Bonhoeffer and Reformed Christology: Towards a Trinitarian Supplement

Introduction

The enemy of any christology which would purport to be faithful to the biblical witness was, for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to ask the “how” question. The “how” question in christology is pernicious because its “final prerequisite” is “the immanent logos of human beings.” ¹ Conceiving Christ within our “logos classification system”—which is to account for Christ in accordance with human reason—is deeply problematic as it detracts attention from the fundamental question, that is, the “who” question. ² The “who” question is the concrete question, the question “about transcendence.” ³ The “who” question forces us to be still—or better, silent—before the “God-human” and “human-God” who overturns all of our attempts to domesticate him, to fix him in a system, and to obscure the very real sense in which he interprets himself to us. ⁴ Whereas the “how” question is one which we put to him, the “who” question is in fact put to us: “But who do you say that I am?” ⁵ The latter question questions us; it interrogates all of our attempts to dethrone Christ and thus to close our ears to the one who pronounces blessed all those who do not take offence at him. ⁶

Bonhoeffer was quite critical of Reformed christology because of its preoccupation with the “how” question. ⁷ In this article I consider Bonhoeffer’s criticisms of Reformed christology and ask to what extent they are on the mark. ⁸ I do so with a view to ascertaining whether the Reformed tradition of christology might offer more resources than Bonhoeffer conceived for safeguarding the sovereignty and freedom of the present person of Christ, a concern which is very dear—and rightly so—to Bonhoeffer’s own theological heart. Basically, I ask whether Bonhoeffer’s account of Jesus’ person—that is of Jesus’ existence as one united with transcendence (being)—leaves any room for an account of his person in relationship to the triune life, what John Webster calls christology’s “backward reference.” ⁹ I ask, furthermore: Does such a “backward reference” necessarily detract from the concreteness of the Christ event or might it actually deepen appreciation of it? Indeed, is the “backward” concern necessarily a preoccupation with the wrong question, the “how” question? Could there be a way in which to articulate the “backward reference”—the function of theology proper—so as to further strengthen the most edifying aspects of Bonhoeffer’s description of Christ’s person? ¹⁰ I think there is, and so offer this article with a view towards the articulation of a trinitarian supplement. Without such a supplement, Bonhoeffer’s christology is hamstrung.

This line of questioning and the supplement to be proposed are, of course, closely related to the matter of the extra Calvinisticum, the Reformed emphasis on the twofold life of the Word, what Heiko Oberman describes as “the later name for the doctrine that the second person of the Trinity continues his rule during the incarnation ‘etiam extra carnem.’” ¹¹ Put differently, to affirm the extra Calvinisticum is to attest that “the Word of God is not entirely circumscribed by his assumed humanity but continues to fill and sustain the universe while he is incarnate in Christ.” ¹² I want to argue against Bonhoeffer that the extra Calvinisticum, rightly understood, is an “indispensable” albeit modest tenet of any christology that would want to preserve Bonhoeffer’s most salutary intuition, namely that “the Word interprets itself according to its nature.” ¹³ The extra Calvinisticum, understood as a commentary on the Son’s identity in relation to God’s inner trinitarian life, the way in which God is eternally said to be God, teaches us that this Word—whose only name is Jesus Christ—is complete and self-sufficient together with his Father and the Spirit, and as such is metaphysically prevenient. ¹⁴

The controlling center of christology is the doctrine of God, specifically the processions of the persons whereby they are said to be. Accordingly, the Word’s relation of origin with respect to the Father is what qualifies him to present himself to us and to do the saving work he does; his relation of origin grounds his work in the economy, is its antecedent basis, and is what secures the notion that the one we encounter in the Gospel is “wholly God.” ¹⁵ Put otherwise, the theological function of the extra Calvinisticum, I argue, is not to bifurcate the Logos asarkos in relation to the Logos ensarkos—Bonhoeffer’s worry—but rather to honor John 8:58: that the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, continues to be in the flesh the one he has always been (and will be) in relationship to the Father who begets him and the Spirit who proceeds from him and his Father. ¹⁶ The Son is eternally the one begotten of the Father; his begottenness, his eternal generation by the Father, not only grounds his coming among us, it also underpins his seeking and saving of us.

