Abstract
This essay challenges the portrayal of philosophical idealism as sinful ‘confinement in the self’, arguing that this obscures a relationship between Hegel and Bonhoeffer characterised by variation rather than contradiction. I first trace a limited congeniality between their respective critiques of the ‘beautiful soul’ and the ‘privately virtuous’, showing how both thinkers resist moral isolation through the call to confession. Second, I follow their attempts to overcome an oppositional logic between such social exchange and divine agency, rooted in the syntax of Hegel’s phrase ‘God existing as community’. This provides sharper focus to Bonhoeffer’s variations, changing the subject from God to Christ and the attendant act from reciprocal confession to intercessory prayer. Rather than merely defensive revision, I argue that this reveals an agile Christology which can sustain an ethical posture of ‘being for others’ through the withheld confession and broken trust typical of a communion of sinners.
It belongs to the essence of the church that it still bears the community of sin within itself, and is real only in constantly overcoming it (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio
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Introduction
In the reception of Bonhoeffer’s works, the legacy of philosophical idealism has not fared well. This is evident in two intellectual biographies that bookend the past fifty years of scholarship. In Eberhard Bethge’s early account, he claims that Bonhoeffer’s second dissertation is ‘basically addressing philosophers, whom he schematically finds guilty of the original sin of idealism, namely imprisonment in the self’. 2 Charles Marsh’s new biography portrays Bonhoeffer’s early view of the German philosophical tradition, running from Kant through Hegel to Feuerbach, as ascribing overwhelming powers to human subjectivity in its ‘world-constitutive’ role. He claims that Bonhoeffer starkly opposes such ‘triumph of a totalitarian ego’, singling out Hegel in especially negative terms. 3
There are passages in Bonhoeffer that render idealism as leading to the ‘confinement’ of the self, often linked with the vivid Lutheran depiction of sin as the ‘heart curved in on itself’, cor incurvatum in se. 4 Nevertheless, there is reason to trouble the pejorative moral connotations of this shorthand. 5 First, Hegel, with whom Bonhoeffer has the most sustained and maturing relationship, must be individuated from the young theologian’s construct of ‘idealism’. This is ironic given that Bonhoeffer criticises Hegel for precisely the loss of personal distinction in rendering a collective. 6 Second, recent interpretations of Hegel see his primary interest in Christian theology for its derivative logic, rather than as material from which to construct his own doctrinal statement, much less one that is inadvertently heterodox. 7 The shift towards Hegel’s philosophical investigation calls to mind disciplinary integrities that Bonhoeffer legitimates even as he pursues his primarily theological work.
In light of these two distinctions, this essay challenges the portrayal of philosophical idealism as tending towards sinful ‘confinement in the self’. I argue that this obscures a relationship between Bonhoeffer and Hegel that is characterised by variation rather than contradiction. In the first part, I trace a limited congeniality between Hegel’s critique of the ‘beautiful soul’ and Bonhoeffer’s criticism of the ‘privately virtuous’. These reveal a shared social logic that renders isolated judgmental consciousness as leading towards a dissolution of the self. That self must instead be relinquished and received back through another’s word, according to their respective accounts drawn from a Lutheran emphasis on confession.
The ensuing community may still be ‘confined’, however, if moral isolation is overcome but an oppositional logic between human selves and divine agency remains. In the second part of this essay, I will show how Hegel’s challenge to such opposition in the phrase ‘God existing as community’ provides the appropriate syntax for Bonhoeffer’s similar goal. Acknowledging commonality brings sharper focus to Bonhoeffer’s ensuing variation in his allusive phrase ‘Christ existing as community’. In the neglected context of this phrase’s attribution in Sanctorum Communio, confession is elided for an act of intercession that pre-empts another’s statement of guilt, a move boldly extended in his Finkenwalde materials. I will argue that Bonhoeffer’s change of subject, and attendant act, is not merely defensive modification. Rather, he employs Hegel towards a juxtaposition of persons that should resource contemporary reprisals of an ethical posture of ‘being for others’, challenging both diffuse and restrictive accounts of the church amid intersecting publics.
Under a broader inquiry into ‘sin and Christian ethics’, this essay asks what do the sins of others evoke in a moral subject? Through the interaction of Bonhoeffer and Hegel’s works, I seek to illumine the hidden sins of moral isolation, acknowledge the constitutive importance of confession one to another, and highlight the need for intercession in the absence of trust. In light of Bonhoeffer’s variation, these aims involve an agile Christology that should strengthen any purported ‘ecclesial’ ethic. With regard to the study of my two sources, the essay is in response to recent calls for a synoptic assessment of Bonhoeffer’s corpus, the English critical edition of his works now being complete. 8 Drawing and legitimating disciplinary bounds is an attempt to acknowledge the resources provided by a concurrent ‘renaissance’ in Hegel scholarship. 9
From Self-confinement to Reciprocal Confession
Hegel on the Confessions of the Beautiful Soul
In the Phenomenology Hegel critiques the self that is buffered from the demands of reasoned exchange:
It lacks the force to relinquish itself, that is, lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to suffer the burden of being. It lives with the anxiety that it will stain the glory of its inwardness by means of action and existence. Thus, to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and it steadfastly perseveres in its obstinate powerlessness to renounce its own self, a self which has been intensified to the final point of abstraction… In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes an unhappy, so-called beautiful soul [schöne Seele], and its burning embers gradually die out, and as they do, the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapour dissolving into thin air (PhG §658).
