Abstract
A constant stream of new scholarly and popular publications about Dietrich Bonhoeffer provide ample evidence of a persistent level of interest in his life and thought, perhaps more so than in any other theologian from the twentieth century. Many of these publications, because they tend to focus on popular works such as Discipleship or Letters and Papers from Prison in isolation from his total body of work, fail to connect what they find compelling in these texts to the many intellectual sources that initially shaped his theology, and as a result offer less-than-adequate interpretations. David Robinson’s examination of Bonhoeffer’s reception of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy is the latest in a series of monographs that seek to remedy that shortcoming. The significance of these studies cannot be understated, because they draw attention to the groundwork that was laid for Bonhoeffer’s later writings in his two dissertations and the lectures he gave as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin.
Robinson states in the introduction that his aim is to perform some ‘intra-Lutheran’ repair work between Hegel and Bonhoeffer through close attention to their respective positions. Such repair is needed, he writes, because Bonhoeffer’s own criticisms of Hegel have tended to occlude the extent to which his thought is still deeply indebted to his nineteenth-century predecessor. He describes Bonhoeffer’s reception of Hegel as eclectic, permitting Bonhoeffer to be critical of his predecessor while at the same time appropriating many of what he calls Hegel’s ‘terms of art’ that he thinks are of value.
The book is divided into three parts, each with two chapters, and a conclusion. In Part 1 Robinson challenges the neglect that Hegel’s influence exerted on Bonhoeffer has suffered due to the latter’s critique of ‘Idealism’ as a form of ‘self-confinement’, echoing Martin Luther’s notion of the incurvature of the self. Robinson contends in the first chapter that Bonhoeffer appropriated Hegel’s concept of ‘objective Geist’ as the basis for his understanding of human sociality, but that he modifies it by insistence that the disruptive Word is prior to Geist and that divine intercession precedes confession. In chapter 2 Robinson argues that, in spite of his critique of Hegel’s claim to divine knowledge, Bonhoeffer uses Hegel’s account of the ‘cleaving mind’ that claims to know the primal beginning and thus is capable of discerning between good and evil.
Hegel’s philosophy, writes Robinson, provides Bonhoeffer with the basis for his alternative theory to ‘atomistic’ philosophies grounded in the reasoning subject. He notes that Bonhoeffer thinks it necessary both to turn away from Idealist theory and to learn from it. Bonhoeffer’s prioritizing of intercession over Hegel’s mutual confession is grounded in the concept of Stellvertretung, vicarious representative action, which occurs in the intervention of God in the person of Christ. While Bonhoeffer rejects Hegel’s claim that reason is no longer compromised but reclaimed in the ‘idea’ of Christ as the second Adam (which obscures the personal address of God in the human being Jesus and enthrones reason in the place of God), he does adapt the notion of the cleaving mind to critique Hegel’s ultimate identification of divine and human knowledge.
Part 2 revolves around Bonhoeffer’s Christology lectures, which he delivered at the same time as his Hegel seminar. Chapter 3 attends to the way that the immanent ‘human-logos’, which Bonhoeffer links to Hegel’s thought, is confronted by the divine ‘counter-logos’ that dethrones autonomous human reason. The aim in this confrontation is not to promote a kind of ‘anti-reason’, but to critique every effort to think apart from the unity of the God-human person. Bonhoeffer thus positions Christ, in whom all of reality holds together, as the hidden center of ‘science’, Wissenschaft. Christ’s presence in Word and Sacrament comprises the theme of chapter 4, and, according to Robinson, Bonhoeffer’s understanding here should be located within the polemical debates taking place between Reformed thinkers, preeminently Karl Barth, and Lutherans such as Franz Hildebrandt.
In this second part Robinson allows us to see the way Bonhoeffer carefully positions himself between, on one hand, the stated positions of nineteenth-century Idealism, against which he advocates a form of reason that is subject to the divine logos, and, on the other hand, contemporary Reformed thinkers, particularly with regard to what he takes to be their insistence that the Logos remains outside the Eucharist, asserting instead that the whole Christ is present in the Supper. According to Robinson, Bonhoeffer credits Hegel with bringing to light the this-worldliness of the sacrament while at the same time refusing the reduction of the incarnate Christ to an idea, with important implications for the political differences between the two.
In Part 3 Robinson examines Discipleship and Ethics to argue that the influence of Hegel on Bonhoeffer is not limited to his time as a student and then as a lecturer in the university, but pervades his later writings. In chapter 5 he shows the divergence between Bonhoeffer and Hegel with respect to their readings of the Sermon on the Mount, with the latter contending that Jesus is a passing figure in the development of the Protestant state, while Bonhoeffer embraces the form of life set forth in the Sermon. Bonhoeffer takes this form of life as the basis for the intentional community that he sets up at Finkenwalde, which means that the church requires its own Lebensraum, obviously a politically-charged concept in Germany at that time. In the final chapter Robinson distinguishes Hegel’s political thought from that of his neo-Hegelian successors, allowing him to compare in a positive light Hegel’s assertion that the state can forfeit its status through the ill-treatment of foreigners with Bonhoeffer’s critique of the treatment of Jews by the National Socialist state. Robinson also reminds the reader that neither Hegel nor Bonhoeffer was innocent of anti-Jewish sentiments.
In a brief conclusion to the book Robinson returns to the theme of Bonhoeffer’s ‘eclectic’ reception of Hegel’s thought to challenge caricatures and dismissals of him, and also to speculate about what the study of these two important figures might portend for the future with respect to theology and ethics. He concludes that Bonhoeffer’s particularist account of the Christian community as revelatory is not reducible to the categories of either visibility or invisibility, but offers it as a witness to the ‘trans-visibility’ of that communal body.
Robinson’s investigation into Bonhoeffer’s reception of Hegel aptly demonstrates what is generally true about his thought, which is that he is a consummate bricoleur, one who uses ideas and arguments of others to articulate his own project, respectful of their original meaning but not at all reticent about appropriating their ‘terms of art’ into his own distinctive agenda. Hegel is among the first noteworthy thinkers with whom Bonhoeffer interacts to formulate his own ideas, and he invariably employs him in that ‘eclectic’ manner.
It is also significant that Robinson reads Bonhoeffer as a theologian, which may seem obvious but is very much worth noting. Virtually everything Bonhoeffer writes is predicated on substantial christological and ecclesial motifs that confer on his ethical reflections a distinctive sense and sensibility which those who think of themselves as ‘ethicists’ often find confusing. The failure to engage his work theologically, or, as he puts it, dogmatically, is a common error, particularly among scholars in the United States.
If there is one structural criticism I would make of this investigation, it is that Robinson does not address other influences, both positive and negative, in Bonhoeffer’s writings that bear upon his use of Hegel. For example, in his treatment of the divergence between Bonhoeffer and Hegel in connection with the Fall, it would have been helpful to discuss the book by Emmanuel Hirsch, Schöpfung und Sünde [Creation and Sin] (Mohr, 1931), to which Bonhoeffer’s lectures were offered in response. Hirsch’s sympathies with the agenda of National Socialism had affinities to Bonhoeffer’s thought, including his use of Hegel, but were put to very different purposes.
Robinson’s investigation, though focused on the development of Bonhoeffer’s thought, provides helpful insights into selected elements of Hegel’s thought as well. In addition, this book brings to our attention some links with other important thinkers who find use for Hegel’s philosophy, for example, the critical appropriation of Hegel’s philosophy by W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom Bonhoeffer became acquainted while in New York and who influenced his interest in the question of race. Students of either figure will find this study worthy of their time and attention.