Abstract
Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation: Berlin, Barth, & Protestant Theology
Michael P. DeJonge
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 158 pp. $81.00
Michael DeJonge, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, deals in his doctoral dissertation with the philosophically and theologically important problem of transcendence. “How is revelation to be understood?” (8). Does it originate inside or outside the human self? For Friedrich Gogarten, Karl Barth, and other so-called “Word of God theologians,” the problem of transcendence was not only a philosophical and theological problem, but a general one that included an enormous political dimension in the European continent in the first half of the twentieth century. It was “‘general,’ because the problem … exercised a generation of German theologians after the First World War,” and it was about “‘transcendence’ because the problem pointed to the inability of the human sphere to connect with a transcendent, divine sphere” (1). The above-mentioned generation of theologians, of which Bonhoeffer later became a part, accused nineteenth-century liberal theologians, Catholic theologians, and conservative Lutheran theologians of reducing divine revelation and human faith to human possessions or possibilities. The result was a political “voicelessness” over against the First World War and provided the ground for the inability to formulate an adequate theology of resistance to Hitlerite Germany and the Second World War.
DeJonge’s book, however, focuses on the epistemological side of the problem of transcendence in light of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Habilitationsschrift Act and Being from 1930: “Given the structure of mind … it seems impossible to know a transcendent without destroying its character as transcendent. The problem of transcendence is especially acute for being theology, which blunts revelation’s transcendence by treating it as a human possibility” (20). As DeJonge analyzes sharply, Bonhoeffer rejects three positions regarding the problem of act and being and thus the central issue of properly addressing revelation: (a) the philosophical, for “no philosophy can solve the problem of act and being in a theologically satisfactory way because philosophy thinks from the self rather than from revelation” (32); (b) the Reformed position, for even Karl Barth—though addressing divine revelation anew by originating it outside the human self in God’s freedom—fails, according to the reading of Michael DeJonge, to understand revelation’s contingency as the act of a divine person whose being is in history (as a result, Bonhoeffer replaces an act-theology by a person-theology); and (c) the position of the Luther renaissance, for unlike Karl Holl, for Bonhoeffer Christ is by definition present as the God-man in history. DeJonge presents Bonhoeffer’s solution to the problem of act and being as one grounded in a Lutheran person-concept of revelation and argues for an alternative to Barth. Put sharply, “God is not subject but person” (56). With intellectual rigor, DeJonge concludes:
Barth follows the Reformed tradition in understanding the person of Christ as the second person of the Trinity, the Logos who becomes present in acts of revelation but who is in eternity. Bonhoeffer follows the Lutheran tradition in understanding the person of Christ as the historical God-man who acts and is in history. (145)
The strength of this fresh interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s Habilitationsschrift lies both in a thorough Lutheran reading of Bonhoeffer’s christological epistemology and in directing research along this line by asking and answering key questions, such as: “How does Bonhoeffer’s person theology make use of Luther?” (144). In Bonhoeffer research, such questions have been answered differently. Unlike DeJonge (see 92–93), for instance, Karsten Lehmkühler paralleled Bonhoeffer’s “pro-me” with Luther’s teaching of the communication of attributes. (See his essay in Bonhoeffer und Luther: Zentrale Themen ihrer Theologie, ed. Udo Hahn, Klaus Grünwaldt, Christiane Tietz, Hannover 2007.) A stimulating discussion can foster further Bonhoeffer research.
The strength of DeJonge’s dissertation is at the same time its weakness. One must question whether both the inner dynamics and systematic broadness of Karl Barth’s christology has been done justice at all times when interpreting Barth purely along confessional lines and, in addition, whether DeJonge differentiated enough what he called “the Reformed tradition”; for instance, no reference is made to a source like the Institutio II (De cognition dei redemptoris) of Calvin.