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In Hegel’s social logic, withdrawal leads towards the dissolution of the self, an ironic judgment because it is self-renunciation from which it fled. John Milbank paraphrases this characterisation as one in which virtuous intentions become ‘sterile, elusive, and collusive’ in the world’s evil, noting that Kant’s deontological approach may be in view. 11
As Hegel develops this characterisation, the isolation of the beautiful soul shows itself accompanied by ‘judgmental consciousness’ about others’ moral actions. This is played out in his parable of the valet [Kammerdiener] in the statement ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ (PhG §665). Robert Brandom makes this account central to his reading of the Phenomenology, illustrating the ‘hero’ as someone who assumes public office with the normative responsibility it entails. 12 The valet sees how his master eats, drinks and dresses, but this is not merely observation of the needs of a finite being. Rather, the valet imputes inward motives to the contingency that compromises any action – in one example Hegel gives, if the master’s action is accompanied by fame, then the valet judges ‘this inwardness to be a craving for fame’ (PhG §665, emphasis original). This imputation of motive is hypocritical because it ‘pretends that such judgment is not merely another manner of being evil but is rather itself the rightful consciousness of action’ (PhG §666, emphasis original). Given that the valet does not acknowledge he is also bound in this moral tension, such judgment shows pusillanimity – an apt term for contraction of the self. 13
In Hegel’s account, this judgmental consciousness is called to confess its own ‘evil’. Evil here is a reference to acting according to ‘one’s own inner law and conscience’, elsewhere functioning for Hegel as a rendition of the term sin.
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In claiming his own evil, the confessant should expect a level of reciprocity, an acknowledgment of ‘selfsameness’ by the one who hears (PhG §666). If this is rejected, the confessor shows not only self-deception but a refusal of community and its sustenance in language:
But following on the admission of the one who is evil [Eingeständnis des Bösen] – I am he – there is no reciprocation of the same confession [das Geständnis]…the judging consciousness repels this community from itself; it is the hard heart which exists for itself and which rejects any continuity with the other…[the ‘confessant’] sees the other as somebody who refuses to let his own inwardness step forth into the existence of speech and as somebody who contrasts the beauty of his own soul to the soul of one who is evil. He sees the judgmental consciousness as somebody who sets his own stiff-necked selfsame character in opposition to the confessing consciousness, and he sees the utter silence of someone who keeps himself locked up within himself, who refuses to be discarded vis-à-vis an other (PhG §667).
The admission of the one who is evil – I am he [Ich bin’s] – is likely a reference to Isa. 47:10, in Luther’s translation, Ich bin’s, und sonst keine! [‘I am, and there is no other!’] 15 Identifying this allusion, Terry Pinkard points out that the confessant speaks of ‘having cleaved only to his own way of judging’. 16
This confession is rebuffed by the hard heart that denies its need to reciprocally confess, showing its solipsism by refusing even to speak in response. The alternative to such refusal is the movement to forgiveness, which must be verbalised; ‘here once again we see language [Sprache] as the existence of Spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others’ (PhG §652). The necessarily spoken word reveals that the hard heart of judgmental consciousness has been broken. This involves acknowledging its share in a history of evil as well as responsibility for the work of reparation. 17
In this account of moral withdrawal and the alternative call to confession, Hegel employs a social logic derived from the heart of the Christian tradition. Though Brandom does not further explore Hegel’s interest in religion, 18 he comments that ‘by using forgiveness as the axis around which revolves the parable he uses to introduce the final form of reciprocal recognition, Hegel is intentionally invoking the central concept of Christianity, and depending on its epitome in the petition of the Lord’s Prayer’. 19 This act of derivation calls to mind the recent argument by Nicholas Adams that Hegel is primary interested in Christian theology in order to investigate its underlying logic, rather than to articulate an idiosyncratic doctrinal statement. 20
Insofar as Hegel pursues a logical investigation derived from doctrine, this aim can be seen as legitimate by Bonhoeffer, though his own project is resolutely theological. From his first dissertation, Bonhoeffer employs other disciplines in the service of his first-order doctrinal work, as Michael Mawson emphasises. 21 In so doing, he acknowledges the difference between inquiries, at one point using the analogy of how sound is perceived differently by musicians and physicists. 22 He later makes reference to how his German-Continental tradition, including idealism and realism, ‘are based on philosophical-methodological demands derived from theological insights’ (15:443/437). Recognising this common source is what is meant by the term ‘congenial’ as I seek to show that Hegel’s social logic bears a limited congeniality to Bonhoeffer’s own ethic of relinquishing ‘private virtue’ towards a robustly confessional form of community.