Bonhoeffer’s Criticisms of Reformed Christology

“I can never think of Jesus Christ in his being-in-himself, but only in his relatedness to me.” ¹⁷ This is Bonhoeffer’s program: a christology that would conceive of Christ in terms of “his being-in-himself” is deeply problematic precisely because it detracts from Christ’s promeity, the promeity of Christ’s present person. ¹⁸ Bonhoeffer was predominantly concerned with Christ’s “real presence,” and this concern “ushers [for him] the question of Christology.” ¹⁹ Concern with Christ’s “being-in-himself” shortchanges, argued Bonhoeffer, “the real presence of the second hypostasis in history.” ²⁰ Here lies the doctrinal grounds on which he levelled his criticisms of the Reformed extra Calvinisticum.

We do well to note that Bonhoeffer used the language of “person” with respect to Christ rather than “subject.” To appreciate Bonhoeffer’s antipathy toward “being-in-himself” language, we must see, as Michael DeJonge points out, that:

Bonhoeffer understands ‘person’ in contrast [to subject], as having both its act and its being in the world. Therefore, a person is by definition present … When Bonhoeffer indicts Barth for understanding God as subject rather than person, he objects to Barth’s location of God outside of rather than in history. ²¹

Bonhoeffer’s difference with respect to Barth—here his preference for “person” rather than “subject” in conceiving Christ—can be extended to the Reformed tradition of christology as a whole. If a person and not a subject has their being in the world, they cannot exist elsewhere, and so an understanding of the person in a way that describes him as ensarkos and asarkos—as the Reformed do—supports an impersonal and essentialist account of Christ’s identity such that actions—for example the incarnation—are understood to be “subsequent to being.” ²² Accordingly, for Bonhoeffer, nothing about Christ as one who is in the world is to be sought outside of him, as if his existence as incarnate, crucified and risen were incidental, substitutable in relationship to his person, as if statements about his identity could be isolated from his present person. Again Bonhoeffer: “I can never think of Jesus Christ in his being-in-himself, but only in his relatedness to me.” ²³

Reformed christology was problematic for Bonhoeffer insofar as it endorses thinking of Christ apart from “his relatedness to me,” ²⁴ a tendency concentrated in the extra Calvinisticum. It encourages abstract thinking by teaching that Christ “remains extra, [that is,] outside,” his bodily form such that his person is essentially divided. ²⁵ This is to move in the direction of a Nestorian christology, the upshot being that the Reformed cannot teach a real incarnation. Interestingly, Heiko Oberman says the same worry animates Roman Catholic reservations regarding the extra Calvinisticum. ²⁶ There is Christ outside the flesh—the Logos asarkos—and Christ according to the flesh—the Logos ensarkos. Accordingly, and over and against traditional Lutheran teaching for which, as Bonhoeffer says, “Christ’s humanity is divinity,” the Reformed posit something even more unhelpful, a kind of “double Logos”—the language is Dorner’s—and thus “a separation in the concept of the incarnation.” ²⁷

Even the conciliar doctrine of the hypostatic union was placed under critical scrutiny by Bonhoeffer and found wanting—although not entirely, as we shall see. For the hypostatic union too begins with a problematic assumption, namely that there is such a thing as two natures whose integrity must be preserved, whose relationship to one another must be sorted out in advance of the actuality of the present person of “the God-human and human-God” who is—simultaneously—humiliated and exalted. The doctrine of the hypostatic union is a tract of christological teaching that we must only take up with great care and qualification as it assumes ground which, in light of Christ’s present person as humiliated and exalted, cannot, for Bonhoeffer, be said to exist inasmuch as it conceives of the two natures abstractly rather than being oriented solely to the “God-human” and “human-God.”

