The Weakness of the Word and the Reality of God: Luther and Bonhoeffer on the Cross of Discipleship 1

Introduction

In an extraordinary essay on the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem, ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’, Hans Ulrich reflects upon the ways in which Bonhoeffer’s writings—and this prison poem in particular—presents us with a ‘grammar of theological work’ and of Christian discipleship. ² ‘What Bonhoeffer articulates in his writings’, Ulrich suggests, ‘is the life of a human being in patient and attentive expectation of God’s action, ready to surrender to God’s will and plan—which makes him a disciple.’ ³ In this article, Ulrich gives particular attention to the significance of divine and human suffering for what it means to become a disciple. Ulrich draws out some important and neglected Lutheran themes in Bonhoeffer’s late theology.

In his earlier 1937 Discipleship, one of Bonhoeffer’s surprising (and again neglected) claims is that ‘the Word of God is so weak that it suffers to be despised and rejected by people’. For the Word, Bonhoeffer continues, ‘there are such things as hardened hearts and locked doors’. ⁴ Bonhoeffer’s point here is that God comes to and dwells within the world in the weakness and suffering of this Word, not through divine authority or strength more directly. Furthermore, Bonhoeffer insists that this weakness is at the heart of what it means to become a Christian disciple: ‘This weakness liberates them [the disciples] from the sick restlessness of a fanatic; they suffer with the Word.’ ⁵ The Word’s very weakness is what frees Christ’s followers to attend to and suffer in the world, namely, without needing to interpret or make sense of this suffering in reference to some external principle or higher ideal. Indeed, this weakness is what allows for a kind of witness and mission that is genuinely Christian. The Word’s weakness discloses a new Christian and theological grammar, a framework for speaking of and attending to God’s own presence and work.

Drawing inspiration from Ulrich’s essay, this article explores and reflects upon Luther’s and Bonhoeffer’s theology of weakness and its implications for Christian mission today. In the first section, I outline Luther’s theologia crucis, as presented in the Heidelberg Disputation; I suggest that this provides the basic framework for a theology of discipleship and suffering. In the second section, I consider the theme of the Word’s weakness in Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship. Third, I draw out and develop these themes with reference to the Pauline language of hope, faith and love. Finally, by way of conclusion, I offer some reflections on the significance of these Lutheran and Bonhoefferian themes for Christian mission and evangelism today.

Luther’s Theologia Crucis

In his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, Martin Luther provided a classic formulation of his own early theological programme and that of the emerging reform movement. At the heart of this Disputation is thesis 23: ‘A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls a thing what it actually is’ (theologia crucis quod res est). ⁶ Luther draws a sharp distinction here between two different dispositions or grammars: two ways of naming things, that is, of positioning ourselves (or of being positioned) with respect to God, one another and reality.

Luther’s ‘theologian of glory’ diagnoses what human beings are on their own terms, apart from how God comes to us in Christ. Luther uses this designation to diagnose the kind of grammar that proceeds from our own natural knowledge of and assumptions about God and reality. Fundamentally, this disposition is marked by our confidence and even hubris; it is marked by a certain confidence that we ourselves can recognise and speak of God, that we can understand who God is and how God is present to and active in the world. The one who operates with this grammar thus understands and speaks of God in terms of various positive attributes and qualities: goodness, holiness, wisdom, justice, and so on. Accordingly, this theologian of glory assumes the basic adequacy and stability of such concepts and language, and, accordingly, assumes a level of continuity and analogy between what we think is good, holy and true, and God’s own being and action. Following Luther, this theologian of glory assumes that God is to be found in and behind those things and values that we collectively endorse. God’s ultimate judgment and grace is anticipated by, or at least continuous with, our own penultimate understanding and pursuit of such things and values. ⁷

Furthermore, this means that this grammar is marked by a certain confidence with respect to reality. The theologian of glory assumes that we can recognize those things that are good and evil in the world. Put differently, there is a confidence that the meaning of reality itself is straightforwardly available to us. As Gerhard Forde has aptly summarised, ‘theologians of glory operate on the assumption that creation and history are transparent to human intellect…’ ⁸ At the heart of this disposition or grammar, therefore, is a conviction that we can know what is what. ⁹ This kind of theologian or human being assumes that she has the capacity to recognise and speak of what things are and what they mean. In Aquinas’s language, there is a confidence that the ‘good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.’ ¹⁰