Bonhoeffer on the Church as Confessional
A synoptic survey of Bonhoeffer’s writings reveals repeated emphasis on the confession of sin. In Life Together he invokes Luther to comment that the Christian life is ‘unthinkable’ without confession to another person (5:114/99). This is not solely for a minister’s hearing, but a practice among believers. In terms reminiscent of Hegel’s symptoms of the hard heart, Bonhoeffer warns that if only one person hears confessions without himself confessing to another, he is liable to exercise a kind of spiritual tyranny in the community (5:116/100). As a result, at the Finkenwalde seminary he ensured that each of his trainees were paired to act as confessors, with student Eberhard Bethge serving as his own. 23
In Ethics Bonhoeffer calls for a recovery of the ‘divine office of private confession’ in order to reclaim a concrete ethics.
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As Nicola Wilkes comments, this central aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought involves more than making amends; it is a source of communal spiritual vitality.
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Standing opposite such healthy candour is the moral actor who not only distances herself from public life but judges others who take up such involvement. In one of six ethical orientations subject to Bonhoeffer’s critique,
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the ‘privately virtuous’ person is faulted for her isolation:
In flight from public controversy this person or that reaches the sanctuary of a private virtuousness [privaten Tugendhaftigkeit]…in voluntarily renouncing public life, these people know exactly how to observe the permitted boundaries [Grenzen] that shield them from conflict. They must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world (6:80/66).
If boundaries are not crossed and otherness remains fixed, the ensuing moral isolation becomes self-destructive or hypocritical. These buffered selves bear likeness to Hegel’s ‘beautiful soul’, particularly as Bonhoeffer goes on to show the attendant contempt they hold for others.
Although Bonhoeffer regularly uses the verb beichten to speak of the confession of sin, it is an act so characteristic of his ecclesiology that he also employs bekennen. This latter verb thus takes on a dual meaning: the first is to a scripturally derived theological statement of belief, a profession such as that adopted as the distinguishing mark of the ‘Confessing Church’ [Die Bekennende Kirche] over and against the ‘German Christians’ [der Deutschen Christen];
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the second is to the admission of sin. This wordplay is bold, coming as it does in a 1935 essay in which the international recognition of the Confessing Church was at stake:
The Confessing Church [Die Bekennende Kirche] does not approach confessionally different churches as its mortal enemies who are intent on its demise; rather, it enters into such contact bearing its own share of the guilt [Schuld] for the inner turmoil of Christendom, enters into that guilt, and, amid all false theologies it may encounter along the way, acknowledges first of all its own guilt and the inadequate power of its own proclamation. It acknowledges God’s incomprehensible ways with the church. It is terrified by the serious nature of any church schism and by the burden such would impose on subsequent generations. It hears here the summons and admonition to accept responsibility and penitence. Given this situation, it will experience the entire distress of its own decision anew, and its own confession here will first of all be a confession of sin [Sündenbekenntnis] (14:407/393).
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In this dual use of bekennen, Bonhoeffer expresses that the church is composed through confession in two forms: doctrinal content and corporate penitence. 29 It is striking that at the onset of the Kirchenkampf (italicise) Bonhoeffer challenges an appeal to the ‘purity’ of the Confessing Church, recognising the vanity of a beautiful corporate soul.
Such corporate emphasis with respect to confession contains an echo of Bonhoeffer’s early appropriation of Hegel’s notion of ‘objective spirit’ in Sanctorum Communio. There he challenges the ‘fear of Hegel’ that is rooted in stark individualism. In this 1935 essay, the ethical effect of this early influence releases him from vilifying his church’s many individual enemies. He writes that the breach between the Confessing Church and the German Christians is not ‘a judgment concerning Christian or unchristian persons, but rather one concerning the spirit of a church that has been recognized and condemned as an antichristian spirit… The issue here is not persons but churches, a matter of Christ and the Antichrist’ (14:406/391-2).
From ‘Immanent’ Social Logic to God-as-Community
That Kind of Community: Bonhoeffer’s Attribution to Hegel in Sanctorum Communio
In the Phenomenology Hegel troubles demarcation between the epistemic and the ethical.
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As Brandom comments, his theory is ‘morally edifying’:
In particular, the sort of theoretical understanding he teaches (the explicit acknowledgment of what he shows to be implicit in our discursive practice) obliges us in practice to forgive and trust one another: to be that kind of self and institute that kind of community.
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Brandom proposes the term ‘trust’ to convey the anticipation among those venturing confession, and so moving away from ‘irony’: ‘trusting is both acknowledging the authority of those trusted to forgive and invoking their responsibility to do so’. 32 There are good reasons to challenge Brandom’s depiction of ‘forgiveness’, which he has cast as a ‘Whiggish’ process of revision like that of common law judges in deliberation. 33 Nevertheless, Brandom brings to the fore the question of the kind of moral community envisioned in a social logic derived from Christian doctrine, with the act of confession and forgiveness at its core.
With a similar emphasis on socio-ethical characteristics, Rowan Williams explains that for Hegel the ‘life of God’ is expressed in the movement towards a community marked by ‘the making of rational connections, the overcoming of otherness not by reduction to identity but by the labour of discovering what understanding might be adequate to a conflictual and mobile reality without excising or devaluing its detail’. Williams ends this particular essay with reference to the social practices of religious tradition ‘whose mark of godliness is self-critical vigilance (what used to be called repentance, I think)’. 34 As Hegel’s language of confession and forgiveness shows, he is more willing to use the religious terms that Williams brackets, but the emphasis on social logic suits the line that has thus far been traced.
Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio shows a clear interest in the kind of moral community the church presents, indeed in articulating a uniquely ecclesial mode of thinking. To this end, he anticipates the emphasis on confession shown in later works by noting ‘I consider it the most important task for today to make private confession of sin [Privatbeichte] a living source of strength for the church community’ (1:248/170 n. 117). Given the strength of his language, it is strange that Bonhoeffer relegates this claim to the footnotes, while the main text of the dissertation contains little elaboration on the act. In the most likely section for confession to be featured, directly prior to the forgiveness of sins between Christians, its place is instead taken by an extended treatment of intercessory prayer.
It is in this replacement that Bonhoeffer makes the aforementioned reference to Hegel: ‘Thus, when one person intercedes in the name of Christ on behalf of the other, the whole community – which actually means “Christ existing as community”, to use a modification of the Hegelian concept – participates in that person’s prayer’ (1:189/126). The phrase ‘Christ existing as community’ is regularly unmoored from its original contexts in Bonhoeffer’s writing, even as it has been elevated to a focal point for his thought. 35 Examining Sanctorum Communio, it is suggestive that this sole attribution to Hegel, an addition to the published version, is made at the point in which spoken confession is elided for intercessory prayer. Bonhoeffer’s substitution involves direct appeal to divine agency, challenging another level of ‘confinement’ – human sociality isolated from the life of God. His invocation of Hegel seems brash, for petitionary prayer is an act that Hegel’s critics, from Charles Taylor to Cyril O’Regan, find difficult to envision within the philosopher’s construal of divine immanence. 36
Nevertheless, it is important to resist the common picture of Hegel as solely interested in social logic within human community, even if Brandom, Pinkard and other interpreters set a boundary thereabout. 37 Hegel resolutely considers the logic of divine agency, however ‘immanently’ it is rendered. In the outcome of the section on confession and forgiveness from the Phenomenology, the reconciling ‘yes’ leads to recognition of the ‘life of God’ in the midst of human community (§671). This reference calls to mind the more notorious phrase ‘God existing as community’, which becomes the basis for Bonhoeffer’s modification. 38 It features in the 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion in Hegel’s description of the ‘consummate religion’, Christianity: ‘Thus the community itself is the existing spirit, the spirit in its existence, God existing as community [Gott als Gemeinde existierend]’. 39
The syntax is important to this widely misunderstood phrase. Logically, it challenges the opposition of divine and human agency without conflating them. This is shown by his choice of the term ‘as’ and the fact that subject and predicate are not reversed. 40 This is important to maintain against claims that human community is thus ‘deified’ in a crude sense. To that end, recent readings of Hegel have sought to argue against an utter loss of distinction between such pairings as divine and human agency, suggesting a ‘Chalcedonian logic’ at work, that is, a logic of ‘distinctness-in-inseparable unity’. 41 This remains an important question, particularly alongside so-called nonmetaphysical readings of the philosopher. For now, I would claim that Hegel’s syntax ought to be honoured, with greater weight given to his claim of Lutheran confessional fidelity. 42
Insofar as Hegel’s logic in the phrase ‘God existing as community’ challenges strong oppositions between divine and human agency, it is well suited to Bonhoeffer’s project of how revelation ‘becomes’ the community. 43 Channelling Luther, Bonhoeffer regularly reverses subject and predicate in speaking of Christ and the church, 44 making it difficult to discern the line between the social processes of confession and forgiveness, much less intercession, and divine revelation. As a result, contemporary Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer challenges Bonhoeffer for not sufficiently differentiating Christology and ecclesiology, singling out ‘Christ existing as community’ as a ‘not unproblematic form’. In the same work Bayer criticises Hegel for giving up the ‘externality’ of the Word, even that of the Host. 45 It is worth a closer look, then, at Bonhoeffer’s variations and the theological experiments they evoke.
Pre-empting Confession: Juxtaposition of Persons from Sanctorum Communio to Finkenwalde
The modified citation of Hegel’s ‘God existing as community’ occurs in a section of Sanctorum Communio on the church’s ‘being-for-each-other’ [Das Füreinander], in which Bonhoeffer begins with the ‘self-renouncing work’ that constitutes community. This involves advocacy to the extreme point of being willing to curse oneself out of communion with God for the sake of others. 46 Drawing on the scriptural accounts of how Moses and Paul were willing to set themselves outside of communion with God for the sake of their people, he writes that this is ‘the abyss into which intercession can lead the individual’ (1:185/123). 47 Given Bonhoeffer’s own identification with Moses near the end of his life, having assumed guilt within his nation and facing the prospect of dying before seeing the land on the other side of war, this early reference foreshadows the cost of his own advocacy. 48
The topic of intercession sees Bonhoeffer stretching vicariousness beyond ecclesial bounds, a move that is often attributed to his later work. Even in a figure unknown to the one praying, such as the case of prayer for the ‘sins of the unknown sailor’, he writes that ‘in intercession I step into the other’s place and my prayer, even though it remains my own, is nonetheless prayed out of the other’s affliction and need. I really enter into the other, into the other’s sin and affliction’ (1:186-7/124). This is no gift of empathy; one finds such vicarity through recognising a common culpability for the sins of the world, the ‘bonds of guilt’ that are most concentrated in the execution of Christ (1:187:124-25). In this way, intercessory prayer is the spoken word that enacts the peccatorum communio, the communion of sinners. It is a bold politics of identity.