In all of this, Bonhoeffer was not insensitive to the concerns which Reformed christology seeks to safeguard in light of the perceived deficiencies in Lutheran teaching, especially as regards its account of the real presence of Christ. Of the Reformed, Bonhoeffer wrote:

The λόγος remains in its Trinitarian relationship and thus apart from the flesh. There is, then, no indissoluble bond with the σάρξ. Consequently, there is no development in the human nature. There is no genus majestaticum, that is, no deification of human nature [Vergottung], because the sentence begins: finitum incapax infiniti. The two natures are not united in any other way than indirectly through the person, that is, what can be said about one of the two natures can be said of the person. ²⁸

Lest one think that Bonhoeffer was only focusing on the perceived lacunae of the Reformed tradition, he also called into question developments in his own tradition which “felt it was important to see Christ’s humanity as divinity.” ³⁴ Bonhoeffer was well aware of how his tradition handles the relationship between Christ’s ascension and session at the right hand of the Father and his real presence in the Eucharist by the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, the teaching that Christ’s humanity shares in all the properties of divinity, thereby enabling it to be ubiquitous as God qua God is omnipresent. Those who worked out—albeit in quite different ways—the legacy of the Formula of Concord fall short in two ways. ³⁵ First, “they diminish the divinity of Jesus by having only a part of him become human through God becoming human … Second, they do not make the humanity of Jesus understandable.” ³⁶ Even the nineteenth-century kenoticists failed inasmuch as they do not shift the discussion onto the level at which all christological inquiry must remain, namely away from defining “in abstracto the divine and human natures in such a way that they had to fit into each other” and toward “one of the first statements in theology—that wherever God is, God is wholly there.” ³⁷ The Reformed tradition—together with many instantiations of Bonhoeffer’s own Lutheran tradition—fails at just this critical juncture inasmuch as they turn “the real Jesus Christ … into a construction.” ³⁸ The way to prevent this is to remain with the only starting (and staying) point there can be: “Who is this human being who is said to be God”? ³⁹ Asked differently, who is this human in whom the whole of God comes to meet us?

Negative christology—and by this Bonhoeffer meant the tradition of Chalcedon with its “not-not- etc.”—is something of a troublesome inheritance. Although Chalcedon’s “genius” allows it to surmount the “how” question with which it starts, like critical christology generally it finally “constructs the God-human, rather than letting the fact of the God-human stand as the presupposition.” ⁴⁰ Were it to let the “fact” of him stand, it would be rightly preoccupied with “events,” of speaking of this one via “his weakness and manger” rather than with thinking him in terms of his divinity and humanity “through a single concept of nature.” ⁴¹ This criticism of negative christology is the key to Bonhoeffer’s lectures, and thus for understanding not only his reservations about negative christology but, most importantly for our purposes, Reformed christology and the extra Calvinisticum. Christology in Bonhoeffer’s account is not so much a matter of speaking of what kind of union may be said to exist between the divine and human in Christ but rather of events, specifically with the present person who self-reveals through “weakness and manger.” ⁴² In Hans Frei’s words, christology should be content to ask, “what does the story tell us”? ⁴³ Teaching on the person of Christ, for Bonhoeffer, unfolds not a conceptual construction but the identity of a person who acts and is acted upon. It is he alone who teaches us to speak responsibly of him by attending to the events of his existence as attested in Scripture.

What ought we to make of this relentless emphasis on the “God-human” as the “presupposition” of all christology? ⁴⁴ I would argue that the events to which Bonhoeffer referred (for example, weakness and manger) are what the Reformed divine Francis Turretin called “the order of operating.” ⁴⁵ Contra Bonhoeffer, however, “the order of operating” reveals something, Turretin argued, namely “the order of subsisting,” or Christ’s subsistence as the only begotten of God. Bonhoeffer’s presupposition would have us ask something Bonhoeffer did not ask, namely how Christ comes to be, indeed to inquire about how Christ’s identity and presence is contingent upon his eternal generation by the Father in the Spirit. I say this because I want to better anchor in a trinitarian way what is already an extraordinarily salutary impulse, namely Bonhoeffer’s unflinching determination to let this One stand forth in all his sheer givenness. As we let him stand, however, we are confronted by One who is from somewhere, namely the bosom of the Father, and this somewhere itself is intrinsic to the Son’s identity. Further to this, this somewhere is essential to the identity we encounter in weakness and manger. Bonhoeffer’s underdeveloped—or better, undeveloped—trinitarian theology did not allow him to go there; accordingly, he was hamstrung. Pointing this up is the theological work of the extra Calvinisticum. There is one present person who in his two states (humiliated and exalted) “remains wholly human and wholly God.” ⁴⁶ Indeed, he does not exist sequentially in those states but simultaneously as states proper to the present person he is. The very condition of possibility for Christ being who he is, is given in the “backward reference,” that is, in his identity as the only begotten of the Father. ⁴⁷