Luther’s own point, of course, is that this theologian of glory is mistaken. Theologically, this theologian is mistaken in that her thinking and speech, at least on some level, is proceeding from her own assumptions and resources, rather than from God’s revelation in and as Christ. In thesis 19 of the Disputation, he writes: ‘That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have actually happened.’ ¹¹ The mistake of this would-be theologian is that she does not recognise that it is God who discloses who God is and what things mean: ¹² ‘Reality is God’s reality, and we are involved in that reality as he is.’ ¹³ Accordingly, any genuine knowledge that we have of God and of the meaning of things proceeds from and is tied to God’s Word. Following Luther, this is because we ourselves have no stable or independent standpoint from which to approach either God or the world. There is no human being as such, only the one who stands before God simul justus et peccator.

In the Disputation, Luther is not only concerned with diagnosing this theologia gloriae, this sinful human disposition with all its assumptions about God and the world, he is also concerned to set forth a more genuinely theological disposition or grammar. For Luther, the cross is the way in which God interrupts and overturns our natural assumptions and dispositions, re-orientating us and setting us within a different story. ¹⁴ Luther’s theologia crucis is thus an attempt to set forth a living grammar tied to God’s disruptive revelation in and as the crucified one. The theologian of the cross, then, is the one who properly attends to the cross and its significance for who we are before God and in the world: ‘He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.’ ¹⁵

On the one hand, this makes clear that for Luther we are to know and speak of God only from the standpoint of the cross: ‘God can only be found in suffering and the cross.’ ¹⁶ As Luther elsewhere famously makes this point, ‘Christ alone, and no other God’. ¹⁷ We have no true knowledge of who or what God is prior to and apart from Christ. ¹⁸ And this always means Christ as the one who was humiliated, who suffered, and who was crucified: ‘True theology and the recognition of God are in the crucified Christ.’ ¹⁹ And if, as Christians, we can properly speak of God only with reference to the cross, this forecloses any attempt to understand or speak of God otherwise and more directly. As Paul famously puts this in 1 Corinthians, ‘I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified’. ²⁰ Luther’s Pauline insistence on the cross is intended to close down speculative attempts to understand God in terms of the attributes or qualities of a perfect being: goodness, pure being, wisdom, power, and so forth. As Bonhoeffer will later make this point in his Christology lectures: ‘If we are to describe Jesus as God, we would not speak of his being all-powerful or all-knowing; we would speak of his birth in a manager and of his cross.’ ²¹

On the other hand, for Luther the cross is not only decisive for how we speak of God, but again includes a grammar for attending to reality as such, i.e. reality as it is before God. In thesis 21 of the Disputation, he writes, ‘He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil’. ²² Apart from the cross, we are disposed to look for meaning in the things that appear good. We look for God’s presence, or try to discern God’s hand, in and through those things that we most value. Luther’s point, then, is that it is the cross that allows us to perceive reality differently, as it truly is. Commenting on this, Marius Mjaaland has recently written: ‘Suffering and cross thus function as the prism through which the world is perceived, or, rather, the grammar which structures thought and perception in light of scripture.’ ²³ The cross allows us to see that God is, in fact, present and at work precisely where we least expect it, that is, even and especially in the depths of our suffering and apparent failure. Hence such things can mean something different than what we ourselves would assume.

