Abstract
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is mostly known—perhaps even among academic theologians—for his role in early to mid-twentieth-century European history. To be more specific, he is known as someone who resisted the Nazis and was ultimately executed because of his resistance. Perhaps he is secondarily known as someone who penned two inspiring and challenging ‘devotional’ works, The Cost of Discipleship (or simply Discipleship in the new translation) and Life Together. Academic theologians are also aware that he was writing a manuscript on ethics between the fall of 1940 and the time he was arrested in April 1943. The 300-plus pages of this unfinished manuscript are simply known as Ethics. Some academic theologians are aware that he wrote some theologically provocative reflections that he included in letters to his friend, Eberhard Bethge. Yet it seems that Bonhoeffer is much more rarely seen as an original theological thinker. It is important to know, however, that behind this life and all of these writings lies the serious work of an academic theologian. And in fact, once one is aware of these academic writings, one can see how they were foundational for Bonhoeffer’s Christian identity—and thus are intricately connected to the whole of his life and writings.
In his important book, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality, Clifford Green helped many of us to see more clearly the importance of Bonhoeffer’s doctoral thesis, Sanctorum Communio, for his subsequent life and theological writings. Michael DeJonge has rendered the same service in relation to Bonhoeffer’s postdoctoral thesis, Act and Being, in this book, Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation. DeJonge’s work is briefer and more narrowly focused than Green’s. He especially helps us to see how Bonhoeffer explicitly and implicitly critiques—and moves beyond—Barth while remaining aligned with Barth’s central concerns. DeJonge only signals in a short chapter how what he has named relates to Bonhoeffer’s subsequent writings; but the signals are helpful. Green is clearly right in the foreword that ‘this book immediately takes its place in the top rank of Bonhoeffer studies’ (p. xi).
DeJonge’s book helps us to locate Act and Being within the philosophical and theological contexts of Bonhoeffer’s time. This includes situating Bonhoeffer among Kant, Heidegger, Barth, and the Lutheran Karl Holl, to mention some of the most significant streams of thought. But this review will mostly focus on the way in which DeJonge helps us to see how Bonhoeffer went beyond Barth’s early theology and, in showing this, also clarifies how Bonhoeffer was able to articulate a theological ethic with deep resonances with Barth while moving beyond him in specific ways.
It was in the winter of 1924–25, while a graduate student at the University of Tübingen, that Bonhoeffer first seriously engaged with the work of Karl Barth. He resonated with Barth’s concern to retain a sense of the transcendence of God. God should not be confused with human beings. Bonhoeffer agreed with Barth that typical ‘being-concepts’ of revelation tended to conflate human potential with revelation—thus implicitly reducing God to an object under human control. For instance, Bonhoeffer thought the latter was true for his former Lutheran teacher, Karl Holl, who correlated our knowledge of the being of God with our (subjective) conscience. He thought also that the typical way of employing the historical-critical approach to the Scriptures put humans in control of any potential word we might hear from God through the Bible. Barth, thought Bonhoeffer, was on the right track by placing the emphasis instead on God acting. If we are to know God—truly know God—we are in need of God’s self-disclosure. Revelation is known only through God’s gracious act. God is never constrained by us, for God is a God of freedom. Thus God is always acting Subject, never an object under human control.
Bonhoeffer knew that important claims were being made here, claims that he felt compelled to take seriously (in this way opposing the approaches of most of his former teachers at the University of Berlin). This agreement with Barth is expressed in some of Bonhoeffer’s earliest writings, including his lectures in Barcelona, Spain, in February 1929. However, as he worked on his habilitation thesis, Act and Being, during the latter part of 1929 into early 1930 he was clarifying some disagreements with Barth.
Though Bonhoeffer resonated with Barth’s concerns, he came to believe that Barth’s focus on the contingent acts of the transcendent God, who always is Subject, makes us ‘ill equipped to deal with what Bonhoeffer calls the fullness of life’ (p. 68). Barth, it seemed to Bonhoeffer, had erected insurmountable problems with his notion of the abstract transcendence and freedom of God. So far as Bonhoeffer could determine, there was, in Barth’s views, no perceived continuity either in the identity of God or in the ongoing involvement of God in history. Because of Barth’s actualism, the transcendent God’s involvement in history was only occasional. And he seemed unable to give an account of the continuity of the Church’s existence across time.