Confession might be understood as implied, but in the cases mentioned – Moses and Paul for the people of Israel, the church on behalf of the unknown sinner – there is no indication that this is forthcoming. The displacement of confession can be likened to the way in which Bonhoeffer narrates the primal intervention of God-in-Christ. In his core concept of ‘vicarious representative action’ [Stellvertretung] Bonhoeffer’s accent is not on human initiative, calling it primarily a theological concept and only derivatively an ethical one. His language of vicariousness first emerges from the biblical concept of how God might regard a whole community as if all had repented. 49 It is also the textual site of Bonhoeffer’s first reference to Hegel’s key refrain: ‘It is “Adam,” a collective person, who can only be superseded [abgelöst] by the collective person “Christ existing as church-community”’ (1:121/72). This background helps to legitimate the thin line Bonhoeffer often leaves between divine and human agency, such as when he provocatively states that ‘in our intercession we can become a Christ to our neighbour’ (1:187/125). Absolution appears likewise ‘immanent’ as the community comes to stand in the person of Christ, though Bonhoeffer oscillates between this picture and an ‘external’ word of divine forgiveness.
In the Finkenwalde materials, composed from 1935–7, Bonhoeffer repeats the phrase ‘Christ existing as community’ (14:449/438). In this context he elaborates on the relation between Christ and church members by using the term ‘juxtaposition’ [Gegenüber] as opposed to that of ‘identity’. In doing so, he draws on the deutero-Pauline language of the body and its head – a vital connection with anatomical difference. 50 As this shows, the change of subject from God to Christ provides him with a fund of images for rendering juxtaposition that conveys unity without losing personal distinction. He terms the latter error ‘Christ-mysticism’.
Whose Community? The Figural Agility of Christ
Bonhoeffer’s use of biblical texts is not merely defensive, a matter of setting roles in order. Rather, scripture evokes his most creative renditions of Christ’s agency before and beyond the word of confession. At the conclusion of a lecture on Christ in the Psalms, he goes so far as to ‘figure’ Christ standing among the crowd calling for the crucifixion:
How can I pray that? ‘Crucify him!’ Prayer not repetition…of the individual who prays – subject is rather Christ the Crucified – he himself prays among the godless: Crucify him! Thus does Christ enter into the world, and we pray stammering after Christ and ask for Christ’s grace (14:391/374-75, emphasis original).
This reading is remarkable for several reasons. It takes place in the Finkenwalde period, which can be seen as more ‘sectarian’ than his later involvement in the resistance and prison communities. Yet as which community does Christ exist in this picture? This placement disrupts anti-semitic judgments derived from the communal guilt of ‘the Jews’ in the Gospel narratives, while the spirited church-community has not yet come on the scene. In Bonhoeffer’s perplexing words, this is ‘God in the world, Christ among his pious and impious enemies’ (14:391/374, emphasis original). Christ remains a surprisingly agile form, or Gestalt, for those who follow after. 51
Such a bold experiment in conveying the primal juxtaposition of Christ – here among the crowd baying for the crucifixion – is an extension of Bonhoeffer’s early treatment of intercession. In light of this trajectory, it is worth revisiting the decision of the English critical editions to render Christus als Gemeinde existierend as ‘Christ existing as church-community’. The reason for rendering Gemeinde as ‘church-community’ is to specify Bonhoeffer’s strong theological norm for the church, contrasted to sociological terms for community. 52 As appropriate as this is to his ecclesiological concerns, it is a distinction Bonhoeffer did not himself make at the level of diction, however well-suited the German language is to lexical fusion.
Moreover, the translation ‘church-community’ provides an added layer of modification to Hegel’s phrase, alongside the change in subject from God to Christ. Along with further concealing the widely-disregarded allusion, this is problematic because it could be argued that Hegel himself restricts Gemeinde to ‘church-community’ as this phrase comes in his section on the ‘consummate religion’. In fact, from Bonhoeffer’s rendition of intercessory prayer in Sanctorum Communio through to his figural reading in Finkenwalde, he may be the one more willing to press the boundaries of ‘revelatory’ religion. Unfortunately, the effect of translating Gemeinde as ‘church-community’ can dissociate the present Christ from those external communities for whom the church stands in intercession, which is to say, for whom the church learns to ‘stammer after Christ’.
Having considered Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on intercession, it is worth reprising the essay’s broader opening question: what do the sins of others evoke from the moral subject? In Brandom’s reading of Hegel, the admission of another’s evil ought to call forth the subject’s confession of her own compromised position. Such responsiveness leads to the ‘trust’ born of a moral community in which confession is reciprocal and forgiveness is shared. Bonhoeffer’s variation on Hegel makes intercession a prior response to another’s sin, pre-empting the act of confession. It thus recognises a deeper constitutive bond underlying what may be evoked by the sins of others, namely the intervention of Christ.