What is clear, then, is that in both instances there is a rupture or break between what we think we know about God and the things of this world, and what God discloses and teaches us in Christ. ²⁴ There is a discontinuity between what we assume and what God reveals is the case. This means that God’s revelation as Christ inevitably subverts our own assumptions. Luther is of course taking up a familiar Pauline theme here: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart’ (1 Cor. 1:18-19). The theologian of the cross is the one who attends to the disruptive force of God’s death upon the cross for human wisdom. To be Christian, a theologian, involves allowing our assumptions and self-confidence to be overturned (and continually overturned) by God in Christ. With the cross, God confronts and disrupts our basic self-confidence and redirects us to the human suffering of Christ as the truth of God. ²⁵

Finally, for Luther the grammar or disposition of the theologia crucis entails a further attentiveness to our own human suffering. When we view God and reality through the prism of the cross, we can begin to recognise God’s presence and action in our own suffering and failure: ‘He who has been emptied through suffering no longer does works but knows that God works and does all things in him.’ ²⁶ Through our own suffering and weakness, God helps us to relinquish our reliance on ourselves and to make us available for Christ. That is why ‘I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ’, Paul tells us, ‘for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.’ ²⁷ Such weakness and hardships help us to surrender our own agendas and make us more available for God’s own work. ²⁸ Ulrich echoes this point: ‘To suffer means to give oneself over to God and his story, which through Jesus has already been revealed to be precisely that suffering.’ ²⁹ Through the cross Christ’s followers are freed from their native, sinful grammar and disposition of glory, and are drawn into a different kind of grammar or story. ³⁰

Bonhoeffer and the Weakness of the Word

Luther’s central distinction between the theologia gloriae and theologia crucis provides the context for understanding the theme of the weakness of God’s Word in Bonhoeffer’s theology. Indeed, it discloses what Ulrich describes as ‘the Lutheran grammar of Bonhoeffer’s theology’. ³¹ Bonhoeffer’s rich mediations and comments on this theme draw out and expand upon Luther’s earlier insights. ³²

In particular, Bonhoeffer makes a similar distinction between two dispositions or grammars at the heart of his 1937 Discipleship. On the one hand, he, too, diagnoses the attempt to engage God and the world through our own active efforts or strivings: ‘All our urging, running after people, proselytizing, every attempt to accomplish something in another person by our own power is vain and dangerous.’ ³³ This activity is dangerous in that it again depends upon and proceeds from our own assumptions and wisdom about God and the world. Bonhoeffer’s concern is that through these activities we are trying to impose our own ideas about Christ on to others.

Developing Luther’s insights in a new context, Bonhoeffer characterises this theologia gloriae as a kind of idealism. Those who operate from within this disposition are governed by adherence to an ideal, rather than by the concrete reality of the Word: ‘The driving restlessness of the group of disciples, who do not want to accept any limitation on their effectiveness, and their zeal, which does not respect resistance, confuses the word of the gospel with a conquering idea.’ ³⁴ These would-be disciples speak and act on the basis of an idealized version of what the gospel is and means. In so doing, they fail to recognise or attend to God’s Word itself, to how God actually comes to us and claims us.

In particular, Bonhoeffer suggests that these would-be disciples neglect the weakness of God’s Word. They neglect the concrete nature of God’s own revelation or address, that is, how God has actually spoken and speaks to us both in Christ and through Scripture: ‘The idea is strong. But the Word of God is so weak that it suffers to be despised and rejected by people.’ ³⁵ In preferring the strength of the idea, Christ’s would-be followers give priority to their own assumptions and wisdom. They remain committed to the certainty and stability of their own knowledge about God, rather than attending to God’s own surprising and unexpected address in Christ’s weakness.

Moreover, Bonhoeffer claims that this commitment to human wisdom and stability preempts attending to the God who comes to us in Scripture. Attending to the cross presses us back into Scripture in its concrete materiality, and vice versa. In an important essay from the Finkenwalde period, ‘Contemporizing New Testament Texts’, ³⁶ he writes that the ‘turn back to Scripture corresponds exactly to the turn undertaken by Christian faith and Christian hope, namely, back to the cross of Christ. In both cases, it is the historicity of God’s revelation that comes to expression…’ ³⁷ Attending to God in the suffering and human Christ leads us to recognise that God is present and speaking to us through these fragile human texts. ³⁸ At the same time, attending to Scripture in its historicity directs us back to a God who suffers a human death on a cross. As Bonhoeffer puts this in a later letter from Tegel prison, ‘The Bible directs people towards the powerlessness and suffering of God’. ³⁹

