Abstract
Koert Verhagen’s Being and Action Coram Deo explores a perennial issue in Lutheran theology: what reason is there to live ethically when salvation is by faith alone? In order to fathom the social implications of the doctrine of justification, Verhagen engages with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s self-consciously Lutheran attempts to give an answer.
Verhagen begins by spelling out the tripartite structure of what, for Luther, it means to live coram Deo (in the presence of God): human beings are related to God as God’s creatures, as sinners, and as people reconciled to God by Christ alone. Against this backdrop Verhagen begins a patient journey through Bonhoeffer’s writings, beginning (Chapter 2) with his doctoral dissertation on the Church. In Bonhoeffer, as in Luther, ‘far from being self-determined, the human being is what she is only in and through the relationship which is established in God’s word of address’ (p. 34). To live in sin is to live turned in on oneself; to live before God is to live in relationship with God – and with others.
Chapter 3 stays with both anthropology and Bonhoeffer’s early theology, to spell out how Bonhoeffer’s justification-shaped understanding of human being contrasted with philosophically based worldviews. Essentially, the difference lies in humanity’s need for divine grace. Philosophical worldviews, including that of the Nazis, operated without any concept of sin. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on sin and the consequent need for Christ to make relationship to God possible again helps explain the theological basis for Bonhoeffer’s opposition to Nazism.
Chapter 4 shifts gear in the direction of ethics. This is done in the first instance by evaluating Bonhoeffer’s anthropology in light of recent trends in Pauline scholarship: what does Paul teach about the relation between justification and ethics? Verhagen concludes that Paul intends participation in Christ to draw the believer into his mission in the world. On this basis, Chapter 5 turns to Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship. Here, Paul ‘understanding discipleship as union with Christ … provides a lens through which to read’ not only ‘Bonhoeffer’s discourse on cheap and costly grace’ (p.104), but his participatory, embodied and ethically substantive approach to discipleship. Chapter 6 makes use of the categories of the penultimate and ultimate in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. The tripartite relation of the believer to God – as creature, sinner and reconciled – is reprised, with real insight, to illuminate the relation of penultimate to ultimate. A final chapter uses Bonhoeffer’s account of justification to critique the ideology of white supremacism.
Few theologians in the past hundred years have succeeded more brilliantly than Bonhoeffer in demonstrating how Christian life in the world may be genuinely theologically shaped. Verhagen’s clearly structured, well-written and intelligently argued monograph, the first to tackle the central evangelical doctrine of justification in Bonhoeffer’s thought, is an excellent addition to T&T Clark’s steadily expanding New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Theology and Ethics series. Readers may draw their own conclusion, however, about the price.