This is not to separate a divine act of intercession from the imperatives of social exchange, the latter so perceptively traced by Hegel and adapted by Brandom. Rather, to speak of ‘Christ existing as community’ is to see intercession become the task of the moral community through which Christ exists. This is not an ecclesiology of blithe ‘participation’ in the life of God which gives little account of breaches in ecclesial trust. It is testimony that intercessions in the midst of Kirchenkampf best reveal the dynamic logic of divine and human agency. It can thus provide hope for theologians and ethicists as they respond to sin and broken trust among intersecting communities – standing in the place of fellow sinners through vicarious prayer, advocacy, debate, and the confessions these entail.
Conclusion
Charles Marsh observes that Bonhoeffer’s socio-ethical terminology – in oft-cited phrases such as ‘being for others’ – can seem ‘monochronic and thin’ without understanding its passage in and through Hegel’s thought. 53 In this essay I have sought to give a thicker account of Bonhoeffer’s selective resources from philosophical idealism. I have done this by complicating the charge of idealist ‘confinement in the self’ as far as Hegel’s work is concerned. Hegel’s critique of the ‘beautiful soul’ and the call to confession reveal a social logic derived from Christian theology that is congenial to Bonhoeffer’s criticism of the ‘privately virtuous’ and his own confessional emphasis.
Acknowledging such limited commonality can focus attention on Bonhoeffer’s variation of Hegel’s phrase in Sanctorum Communio: a change in subject from God to Christ and the related shift from the act of confession to intercession. I have sought to show that this leads him to bold exercises in the juxtaposition of persons, particularly as the scripturally-rendered Christ is given new communal forms. It is hoped that this might render the more open, allusive relationship between Christian ethics and philosophy which this essay has sought to trace. 54 I also trust it will offer fresh possibilities for how Christ can become ‘subject’ of the moral task entrusted to a communion of sinners.
Footnotes
1.
The epigraph is taken from the original manuscript of Sanctorum Communio (1:58-59/221). All Bonhoeffer references in this essay first list the volume number of the critical edition, after which the page number is given for its English (DBWE) and German (DBW) versions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, 17 vols., ed. Eberhard Bethge et al. (Munich: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1986–99); translated as Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, 17 vols., ed. Victoria J. Barnett et al. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996–).
2.
Bethge continues that the philosophers did not recognise themselves in this characterisation, later siding with critics about Bonhoeffer’s conceptual oversimplifications. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, trans. E. Mosbacher et al. (London: Collins, 1970), pp. 97-99.
3.
Marsh goes on to state that in his dissertations ‘Bonhoeffer had mounted an acrid assault on the German philosophical tradition, hacking through the thickets and thorns of Hegelian dialectic in a desperate bid to rescue the sanctity of the social, relational self from a world-dominating “Transcendental Ego”’. Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Knopf, 2014), pp. 91-92, 118.
4.
In his paper at Union Seminary in New York, Bonhoeffer played an ambassadorial role for the ‘theology of crisis’. He writes that in an ‘energetic attack on idealism’: ‘Barth sees in the essential boundlessness of thinking, in its claim a closed system, in its egocentricity a philosophical affirmation of the theological insight of the Reformers, which they expressed in terms of cor curvum in se, corruptio mentis. Man in statu corruptionis is indeed alone, he is his own creator and lord, he is indeed the center of his world of sin’ (10:472-3/445-6).
5.
The language of confinement in the self recurs in other critics. Recently, Martin Rumscheidt writes that what had troubled Bonhoeffer ‘about the philosophy of idealism and the liberal theologies that built on it was the confinement to the self’. See ‘The Significance of Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, in Peter Frick (ed.), Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), p. 208.
6.
Bonhoeffer states that the ‘tragedy of all idealist philosophy was that it never ultimately broke through to personal spirit’. He continues with an appreciation of Hegel’s ‘monumental perception’ of ‘objective spirit, the spirit of sociality’, wanting to affirm the latter without denying the former (1:74/46).
7.
Cyril O’Regan’s study traces the likeness of Hegel’s ‘theological’ ventures to Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme and Valentinian Gnosticism. He regularly notes that Hegel’s ‘heterodoxy’ is unintentional, as ‘Hegel presumes himself not to be deviating from the spirit of Lutheran confession’. Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 195.
8.
This observation leads the collection of essays marking the completion of the critical works in English. The editors note that Bonhoeffer is ‘simultaneously the most quoted and the most misinterpreted Christian theologian of the twentieth century’. Clifford Green and Guy Carter (eds.), Interpreting Bonhoeffer: Historical Perspectives, Emerging Issues (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), p. xi.
9.
Frederick Beiser notes that this is a ‘puzzling’ phenomenon, understandable only because of those ‘nonmetaphysical’ interpreters who have rendered him more acceptable to a secular, positivist age. Robert Brandom is a prime instance. See ‘Introduction: The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and 19th Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 3-5.
10.
11.
‘The “beautiful soul”, who retains his purity of aim inwardly intact, is really the empty subject, and not the truly free subject, as Kant supposed.’ John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 2006), p. 162.
12.
13.
Hegel’s edelmütig and niederträchtig are translated by Pinkard as ‘noble-minded’ and ‘base’, largely echoing A. V. Miller. Brandom renders edelmütig as ‘magnanimous’ and niederträchtig as ‘pusillanimous’, referring to them as Hegel’s meta-attitudes towards the relations between norms (a term which mirrors Hegel’s use of necessity). Brandom, Spirit of Trust, 5.13, pp. 110-11, cf. p. 161
14.
‘It in fact confesses to being evil by way of its affirmation that it acts according to its own inner law and conscience in opposition to what is recognised as universal’ (PhG §662, emphasis original). Peter Hodgson discerns little difference in the use of ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ throughout Hegel’s later Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; see Hegel and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 151 n. 12. Looking ahead, Bonhoeffer himself uses the terms Sünde and Böse interchangeably in the chapter on confession in Life Together (5:108,110/93-94).
15.
Isa. 47:10, NRSV: ‘You felt secure in your wickedness; you said, “No one sees me.” Your wisdom and your knowledge led you astray, and you said in your heart, “I am, and there is no one besides me.”’
16.
Terry Pinkard, ‘Semantic Self-Consciousness: Brandom on Hegel’, Draft essay from the conference Language and Modernity: Brandom’s Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Freie Universität Berlin (19-21 June, 2014), p. 12.
17.
In Brandom’s version, forgiveness looks back over the evil aspect in the confessant’s history and recognises one’s own share in it. This is extended into what he calls ‘retroactivity’ in the concrete, practical response the confessor offers in restitution. Spirit of Trust, 5.14. p.225-9.
18.
On Brandom’s reading, the religion chapter of the Phenomenology comments back on a development already completed in the Spirit chapter, in which it is presented ‘in a more perspicuous form’. Spirit of Trust, 5.14. p.166-7.
19.
Brandom, Spirit of Trust, 5.14, pp. 219-20, emphasis original.
20.
Philosophy is here understood as an investigation of systems of classification and the rules that govern judgments, a ‘second-order discourse’. Theology is meanwhile understood as a ‘first-order’ task of articulating doctrinal loci that takes its categories and rules for judgment for granted. Nicholas Adams, The Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. xviii, 167-68.
21.
The first sentence of Bonhoeffer’s preface to Sanctorum Communio makes this clear: ‘in this study social philosophy and sociology are employed in the service of theology’ (1:21/13). This is emphasised in response to Peter Berger’s criticism that Bonhoeffer does not provide a fruitful starting-point for the dialogue between theology and the social sciences in Michael Mawson, ‘Theology and Social Theory: Reevaluating Bonhoeffer’s Approach’, Theology Today 71.1 (2014), p. 74.
22.
He writes that with regards to the perception of reality, ‘just as sound lies in different spheres of perception for musicians and physicists, so it is with time for idealist epistemology and for a Christian concept of person, without the one sphere cancelling out the other’ (1:48/28).
23.
See Marsh, Strange Glory, pp. 235-37; cf. 5:124/139.
24.
‘The Protestant church lost its concrete ethics when ministers saw themselves no longer permanently confronted with the questions and the responsibilities of the confessional’ (6:395/399).
25.
Nicola J. Wilkes, ‘Life and Health: Bonhoeffer’s Normative and Divergent Accounts of Private Confession of Sin’, Theology Today 71.1 (2014), pp. 64, 67-68.
26.
Bonhoeffer lists ‘reason, ethical fanaticism, conscience, duty, free responsibility, and quiet virtue’. ‘Free responsibility’ appears closest to his own position for many interpreters, and here he shows himself aware of its tragic character. See 6:79-80/65-66.
27.
‘A confession is the church’s response, as formulated and spoken in its own words, to the word of God in the Holy Scriptures’ (14:404/389).
28.
‘The Confessing Church and the Ecumenical Movement’. The essay appeared in August 1935 in the periodical Evangelische Theologie (2, no. 7:245-62). DBWE 14:393-4 n[1].
29.
Bonhoeffer’s dual sense of ‘confession’ holds together what Andrew Shanks, attempting to explicate Hegel, pulls apart in his book’s driving contrast: ‘truth-as-correctness’ and ‘truth-as-openness’. Not surprisingly, Shanks allows that Nazi Germany is a case in which this breaks down, in which ‘openness’ meets its limits and ‘reluctant schism’ is warranted. See A Neo-Hegelian Theology: The God of Greatest Hospitality (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), p. 25.
30.
Pace Bonhoeffer’s claim that with regards to Realität the ‘social’ category cannot be derived from the ‘epistemological’, which he claims would be a change into a different category (1:45/26).
31.
Brandom, Spirit of Trust, 5.15, pp. 239-40, emphasis original.
32.
Brandom, Spirit of Trust, 5.15, pp. 220-21.
33.
Terry Pinkard points out the stark contrast shown by the historic institution of such a procedure: ‘After violently subjecting the Anglo-Saxon king and his subjects at Hastings, William sent out judges to various parts of his new domain to establish a “common law”. There the object was not to rationally extend some old rulings but to displace the old rulings root and branch and replace them with a new authority, one backed up by more than semantic sanctions. There was little to no “forgiveness” practiced there.’ Pinkard, ‘Semantic Self-Consciousness’, pp. 7-8.
34.
Rowan Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, in P. Berry and Andrew Wernick, Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 76, 79.
35.