Following Bonhoeffer, this means that we are to attend to these texts as the place of God’s revelation and witness in their entirety and simply as they stand: ‘It is precisely as such a historic, temporary word that it is indeed the word of God.’ ⁴⁰ This means that Scripture as God’s Word and address to us, where God calls and claims us in Christ, always is and remains a thoroughly human word. God is present in this human word, making it God’s own; but this is God’s Word, Bonhoeffer insists, in such a way that ‘the human word does not cease being temporary bound and transient’. ⁴¹

As with Luther, this means that God’s presence in revelation—in Christ and through Scripture—remains a hidden presence. In both cases God’s revelation remains concealed under the form of fragility and weakness. ⁴² In his 1933 Christology lectures, Bonhoeffer asserts that Christ ‘comes among us humans not in Godly form, but rather incognito, as a beggar among beggars, an outcast among outcasts; he comes among sinners as the one without sin, but also as a sinner among sinners’. ⁴³ In Christ and through Scripture, God embraces and enters the sinful condition of humanity. God’s Word is ineluctably tied to human suffering and weakness. As Ulrich makes this same point, ‘Jesus therefore is not the last triumphant representative of God—he is the one in whom God himself suffers, stepping into our human powerlessness and loneliness’. ⁴⁴

Faith, Hope and Love

What are the implications of Luther’s and Bonhoeffer’s theology of the crucified Christ? What does this weakness of God’s Word, in Christ and through Scripture, mean for the shape of the Christian life? The implications of this theology can be further explicated using Paul’s language of hope, faith and love (1 Cor. 13:13).

First, for both Luther and Bonhoeffer it is because God in Christ takes on and enters into a suffering and sinful world that we have grounds for hope. For both, it is only this kind of God who is able to save us. In his 1535 lectures on Galatians, for instance, Luther reflects: ‘Whenever you … wonder how or where or in what condition to find a God who justifies and accepts sinners, then you must know that there is no other God than this Man Jesus Christ. Take hold of Him, cling to him with all your heart, and spurn all speculation about Divine Majesty.’ ⁴⁵ In preparation for a sermon for Trinity Sunday in April 1936, Bonhoeffer put this same point even more bluntly: ‘What good does a God do us who is in eternity, stronger than the majesty of the world, stronger than sin and death? This God does not concern us? How can such a god help us?’ ⁴⁶ It is only the God who is present in the suffering of Christ that provides hope in the midst of our own suffering and sin. ⁴⁷ For Luther and Bonhoeffer, God’s presence in Christ means that we are no longer alone in our suffering. This means that we no longer have to take flight into ideas or ideals, but can have hope where we are. As Ulrich reminds us, ‘Christian hope is not about expecting another world, but rather an encounter with God himself in this world’. ⁴⁸

Second, God’s presence in suffering and weakness, in Christ and through Scripture, provides the basis for faith. God’s presence in suffering and on the cross frees us from having to depend on our own knowledge, and instead turns (and continually returns) us to faith in Christ. Following Paul, the very foolishness of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18-20), the incomprehensibility of God as present and at work in this place, helps to disrupt our confidence in our own knowledge and assumptions. In his Christology lectures, Bonhoeffer expresses this Lutheran insight: ‘faith exists when I yield myself to God … even and especially there where it goes against all visible appearances. Only when I give up having visible confirmation do I believe in God.’ ⁴⁹ The point, then, is that God’s suffering on the cross challenges our own knowledge and assumptions about God, helping us to instead trust in and embrace God’s own story: ‘Faith is trust in God’s plan.’ ⁵⁰ By confounding our attempts to speak of God on our own terms, the cross liberates us to attend to how God comes to and is present with us.