Bonhoeffer’s criticisms of Reformed christology—like that of developments within his own tradition and indeed of Chalcedon—attacked the degree to which it deflects attention away from “the central problem for all Christology” and “the central point that decides everything,” namely “did Jesus, as the God-human who is humiliated, enter wholly into human sin”? ⁴⁸ In other words, is there a real incarnation? Jesus’ complete solidarity with us is possible and actual because he is not only wholly as we are but wholly God. The key word is, again, “wholly.” But this is exactly what the extra Calvinisticum, and so Reformed christology, cannot grant, Bonhoeffer argued, and so is the point at which it stumbles. Problematically, Jesus remains in his trinitarian relationship: the “wholly” is thereby undermined and the Reformed—Bonhoeffer adjudged—can no longer endorse Christ’s entering fully into human sin, his being “as we are,” his coming in the “ὁμοιώμα σαρκὸς,” and all that because “this One is Christ.” ⁴⁹ If we are to be healed of our sin, indeed to have our sin carried, it must be, averred Bonhoeffer, by “One who is without sin, the Holy One, the Eternal, the Lord, the Son of the Father,” the Lord who is indeed “the very peccator pessimus.” ⁵⁰ Interestingly, the Reformed would endorse this, but with several qualifications, the chief being that what enables Christ to be wholly under the conditions of death as the one he eternally is, is his eternal relationship to the Father whereby he is generated by the Father. This is what the extra Calvinisticum—rightly understood—amplifies. It reminds us that the One who comes in the ὁμοιώμα σαρκὸς comes as one who does not cease to be “in God’s relationship in and for himself to all eternity,” and because he does not cease to be “in God’s relationship,” the sin and death in which he “became” does not triumph over him. ⁵¹

We cannot stop here having only isolated the “central problem.” ⁵² Rather, we need, argued Bonhoeffer, also to come to grips with “one of the most decisive elements in Christology,” namely the “empty grave” as “the visible authentication of the resurrection,” for this provides the response to the central problem of Jesus’ entering wholly into human sin. ⁵³ Why is this moment so fundamentally decisive, and what is its relationship to the “central problem”? It is “the final stumbling block,” the last moment wherein Jesus remains incognito, the incognito which “He will not lay aside until he comes again, for the Last Judgment.” ⁵⁴ This is not to say that he will return as Another in the last judgment. Quite the opposite: he will finally be revealed as the One he is. The reason the empty tomb remains one of the most decisive moments is because it reveals Christ to be who he is, the God who became human. The past tense is key: the Son freely and radically identified himself with “the likeness of sinful flesh” in such a way that he “became sin.” ⁵⁵ The theological function, if you will, of the empty tomb is to point us once again to the force of the word “became.” “God became human” means that God is wholly to be found in the One who comes in the ὁμοιώμα σαρκὸς, suffers death and is raised. God is “wholly there,” argued Bonhoeffer. This Reformed christology cannot confess in the manner that Bonhoeffer would want precisely because the Word cannot be said to be wholly there: he also remains somewhere else, namely in the heavenly session or trinitarian repose. Furthermore, to say “God becomes human” rather than “became human” does not do sufficient justice to the once and for all nature of the incarnation. ⁵⁶ The language of “becomes” cannot honor the “wholly” with which Bonhoeffer was so concerned, neither the fact that this One is wholly God and wholly human as the humiliated and exalted one—the God who became human in a once and for all kind of way.