Bonhoeffer’s solution is not to eliminate the emphasis on God as subject or the contingency of God’s revelation through acts. However, rather than concentrate on God as subject, Bonhoeffer focuses on the person of God—act and being united in the God-man, Jesus Christ. Thus God’s acting is not merely occasional but has decisively entered history in the person of Jesus. The freedom of God is no longer formally defined but made flesh and given substantive definition in Christ. The redemptive power and the persuasive, commanding Word of God are expressed through this God-man. Shape is given to divine continuity through the incarnation. God has entered history. In Christ, God has created a people—a body of Christ—who have historical continuity, who occupy space and time. Bonhoeffer will, in subsequent writings, attempt rhetorically to name the ways in which God has spoken with clarity through commands, created a people, and acted to reconcile the world to Himself—and yet is still the living God, a transcendent Subject whose act and being are disclosed in the God-man, Jesus Christ.
All of this is named through a sophisticated philosophical and theological argument in Act and Being. DeJonge has shown the huge significance of this work both for understanding Bonhoeffer himself and for seeing continuity as well as discontinuity between himself and Barth. As stated above, DeJonge has also signalled the significance this early work has for Bonhoeffer’s subsequent life and thought. There are concrete implications of this rather abstract academic work. Though DeJonge doesn’t name it, I would note specifically that it is likely that this theological work prepared Bonhoeffer to experience his school year in New York City at Union Theological Seminary, 1930–31—especially under the influence of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and the budding pacifist Jean Lasserre—differently than he might have otherwise. Having been convinced that the living God acts redemptively and as a commanding presence through the person of Jesus Christ, Bonhoeffer underwent a transformation in his way of viewing his own Christian life. In a letter to his friend, Elizabeth Zinn, on 27 January 1936, Bonhoeffer refers to a transformation that happened in his life prior to 1933, probably alluding to his experiences in New York City. He says that he had previously been lonely, had not prayed much, was vain, was his ‘own master’—that he in essence ‘had still not become a Christian’. Then a transformation took place. ‘It was from this that the Bible—especially the Sermon on the Mount—freed me. Since then everything is different.’ He said that he ‘now saw that everything depended on the renewal of the church and of the ministry’ and that ‘Christian pacifism, which I had previously fought against with passion, all at once seemed self-evident’.
Once we have become conscious of the theological shifts named by DeJonge and the existential ‘grand liberation’ named in this letter of 1936, we can see specific manifestations of the shifts brought about in Bonhoeffer’s ethics. On one hand, in February 1929, in a lecture on Christian ethics in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer said (still under the influence of Barth’s notion of the abstract transcendence and freedom of God): ‘I will defend my brother, my mother, my people, and yet I know that I can do so only by spilling blood; but love for my people will sanctify murder, will sanctify war.’ In the same lecture he said: ‘It is the most serious misunderstanding to turn the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount once again into a law by applying them literally to the present. Not only is such transference meaningless because impracticable, it also goes against the spirit of Christ, who brought freedom from the law.’
On the other hand, after having written Act and Being and having undergone a transformation in New York City, in August 1932 he was saying something quite different (speaking to Christians in Gland, Switzerland): ‘The church forsakes obedience whenever it sanctions war. The church of Christ stands against war in favor of peace among the peoples, between nations, classes, and races.’ He is also beginning to speak differently about the Sermon on the Mount, so that by December he says: ‘To the simple reader of the Sermon on the Mount, what it says is unmistakable.’ ‘The commandment “You shall not kill,” the word that says, “Love your enemies,” is given to us simply to be obeyed. For Christians, any military service, except in the ambulance corps, and any preparation for war, is forbidden.’ These thoughts are then repeated in several lectures and given their fullest articulation in the book Discipleship, and given life in the experimental seminary community at Finkenwalde, whose practice is summarised in Life Together.
Among many recent readers these emphases have been lost, partly because Bonhoeffer’s strong focus on peace has been almost muted in the 2010 biography of him by Eric Metaxis. Moreover, for almost all of us Bonhoeffer’s strong and consistent focus on the call of Jesus Christ, the Prince of peace, to pursue peacemaking—including caring for and speaking out for the least among us—is, if not lost, at least muffled because of Bonhoeffer’s alleged involvement in attempts to kill Hitler. Among many debates that will be sparked by DeJonge’s important book, one is how Act and Being provided a theological foundation for Bonhoeffer’s christologically oriented ethic, as expressed in Discipleship, Life Together and Ethics, and embodied to the end of his short life.
If I may append a note, my co-authors and I aim to contribute to these discussions in the volume, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking.