and nonhuman—because Jesus’ true disciples “long for the renewal of the earth and for God’s perfect justice.” In short, it will lead us to the conviction that we cannot serve two masters and will call us to turn from Mammon to God, to renounce our wealth and cheap grace and to take up the costly grace of the cross.
Asking Bonhoeffer’s question of who Christ is for us today will lead us to ask other difficult questions, like whether we should pay our taxes when we know that those funds are being misappropriated to impoverish the many, enrich the few, and proliferate weapons and wars that threaten lives and ecosystems. Should we vote our consciences our act on them? Should we trust the government to represent us, or should we represent Christ even when it leads us to disobey the government, break laws, and endanger our financial and/or physical security? Should we grant asylum to God’s children whom the government and our neighbors call “illegal aliens” and accept the risks involved? After examining the ethic of resistance that led Bonhoeffer to subvert the norms of Nazi Germany in solidarity with those who suffered at the hands of his own society, David Wellman poses several important questions for 21st century American Christians:
On whose behalf might we be called to act? Would it be Iraqis in particular or Muslims in general? What about the growing legions of the poor? Perhaps the focus should be on the preservation of indigenous cultures…who are systematically despoiled, hated, marginalized and forgotten because of their race, their culture, their gender, their beliefs or their sexuality. And what about the destruction of the ecosphere itself, the foundation of all human and
non-human life, that is daily imperiled by many who would claim Christianity as their guide? As dwellers among the world’s wealthiest people, we certainly all have dirt on our hands, but this can only mean that we too have a role to play. For Jesus wants us all. “Never did [he] question anyone’s health and strength or good fortune as such or regard it as rotten fruit…Jesus claims all of human life.”
Perhaps Bonhoeffer, in this vain, would agree with his compatriot Jürgen Moltmann that, “The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community.” As the community called by God to welcome all humanity in loving service, we must proclaim and embody the three main characteristics of Jesus’ own ministry: caring for the poor, healing the ill and wounded, and announcing the Kingdom of a God who, unlike the gods of this world, derives power and prosperity out of serving and sacrificing for rather than subjugating marginalizing the weak. This is Christ’s call for all of humanity to be what it truly is, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Bibliography
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 1. Translated by Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Leukens. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
_____ Discipleship. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 4. Translated by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
_____ Letters and Papers from Prison. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8. Translated by Isabel Best, et. al. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
Kelly, Geffrey B. “The Idolatrous Enchainment of Church and State: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Freedom in the United States.” In Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition, John W. de Gruchy, 298-318. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.
Kyung, Chung Hyun. “Dear Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Letter.” In Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition, John W. de Gruchy, 9-19. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
Mühlhaus, Karl-Hermann. “The ‘End of Religion:’ An Error of Bonhoeffer or a Challenge to Theology in the Postmodern Situation? Reflections on Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Nietzsche.” Theology & Life 30 (2007): 65-94.
Pangritz, Andreas. “‘Who Is Jesus Christ, for Us, Today?'” In The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John W. de Gruchy, 134-153. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Selby, Peter. “Who Is Jesus Christ, for Us, Today?” In Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition, John W. de Gruchy, 20-38. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.
Wellman, David J. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethic of Resistance in George W Bush’s America: A Call to Progressive Christians in the United States.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 60, no. 1-2 (2006): 69-77.
Heretical Rhetoric 