Review and Assessment

Was Bonhoeffer right? Is Reformed christology unable or unwilling to confess that God is “wholly there?” The answer is “no,” but not for the reasons Bonhoeffer would envisage Reformed christology to marshal. The modest function of the extra Calvinisticum has to do with a kind of trinitarian specification, with “the ongoing place of the Son in the trinitarian life.” ⁵⁷ Reformed christology would rather say that “the Son of God”—and not God—is “wholly there” in Christ. The Son is the eternally preexistent Logos who subsists, first of all, from eternity. This, of course, Bonhoeffer would never have denied. But, unlike the Reformed, Bonhoeffer did not understand such an affirmation to be of material consequence. To describe the eternal subsistence of the Son in relationship to the Father is to invoke the language of origins, relationally speaking, that is to identify the Son as the One who receives his being from the being of the Father. ⁵⁸ The Son’s presence is the presupposition of christology; but his presence is a function of his identity, and an account of his identity is supplied by description of his origin as one eternally generated by the Father. The Son’s being begotten of the Father (his generation, the relation of origin which gives him his name) and the Father’s begetting of him are internal to God’s being as a hypostatic being. Furthermore, the trinitarian hypostases are mutually constituting in such a way that they are the way in which the being of God is said to exist. And so, the “Son of God” is “wholly there” as the Father’s obedient emissary while remaining wholly the only begotten Son of the Father. His identity in himself cannot be unfolded apart from the Father by whom he is and by whom he is sent in the Spirit common to him and the Father. This One moves towards the economy in which he is wholly there as the Son of the Father. The Reformed appreciate—and this is why they are concerned with election—the extent to which the economy is “the realization of the divine counsel.” ⁵⁹ Thus, the extra Calvinisticum is not a matter of affirming that Jesus Christ—the Lord—remains exalted in his heavenly existence even as he is humiliated in his earthly existence, or of distinguishing between the natures in an abstract sense. Understood to point to what grounds the “wholly there” of the Son, the Word who remains wholly of the Father in his humiliation and death, the extra Calvinisticum has a salutary theological function as a much-needed supplement to Bonhoeffer’s rather underdeveloped trinitarian theology. The eternal Son became flesh, bone of our bone: thus the “infinitum capax finiti.” ⁶⁰

The extra Calvinisticum pertains not so much to the hypostatic union but to the particular mode of being of the second person of the Trinity. The Son stands as the presupposition of the work accomplished in his mission insofar as his procession from the Father has “a term in the history of the world.” ⁶¹ Just so, his humiliation, which is our exaltation, “is contingent to his identity,” his relationship to the Father, and the Spirit who proceeds from them. ⁶² The extra Calvinisticum does not, then, concern the relationship between the two natures—the matter of the hypostatic union—or the relationship between the two states—mapped onto the ensarkos/asarkos distinction. Rather, the extra Calvinisticum reminds us that the Son continues to be wholly in relationship to the Father and the Spirit—“The eternal Son exists receptively as one whose self-existence (autotheos) and almightiness are granted to him by the Father.” ⁶³ In other words, the Son—Jesus Christ—never exists without the Father—and vice versa; the backward reference (his being begotten of the Father) is the condition of possibility, indeed the “explanatory thesis,” for his being who he is and his doing what he does. ⁶⁴ Simply put, the extra Calvinisticum honors Christ’s identity according to the other hypostases. The Word is not exhausted by his appearing, in that his appearing is understood as the expression of his eternal being in relationship to the Father: Jesus Christ is begotten before the ages and, on that basis, sent “in the fullness of time.” ⁶⁵

Do such affirmations do more important theological work than Bonhoeffer allowed? Might such christological teaching provide us with crucial insight into Christ’s personal being in such a way that Bonhoeffer did not espy? Yes, I argue, insofar as the Son enacts his identity as One from the Father (and the Spirit), his action thus being the very extension of his eternal relatedness to the Father (and Spirit) from all eternity. His relationship to the Father holds all the force in the world for answering the “who” question: for Christ is not God in any generic sense; rather, he is God as the Son of the Father. What generates his triumph over death is his being as “God from God,” which is not to be simply identified with his existence, but understood to be that work which is enacted in his existence, his mission which accomplishes the world’s salvation.

Thomas Aquinas is helpful here. Thomas, following Gregory of Nyssa, heard the Lord as teaching in John 8:58 that “his existence is an eternal existence … For an eternal existence knows neither past nor future time, but embraces all time in one indivisible” instant. ⁶⁶ That Jesus “had being both before Abraham and after him” is of course because Jesus “was not made as a creature is, but was eternally begotten from the essence of the Father.” ⁶⁷ To affirm that this man Jesus is “wholly God” (and wholly human), as Bonhoeffer did, we must have recourse to this neglected tract of Christian teaching which the doctrine of the Trinity supplies. This is again not to suggest that Bonhoeffer denied such teaching. But it is to suggest that it does far more work than Bonhoeffer allowed it to do, or perhaps, would even think it capable of doing. The trinitarian dimension of Jesus’ person remains undeveloped in Bonhoeffer. It is this dimension which ensures that his essence and existence are neither collapsed into one another nor separated but instead rightly “distinguished” in a manner that Bonhoeffer himself did not do. Jesus’ existence is the genuine unfolding of his being “both before Abraham and after him,” that is, his being with respect to the Father.