Third, God’s presence on the cross of Christ facilitates Christian love. Attending to God’s presence as the crucified one frees us to live in the world and for the neighbour. In Christ, God has embraced humanity in its suffering and fragility. And this in turn frees us to similarly embrace others simply as we find them. Put differently, the cross frees us to see and respond to others as they actually are, not with reference to some higher ideal or purpose. This, of course, is the central movement of Luther’s ‘Freedom of a Christian’: ‘From faith … flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves one’s neighbour willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame of gain or loss.’ ⁵¹ As Bonhoeffer develops this theme in his Ethics, ‘The cross of reconciliation sets us free to live before God in the midst of the godless world, sets us free to live in genuine worldliness’. ⁵² God’s work on the cross frees us to love the world and those in it.

Reframing Christian Mission

In this final section, by way of conclusion, I will simply draw out a few implications of this theologia crucis for contemporary Christian mission and evangelism. Given the weakness of God’s Word, how are we as disciples to witness to and engage the world today?

First and foremost, the Lutheran theme of God’s presence in weakness provides a useful counterpoint to a continual Christian temptation to pursue missional and evangelistic activities that are triumphalist and even imperialistic. Attending to God’s presence on the cross can help to preempt a kind of witness and activity that tries to engage the world from a position of strength. In other words, the grammar of the cross frees us from needing to rely upon or make use of our own strength in relation to other human beings. More subtly, this grammar frees us from a benevolence that implicitly construes the other as a project or object of charity. In either case, the cross reminds us that we do not possess any special knowledge, insight, or truth vis-à-vis the other: ‘In dealing with other people, the disciples do not possess any special power or right of their own.’ ⁵³

This in turn frees Christians from needing a fixed programme or governing ideal when engaging in mission and evangelism. As already suggested, by attending to and participating in the suffering of the cross, we are freed from having to depend upon our own wisdom and knowledge about God, others and the world. The unexpected nature of God’s presence in this place frees us from needing to be in control. As Bonhoeffer puts this in Life Together, ‘this means I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with love’. ⁵⁴ The cross frees us to begin to attend to the surprising ways in which God continues to be present and at work in the world today, which will often conflict with our own assumptions about who God is and how God works.

If this is the case, then we are never finally in a position to judge the effectiveness of our own witness. God’s presence on the cross discloses that God’s ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:9). This suggests that God may well be present when our attempts at mission and witness appear to us to be failing. In a sermon from 1518, Luther suggests that it is through our failure that we begin to rely on God’s grace: ‘Here is where all who undertake to do something of themselves are compelled to submit and be conquered … We must despair of everything that we can do. But those who say, Ah, but I have done as much as I possibly can; I have done enough, and I hope that God will give me grace—they set up an iron wall between themselves and the grace of God.’ ⁵⁵ Our very failure and despair makes room for God’s own work in and through us.

On the other hand, this suggests we should similarly be cautious when our attempts at mission and evangelism seem to succeed. Commenting on success in Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes: ‘The figure of the judged and crucified one remains alien, and at best pitiable, to a world where success is the measure and justification of all things.’ ⁵⁶ While not suggesting that we should avoid success per se—that is, set out with the intention of failing—both Luther and Bonhoeffer hold that success brings with it a temptation to make this success into its own justification. When our endeavours appear to succeed, we become tempted to claim this success as our own. Put differently, we become tempted to attribute apparent success to our own strength and wisdom. We know from the gospels, of course, that such apparent success is often fleeting. While large crowds do at times gather to listen attentively to Jesus’ teachings, they just as quickly disperse and turn against him.

God’s presence on the cross, therefore, directs our attention away from our own activity, endeavours, and works, and from any success or failure therein. The cross reminds us that it is God’s own presence in an all-too-human human suffering, and not our own knowledge or strivings, that ultimately brings about change and redemption in the world. In light of this, the task given to Christians is to recognise the limits of what we ourselves can know and achieve. ⁵⁷ Instead, the grammar of the cross locates us within a new story; it leads us to be prayerfully attentive to God’s own work in Christ and in and through us. To give Bonhoeffer the final word:

In their own lives, only the saints see strife, hardship, weakness, and sin. And the more maturity they gain in the state of sanctification, the more they recognize themselves as being overcome, as those who are dying according to the flesh … But because of this very fact, their whole life must now be an act of faith in the Son of God who has begun his own life in them. ⁵⁸