In the afterword to the German critical edition of Sanctorum Communio, Joachim von Soosten already observes that ‘in the debate over Bonhoeffer’s dissertation, this phrase has almost taken on a life of its own; consequently, its original meaning in Bonhoeffer has been almost totally obscured’ (1:295/311).
36.
Charles Taylor admits to being baffled at the form of Hegelian prayer. He pictures it along the lines of contemplating identity rather than taking the form of petition. See Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 494.
37.
In Terry Pinkard’s rendition of Hegel: ‘It will turn out, so Hegel will argue, that the God of this religious community is not the transcendent metaphysical God of orthodox Christianity but is what is divinely immanent within human life itself as the human community has come to understand itself. What we take as sacred – the divine – are the things that for us have come to have absolute value (that is, in Hegel’s words, what “exists in and for itself”)’. See Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 219-20.
38.
Bonhoeffer received much of his Hegel mediated through his first dissertation advisor, Reinhold Seeberg, with this phrase featuring in Seeberg’s Dogmatik. In appraising the influence, see Rumscheidt, ‘von Harnack and Seeberg’, in Frick (ed.), Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation, p. 202.
39.
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. III. The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter Hodgson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 331.
40.
‘The false opposition between spirit and community, and thus between God and community, is overcome in a logic in which spirit is a predicate of community, and community is a predicate of God. It is vital to observe that it is not a logic in which God is a predicate. The logic is not reversible: it has a single directionality.’ Adams, Eclipse of Grace, p. 208.
41.
Drawing on Martin Wendte’s account of the relation between logical and theological investigations, Adams uses Chalcedon as a model for describing Hegel’s logic of ‘distinctness-in-inseparable unity’. Adams, Eclipse of Grace, p. 6.
42.
Hegel gives a vigorous defense against challenges to the integrity of his Christian doctrine. In the following letter excerpt, he goes on to challenge his recipient’s rationalist criticism of the Trinity: ‘I am a Lutheran, and through philosophy have been at once completely confirmed in Lutheranism. I detest seeing such things explained in the same manner as perhaps the descent and dissemination of silk culture, cherries, smallpox, and the like.’ G. W. F. Hegel to Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck, 3 July 1826, Hegel: The Letters, pp. 519-20, cited in Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 222.
43.
An example of this is Bonhoeffer’s most assured statement that ‘the church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God. The New Testament knows one form of revelation: Christ existing as community’ (1:141/87). Bonhoeffer claims that ecclesial acts such as intercessory prayer must be ‘viewed from two angles’, challenging a stark division between human action and divine will (1:186-7/124).
44.
Among Luther’s phrases to which Bonhoeffer refers: ‘We are God through the love that makes us charitable toward our neighbour’ (1:178-9/117-18). Bonhoeffer sounds a recurrent caveat: this is not to imply ‘any mystical notions of blurring the boundaries of the concrete reality of I and You’, even if desire is united and ‘the positions resulting from sin are, as it were, exchanged, or transformed’ (1:179-80/118).
45.
See Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Cambridge, MA: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 271, 251.
46.
It is said of Bonhoeffer’s forebear that ‘so nervous is Luther of founding justification in nobis that he speaks of a willingness to be damned as the one assurance of salvation’. See Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on the homo incurvatus in se (London: T&T Clark, 2006), p. 78.
47.
In so doing, Paul is an example of obedience ‘to the command that we should unreservedly surrender ourselves to our neighbour. But precisely for this very reason, he remains where he wishes God to ban him from, namely in the most intimate community with God’(1:185/122-3).
48.
Bonhoeffer’s poem ‘Death of Moses’ reveals how he identified with the patriarch. See Craig Slane, ‘The Death of Moses: Why Moses?’ in Bernd Wannenwetsch (ed.), Who Am I? Bonhoeffer’s Theology through his Poetry (London: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 228-30.
49.
He cites God’s statement in Gen. 18:32 that ‘for the sake of ten I will not destroy them’ (1:120/75). The unmentioned context is that this is in response to Abraham’s intercession for Sodom.
50.
In a lecture on the church, Bonhoeffer states that ‘he who is the church-community [Gemeinde] itself is also its Lord. But not the heavenly head of the earthly body, but also as the head wholly connected with the earthly body. Nonetheless, here a juxtaposition [Gegenüber] of the church-community and Christ, a non-identity [eine Nicht-Identität]’ (14:450/438-39).
51.
In ‘Ethics as Formation’, Bonhoeffer claims that Gestaltung, formation, depends entirely on the singular Gestalt of Christ. It provides a contrast with striving for the Übermenschentum. See 6:92-4/79-81. Cf. 6:88/75: ‘in the figure of the crucified, human beings recognize and find themselves’.
52.
The editors of Sanctorum Communio reason that ‘in Bonhoeffer’s most distinctive and fundamental usage in this book, Gemeinde means Christ present as sanctorum communio…its meaning provides the theological norm for “church”. This in contrast with “sociological” terms such as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft’. See DBWE 1:14-17.
53.
He elaborates that ‘Hegel compelled Bonhoeffer to consider nothing less than the ontological and structural reconfiguration of the person in fellowship with God’. Marsh, Reclaiming, p. 175 n. 11.
54.
I want to thank Carsten Card-Hyatt, Nicholas Adams and David Fergusson for comments on early drafts of this essay.