Jesus’ humanity does not lead us to his divinity; his being the “human God” does not lead us to affirm that he is the “God-human.” For his existence as true God and true human is contingent upon his essence as one “eternally begotten from the essence of the Father.” ⁶⁸ Christ’s person can only be rightly conceived in relationship to its basis, precisely his “eternally being begotten of the Father.” ⁶⁹ Christ can be humiliated and exalted “for us and for our salvation” because it is not his two natures that constitute his one person but rather because his filial relationship to his Father is extended in his mission and the work it accomplishes. Accordingly, the extra Calvinisticum is neither a commentary on the relationship between his natures nor an assertion that Christ maintains “his divinity and all of its attributes even as he is incarnate.” ⁷⁰ Rather this Reformed doctrine aims to acknowledge that it is his filial relationship to the Father—invisible as that is to us—that guarantees Christ’s being who he is. Bonhoeffer’s criticisms that the extra Calvinisticum turns “believers to this divinity apart from his humanity” and functions as an unhelpful gloss about how “these two natures constitute the one Christ” may have missed the mark when the extra is understood as a commentary on the Son’s relationship to the Father. ⁷¹

It is important to note that Karl Barth regarded the extra Calvinisticum as set out in his commentary on questions 47 and 48 of the Heidelberg Catechism to be a “theological disaster.” ⁷² Barth—like Bonhoeffer—did not want to distinguish “between his divine and his human nature,” as seems to be done here, for Christ is true God and true man “under all circumstances.” ⁷³ However, as I have suggested, the extra Calvinisticum may be understood otherwise. What guarantees that this One is “wholly God”—or better, “wholly God’s Son” through thick and thin—is his filial relationship. The foundation of all his activity is best understood through the categories offered by an account of his immanent identity with respect to the Father. His activity (and presence) is to be understood as a function—really, the overflow in time—of his immanent procession which, mercy of mercies, has “a term in the history of the world” ⁷⁴

Conclusion

In this article I have sought to provide an answer to the question: What generates a real incarnation? With Bonhoeffer, I have affirmed that the Son of God is wholly there insofar as he is not to be sought elsewhere. What enables him to be wholly there, however, is properly set forth in a tract of christological teaching to which Bonhoeffer was adverse—the extra Calvinisticum—largely because of the way in which it has been used as a commentary on the character of the hypostatic union so as to preclude the imprisoning of the Son of God within the limitations of a given place. However, the extra Calvinisticum may function differently, indeed truly trinitarianly. Rather than the etiam extra carnem funding a Nestorian christology and thereby threatening the reality of the incarnation, the extra Calvinisticum can be understood to emphasize precisely that which qualifies Christ to be wholly there. Such an understanding does fund “Christmas joy,” but perhaps in a more restrained way than Bonhoeffer would have envisaged. ⁷⁷ The eternal Son became “flesh of our flesh,” but there is in this affirmation a trinitarian density not found in Bonhoeffer. This density establishes the condition of possibility by which the Son became our flesh and is the guarantor of its surety. Rightly understood, this Reformed distinctive draws attention to the reality of the incarnation as a conclusion drawn from the Son’s place within the holy Trinity. That Christ can be wholly there while “he continually filled the world even as he had done from the beginning!” is because he is and remains the only begotten Son of the Father, God from God. ⁷⁸ Such a trinitarian setting for christology can in fact strengthen Bonhoeffer’s positive statements. When understood as a commentary on the Son’s everlasting procession, the extra Calvinisticum illumines Christ’s work of taking “away the sins of the world” as the outworking of his mission as the One sent and coming forth from the being of the Father in the power of the Spirit from whom he receives his humanity in the “fullness of time.” ⁷⁹